Legwork

by Daryl Chin

Still from Yvonne Rainer's FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO... (1974)

The project of historiography, especially in relation to cultural practice, has always been fraught with problems. Certainly, by the end of the 1960s, when there appeared the rise of ideological frameworks which acknowledged “difference”, we have learned that a simple assertion of historiographic completeness is a dogmatism which must be challenged.  Even the theory of origins has been called into question in the epoch of post-modernism.

Quite frankly, I’ve lived long enough to see aspects of my life, from childhood on, being scrutinized and memorialized and theorized out of any semblance to the concept of “truth”. I shall give one example, which occurred to me because of the recent conference, “Performing the Future,” held from 8 July to 10 July, 2010, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. There was someone who has been a theorist of “queer performance,” and this is someone I’ve known for quite a while. But I remember reading one of his books, which began with a discussion of Charles Ludlam; he began by explaining how, when he first arrived in New York City, he never bothered to see Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company live. Although he arrived in New York City in 1984, when Ludlam was in the throes of his immensely productive career (Ludlam would die in 1987), he could have seen Ludlam at any time, but chose not to;  but now, as a Performance Studies professional whose specialty is queer performativity, he had to theorize about Ludlam. So he did. Now, it’s one thing to write about a performance one has never seen, using archival materials to provide the evidentary content. This, in fact, is what theater research is often about: this is the process of historicization which is the foundation for theater scholarship. But it’s quite another thing to simply theorize about an artist because said artist fits within the framework of one’s theoretical precepts (even if, or especially if, one has never seen said artist’s work). It’s also suspect to theorize about an artist when, in fact, the actual performances might invalidate the theoretical presuppositions.

Performance Studies should be dealing with the manifestations of performance, providing frameworks to explicate, to interrogate, and to analyze that most ephemeral of artistic practices. This seems to be, or should be, logical. However, Performance Studies has become a catch-all for sloppy scholarship, lack of rigor, and unfounded theoretical assumptions. Be that as it may, what is important (now) in dealing with many performative manifestations is the accessibility of the artists; quite frankly, if we are dealing with performance since the 1960s, many artists are still alive, so the ability to access these artists should not be a matter of exhumation, but simply a matter of introduction.

In dealing with a phenomenon such as the Judson Dance Theater, it is important to remember the limitations of the situation at hand. Annette Michelson, in her essay “Yvonne Rainer: The Dancer and the Dance” (1974), spoke of the constraints of the New Dance: “New dance, like new film, inhabits and works largely out of Soho and those adjunct quarters which constitute the center of our commerce in the visual arts. They live and work, however, entirely on the periphery of their world’s economy, stimulated by the labor and production of that economy, with no support, no place in the structure of its market. New dance and new film have been, in part and whole, unassimilable to the commodity value. Existing and developing within their habitat as if on a reservation, they are condemned to a strict reflexiveness.” Susan Sontag, in her essay “Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition” (1962), mentioned that in the audience “one sees mostly the same faces again and again.” To have been in the audience for many of the events that constituted “the Judson Dance Theater” turned out to be an experience which was quite circumscribed. An example: when “The Mind Is a Muscle,” Yvonne Rainer’s magnum opus from which her signature dance, “Trio A,” was introduced, had a four-evening run at the Anderson Theater on Second Avenue and Seventh Street in lower Manhattan, that means that, since the Anderson Theater (which is now the Orpheum Theater) has a seating capacity of 400, if the run was sold-out (which it never was), a maximum of 1600 people would have seen it in the spring of 1968. (In fact, according to Rainer, her estimate of the audience at all four performances would amount to 250 people.) From the possible total of 1600, the influence of  “The Mind Is a Muscle” has been extraordinary. Just as an aside: attending a dance concert by Simone Forti at a venue on West 14^th Street in 1974 or 1975, the audience of approximately 150 consisted mostly of other post-modern choreographers and dancers, including Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, David Gordon and Valda Setterfield, Barbara Dilley, Trisha Brown, Nancy Green, Douglas Dunn, Sara Rudner and Rose Marie Wright, Carolyn Lord, Marjorie Gamso, Mary Overlie and Wendell Beavers… I remember thinking that if a bomb had gone off, most of what was called the downtown dance scene would have been wiped out. The downtown dance scene was never that big, and after a certain point, if you’d gone to the various venues (Judson Memorial Church, St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, Clark Center, Cubiculo, La Mama E.T.C., as well as various galleries and museums, etc.), you started seeing the same faces again and again.

Though the scene was small, it was also very multifaceted, with artists ranging from people with incredible facility (Gus Solomons, Jr., Kenneth King, Deborah Hay) to people who had not studied dance until they were adults, so they didn’t have standard dance training (Rudy Perez, David Gordon, Simone Forti). And the influences, the affiliations, and the associations were also as diverse as the people involved; even taking what has become known as the Judson Dance Theater as an example, aside from the general involvement with the composition class taught by Robert Ellis Dunn, the dancers had already studied with Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, Anna Halprin, Merle Marsciano, Beverly Schmidt and Roberts Blossom. The approach to movement was never uniform; in 1968, Jill Johnston, the most dedicated chronicler of the downtown dance scene of the 1960s, wrote an essay, “Which Way the Avant-Garde?” and concluded: “The avant-garde choreographers of the sixties number a mere handful and their audience is nothing next to the droves who turn out for everything conservative; but they and their dedicated followers (many of them artists with similar concerns) tenaciously cling to the principle that revolution is not only inevitable but essential…. I’ve just barely touched on the activities of the avant-garde dance in New York. Meredith Monk, for instance, is one of the most interesting younger choreographers around. With her multiple concerns, she has been exploring the possibilities of dancy dances, of ‘found’ dances, of environmental dances, of ‘still’ images, and of intermedia work. Also dealing with imagery in an intermedia framework is painter Robert Rauschenberg. I think the question whether some of these things are dance or not is irrelevant to the vitality of a movement which, in any case, has questioned the entire fabric of traditionalist dance – both structurally and philosophically.”

One aspect of the downtown dance scene (and there was a corollary in the underground film scene) was the lecture-demonstration. One important venue for dance in the 1960s and 1970s was The New School, in a program run by Laura Foreman. The programs would often showcase three or four choreographers, who would show either a short work or a section of a longer work, and then they would be required to talk about the work, to explain their intentions and to discuss their process. This lecture-demonstration format was an extension of the methodology of the composition classes taught by Robert Ellis Dunn. Trisha Brown once said that, prior to the Judson Dance Theater, dancers simply learned the movement technique of a specific choreographer (Graham technique, Humphrey-Weidman technique, etc.) and developed their style within that technique (as Jose Limon did with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman), but since the Judson Dance Theater, dancers had to think, and they had to articulate what they thought. And when you went to see dance in the 1960s and 1970s, you were often given a lot of information, in the guise of notes in the program, commentaries, and addresses to the audience. Several choreographers began using the lecture-demonstration as a form for their work: three choreographers who did this were Steve Paxton and Gus Solomons, Jr. and Kenneth King. I’m just using this as an example to explain the fact that discourse, critical and analytical, was central to the downtown dance scene. It continues to this day, with the Movement Research concerts currently being held at the Judson Memorial Church, where works-in-progress are presented for discussion between the choreographers and the audience.

In trying to talk about the Judson Dance Theater, one problem has been finding evidence of the multivalence of the phenomenon. I can point to the parallel in film: in the preface to the first edition of P. Adams Sitney’s “Visionary Film”, Sitney concluded, “This book does not pretend to be exhaustive of American avant-garde film-making. Nor does it discuss the work of all the most famous and important film-makers. Major figures such as Ed Emshwiller, Stan VanDerBeek, Storm De Hirsch, and Shirley Clarke, to name a few, are not discussed here.” However, in the ensuing years since “Visionary Film” was first published in 1975, there has been few, if any, attempts to rectify Sitney’s omissions; one of the only scholars to have attempted to do justice to a more inclusive view of the avant-garde film has been Wheeler Winston Dixon with his book “The Exploding Eye”; however, most studies of the American avant-garde film have simply reiterated the basic schema of Sitney’s book.

