In response to the digital-first culture that defines his era, Miles Greenberg is finding meaning through poetic sculpture and performance that amplifies the corporeal.
If Miles Greenberg hadn’t become an artist, he might have been a physical therapist. “Anatomy was my obsession growing up,” he says. “I could probably still pass my grade 11 biology exam.” An interest in the construction, limits, and potential forms of the human body continues to guide his practice, whether it’s through being pierced with arrows—Étude pour Sébastien (2023) and Sebastian (2024)—walking on a treadmill for 24 hours with no breaks excluding a 23-minute loss of consciousness, as in Oysterknife (2020), or more recently, translating his own image into a variety of sculptural mediums. Endorsed by the esteemed artist Marina Abramović from early on in his career, Greenberg produces work that punctures contemporary digital alienation with the primacy of sensuality.
Recently, Greenberg, 27, began experimenting with a chiropractic routine directed at his skull in one of many efforts to become increasingly familiar with his anatomy. “Our skull is made up of all of these bones that connect and fuse over the course of our lives,” he explains, “but they still need to be aligned now and again. I was delivered with forceps after a 40-hour labor, so my head is a little off-kilter.” The procedure he has been receiving involves a doctor attaching a small latex balloon to “what is essentially somewhere between a syringe and a bicycle pump” and inflating it for several seconds inside the patient’s nasal cavity.
“You hear these loud cracks of your skull, bones realigning. I’ve been having all these crazy medical revelations since, like I started breathing differently. My voice has changed a tiny little bit. I feel calmer. The tornado of low-level anxiety that is always there has managed to dissipate, just slightly. It ties into my work because all of it is about very subtle, very sensitive, very tiny little shifts in the body over the course of many, many hours. It’s turned into a hyper-awareness of my body over the course of my entire life.” If there is a unifying theme in Greenberg’s oeuvre, it is the experience of inhabiting one’s flesh at the highest pitch of attention.
“You hear these loud cracks of your skull, bones realigning. I’ve been having all these crazy medical revelations since, like I started breathing differently. My voice has changed a tiny little bit. I feel calmer.”
In Fountain II (2023), two performers stand embracing atop a white plinth in a pool of what appears to be their own blood, bordered by a shore of black rocks like an eerily calm volcano. As tender as it is violent, the work is a sequel to a solo piece (Fountain I, 2022), inspired by the art of the Austrian Actionist painter Hermann Nitsch, exploring the “final stages of heartbreak—when one finally turns one’s entire body inside out to reach a sort of ecstasy.”
From the sound of rust-colored water dripping from the performers’ bodies into the pool below, to the way that same water reflects a tinted glow across the room, sensory gestures are magnified in a carefully constructed environment. Entering the gallery space, immersion is immediate and total. “For me, a lot of new media amplifies alienation, as opposed to subtracts from it,” Greenberg says of the importance of materiality in his work. “I feel more connected to people through flesh and blood than I do through new ways of building screens between each other. I think that’s why my work is particularly resonant with younger people too.”
“I feel more connected to people through flesh and blood than I do through new ways of building screens between each other.”
Greenberg speculates that the rise of digital technology in the 1980s was most interesting to those born before it. For his own generation, born into a world of screens, corporeality is a more alluring, mysterious frontier. He acknowledges a certain “shared sensibility” with, though not direct influence from, some of the aesthetics of video games he enjoyed in his youth. Like many people, but especially those who grew up with access to the internet, Greenberg spent portions of his childhood developing memories and attachments to these visual representations of unreal, impossible places.
In general, society’s continual direction of attention toward digital spaces tends to lull individuals into sleepwalking through day-to-day reality. Entering Fountain II, spectators are immediately awakened to their senses. Ironically, in Greenberg’s work it is through entering an oneiric landscape that one is snapped out of daydreaming.
What the audience experiences, however, is only a glimmer of what the performers themselves go through. “The performer,” Greenberg says, “is really invested and immersed physically, in a way where their brain has to be rewired. They can’t even see the same way, hear the same way, smell the same way. All the senses are totally arrested. The audience is getting maybe 10% of that experience.”
