In her excellent book Inventing the Renaissance, historian Ada Palmer describes Sistine Chapel tour guides as they attempt to explain why its ceiling has so many images of naked men. Some, she writes, “provide an endless variety of contradictory explanations of what perfectly wholesome scriptural or theological thing these splendidly gratuitous hot naked men symbolize. They’re naked men. All Michelangelo’s works are full of naked men. He loved, loved, loved depicting naked men. (Even most of his women are naked men with lumps attached.)”
Miles Greenberg’s video installations “TЯUTH” and “LE MIROIR,” both on view at the Current gallery in Stowe, leave no doubt that, though his works veer in various directions, he’s similarly enraptured with bodies. Greenberg describes himself as a sculptor, though he is known for his endurance-based performances — 24 hours walking on a treadmill, for instance, or locked in a plexiglass box full of moths for five hours, or standing on a slowly rotating pedestal while pierced with arrows for eight hours — that he films and then edits into video works such as the ones presented here.
Greenberg lives in New York but grew up in Montréal. His solo show is a coup for the Current: He’s more of an international art star than we usually see in Vermont. Though he is only 28, he has presented work at venues including the Venice Biennale, the New Museum in New York City, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Louvre in Paris.
The artist’s background is complex and fascinating. He is Black, queer and Jewish, and he “left formal education,” as his bio puts it, at age 17. His mom, Phoebe Greenberg, hails from a wealthy Canadian real estate development family and worked for decades in theater. In 2007, she started the PHI Foundation in Old Montréal, one of the city’s most prominent venues for contemporary art. So he can claim an identity that’s both marginalized and privileged — a rarity in any field.
Greenberg often cites legendary artist Marina Abramović’s 2010 performance “The Artist Is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as an inspiration for his practice. She is also a family friend who became Greenberg’s mentor, an experience that undoubtedly afforded him both an art education and access to opportunities most artists only dream of. Yet his success is undoubtedly due at least in part to his personality: He is thoughtful, funny and intellectually voracious. After arriving 45 minutes late for his artist talk in front of a wilting crowd at the Current last month, he proceeded to charm the pants off everyone.
Both pieces feature beautiful people,
beautifully filmed.
Greenberg presents “TЯUTH” as a three-channel installation. The viewer is surrounded on three sides by wall-size projections, all of them filmed during a seven-hour 2023 performance at Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Arts. Greenberg and seven other nearly naked performers pair off with actual swords, enacting slow movements as though in a duel. The performers, all of whom are Black, are coated in black oil and wear opaque black contact lenses. The action takes place in and around a pool of vermilion water, on black, oil drum-like rotating pedestals. Close-ups show seeming defeats and victories, menacing looks and fearful ones, and highlight the performers’ slick bodies and reflective swords. Visitors in the background watch, push strollers and film with their phones.
In the main gallery, “LE MIROIR” is a six-channel installation, this time using six video monitors that encircle the viewer. Ten people in black bodysuits strike poses on mirrored pedestals set in a reflecting pool at the historic El Badi Palace in Marrakech, Morocco, a performance Greenberg gave as part of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair last year. Images of the group of performers are interspersed with footage of just two — Greenberg and Jean Paul Paula — as a pair of lovers walking across sand dunes (filmed in the Emirati desert near Oman). A live python wraps around Greenberg and sometimes slithers across a mirror or around a mysterious crystalline rock.
Both pieces feature beautiful people, beautifully filmed. With its otherworldly red pool, “TЯUTH” seems to allude to 1960s sci-fi sets, and Greenberg said it draws on first-person fighter video games — hence a synthy soundtrack that evokes that medium. “LE MIROIR” is closer to creating a narrative: The lovers periodically embrace or are drawn apart, as the other performers occupy the role of a silent Greek chorus. The exoticism of its setting is nicely counterbalanced by the shorts-clad tourists watching the performance, though some of its imagery veers a little close, for this viewer’s taste, to the romantic fantasy of a perfume ad.
Yet there’s something missing at the heart of these works. They exist between performance, video and sculpture but don’t offer a fully satisfying experience of any of those mediums. At about 15 minutes each, neither captures the sense of an intense moment stretched out over hours that Greenberg described as fundamental to his performances. Visual suggestions of the inspirations he references, from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 film The Mirror to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, hint at narrative but don’t give the viewer enough breadcrumbs to trace a story. And while the formal, aesthetic aspects of both pieces are strong, even an immersive presentation of the video flattens what is surely, in person, a visceral spatial experience of the performers’ presence.
That said, some of the unsettling aspects of the show at the Current are its greatest strengths. The black oil on the performers’ bodies and strange, opaque eyes purposely cast each of them as an Other — but one who is powerful rather than marginalized. They seem like marble statues in photonegative, and because of that they point out the strangeness of identifying such classical objects’ blank whiteness as a human quality. Greenberg nods toward but doesn’t fully embrace a racial reading of his work — he wants the bodies he uses to seem universal, he said — but the discomfort and decentering this work may provoke for white Vermonters should be seen as necessary, powerful and rare opportunities.
During his talk, Greenberg spoke about this kind of depersonalization as a method of stripping away historical baggage and turning the body into pure form, exploring it aesthetically without the objectification or dehumanization that runs through the history of art. That idea doesn’t need any extra bells or whistles. It’s an intriguing and tricky prospect that could fuel his artistic exploration for years to come, and one that an old-school sculptor such as Michelangelo would no doubt endorse. ➆
“Miles Greenberg,” on view through October 17 at the Current in Stowe.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Sing the Body Electric | International art star Miles Greenberg brings his body to Stowe”
This article appears in July 29 • 2026.
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