Similarly, instead of trying to find out more about the numerous personalities involved in the Judson Dance Theater, the focus remains on those already acknowledged. When I reviewed Yvonne Rainer’s “Work 1961-73” for DanceScope (Spring 1975), I began by stating that she was not the most original choreographer of her generation (that would be Simone Forti), nor was she the most rigorous choreographer of her generation (that would be either Deborah Hay or Steve Paxton), nor was she the most fluid choreographer of her generation (that would be either Trisha Brown or Ruth Emerson), but Rainer was certainly the most comprehensive choreographer of her generation. What I discovered was that, since most people had no interest in finding out about the other choreographers of the Judson Dance Theater, the centricity of her career has singled her out, and she has received a disproportionate amount of coverage, considering the fact that the bulk of her choreographic career lasted little over a dozen years. Yet, even given this designation of Rainer as the paradigmatic figure of the Judson Dance Theater, the distortions in how her career is categorized derive from the presumptions which the commentators already have.

Rainer herself was very aware of this. In discussing the situation of Robert Rauschenberg’s association with the Judson Dance Theater, she noted, “Upon Rauschenberg’s entry – through no error in his behavior but simply due to his stature in the art world – the balance was tipped, and those of us who appeared with him became the tail of his comet…. If Bob raised his thumb it was something very special because he was doing it; if I raised my thumb, it was dancing.” So I shall make some comments which might seem to be rather strident, but in this situation, such stridency might be warranted.

I shall use Rainer’s own words as my backup. For example, the emphasis on Rainer’s career has stipulated the connections of her work to Minimal and Conceptual Art, yet her work did not start in that way. “It should be kept in mind that the literary element of my performance work… may give a somewhat distorted impression of what that work was about.” Why these distortions happened, I shall try to explain. And I’ll try to make it fast.

From the late 1960s on, Artforum became the most influential of the art magazines in the United States; though Artforum never attained the circulation numbers of the other major art magazines (Art in America, ArtNews, Arts); the reason for its influence (out of all proportion to its readership) was that, since it wasn’t the most lucrative of the art magazines, it allowed a lot of people who weren’t critics (artists and curators) to publish. Donald Judd, Robert Smithson and Robert Morris were among the artists who wrote articles for Artforum. The editorial board of Artforum included critics who exercised their influence in a variety of ways, such as curating; among these critics were Lawrence Alloway, Robert Pincus-Witten, Max Kozloff, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson. Pincus-Witten, Krauss and Michelson were among the most ardent advocates for what is now known as Minimal Art; one reason was because they were critics tired of what Rosalind Krauss called the tyranny of the Existential pretensions of Abstract Expressionism and its critics, in particular, Harold Rosenberg. Krauss noted that they did not want to interpret the gestural symbolism of Abstract Expressionism, they wanted to denote the formal qualities of the paintings. (Similarly, Jill Johnston explained about the Judson Dance Theater choreographers, “They are making it clearer than ever that formalist structural concerns were always an issue and that the future of dance rests on these concerns rather than any new cult of personality or new schools of technique.”) Another reason was that, as notable educators, these critics were influencing future generations in terms of their specific formalist/structuralist approach, and that would continue throughout the five decades since the initial classes given by Robert Ellis Dunn.

In terms of Yvonne Rainer: she had been singled out by Jill Johnston very early on in her choreographic career; she was also singled out by other critics, such as Allen Hughes of the New York Times, for one reason, because of the prolific nature of her output in the early 1960s; Annette Michelson added to the view of Rainer’s work in terms of its formalist/structuralist qualities in her essays “Yvonne Rainer, Part I: The Dancer and the Dance” (Artforum, January 1974) and “Yvonne Rainer, Part II: Lives of Performers” (Artforum, February 1974). Because (by 1971) Rainer’s work shifted into cinema, Rainer’s critical audience encompassed not just dance critics but film critics. The importance of the feminist film movement, as exemplified by such journals as Camera Obscura, coincided with Rainer’s development as a filmmaker, and she found crucial critical support among feminist film critics such as Teresa de Lauretis, Lucy Fischer and B. Ruby Rich. Those are some of the reasons as to why Rainer was singled out (in particular, her proximity to Minimal Art, as epitomized in her concerts at the Whitney Museum, “Continuous Project-Altered Daily”, which were held concurrently with Robert Morris’s sculptural exhibit of the same name); her willingness to write about her own work also provided a convenient context, especially for those people who had no prior knowledge of dance (as most film critics had not).

For me, it’s neither here nor there to determine whether or not Yvonne Rainer merited her designation as the exemplar of what we can call Post-Modern Dance. But I’d like to make an aside: in the mid-1970s, Lucinda Childs published a “portfolio” about her early works in Artforum; in the introduction, she stated that the influences on her dances were Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer. I’m not saying she’s lying, I’m saying that she’s a performer and she’s playing to her audience. She doesn’t mention Bessie Schoenberg, whom she studied with at Sarah Lawrence College; she doesn’t mention Hanya Holm, in whose company she danced while she was still in school; she doesn’t mention James Waring, in whose company she danced (along with Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, David Gordon, Freddy Herko, Aileen Passloff, Toby Armour, and Arlene Rothlein); she doesn’t mention Aileen Passloff; she doesn’t mention Arlene Rothlein. In short: Childs didn’t mention any dance influences on her career, because she was writing in an art magazine, and she wanted to appeal to an art crowd.

We’re aware that the dynamics of observation can change any situation; this has caused changes in sociology and anthropology, as the notion of the detached observer has been discredited. We know that the questions that are asked often predetermine the response. The determination of the market mentality in which the art world achieves its valuation through the quantification of commercial status coincides with the ascendancy of the commercial cinema as the arbiter of cultural values. This was a situation foreshadowed by Andy Warhol. Which is to say that we know the current critical research in the area of Post-Modern Dance has stressed the proximity of the visual arts at the expense of Post-Modern Dance’s history in relation to dance and theater. Just as an example of this: one of the most important theater works in which Yvonne Rainer and Lucinda Childs were involved was the 1963 production “What Happened” based on Gertrude Stein’s piece, directed by Lawrence Kornfeld, with music by Al Carmines. In its time, “What Happened” was widely acclaimed, it was one of the highlights of the 1962-63 theater season, it played to sold-out houses at the Judson Memorial Church, and it won an Obie Award from the Village Voice. Here is Susan Sontag’s comment (from her essay “Marat/Sade/Artaud”): “We have up to now lacked a full-fledged example of Artaud’s category, ‘the theater of cruelty.’ The closest thing to it are the theatrical events done in New York and elsewhere in the last five years, largely by painters (such as Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenberg, Jim Dine, Bob Whitman, Red Grooms, Robert Watts) and without text or at least intelligible speech, called Happenings. Another example of a work in a quasi-Artaudian spirit: the brilliant staging by Lawrence Kornfeld and Al Carmines of Gertrude Stein’s prose poem, ‘What Happened,’ at the Judson Memorial Church last year.” Yet Rainer and Childs are never asked about “What Happened”, just as they are never asked about James Waring.

But in “Work 1961-73”, Rainer did write about James Waring: “Jimmy had an amazing gift which – because I was put off by the mixture of camp and balleticism in his work – I didn’t appreciate until much later. His company was always full of misfits – they were too short or too fat or too uncoordinated or too mannered or too inexperienced by any other standards. He had this gift of choosing people who ‘couldn’t do too much’ in conventional terms but who – under his subtle directorial manipulations – revealed spectacular stage personalities. He could pull the silk purse out of the sow’s ear. At its worst, dancing with Jimmy could feel like a sow imitating a swan, but I got a lot out of it. He used what I had and demanded more than I thought I had, and his instincts were usually right. In some ways he fathomed my potential more accurately than I could at the time. Although I have often disagreed with him on matters of taste and style, I can’t dispute that he is something of a genius.” Don McDonagh, in his book “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance”, stated: “He existed as a focal point for dance experimentation before the existence of the Judson Dance Theater and thus permitted dancers like (Paul) Taylor, Yvonne Rainer, Fred Herko, Lucinda Childs, Aileen Passloff, Deborah Hay, and Arlene Rothlein to gain valuable performance experience when few other opportunities were available to them.”

