In August, Polish artist Pawel Althamer was in Pittsburgh to film a trailer to "Real Time Movie," a peformance piece that will be performed at the Carnegie International and employ actors whose role is to blend in. Peter Fonda, seen in the car's side mirror and below, was part of the preview and may be a part of the piece. Click photo for larger image. Related article: Curator calls International a 'gift' well worth effort Performance Preview Where: Carnegie Museum of Art, Oakland. When: Through March 20; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tues.-Sat.; noon to 5 p.m. Sun. PCTV: Video and film art from the 2004 International will be broadcast at 11 p.m. Saturdays on the Pittsburgh Cable Television channel. Admission: $10, seniors $7, children and students $6, members free. Performances: Trisha Donnelly, "Letter to Tacitus" 11 a.m., noon, 2:30 p.m. today; Hall of Architecture (also noon Oct. 16, 23, 30 and Saturdays in November and December, enacted by other performers). Pawel Althamer, "Real Time Movie" 1 p.m. today and Oct. 16, 23, 30; corner of Forbes Avenue and South Craig Street. Katarzyna Kozyra, "Non so piu cosa son, cosa faccio (I don't know anymore what I am, what I am doing)" 3 p.m. today, Carnegie Music Hall. Information: 412-622-3131 or www.cmoa.org.

The 2004 Carnegie International opens today at Carnegie Museum of Art, and while the globally pre-eminent exhibition continues through March 20, today will be unique: Three of the 38 exhibiting artists are in town to enact their performance pieces.

Performance art remains a significant component of contemporary art expression and is no stranger to Pittsburgh. The Andy Warhol Museum has sponsored a successful performance art series, Off the Wall, for four years. It has presented, among others, all of the members of the NEA Four, whose racy acts placed the National Endowment for the Arts in the center of a political controversy in the 1990s. Performance artists regularly appear locally at venues ranging from theaters to the Three Rivers Arts Festival.

But those are generally one- or two-night events. Incorporating a performance artist into a major and long-running exhibition is another matter. Unless the budget is voluminous, putting up an artist and paying him/her to perform for weeks isn't feasible. Often the only presence is a documentation of an earlier performance.

So it comes as a pleasant surprise that three performance artists have been included in this International. Each will perform live today and have varying presence during the rest of the show's run.

They are Trisha Donnelly, a 30-year-old native and resident of San Francisco, and Polish artists Pawel Althamer, 37, and Katarzyna Kozyra, 41, who live in Warsaw.

Kozyra gained a reputation of enfant terrible in Europe in 1993 with a work titled "Pyramid of Animals," based on a Grimm fairy tale, that stacked a stuffed horse, dog, cat and cockerel. She selected the dog and cat from a pile of gassed corpses, witnessed the killing and flaying of the horse, and personally wrung the cockerel's neck, according to a February 2001 article in The Economist. When the piece raised the hackles of animal rights activists, Kozyra shrugged off the criticism, saying that she only documented the kind of butchery that was a daily occurrence in the human and pet food industries.

When fighting cancer in 1996, she turned her attention to the human body, creating a self-portrait as Manet's "Olympia," with eyes sunken and head bald from chemotherapy. Since, she's filmed in men's and women's bathhouses. Her "Rite of Spring" video installation in the International should be as shocking to today's audience as its namesake was when it was first performed.

The piece she'll perform live today is described as "the culmination of a two-year project in which the artist has made a serious attempt to fulfill her lifelong wish to become an opera singer," an artistic form that seems made for her.

In comparison, Althamer sounds low-key. But that's only until you begin to realize that his ventures into the everyday aren't documentary as much as query -- his intent is to transform, not report.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, said in relation to a site-specific work Althamer did for it in 2001, that the artist "aims to redefine the viewer's perception. ... He questions the notion of time and space through the exploration of the human body and nature."

Postmasters Gallery Polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra, shown here rehearsing with Grzegorz Pitulej, will open the Carnegie International with a performance piece described as the culmination of a two-year project in which the artist has made an attempt to fulfill her lifelong wish to become an opera singer. Click photo for larger image.

This week's Artforum International News Digest reported that he'd been awarded the 2004 Vincent van Gogh Biannual Award for Contemporary Art in Europe ("the Vincent") -- which includes $56,000 cash -- "for work that situates the human body between classical sculpture and performance art."

Althamer's performance work, "Real Time Movie," will take place in front of the museum and employ actors whose role is to blend in with the usually eclectic town-and-gown crowd that passes the museum daily. These will be amplified this weekend by artists and art aficionados from around the world here to see the International. Watch for a while and you may be able to distinguish the actors. There's also a mystery component. Actor Peter Fonda was in Pittsburgh in August to film a short "preview" of the work that is being shown in local movie theaters and in the International. What other part he may play, if any, hasn't been disclosed. Word has it that other celebrities may be incorporated in further renditions of Althamer's concept through the exhibition run.

Of Donnelly, International curator Laura Hoptman writes in the catalog "... Using a vocabulary of familiar images and gestures, [she probes] the notion of essences and the inchoate, or perhaps the preverbal."

	Bill Wade, Post-Gazette Peter Fonda outside the Carnegie Musuem of Art in Oakland this past August. Click photo for larger image.

The artist has, for example, produced a video documenting her attempt to summon rain in a Canadian forest, and filmed blind friends of hers walking on the beach and eventually becoming disoriented as they attempt, on command, to walk with or against the wind.

She'll perform "Letter to Tacitus" today, a piece that others will enact throughout the year. Described only as a "poetic" work, one must speculate about what the artist could convey in a five-minute performance about the person generally acknowledged to be the greatest Roman historian. Tacitus lived between A.D. 55 and 117, and beyond record and biography also addressed such subjects as the decline of eloquence in (his own) modern times.

Donnelly also has three installation works in the exhibition.

If today's events are an indication, this International promises one heck of a ride.