The Monitor: Performance art has its TV moment

“You know the problem with most performance art? It doesn’t go far enough.” That’s James Franco, playing the role of the serial killer Franco on “General Hospital” last week, talking to the performance artist Kalup Linzy, who plays the role of the performance artist Kalup Ishmael, Franco’s accomplice.

Crime feels like a good metaphor for Franco’s extended “General Hospital” story arc, which spans fiction and nonfiction, art and television, comedy and drama, sincerity and something that is not sincerity but passes for it anyhow. It’s clear that Franco the actor, to say nothing of Franco the artist and art lover, is getting away with something, though what exactly is tough to say. Conveniently, he plays a character that smirks a lot.

Performance art is having its moment on television — small but not insignificant. In addition to Franco’s extended soap opera experiment, there’s the Bravo reality competition “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,” which included among its competitors a well-known performance artist, Nao Bustamante, along with other cast members who may be inadvertent experts in the medium.

Television should be a natural home for such artists, especially reality television, with its emphasis on the invented self. But watching Linzy on “General Hospital” and Bustamante, who was eliminated from “Work of Art” last month after surviving just a few weeks, shows just how fickle a partner television can be.

Linzy’s scenes on last week’s episodes were negligible. (He’ll also appear in an episode next week.) He played a singer — though Franco referred to him as a performance artist — used as a diversion to allow Franco to menace another character. Linzy’s work often involves music, in lo-fi, sometimes awkward pieces where he performs in drag. He also riffs on soap operas in his work, which is a reason Franco said he wanted to bring Linzy into this world.

“I thought it’d be interesting,” Franco said alongside Linzy at a Los Angeles Gay Pride event (available on the website worldofwonder.net), if “I took a real artist that was inspired by soaps and then you were in a real soap opera doing their own version of contemporary art.”

But on the show, Linzy is underused. His rendition of “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” was functional, at best, far less ornery or revealing than the performances he’s made his stock in trade. It’s a coup for Linzy, or at minimum, an extremely exciting footnote.

Perhaps the real performance art here is on the part of “General Hospital” producers, playing the part of thought leaders in daytime television and capitalizing on the attention brought to the show by the presence of a semi-famous Hollywood star.

Or perhaps they knew what they were getting themselves into, and they were proving a point about the durability of their form. Linzy and Franco can do only so much damage.

“There’s a lot of layers,” Franco told the World of Wonder interviewer, though obviously, layers are not enough.

“Work of Art” presented what appeared initially to be a more robust opportunity. Bustamante was the only one of the 14 artists with extensive experience in performance art. One of her more famous works, referenced frequently on the series, was a piece where she wrapped her head in a water-filled plastic bag, holding her breath until she had no choice but to tear the bag open and let the water spill around her.

But a show that valorizes result over process isn’t particularly kind to an artist whose most exciting work has an experiential quality to it, and Bustamante struggled through most of the challenges. Perversely, the piece that got her eliminated was a performance piece, her first, unless you count her whole participation in the show as one grand-scale performance, which may have been the point all along. “Failure is completely OK,” she said after she was eliminated. “In the process of making art, we have to really push beyond our own boundaries and be able to fail.”

Maybe if she’d had a more thorough comprehension of the power of the camera, and of reality-TV editing, she would have gone further. Instead, the show’s surprise performance art star has been the young installation art wunderkind Miles Mendenhall. In one challenge, inspired by his own insomnia, he created a bed, and then proceeded to sleep in it during the gallery-show evaluation.

In the first week’s challenge, he was paired with Bustamante, tasked with creating a portrait of her. He photographed her in repose, in the manner of 1800s death portraits. It was mildly misogynistic but made for spectacular art, not the least of which because of Bustamante’s willing participation in her own silencing.

Bustamante had a tougher time articulating herself. In her audition tape, she joked about becoming the show’s villain. “She’ll try to turn the show into her show,” she joked. “It’s gonna be ‘The Nao Show.’ She’s gonna try to control people. She’s gonna try to get other people to make her art for her.”

If only. Her performance piece, in which she built a ramshackle hut, dressed in plastic bags and smeared what appeared to be excrement but wasn’t on herself, was unfocused and unpleasant but not provocative. She received the judges’ criticism still in character, but by the time of the actual elimination she’d changed back to her street clothes.

In her audition tape, Bustamante proclaimed, “Sincerity is the new radical” — in three different takes. (Ha.) But maybe by that point, she’d come around to thinking just that. All that performing had gotten the best of her.

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