One fascinating fact is that the discrepancy in the economic situation has been central to the research: off-Broadway theater was never exactly a lucrative enterprise, while the art world, certainly since the 1960s, has been one source of advanced material wealth. And so there has been a corresponding discrepancy in the way that scholarship has followed the money; if we take the annual conferences of the Association of Theater in Higher Education and the College Art Association as indicators, the amount of research being devoted to contemporary theater and to contemporary art is disproportionate, to say the least. And so it should come as no surprise that students researching the Judson Dance Theater would focus on the association with the art world, specifically with the successful artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris, rather than with the composers and musicians who had been part of the Judson Dance Theater, such as Malcolm Goldstein, Philip Corner, John Herbert McDowell, and James Tenney. (It’s significant that Alex Hay, Carol Summers and Carolee Schneemann, three other artists closely associated with the Judson Dance Theater, have not been investigated to the extent of their involvement, and Charles Ross, the sculptor who created one of the most significant collaborations with the Judson Dance Theater, has been totally ignored. I should amend that to say that the rise in feminist studies in art history and in performance studies brought a great deal of attention to Carolee Schneemann in the last two decades.) The collusion of economic success as an arbiter of artistic merit has infected the valuation of recent art history, and that infection has proven contagious in most dealings with the history of the Judson Dance Theater.

And so the connections that the Judson Dance Theater had to the developing off-off-Broadway scene have been elided if not outright erased. The Judson Dance Theater as a site for the experimental music scene prior to the formation of Fluxus has also been neglected.

I don’t mean to single out Yvonne Rainer, but since she’s already been singled out, I might as well just add fuel to the fire.

For example: though Yvonne Rainer did include films and slides in her work, she was not primarily interested in multimedia work. That would be Beverly Schmidt and Roberts Blossom (the Schmidt-Blossom Dance Company, which existed from 1960 until 1965; Rainer was in the company for a period), then Elaine Summers and then Meredith Monk. Actually, Yvonne Rainer had no great interest in “ordinary movement”. Jill Johnston (“Which Way the Avant-Garde?”): “If the most revolutionary proposition of the new dance was that any sort of movement, or action, or any kind of body (nondancer as well as dancer) was acceptable as material proper to the medium, it was also true that certain choreographers remained in some dialectical relation to tradition, retaining a technical basis for movement while seeking to transform the outmoded structuring of conventional techniques. One of the most encouraging aspects of recent developments is a reassertion of a concern for such movement – as it is still understood in the context of the dance tradition – in a programmatic effort to define it in truly contemporary terms.” (Johnston cited Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay and Lucinda Childs as choreographers who “have recently attacked the problem of advancing the medium within a sphere that lies somewhere between ordinary action (anybody can do it) and a more dance-based idiom.”) Yvonne Rainer herself has explained, “I guess the range of my interests was quite a bit broader than was many other people’s in the workshop (Robert Dunn’s composition class). I mean just in terms of my personal performance and in terms of my choreographic work for a group. Like doing a dance that just consisted of running. That seems a novel idea but, unlike Steve Paxton who did a dance that consisted only of walking, I was still wedded to or interested in undermining or making reference to certain kinds of theatricality that I was then becoming more and more in opposition to.” If Rainer was interested in ordinary movement, it was in relation to, in dialectical opposition to “traditional” dance. Similarly, “task performance” was never a focus for Rainer’s work, but only in relation to traditional dance movement. Simone Forti is credited with coming up with the idea of “task performance” and she created pieces in which the action was the focus in and of itself, but for Rainer, a task was always embedded in a theatrical work (as opposed to Forti, where the task was the theatrical work).

My point is that if you look at the work (even in terms of its excavation as art historical artifacts), you will come to a broader understanding, not just of (say) Yvonne Rainer’s actual achievement, but her connections to the broader cultural scene of the time. I’ll give an example of the Schmidt-Blossom Dance Company. Beverly Schmidt was a principal dancer with Alwin Nikolais in the 1950s; she began to present her own work in the mid-1950s, and soon was joined by her husband, the actor Roberts Blossom. Beverly Schmidt also started teaching at Sarah Lawrence in the late 1950s, and one of her students was Lucinda Childs. Lucinda Childs has mentioned how Beverly Schmidt was one of the dancers that people were interested in seeing in the late 1950s, because her work seemed so original. The original aspect of her work included the incorporation of media in her pieces, not just lighting effects and slides (which had been a signature of Nikolais’s work), but also film. Schmidt herself was a very strong and very lyrical dancer, but the media aspects of her work were handled by her husband, Roberts  Blossom. Quite frankly: sometime in 1960, he got the idea that film could be used in a theatrical presentation. He’d helped his wife with lighting effects and slides (which derived from Nikolais), but the idea of using a moving image as part of the theater… it’s hard to explain, but nobody had ever done that before, but Roberts Blossom got that idea. And so Roberts Blossom began to develop pieces with his wife which would incorporate film. (Robert Whitman began using film in 1961, and is usually credited as the person who started using film as a multimedia element in performance.) People were so excited that many people sought out the Schmidt-Blossom Dance Company, because they wanted the chance to work with someone who was so original. (Some of the people who worked with Beverly Schmidt and Roberts Blossom include Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, and Phoebe Neville.) Yet Roberts Blossom’s name has been all but eradicated from histories of dance, art, theater and performance. Why? In the mid-1960s, Beverly Schmidt and Roberts Blossom divorced; Schmidt went onto teach (she still performs on occasion) and Blossom returned to his career as an actor. In the theater, he worked with Peter Brook; in film, he has worked with Steven Spielberg (CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND), Jonathan Demme (CITIZENS BAND), Don Siegel (ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ), among others. The divorce was (by all accounts) one of those acrimonious trainwrecks. Beverly Schmidt has been interviewed about her connections with the Judson Dance Theater, but Roberts Blossom has been ignored. And this points to the biases that have developed in theater and dance research, in which performance theory now stresses gender issues. So in the case of Roberts Blossom: you have a white straight male who is not an “artist” but an “actor”. It doesn’t matter that he was one of the most original artists of his generation, he doesn’t fit into the proper categories and so he must be totally erased from the public record.

And so, in confronting the situation of the historicizing of the Judson Dance Theater, I am faced with the constant erasures, elisions, and omissions which have now become compounded by continual repetition of the same misinformation. I used the analogy with “underground film”: it’s true that I was (and am) friends with many filmmakers, including Bruce Baillie, Ken Jacobs, Robert Breer, Ernie Gehr, and Jonas Mekas (whom P. Adams Sitney wrote about in “Visionary Film”); but I am also friends with Tom Chomont and James Benning (whom P. Adams Sitney did not write about). I don’t take anything for granted, and I certainly don’t take another person’s pronouncements as gospel about people and places with which I have been familiar first-hand.

So if you look at Yvonne Rainer’s career, you won’t just get Robert Morris and Robert Rauschenberg, you’ll get James Waring. Waring was the quintessential Greenwich Village choreographer in the late 1950s and 1960s: he worked with many of the New York poets, including Frank O’Hara, Diane Di Prima, and Kenneth Koch; he worked with the Living Theater (Julian Beck designed sets for some of Waring’s dances); he collaborated with a lot of artists, including Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Robert Indiana, Larry Poons, George Brecht, Robert Watts, and Robert Whitman. Before his untimely death in 1975, he had disbanded the idea of working with his own company, but was creating dances for other dance groups, but the men who were in his company just before it disbanded formed a company which premiered in 1974, and it was called the Ballets Trocadero! (Talk about camp and balleticism, as Rainer characterized Waring’s work.) Before she decided on a career in dance, Yvonne Rainer studied acting, first with Lee Grant, and then with Paul Mann, and throughout the early 1960s, there were occasions when she worked in theater, not just the case of “What Happened” but also the collaboration with the actor Larry Loonin on a two-character play called “Incidents” (which was performed at the Caffe Cino). You don’t just get her connection to art, but to theater and to dance. I gave the example of the dance “We Shall Run”: if you look at the cast, you’ll notice that all the women in it were dancers, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, June Ekman, Ruth Emerson, Sally Gross, Deborah Hay, and Carol Scothorn, and the idea of dancers performing an action like running is very different from people with untrained bodies running. And Rainer herself acknowledged this when she said she was trying to create this movement in relation to a theatricality that she was in opposition to.

