Looking Back, Looking Forward: 9

As is the seasonal norm, and in a daily series of postings, ArtReview's critics and columnists pick their favourite exhibitions, performances, books or events from the past year, and look forward to those of 2012.

Jonathan T.D. Neil is ArtReview's associate editor, based in New York, from where he files this:

'Looking Back?

Three words: Liz. Magic. Laser. Besides having the best name in the business, Laser triumphed with I Feel Your Pain, a Performa11 commission that blew the doors off much everything else that was on offer during the third edition of New York's three-week long performance biennial. Though one (or two) acts too long for my taste, the piece has stayed with me and is quickly becoming a new point of reference for what political theatre, and the Brechtian tradition, can be. Adapting historic dialogues and monologues from prominent celebrity politicos – e.g. Barack Obama, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Clintons – to soap opera melodrama, crossing these with excerpts from exurban hotel-conference-center-type self-help and sales literature, filming and screening the whole thing live in and amongst the audience, and tossing in a mime MC (a mime MC!) for good measure – I Feel Your Painstands as a thoughtful and entertaining (the horror!) work of high ambition in a field that often eschews all of those things.

Liz Magic Laser, I Feel Your Pain, 2011. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy Performa.

Looking forward?
To a revival of the future.'

Liz Magic Laser, I Feel Your Pain, 2011. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy Performa.