As part of his commission to design Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, Friedrich Kiesler created an object, the Correalist Rocker, that had seven different positions and functions as a pedestal and chair. He made a second form, the Correalist Instrument, which had eighteen.
Seven Portraits on a Correalist Rocker is a fifteen-minute performance that turns Kiesler’s object into a storyteller’s seat. I rotate an MDF replica into all seven positions and adapt my body accordingly. Within each configuration, I describe a portrait of Peggy. Some are actual renderings by contemporaries like Man Ray, Virgil Thomson, and Max Ernst. Others are loosely based on her work with Marcel Duchamp, Maya Deren, and Kiesler. One is a portrait given by the Correalist Rocker itself.