The distortions of critical response to Rainer’s career come from the initial advocacy of the Artforum critics, in particular, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson. During the 1960s, Krauss was living in Connecticut, and Annette Michelson was the Parisian arts editor for the New York Herald Tribune until 1966, when she returned to New York City. Quite frankly: they never saw the bulk of Yvonne Rainer’s work as a choreographer and dancer during the period when she was most active. When Krauss saw Rainer’s work, it was when Rainer performed at the Wadsworth Atheneum under the auspices of Robert Rauschenberg, so her perception of Rainer is filtered through this art world slant. And if Michelson saw Rainer’s work when it toured in Europe, it would have been under museum and gallery sponsorship, which came from the presentation of work by Rauschenberg and Morris on the same program. And Michelson is presuming a lot about Rainer from Michelson’s critical partisanship of Minimal Art, particularly in relation to Donald Judd and Robert Morris. And the prejudices of Krauss and Michelson have filtered down through their students, who include Noel Carroll and his wife, Sally Banes. This is not to dismiss Sally Banes’s work, which I think is of vital importance: “Terpsichore in Sneakers”, “Democracy’s Body” and “Greenwich Village 1963” are three of the best works of dance scholarship that I know. But there are omissions, and people should be aware of that fact. And so there are areas of research that remain to be explored and investigated, and that is the point I’m trying to make.

—Daryl Chin

Berlin, June 2010-Brooklyn, September 2010

Bibliography

Banes, Sally: DEMOCRACY’S BODY: JUDSON DANCE THEATER, 1962-1964. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1993.

—–: TERPSICHORE IN SNEAKERS: POST-MODERN DANCE. Houghton Mifflin, Boson 1980.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston: THE EXPLODING EYE: A RE-VISIONARY HISTORY OF 1960s AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA. State University of New York Press, New York 1998.

Johnston, Jill: MARMALADE ME (revised and expanded edition). Wesleyan University Press, Hanover and London, 1998.

McDonagh, Don: THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE OF MODERN DANCE. Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, New York, 1970.

Rainer, Yvonne: WORK 1961-73. Presses of Nova Scotia College of Art & Design and New York University, Halifax and New York, 1974.

—–: THE FILMS OF YVONNE RAINER. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989.

—–: A WOMAN WHO… ESSAYS, INTERVIEWS, SCRIPTS. PAJ Books: Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1999.

Sitney, P. Adams: VISIONARY FILM: THE AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE 1943-2000. Oxford University Press, London, 2002.

Sontag, Susan: AGAINST INTERPRETATION. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1966.

DARYL CHIN is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn; from October 2009 to July 2010, he was a Fellow at the International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Mistaken Identities, Part I (co-author: Larry B. Qualls) was a lecture given at the Performing Tangier 2010 Conference: New Perspectives on Site Specific Art in Arabo-Islamic Contexts in May 2010.

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Dear Diary,

We did not come up with the subject for this issue. Virtuosity was the theme of the conference Prekäre Exzellenz, which LW had the opportunity to attend in Berlin last June. And this was just the beginning: it didn’t take long to find out that virtuosity also happened to be a leitmotif of this year’s steirischer herbst, a contemporary art festival in Graz, Austria, a festival that bizarrely plays a distant, yet significant role in LW history. This was what it took for us to realize that virtuosity is on people’s minds and even holds a prominent place in discourse.

Issue 004 reacts to the current situation of virtuosity obliquely.

We are happy the way things are shaping up with this whole highfalutin’ virtuous virtuosity story.  We never really bought into the overwhelm wrought by virtuosity and its accomplices: immortal geniuses and perfectionist masters of objects-in-themselves. That said, this issue has been rather fun.

In a true story of the Judson Dance Theater, artist and writer Daryl Chin delivers a sharp-witted clear-cut account of the splendors and miseries of an oft-glorified, supercreative 1960s New York City bursting with original originality.  Here friends hanging out and making things together and (not) being forgotten are taken seriously as the core stuff of art history and understanding the personalities that make it.

We enjoyed strategizing our market presence and value virtuosically together with Doug Popovich, a NYC-based brand and marketing communications geek and artwife (he even has a rhinestone belt buckle that reads: Kunstfrau).  A visual correspondence with the Zeitgeist of the visual arts materializes through images of artist Alex Auriema’s recent work Economy of Dissonance, which is now on exhibit at Transcient Spaces (a project organized by Uqbar art space) in Berlin.

Caleb Waldorf reflects on The Public School as a somewhat virtuosic fluctuation between practicing space programming and theorizing it.

Of course, our Intellectual Trend Digest, a.k.a. LW’s TrendMatrix evolves around the spectacular genius of branding. The ride was rad.

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Artist and writer Daryl Chin gave this talk on the Judson Dance Theater in Gabriele Brandstetter’s seminar at Freie Universität.  It is amazing.

Still from Yvonne Rainer's FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO... (1974)

I want to welcome everybody, and I want to give three facts, three personal facts. In 1963, my family moved to Chatham Square, which is a co-op.  But what that meant was that in the summer of 1962, we could not go away because my parents were saving money to buy the co-op.  So what happened was, I had to stay in the city.  For some reason, I thought it was 1963 that I stayed in the city, but it it turned out it was 1962 because Kennedy was shot in ’63 and we were already living there in Chatham.  In the summer of 1962, I was in the city. I was eight years old, and I went to every movie I could go to.  But I also went to different things in the evening.  Washington Square Park had a lot of concerts.  They had band concerts and outdoor events.  There were two churches.  Washington Square Methodist Church and the Judson Memorial Church.  In July of 1962, I went to a dance concert that was supposed to start at 7 o’clock.  I was supposed to get home by 9:30, so I had to leave by 9 o’clock.  I didn’t know it was going to go on for a while.  Who knew that it was going to be three hours?  That turned out to be historically the first Judson Dance Theater concert.  So that’s the first fact.

The second fact is the summer of 1974.  In the summer of 1974, I had just graduated from Columbia University.  I didn’t have a job, so I was trying to send out my resume, and what happened was that I was talking to different people and Elaine Summers said, “Well, why don’t you come and help me this summer if you don’t have a job?”  I said fine. So two or three days a week I went to her place.  And she had this organization called The Experimental Intermedia Foundation, which was a non-profit organization.  At the time, in 1970, Trisha Brown had started her dance company, but to create a non-profit, it was one of those things that you had to incorporate. You had to do all of these things, so it was always easier to find someone who already had a non-profit, so that you could be umbrella-ed by that organization, as they call it, umbrella.  So the Trisha Brown Dance Company was also a part of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation.

Now, here’s the thing.  This is the summer of 1974.  I wanted to mention that in 1967-68, George Maciunas, who is sort of the person who founded Fluxus, he got this brilliant idea.  There were a lot of buildings that were being abandoned in SoHo, so he started to move in his friends.  I mean, literally, move in his friends.  He was starting to co-op these things, people were buying things.  So people came.  He found this building at 537/541 Broadway and 110/112 Mercer Street.  The thing that was so incredible about it was that there were no pillars.  Just these huge spaces with no pillars.

So immediately he called Simone Forti, who he was very close to. You know, it’s one of these, Oh!  And they called a friend and they called a friend and they called a friend.  Simone moved into the third floor at 537 Broadway.  Jean Dupuy was on the second floor.  Frances Alenikoff, who was a choreographer who did multimedia work, was on the fourth floor, and Elaine Summers was on the fifth floor.  Then on the fifth floor at 541 was Trisha Brown, fourth floor was Lucinda Childs, third floor was Douglas Dunn, and the second floor was David Gordon.  So they all moved into basically the same building.  At 110 Mercer on the fifth floor was Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota and at 112 Mercer was the Japanese artist Ay-o.  And also at 110 Mercer was Joan Jonas on the third floor and Yoshi Mato and Barbara Wada was at 112 Mercer.

I spent the summer of 1974 basically on the fifth floor of 537 and 541 Broadway, and there were times when, especially on the weekends, we would do things like just sort of go out, hang out, have dinner, and go to the movies.  And we were: Elaine Summers, Simone Forti, and Trisha Brown.  I should mention that the thing about the building was that it was a circular thing around a courtyard.  The courtyard had all these windows that sort of overlooked each other so that you really could do something like yell across and talk to people.  But the first thing that Lucinda Childs did when she moved in was that she got shades.

