The Kembra Pfahler availabism philosophy is not, it turns out, a manifesto you can download. It arrives in person, announced by a large gnome-shaped bell, scrawled in capitals on a whiteboard, and demonstrated by a woman in a green jumpsuit who will put her phone number up for anyone to call, anytime, and actually mean it. In late July, Pfahler brought that philosophy to Art Omi, a not-for-profit arts centre and 120-acre sculpture and architecture park in Ghent, New York, to teach what amounted to a performance art 101 class.
The word she wrote on the whiteboard was AVAILABISM: an artistic practice centred on making use of what is readily available. On stage, that might mean showing up with a large cut-out sheet wrapped around you rather than expensive costume pieces. In life, it extends considerably further, into how you understand your own temperament, your community, your materials, your time. When one student mentioned shyness, Pfahler told them to hold onto it. Being shy, she said, is a good thing, and she is less inclined to work with people who crave the spotlight. Availabism, in that reading, is less a technique than a disposition: an orientation towards what you already have, including the inconvenient parts of yourself.
A practice built from nothing, and nearly four decades of proof
Pfahler traces the word to an early encounter at the School of Visual Arts, where her teacher, artist Joseph Kosuth, asked what she was. Offended by the question at seventeen, and not yet knowing the answer, she told him she was an availabist who made the best use of what was available. Shortly after, she quit school. New York provided the rest. She organised ‘The Extremist Show’, a nine-day event mixing performance and music with drawings, paintings and sculpture at ABC No Rio. She found, as she puts it, not only the idea but a community of people to help her understand what she was doing. By her own account, it took another decade to understand what that meant.
The same commitment to working from available materials shaped her more extreme performances: in the 1980s she funded underground film projects through work at an independent porn studio; on stage with The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, she became known for head-to-toe single-colour body paint, a three-tiered black wig, stiletto boots and blacked-out teeth. When she sewed her vagina shut for Richard Kern’s Sewing Circle in 1992, she found herself having to explain it at a family gathering to an eleven-year-old nephew. The lesson she draws from that is not one of regret but of clarity. ‘You always have to be prepared to talk about your performance at the dinner table with your grandmother at a Jewish, Buddhist or Muslim holiday,’ she says. ‘It’s impossible to do things in secret.’
The new Rizzoli book and the Kembra Pfahler availabism philosophy on the page
Those decades of performance are now documented in a new book published by Rizzoli USA, released on 17 March 2026 and priced at $75.00 in the US. Pfahler says she worked with senior editor Loren Olsen on it for about seven years. The volume is, in a sense, a record of availabism practised at its most sustained: a career built from nothing, documented slowly, without rushing to a conclusion.
That patience is itself a teaching. Pfahler is emphatic that performance is not a vehicle for recognition. ‘You’re doing a performance to share new ideas,’ she says. She credits the punk generation of early-1970s Los Angeles with a related lesson: wanting to go straight to the top every time will give you a nervous breakdown. The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black toured the US in the 1990s, playing cities where the audience might amount to three punk rock gay kids waiting at soundcheck, and doing it precisely because those were the cities where their presence meant something. Europe was warmer to them, which is exactly why she chose not to tour there first.
Her hard rules for performance are two: always pay people, and do no harm, including to yourself. She learned the latter the difficult way, after house paints put her in hospital and glass-based glitter threatened her eyesight. The rule clarified itself during a conversation with Sharon Stone, who said something along the lines of ‘We all have to be careful.’ ‘I was like, “Jesus Christ, you’re absolutely right,”‘ Pfahler recalls.
Beyond those rules, she recommends the freedom of embarrassing yourself in public, picking a date for a solo performance, making a flyer, and figuring the rest out later. ‘My desire has always been to create things from nothing,’ she says. On the whiteboard at the end of class, beside her phone number, that desire looked less like a philosophy than an open invitation.
