
Miles Greenberg Turns Marble Into Muse
By Ivan Guzman
Jan 17, 2025For Miles Greenberg, it’s hard to put into words exactly what his role as an artist is. “I don’t even know what I do, but I do it every day,” he tells PAPER. “People might think of me as interdisciplinary at this point, but at the end of the day, I personally feel like I have one job.”
That job seems to be mostly centered around bodies and the passage of time — all of which manifest in “Desire Path,” Greenberg’s inaugural U.S. solo exhibition dedicated exclusively to sculpture. And this past week, cultural icons such as Marina Abramovic, Michèle Lamy and Travis Scott gathered at Salon94 to celebrate the artist’s marble creations — a pivotal moment for someone who is best known for their endurance-based performance art.
“I was always really attracted to the idea that I could push a body in the same way that you can push a stone to last as long as it does, as long as it will until it turns into dust,” Greenberg says. “That’s what I wanna try to do with the body.”
The title “Desire Path” references the shortcuts people create through repeated movement, cutting across predefined routes to follow their instincts. For Greenberg, that intuitive process is key to his work, as the marble sculptures at the centerpiece of this exhibition were derived from 3D scans captured during his 2023 performance, “Fountain II.” These figures, intentionally glitched during the scanning process, are meticulously hand-finished by Greenberg after a year and a half of working with Monumental Labs. The result is an intimate dialogue between the ancient and the digital, the eternal and the ephemeral.
To learn more about “Desire Path,” we sat down with Greenberg to pick his brain about how our bodies navigate space, memory and always trusting your gut.
Congratulations on your show. Can you tell me about the name "Desire Path" and what that means for you?
If ever you’ve seen in a public park, or really any public place with an L shape in the sidewalk, and there’s sort of a diagonal that cuts across from people walking over it many, many times. It kills the grass and sort of clears the vegetation. That’s a desire path. It’s sort of an architecture term for the idea of the shortest distance between two points, which points out a failure in an infrastructure. So people will tend to gravitate towards a shortcut of their own creation many, many times. I just really loved it because it obviously alluded to a much bigger idea around desire, which was a big part of the pieces and a big part of the performance that originated the work. I think it spoke of something to do with intuition to me and intuition-directed ideals around how to think — how to feel through your own body. I think that’s something that’s very consistent in my work.
I see the consistency of bodies being a thing in your work. You showed at my friend Saam’s gallery, New York Now!, last month.
Yeah, that’s actually right next to my studio. It was such a fun show. It was great because we were carrying these huge clones of me. They’re the same weight as me; they’re three inches shorter than me. We didn’t have to get them very far because we share a corner. Technically, it’s the same building, so it was very convenient, fun and spontaneous. Sometimes I do these big production shows, but it was really great. Saam is awesome, and it was great to do something so local.
This was also your first time working with marble. What was that like?
From conception to realization, it’s been a year and a half. Throughout that year, I’ve spent a lot of time with the team at Monumental Labs, which is an incredible team. They have essentially mentored me in carving. It was something that I never learned how to do in any kind of school. I mean, I’m a dropout. But it was a really great experience to be able to gain this skill that, coming from no formal education, I never thought I would have.
We started with a digital mesh of the sculpture straight from the 3D scans as I do them. It’s a multi-access gigantic robot arm. But afterwards, it was about the hand finishing aspect, getting to know different stones and how they react. They’re all a bit temperamental. Each color had its own particularity. It’s a very eye sensory kind of experience. It’s very sensual. You’re sort of focusing on these microscopic details of the bodies of the subjects. I’ll spend two afternoons on an elbow. There’s something very romantic about it, actually.
Yeah, it’s like they did back in the day in Greece.
Greece, Rome, France, Iceland, everywhere has different sorts of sculptural traditions. Around Africa and Asia, too. But marble is pretty specific to the Western canon, which is something that really attracted me to it. I feel like the canon of Western sculpture, Greco-Roman statuary specifically, is maybe half of what inspired my performance practice. So to play with it on this scale and actually be able to reply in homage to the traditions and the works that raised me was a really beautiful opportunity. I grew up going to the Louvre, and of course I went to the MET when I would come visit New York, as well as museums around the world. For me, the thing that always attracted me to marble was a certain sense of permanence. I always try to model my performances off of that. My ideal art viewing experience is standing in front of the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre, right? It’s like this immovable object that you view from these different vantage points. There’s this very particular staging to it that I think is extremely powerful. The same goes for the Venus de Milo. There are parts missing. There are arms missing; there’s a head missing. There are all these different evidences of time, and temporality is a part of it. But it is still something that you know extends so far beyond your lifetime. I think there’s something that is very reassuring about that — that something in movement can still feel so strong and so steadfast.
When I started making performance, I was always really attracted to the idea that I could push a body in the same way that you can push a stone to last as long as it does, as long as it will until it turns into dust. That’s what I wanna try to do with the body. You get that evidence of temporality, but instead of a limb or a nose or an arm falling off after 700 years, you get the body kind of crumbling in its own way after seven hours. That’s the connection that I’ve always thought of. So when I’m working in marble or working in sculpture, even when I’m working in video, I think it’s really important for me to treat everything like a body. I don’t see it as very different or separate from performance. People might think of me as interdisciplinary at this point, but at the end of the day, I personally feel like I have one job.
And that job is working with bodies, would you say?
Kind of? I don’t know how to put it into words. I don’t even know if I know what I do, but I do it every day. But yeah, it feels very logical and from an intuitive place.
You also teamed up with Marni on this show, and you have some more things coming with them this year?
Yeah, I think a lot of it is a little bit too up in the air to talk about in super concrete terms, but I had a really lovely opportunity to have Marni sort of co-sign the project and underwrite it. The collaboration with them so far has been really wonderful, and I love what Francesco [Risso] does. He’s an artist. He paints. He does other stuff, so we didn’t collaborate directly in terms of the making of this work, but I think that it’s a super collaborative environment. And I appreciate them a lot. Fashion is fun for me, but I’m not sure what I’m allowed to talk about yet.
Photography: Eva Roefs, and courtesy of Alma Communications
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