February of 1982. What happened was that in the fall of 1981 I was contacted by two friends.  Wendy Perron, who is a dance critic, she is now the editor of Dance Magazine.  At that time she was also a cabinet member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company.  Cynthia Hedstrom, who was then the head of Danspace at St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, and Cynthia had been a dancer with Lucinda Childs.  They contacted me because Wendy was teaching at Bennington.  Judith Dunn was also teaching at Bennington, and because of that Wendy got this idea to create this thing which was the Bennington-Judson project, and what she did was she tried to track down as many people as possible.  She had all these programs from the Judson Dance Theater–who had performed at Judson and videotaped them, to get information from them, and also if it was a possibility to have her students recreate the work.  So we decided to do this thing, the Judson Dance Theater Reconstructions.  And that happened in February 1982.

Often when you’re in a certain situation, you don’t know the whole picture… So it’s the type of thing where Cynthia and Wendy have an image of the Judson Dance Theater, but they didn’t have a complete image.  In other words, they knew the people that Lucinda Childs knew, or they knew the people that Trisha Brown knew, but they didn’t know the other people that were there.  And there were a lot of other people.  So it was my job to sort of figure out who was in touch with who and to try to get as many people as possible.  We wound up getting about 30 people.  It was really varied, and it was very interesting, and I think it was very successful.  But what happens after that is, and this is the thing: So much of the art, hmmm, shall we say, the art events, of the period of the 1960s, 1970s are really getting very partialized.  At the end of the introduction to the first edition of Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney wrote that his definition of visionary film only covers a portion of what we would call experimental, avant-garde film activity in the United States since the 1940s.  Then he says that he hopes that other people will explore this very rich territory, very rich material, and will actually look for other filmmakers to investigate.  He cites four: Ed Emshwiller, Stan VanDerBeek, Shirley Clark, and Storm De Hirsch.  Well, unfortunately, I haven’t seen any major studies of these people since P. Adams Sitney wrote his book because nobody has taken the time to look at these things.  And so it’s like, Oh, this is a bad situation.

I figured that one person everyone will know if they study the Judson Dance Theater will be Yvonne Rainer.  So I’ll start with Yvonne.  I’ll do something about her resume, and actually I’ll talk about how it is very partialized in the way that her life has been historicized and theorized, and it also distorts a lot of her work. Not only does it distort it, but it doesn’t explain how her work fits in with other things that were happening at the time, including a lot of things Off Broadway, other dance things, etc.  One thing that I should mention is that when Yvonne Rainer used to have a resume, I don’t know if she still does, she used to always list three dance companies because those were the only dance companies she ever worked with before she started her own choreographic career.  The three dance companies are: Edith Stevens, 1957 – 58.  One of the reasons was that Edith Stevens was not really, shall we say, a major choreographer.  But she was somebody who, because she didn’t really have movement ideas, the way Cunningham had at the time, Sybill Shearer had movement ideas, she allowed a lot of improvisation, which Yvonne totally fit in with.  So that was the first person.  But now the next two are actually really really important.  She always lists of course James Waring and then the Schmidt Blossom Dance Company, which is actually Beverly Schmidt and her husband Robert Blossom, which I’ll get to.

The thing about the James Waring Dance Company was that James Waring was for many many years–it’s the sort of thing where if you said Greenwich Village and dancer, you thought of James Waring and his company.  He was one of those people who did not define a movement style, the way Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham did, but what he did was, he tried to use as many people as possible in his company, people he thought were wonderful performers even if they couldn’t dance, if they had two left feet, even if they were, as Yvonne said, “a sow’s ear trying to be a silk purse.”  That’s how she described working with James Waring.  The classic example of the company is David Gordon, who was a student going to Brooklyn College.  His girlfriend, also going to Brooklyn College, was a dance student.  She had taken classes with James Waring in Greenwich Village, and he accompanied her. James Waring, he’s sitting there week after week, and he says, “You, come here.”  And he says, “Just run.”  So he runs.  And he says, “OK, I’m doing a dance, and it’s going to be shown in a month.  And you’re in it.”  And that’s how David Gordon got his dance start.

In the case of Yvonne Rainer, how she got to the James Waring Dance Company, and I should mention this because on June 4th of this year at the Judson Church, there was a memorial concert for James Waring.  Two people, Toby Armour and Aileen Passloff, presented some old work and a new piece.  Toby and Aileen were in James Waring’s dance company starting in the mid-’50s.  What happened was, (Yvonne Rainer always talks about it) she went to a concert.  One of the other things James Waring did was he organized concerts so that other people could show their work.  He would organize an event, and he would say, “OK, I’ve heard you’ve choreographed something, so why wouldn’t you do it in this work?”  This is also something Yvonne Rainer always talks about: he had heard of some of the things she had done in the Robert Ellis Dunn class.  And he said, “OK, I heard you did these dances. I think they were Three Satie Spoons to the music of Erik Satie.  He said, “Why don’t you do this?”  He set the date.  He said, “There’s going to be a concert, and you’re going to present.”  And that was it.  That was her first dance presented in New York City.

What happened was a few years before she went to one of these events and saw Aileen Passloff, and she’s always described it as, She didn’t do that much, she was sort of hunched over and ran across the stage.  She took a pencil and started biting it.  She said it was just the strangest thing because they were actions she didn’t consider dance, but they were so powerful and she said it was so female and funny.  And she said, I just have to work with that woman.  So she found out that Aileen Passloff was also in James Waring’s dance company, so she started taking classes with James Waring.  And James Waring looked at her and said, Oh.  He just liked the way she looked.  And he asked her to be a part of his dance company, which just floored her.

One of the things about James Waring was that his work was very theatrical.  He also did things that were like plays. I mean literally plays, even though they were dances.  He would work with poets.  Diane di Prima, Kenneth Koch, various other poets, and they often would write dialogue for texts that people read. He would work with artists, I mean artists like Al Hansen, Red Grooms, and other people who created sets for him and costumes.  He also worked with musicians, not in the way that Cunningham did, who was trying to divorce the music from the dance.  It was like no, they developed the scores together. John Herbert McDowell, Malcolm Goldstein were others.  They were all semi-plays, and they had all these people in it.  So at one time, James Waring’s dance company included Toby Armour, Aileen Passloff, Remy Charlip, who also of course was one of the original people in Merce Cunnigham’s company, and Freddie Herko, Eddie Barton, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, and Yvonne Rainer.

One of the reasons I bring this up is because everyone knows that there is this thing that Yvonne wrote, which is the end of an article that she wrote for The Drama Review, “Parts of Some Sextets,” and it’s called even online or whatever, I looked it up, the “No Manifesto,” no to theatricality, no to… All of which is like, well, I wouldn’t say that, because up until probably 1965, just as an example, there’s “no to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer.”  And it’s like yeah, well, I don’t think by taking off your clothes you’re not seducing the performer.  And Yvonne Rainer was one of those people who liked to be naked.  A lot.  There are at least five of her early dances in which she’s wearing no clothes.  One of them is Words Words, and there’s a very famous picture of her.  She and Steve Paxton, it was a duet.  They’re both naked, except of course you can’t be naked in New York City, so he had what was called posing strap, and she had those pasties that you put on that had tassels.  Picture that with tassels, you know the kind that strippers use.  I don’t think that if you’re wearing what strippers wear you’re not not trying to seduce the audience.

Everybody knows that there’s this famous dance class that became the Judson Dance Theater, which is Robert Ellis Dunn’s class.  I should say that the precursor in New York City to this class was John Cage’s New School class, from 1958 -1960, and that was a class where people who wanted to be musicians came.   Jackson Maclow, La Monte Young, Philip Corner, Malcolm Goldstein, Dick Higgins.  Oh God, a lot of people.  Al Hansen took that class, even though he was a painter, but he took the class.  And then it was one of those things where a lot of people from other places came to take the class too.  One of those people was of course Yoko Ono.

How this relates to 537/541 Broadway was that Fluxus started because when George Maciunis was living with Yoko, Fluxus became his way of trying to promote Yoko.  It was like you’d have a classroom of all these different people, and then you’d always have Yoko on the bill.  So Fluxus got started with George Maciunis’ obsession with Yoko Ono.

Robert Dunn’s class.  He had been an assistant to John Cage for the Cunningham Company, and often he played piano, Robert Dunn.  And his wife Judith was one of the people who was part of the original Merce Cunningham Dance Company.  Along with Viola Farber, Carolyn Brown, and Remy Charlip.  This happened about 1953 – 54, maybe earlier, but the point is that Robert started teaching his class, and originally it was only seven people who came, two of them being Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton.  Another one was this dancer named Marni Mahaffy.  I know that Sally Banes in her book Democracy’s Body has sort of talked about this set of people.  But what happened was that people began to, look, it’s like this: people didn’t have television.  I mean, in the late ’50s, early ’60s, a lot of artists didn’t have television.  They just didn’t have television, so what were they going to do?

