BEING WATCHED
Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s
LAMBERT-BEATTY, CARRIE
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Description:
In her dance and performances of the 1960s, Yvonne Rainer famously transformed the performing body - stripped it of special techniques and star status, traded its costumes and leotards for T-shirts and sneakers, asked it to haul mattresses or recite texts rather than leap or spin. Without discounting these innovations, Carrie Lambert-Beatty argues in Being Watched that the crucial site of Rainer's interventions in the 1960s was less the body of the performer than the eye of the viewer - or rather, the body as offered to the eye. Rainer's art, Lambert-Beatty writes, is structured by a peculiar tension between the body and its display.Through close readings of Rainer's works of the 1960s - from the often-discussed dance Trio A to lesser-known Vietnam war-era protest dances - Lambert-Beatty explores how these performances embodied what Rainer called the seeing difficulty. (As Rainer said: Dance is hard to see. ) Viewed from this perspective, Rainer's work becomes a bridge between key episodes in post-war art. Lambert-Beatty shows how Rainer's art (and related performance work in Happenings, Fluxus, and Judson Dance Theater) connects with the transformation of the subject-object relation in minimalism and with emerging feminist discourse on the political implications of the objectifying gaze.In a spectacle-soaked era, moreover - when images of war played nightly on the television news - Rainer's work engaged the habits of viewing formed in mass-media America, linking avant-garde art and the wider culture of the 1960s. Rainer is significant, argues Lambert-Beatty, not only as a choreographer, but as a sculptor of spectatorship.
Details:
- Publisher: Mit Pr
- Depth (m): 0.029
- Dewey: 792.8/2092
- Height (m): 0.232
- Pages: 384
- Published Date: Tue 30 Sep 2008
- Weight (g): 985
- Width (m): 0.187
Availability
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