Lizzi Bougatsos Plays with Fire

Lizzi Bougatsos, the artist, musician and downtown troubadour, performed a piece in 2001 at age 27 with her band, Actress, that included fire: a youthful and dramatic representation of her disillusionment with the art and music worlds.The performance went awry when Bougatsos’s costume caught aflame, causing severe burns throughout her body. That fateful night, and the following months of excruciating recovery, are immortalized in her show ‘Idolize the Burn, An Ode to Performance’ at TRAMPS’s new space in New York. The exhibition is a tribute not only to that singular performance but to Bougatsos’s beginnings and existence as an artist, showcasing her life as a gesamtkunstwerk dedicated to chasing the euphoria of artistic expression and belonging.

Bougatsos has been a fixture of the New York arts scene for decades. Best-known for her work in music as part of the band Gang Gang Dance, she has collaborated with artists such as Rita Ackermann in Angelblood (2014) and Jonas Mekas at poetry readings in 2017 and has exhibited her visual and performance art internationally. Instead of centring her music and time-based work, however, this exhibition focuses on Bougatsos’s sculpture and assemblage, particularly the readymades pertaining to her injury and slow recovery. The majority of these objects are bandages, as seen in pieces such as Skin Drawing II (I Prefer the Floor) (2022), made of nylon, silicone and fabric that mimic quilted animal hide. By using her personal injury archive as material in these works, Bougatsos asserts authority over her experience, transforming the stained, normally disposed-of skeins of medical-grade fabric into a document of her resilience.

Although Bougatsos frames the exhibition as a monument to that life-changing 2001 performance, the most poignant moments of the show come when the artist drills deeper into her biography and analyzes the beginnings of her artistic life as a child. The ballet shoe – a remnant of her adolescent ballet training – is a constant motif throughout the exhibition, serving as a symbol of her punishing commitment to her art. In one of the larger chandelier pieces in the exhibition, Stalinist Couture over the Mother (2022), she covers the shoes in wax and resin, combining the pain of her past and present artistic pursuits in a sly critique of the perfection and artifice required of female performers of all ages.

In the main exhibition space is an assemblage entitled Sad Violin (2022). A cheap music stand and a paper fan encased in a plastic frame abut a carefully placed photograph of Bougatsos as a child sitting before a mirror on a 1970s shag carpet, simultaneously enraptured and confused by her reflection. In a detail too perfect to fabricate, an inflatable clown toy jeers in the background of the image, as if an omen of the artist’s Sisyphean journey of constant reinvention ahead.

Photographs from Bougatsos’s personal archive abound in the space. First Band, Russia (1976/2022), which comprises a polaroid of the artist’s first performance with her band, leans gingerly against the wall atop an electric socket. This single image captures a moment of self-actualization in its most primal stages: her face reflects equal parts joy and horror. It crystallizes the fact that this exhibition is an ode not to performance but to performer – a celebration of Bougatsos’s personal strength and perennial innovation in pursuit of the spotlight.

Lizzi Bougatsos, ‘Idolize the Burn, An Ode to Performance’, is on view at TRAMPS until 22 March. 

^{Main image: Lizzi Bougatsos, ‘Idolize the Burn: An Ode to Performance’, 2023, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and TRAMPS, New York and London; photograph: Mark Woods}