People began to do things like events.  Like on Monday nights, there’s this thing.  This sort of class that Robert Dunn teaches, so at that time, before she hooked up with Robert Morris and after she divorced Al Held, one of the people that Yvonne Rainer was going with was Phil Horner.  So Phillip started coming to the Robert Dunn classes.  And Simone Forti had come from California, and she was accompanied by her husband, Robert Morris.  And James Tenney, a composer, was a very close friend of Robert Morris, and his wife, Carollee Schneemann, they would often accompany Yvonne and Phil, and they would show up at Robert Dunn’s class.  It was a social thing. People just started coming.  One of the things about it was that Robert Dunn always said that he never tried to tell people exactly what to do, but that they were just general frameworks. Time.  This that the other thing. How much space.  What was always was amazing, at least he said, was that some people just didn’t think like anybody else.  The person that he really said this about was Simone Forti.  He said, you never knew what she would come up with.  For example, as an instruction, OK, we’re doing a ten minute dance. Come in with a ten minute dance.  She comes in and she says, I have a dance, and I will read it.  And so for ten minutes she reads.  And it’s like, well, it’s an action, and she just had these ideas.  Nobody ever knew how she got these ideas really, but she was pretty amazing at that time.

Many of you who know of the screenplays I’m working on. Let’s put it this way: Simone always thought that her lot in life was going to be that she’d be somebody’s wife and mother.  For example, when the Judson Dance Theater started in 1962, she had already married Robert Whitman, and he decided that he didn’t want his wife performing her own work.  He only wanted her to perform in his work.  And she did.  So, uh, not gonna get into that one.

The other thing that is hard to explain to people is shifting alliances.   For example, Lucinda Childs had been a student at Sarah Lawrence where she studied with Bessie Schoenberg, and two years later another girl from Sarah Lawrence, who was studying with Bessie Schoenberg also had this idea of, Oh, I want to go downtown and hang out with the people there.  And that was Meredith Monk.  I say this because in the ’60s, initially, Lucinda is not the most outgoing person I’ve ever met, so she really had a group of friends.  The friends she really hung out with initially, she was not part of the, what Shigeko Kubota later laughingly called Rauschenberg’s babies.  She wasn’t a part of the Rauschenberg group. Actually she hung out with Arlene Rothlein, and also Freddie Herko, who were also people in James Waring’s company.  Freddie Herko was very famous for any of you who know about Warhol, because he was the first of the Warhol superstars who died.  In 1964, he was the person who was on speed and decided to go out the window.  Before anybody could stop him he literally went out the window.  So that’s Freddie Herko.  After that, Lucinda really became withdrawn, but then Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton sort of had her join their group and sort of go out with them and see things.  So that’s how that happened.  But before that she was also the girl who Warhol initially was really fascinated with because she was from a very well-to-do WASP family and was sort of a semi-socialite. He wanted her to be his sort of first superstar.  But she was really resistant.  So the only actual film he ever did of her was Lucinda Childs’ shoulders.  That’s it.  He got to film her shoulders.  She wouldn’t do a screen test with her face.  I don’t know whether that’s art or not, but that’s what happened.  Because then he would find of course Edie Sedgwick, and the rest, as they say, is history.

As I said, in Robert Dunn’s class, a lot of the people began to bring in other people, so there were painters and sculptors and musicians.  One of the points I wanted to make about the way this whole history gets distorted, and I use P. Adam Sitney’s Visionary Film as an example, is that starting in 1969 –  1970, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson were writing a lot about what we now call minimal art.  They were writing about Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Robert Morris, and so on.  And they were theorizing about their work, which wasn’t too hard because Donald Judd and Robert Morris, etcetera, were theorizing themselves. What they did was also align it with, as they said, “The new sculpture is aligned with the new dance.”  They would write about what they envision this dance to be.  It was one of those situations where if you haven’t actually seen it, but you’re trying to write about it, and you’re theorizing from, shall we say, written evidence, and the evidence of things is, for example, Yvonne Rainer’s “No Manifesto,” you’re getting a distorted idea.

Let me put it this way.  Around 1965, Yvonne Rainer did a piece called, We Shall Run, which really consisted of people running in a whole bunch of patterns to music.  I think the music was Berlioz Requiem.  But the point is that if you read about it, you think, yes, this is about running in place, running in pattern, etc., but don’t forget that the people she asked to be in her piece were people like Sally Gross, Judith Dunn, Deborah Hay, in other words, people who were very much trained dancers. So the actual effect of the work is more like Esplanade, which is a Paul Taylor piece, which is simply movements of running and jumping to Bach music.  That’s the thing.  If you’ve seen it, you say, Oh, that’s the connection to Paul Taylor.  But if you haven’t seen it, you’re thinking Oh, these are just people running.  But they’re not people just running. They are dancers running.  It’s very different.

If you look at it, quite frankly, Yvonne is no fool.  She knows, as she has said, if you want publicity, you go and you get the person who can give you more publicity. You have Robert Rauschenberg in your work because you know all these art people, Oh my God, they’re going to come to it.  So she asked Robert Morris and Robert Rauschenberg, but she always asked people who were dancers to be in her work.  She didn’t really deviate until after 1967 from people who were trained dancers.  For example, in Parts of Some Sextets, which is the piece where at the end she puts the “No Manifesto,” she talked about getting the cast together.  Part of the thing was moving a series of mattresses back and forth through the thing, and then piling them up.  But all the people were dancers except for Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris.  Joseph Schlichter was in it because she had asked Trisha Brown who was… Trisha Brown’s husband, and he was actually a dancer.  He had done Broadway. He was actually a dancer in several Broadway shows.  So you have these people who are trained dancers.  You’re not dealing with “ordinary people,” like Steve Paxton, who really did want to take out dance from dance and really did want to use ordinary people.  He did and so did Deborah Hay.  And the reason that’s very interesting is because of all the people in the Judson Dance Theater group, Steve Paxton was the most trained, and shall we say, “the best dancer,” literally.  He had come to New York because he had been working with people  in college who had worked with the Jose Limon Company, and he came as a Jose Limon dancer.  After he worked with Limon, he was studying, and Merce Cunningham asked him to be a part of the company.  So this was someone who was really a good dancer.  So he decided to do away with dance. Dance is artificial.

So why do people get the wrong idea?  Because a lot of this information is coming second hand and third hand.  At this point, people say, Oh, Sally Banes’ book, and then there have been articles by people like Douglas Crimp about Yvonne Rainer.  Well, none of them actually saw Yvonne perform when she was actually performing.  Both Sally Banes and Douglas Crimp were students of Annette Michelson, who also never saw Yvonne Rainer perform.  So it’s the sort of thing where it’s like, wow, this is getting to be like traces, ghostly.  You’re getting to the point where a myth is being built up. And then why don’t people say that’s not really what happened?  Well, it’s because people have egos.

Nobody’s going to say, oh wait, you’re theorizing and it’s all wrong.  They’re going to say, oh, isn’t that nice.  There’s an expression: Hoist with your own petard.  And honey, all of these people have such petards you would believe it.

One of the things that happened with the Judson Dance Theater Reconstructions was that we had over 30 people who were able to recreate their work.  Some people refused.  Trisha Brown at the time refused.  One of the reasons was that she was well into her first decade of her own dance company, doing all of these things that started with accumulation, and she didn’t want to recreate any of those things like the room game or walking down the side of the building, all of these things where people weren’t really dancing, they were just moving within certain constrictions.  Another person who said nooooo, I mean practically bit our heads off, was Robert Morris.  He did not want to reconstruct anything.  Lucinda Childs reconstructed Carnation.  Her point was: get me to do it before I can’t do a handstand anymore.  Her work after 1969 was very different.  Her work became an issue of pure movement.  Before that, her work wasn’t, it was very theatrical.  She was in James Waring’s company and was very influenced by him.  She created these little characters.  Carnation is a performance where she’s this addled housewife.  She does everything wrong.  She uses the colander except she uses it on her head.  She takes a whole bunch of sponges.  She makes a sandwich of sponges and then she bites on it.  It was very funny.  The thing is that was her work before.  One of her most famous pieces was actually only done within the framework of Robert Dunn’s workshop.  What she did was, she left the tape recorder, she said, give me five minutes.  She put on the tape recorder and it said, “Go to the window!”  Everybody went to the window, at which point she was on the other side of the street, where she did a whole travelogue thing, where she pointed out this is this store.  And she did this whole movement, and she went across the street describing things as she went.

