Ryan McNamara, the Brooklyn-based performance artist who once staged a commissioned piece in Louis Vuitton’s flagship, a “showboy production line” in which, for two hours, 30 male dancers conga-lined through the store to a loop of old chorus-line music created by McNamara. As they danced, they passed various Louis Vuitton bags, spontaneously licking them. “Performance is inherently subversive,” McNamara said, “in that the presenting institution cannot guarantee what is going to happen.”

Now he’s presenting Misty Malarky Ying Yang, a new performance at High Line Art that commemorates the 35th anniversary of Jimmy Carter’s ill-received Malaise Speech, given July 15, 1979. McNamara and a group of performers will use the televised address — in which the president blamed the oil crisis on over-consumption by the American public — as the point of departure for a choreographed, immersive spectacle that will snake along the length of the High Line from its southernmost point to its northernmost. The title of the show, Misty Malarky Ying Yang, refers to the name of the Siamese cat belonging by the president’s daughter, Amy Carter, while in the White House.

July 15–17, 2014, 7:30 pm, south end of the High Line @ Gansevoort Street