Because of the possible risks involved in some of his pieces, Greenberg never asks anyone to attempt something he hasn’t already performed himself. It is only while performing that Greenberg feels he comes into contact with a sustained state of total presence and aliveness: “I would say that on stage is probably the only time I don’t feel a little alienated or a little isolated.” Each performance opens a new way of experiencing one’s own flesh, and therefore selfhood. “I want to live in as many ways as possible before I die. I feel a lot more alive on stage than I do when I’m not on stage.”
To Greenberg, feeling alive is related to a consistent awareness of the relationship between individual choices and their impact: “Feeling immediate consequences to every single decision that you make, feeling immediate reactions.” While performing, “every movement and gesture makes more waves than it would otherwise. If I move my arm in a particular way, if I take a step in a particular way, if I move at a certain speed versus another speed, I feel the energy that I put out bounce off the audience, like echolocation, and it amplifies everything that I do.”
This feedback induces Greenberg into a state of hyper-awareness, not only of his own physical presence and its relationship to the surrounding environment, but of the infinite possibilities for action that might proceed from such a set of circumstances. No shift in balance, no breath, no movement of an eye or finger is trivial. At every moment of a performance, whether it’s 9, 12, or 24 hours long, Greenberg describes being “hypnotized into something that feels closer to reality, to me, than a daily social life or calendar.”
For an artist so devoted to the study of presence and immediacy, it might seem counterintuitive that Greenberg has recently begun incorporating sculpture into his work, as seen with his contribution to the Yokohama Triennale earlier this year. Greenberg, however, thinks of it as a natural extension of his interests and possibly even a return to earlier passions: “I learned how to make performance from sculpture, so it felt natural. In lieu of an arts education, I learned by looking at Greco-Roman statuary at the Louvre, or neoclassical sculpture at the Met.”
“Every piece furthers my understanding of my own body, but I’m not learning some big new secret. This is just the next step, it’s not a revolution.”
While touring his studio, Greenberg shows off a life-size, uncannily realistic silicone mannequin made in his likeness (sans genitals, because he “didn’t want to deal with the implications from a collector standpoint”) and a marble sculpture based on 3D digital renderings of his physique and movement. Has exploring the human form in inorganic mediums transformed his thinking about his own body? “No,” he says, “and that’s how I know it’s working, because it’s all analogous and synchronous to the performance practice. So, yes, every piece furthers my understanding of my own body, but I’m not learning some big new secret. This is just the next step, it’s not a revolution. Maybe it will be at some point.”
A crucial aspect of live performance is the potential for the performer to make decisions moment to moment, and the serendipity that makes each iteration of a work unique. Working with stone, Greenberg notices a similar serendipity at a more patient, geologic scale. While carving quartz, he observed that a line of darker pigment in the material resembled a streak of tears running down his sculpture’s cheek. Greenberg’s work reminds us that our bodies might have more in common with other forms of matter than we typically imagine, subject to the same laws of physics, decay, and chance.
Reflecting on his early-childhood creative impulses, Greenberg describes a vivid memory of learning what a rainbow was: “Okay, so it’s water and air and sunlight, right?” To recreate the effect, he went outside to gather “flowers very meticulously, picking the brightest, most vibrant colors,” adding their petals to a vase full of water and throwing it toward the sun. “That was my first time observing physics and time and thinking, okay, there’s something we can make here using the laws of nature,” he remembers. It’s an apt way of framing almost all of Greenberg’s output since: Whether it’s enacted through performance, sculpture, or any other form, Greenberg’s true medium is reality itself.
Homepage banner image,Miles Greenberg, Sebastian, 2024, 60th Biennale Arte, Palazzo Malipiero, Venice, Italy. Museum Berggruen and Neue Nationalgalerie. Photo by Francesco Allegretto. Homepage thumbnail image, Miles Greenberg, Respawn, 2024.Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, photo by Rebecca Tisdelle Macias. Three top inside images, Miles Greenberg, Sebastian, 2024. 60th Biennale Arte, Palazzo Malipiero, Venice, Italy. Museum Berggruen and Neue Nationalgalerie. Photo by Francesco Allegretto. Image above, Miles Greenberg, Sebastian, 2024, 60th Biennale Arte, Palazzo Malipiero, Venice, Italy. Museum Berggruen and Neue Nationalgalerie. Photo by Francesco Allegretto.
Taken from Mission 12th Issue, The New Order. Available here.