The other thing I should mention is that the workshop started in 1960 – 61, and it basically ended by 1965, but by 1964, a lot of people were starting to come in from overseas. Two people from Japan that everybody remembered was Suzushi Hanayagi, who later became very famous as a sort of classical Japanese dancer.  The other one was Cheiko Shiomi.  Rosemary Butcher arrived in New York a few years before that to study really with Graham.  She had taken classes at Cunningham, and she had heard about this workshop.   And when it started, she had just become part of it.  So all of these people were there.  It became sort of international because a lot of people began to come from overseas, and then they would go back and try to sort of recreate the ideas being discussed and embodied in these workshops.

One of the things we were able to do with the Judson Dance Theater Reconstructions was on Saturday afternoon, from noon to 4pm, Robert Ellis Dunn taught his last workshop in New York City at the event.  A lot of people went.  A lot of the people who were then, sort of the whole collaborative idea, a lot of people who were at that time in Movement Research came and took that workshop. I couldn’t because if you’re running the program it’s very hard.  There was a program Thursday and Friday and then another program on Saturday and Sunday, so I sort of sat in on things a little, and then I would rush out.

The thing that drove me crazy in later years, was that I would try to get him to sit down and write a book about dance, composition, his ideas.  And he never really wanted to do that.  Never.  He kept saying he would do it, and then came another little letter with a few little notes, and I said, well, do you want to write the whole thing?  And I would suggest things like, why don’t you use a tape recorder and I’ll try to transcribe it?  No, not really, wasn’t going to happen.  So that was unfortunate.  But we did become really good friends.  It was interesting, too.  Another person with whom I became close friends but who didn’t get to take the workshop was Kenneth King. At the same time we became very good friends with Robert Dunn, and we stayed good friends until he died in 1996.

One of the things he stressed was that there was never any one way of doing anything, which also meant that even though this whole sort of movement was supposed to be centered on the idea of ordinary movement, task-performance, etc., that actually that wasn’t the case and he had no problem with, shall we say, trained dancers doing their own dance, just as long as they didn’t try to fit themselves into a very prescribed format.  A lot of people worked with Martha Graham, and they would go and sort of do sub-Graham work. You go around the world and you see people who, there are teachers who have studied with Graham, so you’re seeing in places like the Phillipines, or Japan, or Mexico, these sub-Graham dancers, which is supposed to be modern.  And it’s really horrifying.

His idea was that everyone should find a way to work that would free their creativity, so that you didn’t have to do what everybody else did. One of the things that I remember about that workshop was that a lot of people had come in with preconceptions.  For example, this whole bunch of people who had worked with Simone Forti, Pooh Kaye, Yoshiko Chuma (The School of Hard Knocks) and David Appel.  They had an idea of what the class would be, and he kept trying to figure out ways to say, “This is what you’re expecting, so this is not what we’re going to do.”  In a way to drive people crazy, but in another way so you were always off-balance, so that you always had a way to think there was something bigger to do.  And that was his aim.

We’re getting near the end.  I wanted to stress that, here’s the thing.  If you are going to study the Judson Dance Theater, the point is that a lot of the people are still alive.  I don’t know how much longer, but they’re still alive.  For example, in one very early article in the 1970s about Yvonne Rainer, there were a bunch of photographs of her pieces, and I was really appalled because it’s like, oh, they were able to identify Robert Rauschenberg and Trisha Brown.  And then there were two people: they put unidentified and unidentified.  The two people turned out to be Judith Dunn and Sally Gross.  And it was like, excuse me!?  At that time, Judith was still alive. She died not too long ago.  Actually, Bill Dixon died just two weeks ago.  He was a jazz musician.  Starting in 1969, he and Judith Dunn always collaborated.  She was always working with live music.

This is another thing people don’t understand.  People think it was a very homogeneous group, and it actually wasn’t.  People work a lot with outside, and alot of other things happened.  One person who is very important in the early days was Carla Blank.  One of the reasons she was very important was because she was really an organizational person.  She would organize the concerts.  She would say, “OK, Let’s see what we’re going to present at the next concert. Who has a piece?”  And then she would say, OK, it’s gonna be two hours, and she would sign this and that.  She was very organizational.

In 1965, her husband got a job teaching in Portland, OR.  That’s where she found love.  And her husband happens to be Ishmael Reed, the African-American novelist.  So it’s the type of thing where if you don’t know all these things, Judith Dunn and Bill Dixon, the jazz musician who is also African-American.  There were a lot of different people.  It was very varied.  It may not be that everybody was dancing.  But if you went to the concerts there were a lot of people. By a lot of people I mean there were black people, Asian people. You’d see a lot of different people in the pieces.  That’s something you don’t get the flavor of.  That’s a very important thing because during the 1980s, during the culture wars, there was a lot of, shall we say, contention about what people call the avant-garde.  People would say, oh, it’s so exclusive.  Chris Choi for example, who’s a documentary filmmaker, once she made this comment: “Video art, that’s a white people thing.”  And it’s like white people?  Excuse me.  Nam June Paik is usually credited as the father of video art.  I didn’t know Nam June changed his color.  It’s like who are these people? They always got really fierce in those days, especially during grant cycles.

I hated being in this position because I always knew that I was the person who was there because I was the non-white person who would always stick around for the after party.  It’s like, well, you get assigned a role, and that was mine.

I think we’re almost finished, so I will end with (sort of) three stories.

So we’re all waiting in the lobby in the Brooklyn Academy of Music for some Robert Wilson extravaganza.  Two nights before that at American Ballet Theater was As Time Goes By at the theater.  Whoever was the assistant to the person who was running… Was it Margie Wittgenstein who was running the Brooklyn Academy of Music?  This woman was his assistant, and I knew that, so she went over to Twyla Tharp and she said, “Oh, Twyla!  I just saw As Time Goes By, and I loooovved it!  Oh and Twyla, it’s so short, it’s not fair.”  And Twyla gives her a look and says, “I’m not fair, honey, life’s not fair.”

The second story is at the memorial for Robert Dunn.  See, what happened, especially during the eighties, a lot of times, for example the Festival d’Automne in Paris, had a thing where they invited Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown and David Gordon to participate, sort of this whole Judson Dance Theater whatever.  And they had asked if they wanted to have someone who was a critic or commentator to speak about the Judson Dance Theater.  Trisha and Yvonne suggested Annette Michelson.  I knew that that Robert Dunn was hurt by this because he was like, how come nobody is asking me?  What am I?  At the memorial, Yvonne said this, and I remember very clearly, she said that if there was ever a person she ever wanted the approval of, it was Robert Dunn.  She said she wasn’t the only one.  She knew that everyone else felt that way.  Then she said that maybe we neglected him.  I’m really sorry that he felt that way, but he should have known that it wasn’t just that we respected him.  And she said, he should have known that we loved him, and that we wouldn’t have any careers without him because he was the person that really inspired us.  So that’s what she said.  Of course he’s dead but what can you do?

And then there’s a third story.  Starting around 1969, as I said Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson started writing about minimal sculpture, minimal art, and they often aligned the new sculpture with the new dance. They talked about the principles of task-performance and so on and so forth.  And they always would talk about Yvonne Rainer.  They always had the same list of people: Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton. Never David Gordon, which was probably right because he was very different.  He still, to this day, was very much influenced by James Waring.  He really had dialogue in his dances.  Lucinda Childs, and of course, Simone Forti.   In 1976, the Dia Art Foundation did a whole series of pieces, a sort of retrospective of the work of Robert Whitman, and so I’m there, Larry’s there, (Larry, he’s my partner) with friends.  So at the end of one piece, we’re standing there talking to a really good friend, and Annette Michelson comes barrelling through, because standing right next to us is Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Wilson, so she basically runs over and practically knocks down the person I’m talking to.  And I realized, Oh my God, she doesn’t know who the fuck this woman is!  So she’s talking to Robert Rauschenberg, she’s talking to Robert Wilson, and I go, Annette!  This is before we were neighbors, by the way. I moved into 141 Wooster Street in 1980.  This is 1976.  1980 on the sixth floor.  Guess who else was on the sixth floor?  Anyway, so I was like, “Annette!”  She goes, “Yes.”  How this broad from Brooklyn ever got this highfalutin’ British accent, I don’t know.  And I said, “Annette, I’d like to introduce you to somebody.”  And she goes, “Oh really, who?”  And I go, “Simone Forti!”

