Miles Greenberg’s Latest Art Piece Required a Fencing Coach and a Sex Doll Maker

“Everyone Who Made This Happen” takes a look at the outsize teams of artists and creative types it often takes to produce a single work.

Number of people involved: Over 40, including those from the Art Gallery of Ontario, which co-commissioned the work alongside the Luminato Festival Toronto, and Phi Studio, a Montreal production company.

Time from commission to performance: Six months.

From noon to 9 on a Wednesday this past June, the Canadian artist Miles Greenberg, 26, stood in Walker Court at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and sliced the air with swords and daggers. Instead of dueling a human opponent, he squared off against a camera held by a robotic arm that countered and recorded his movements. All around him, strewn across the mirrored floor, were nine uncanny silicone sculptures of his likeness positioned as if they’d already been slain. Occasionally the artist stabbed one of his clones, picking up its weapon before reassuming his position in front of the camera.

Greenberg, who has made his name with elaborate performance pieces that emphasize the body and how it changes yet perseveres over what’s often a grueling period, found inspiration for “Respawn” (2024) in R.P.G.s, or role-playing video games. Every hour on the hour, a disembodied voice interrupted the soundtrack’s progressively deepening ambient bass drone to announce, “Level 1,” “Level 2” and so on. Additionally, the camera footage, which was projected on two monitors outside of the court and will live on as a video work, mimicked the perspective of a gamer sitting on their couch. The artist saw a parallel between the many lives of R.P.G. characters and how, in our own lives, we dispense with versions of ourselves as we evolve. The more exhausted he became, though, the more compassion he had for his corpselike clones. “I ended up feeling very held by them,” he says — just as he did, in a different sense, by the people behind the scenes.

Along with Greenberg’s actual performance, the piece included a poem by the Canadian novelist and playwright Jordan Tannahill, which was read aloud by two A.I.-generated voices, one belonging to a grown man and the other to a child. Lines from it — “At last I became the intolerable image / the bastard scion / fastened to his hook / & peeled clean of myself” — also appeared on the clones. John Freeman, Greenberg’s studio manager and a tattoo artist, had taught him how to ink their rubbery chests — and had assisted with finding the Belgian sex doll company that fabricated the doppelgängers, which were based on 3-D scans of Greenberg’s body. The Toronto-based immersive studio Quiver recommended using a specific robot before preprogramming its choreography.

Also essential to the piece were art handlers, installers and the curator Bojana Stancic, not to mention the creators of the video games that Greenberg credits with shaping his aesthetic. “People obviously fixate on the heavy-duty performance aspect, but it’s so much more than what’s onstage,” he says. That’s not to say that the piece — for which the artist brushed up on his high school fencing skills by training with Tony Mita of New York Combat for Stage & Screen, in addition to his usual trainer, Marie-Claude Després, who was once an in-house physiotherapist for Cirque du Soleil — wasn’t physically demanding. And yet, as a feat of endurance, it wasn’t unprecedented. “Yeah, this was nine hours,” says Greenberg, “but I definitely played World of Warcraft for more than nine consecutive hours in my teens.”

Photo assistants: Samuel Engelking, Gerry J. Diaz