Michael Portnoy

For the Dream Theater drummer, see Mike Portnoy.

Michael Portnoy (born August 2, 1971) is an American visual artist, filmmaker, choreographer and performance artist.

Michael Portnoy
Michael Portnoy (2016)
Born	(1971-08-02) August 2, 1971 (age 53) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Education	Vassar College
Known for	performance art, film, sculpture, dance, theater
Website	strangergames.com

He has been described in Art in America as "one of the most interesting performance artists anywhere",^[1] and by Artforum as a "great Absurdist".^[2]

Background and early work

Portnoy was born in Washington, D.C., and studied comparative literature and creative writing at Vassar College and theater at the National Theater Institute at The Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. After moving to New York City, he formed several short-lived experimental theater groups before concentrating on solo performance. In the mid 1990s, Portnoy performed in venues such as Surf Reality and Luna Lounge's weekly show "Eating It".^[3][4] At the same time, Portnoy started working as a dancer for the New York choreographer Koosil-Ja Hwang.

Soy bomb incident

For Bob Dylan's performance of "Love Sick" at the 1998 Grammy Awards, Portnoy was hired by Dylan's production company as a background dancer. Halfway through the performance, Portnoy ripped off his shirt, ran next to Dylan, revealing the words "Soy Bomb" written across his chest. The Grammys did not press charges against Portnoy for the act, but he was not paid for the gig.

When questioned by reporters, Portnoy later stated: "Soy... represents dense nutritional life. Bomb is, obviously, an explosive destructive force. So, soy bomb is what I think art should be: dense, transformational, explosive life".^[5][6]

The event was parodied on Saturday Night Live, where he was portrayed by Will Ferrell, and on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. In 2005, the band Eels included the track "Whatever Happened to Soy Bomb" on the double-disc album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations. In 2016, the TV show Broad City parodied Soy Bomb with a performance artist character played by musician Har Mar Superstar.

Later career

Relational Stalinism

Central to many of Portnoy's projects is his tongue-in-cheek concept of 'Relational Stalinism', a form of relational aesthetics that works against "the fashionable promise that an artwork might offer a democratic magic, transforming inter-relational codes into something nicer…"^[7] This breed of absurdist, dictatorial interaction with participants has been described as "a clarification of the artist's imperious role as producer and performer".^[7]

Experimental comedy

Portnoy’s work is also framed by what he calls experimental comedy, or "the injection of the sublime, the blatantly inscrutable, the abstract, the primal, the choreographic, the theoretical, the improbable, the generative, the post-rhythmic, the turbo-stupid, etc., into the frame of stand-up".^[8] This has been manifested in the operatic stand-up routine of The K Sound (2006), Taipei Women’s Experimental Comedy Club (2010), and Script Opposition in Late-Model Carrot Jokes (2011), a project that investigated the "carrot joke", a term used in cognitive linguistics to describe a poem-like joke with a high degree of ambiguity, blunt omissions of information and logical faults and inconsistencies.^[8]