So these are the three messages:

1.  Life may not be fair, but things like the Judson Dance Theater actually tried to make things a little more egalitarian, so that people who were really trained dancers, like Steve Paxton, or almost untrained dancers like David Gordon, could find a place to be choreographers.

2.  Yvonne Rainer’s statement, what I mean is that, if you’re going to investigate it, don’t just go in the prescribed way.  Don’t just be like Douglas Crimp and Sally Banes, in other words, getting your information from Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss who didn’t see these things.  Try to find a way to reach out.  Look for other sources.  And not only that, because what you’ll find is a lot of these people are still around.  And not only that, but they’re really nice.  You’ll have a great time knowing them.  You’ll have a great time meeting them, talking to them.  It’s like Yvonne said, you won’t just get information, you’ll get love!

3.  The third point was: Listen, don’t be one of those researchers who’s going to knock over Simone Forti to get to Robert Rauschenberg.

DARYL CHIN is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn; from October 2009 to July 2010, he was a Fellow at the International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Mistaken Identities, Part I (co-author: Larry B. Qualls) was a lecture given at the Performing Tangier 2010 Conference: New Perspectives on Site Specific Art in Arabo-Islamic Contexts in May 2010.

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The Public School was started by Sean Dockray, currently director of Telic Arts Exchange, and a group of collaborators in 2007 in Los Angeles.  With the help of Caleb Waldorf, The Public School Berlin was launched in late September 2010.

Caleb Waldorf: My involvement in the project came shortly after attending the second class held at the school in LA titled, Ranciere: The Politics of Aesthetics (and/as an Ethics). I found the class to be amazing and at the completion of the course emailed Sean to ask if the school needed any help, with well, anything. I was super excited and wanted to do whatever I could to contribute. I then joined the D.A.N. a few months later on the first “rotation” of the committee.

To hopefully paraphrase Sean accurately, one of the motivations for starting the school was to engage with the question of how labor unfolds in the programming of an arts space. Telic Arts Exchange was organizing exhibitions and preparing projects, which while diverse in terms of form and duration, still largely took place within the context of an exhibition format. Orchestrating this type of programming requires a significant amount of labor by the organizers “behind the scenes,” and yet the actual experience of the production could be very short. What The Public School then did was try to reorient that structure toward another one: a school. After all, a school is also one system of programming, just like an exhibition is.

Legwork: It is indeed. So I suppose just as an exhibition has a curator, a school has a programmer or a principal. I find it interesting that The Public School emerged in an art space context.  After the curatorial turn, this context enables us to see, discuss, and thematize that “behind the scenes” figure, be it a curator, a programmer, or a project author.

CW: There is a long history of artist-run educational projects, and it seems like more and more are popping up every day. Over the last year and a half we have been taken up into many conversations about art and education that are happening in the arts/academic worlds. We participate in these both directly and also by being mobilized within a specific conversation as an “example.”

Part of our motivation for organizing There is nothing less passive than the act of fleeing… this summer in Berlin was to think about our project in relationship to these broader conversations that have taken and are taking place right now – but not only within an arts context. In other words, we wanted to have a conversation to help us consider issues that aren’t always covered in an art space context. That being said, the texts discussed in Berlin don’t deviate too much from some of the conversations that have been taking place in Los Angeles for the last few years. In fact, I don’t see how we could have created the program without the classes and people who have participated there.

LW: So what are the specifics of the facilitating function/act here? It sounds like there is more than a random exchange of experience.

CW: I’m not entirely sure it is random. For me it is very much an organizational project that tries to figure out a discursive space that resist traditional formations of knowledge, both in its accumulation and circulation. To be even simpler: how do we learn things, organize people, work with people, practice knowledge?

LW: It looks like your strategies to deal with these issues and to answer these questions are in a way pre-determined by the contextual space of origin of the project. What I mean is that maybe being placed within an art context is exactly what creates conditions and possibility, a way of thinking, of playing with detaching, the overcoming of what you call “discursive spaces.” To play with them, to make them a bit more open than academia usually does. Or an art institution usually does.

CW: I think so, but it is a very difficult to identify the “art” in the project. Ultimately I think even addressing that brings up another issue, which is whether we want to hold on to “art,” to that term. Do we have any investment in “art?” Is there a strong desire to challenge contemporary notions of art practice via The Public School so we could say that there is a different way of working as a contemporary artist? Or do we want not to have that conversation at all and say that this is not art but something completely different? I don’t have a very well formulated idea on any of these questions, but I still hold onto the term art at the moment. In my practice, both within The Public School and with other projects, this is something that I am trying to figure out. And my position is one that ends up being somewhat schizophrenic, and I move back and forth to different sides of the argument(s) often.

All that being said, a large portion of people involved in the project are not artists. The Public School Los Angeles committee is comprised of an architect, a couple of artists, someone who studies comparative literature, etc. In New York, there are people more involved in publishing and architecture. In Helsinki, they have architects, artists, musicians. It is quite a good mix, all of whom aren’t familiar with contemporary (or historical for that matter) art practices, and who I don’t think have an investment in the project as “art” per se.

Just as a quick anecdote from the Berlin seminar—the person with the best attendance who only missed one of the thirteen days is doing his Ph.D. in political philosophy here in Germany. I know from separate conversations outside of the seminar that he has very little knowledge of contemporary art or these kinds of artist projects. He came because he was at first curious, and he stayed because he enjoyed the conversations and the framework that supported them. Now given that this seminar was very much text oriented (many of our classes are not), he seemed particularly attuned to how the conversations unfolded and how everyone involved interacted, which he said he felt was very different from what he is used to. This is a common reaction for those participating.

What I think struck this person is something that is often the case, which is that the person facilitating a class is not the most knowledgeable on the subject being “taught.” More often than not there are others in the room that may have more “expertise” if you could call it that. So within the context of a class there is a lot of adjusting and readjusting that happens to find a common ground to talk and think together. Sometimes this doesn’t happen, and you can have a really strange class!  But more often than not it can be extremely productive. Maybe when you are not sure where the conversation is centered, where your position is located, where the knowledge is concentrated, these aspects allow for some divergent things to take place.

LW: But that is interesting. It still has an art element to it, but displaced. It still contains both things but is not explicitly either of them. The example of the schizophrenic body, neither/nor; it’s both but not through an explicit manifestation. It comes exactly through having both theory and practice classes.

CW: Yes, and we think about that while programming the school. We try to have theory classes that lean towards practice, and practice classes that lean towards theory. It doesn’t need to be a text, but there should be some level of criticality involved.

For example, someone proposed a class called Making Furniture. My friend Isaac Resnikoff, who is an artist and wood worker, agreed to do it. So we thought it would be great if the pieces of furniture we built would teach different furniture building techniques – different kinds of joints, specific cuts, and using all of the tools in his shop. So he designed two pieces of furniture that were pedagogical. That has nothing to do with reading theory, but it is a way of thinking about a practice where you’re learning through making.

Also, another good example comes from one of the first class proposals at The Public School Los Angeles, which was called Sadism and Masochism. The class description (what would take place) was “Theory and Practice.” It was one of the most popular classes, so we decided we should schedule it. I don’t have a lot of experience on this subject matter, but it is something I was interested in, so I decided to take it on. What ended up being organized was a class in which we read theory, fiction, we had a screening and a whipping demonstration by a woman who had been involved in the Los Angeles BDSM scene for over 30 years. In addition, we got invited to do something at a conference where we did an “arousal” performance that lead into a talk by Niklaus Lagier.  It was a talk that involved him reading short excerpts from a text we read in the class interrupted by someone demonstrating flagellation. This one class turned into a web of different activities: historical, theoretical, public events and publishing. And all it took was the title, “Theory and Practice.” The broadest possible description.  But once it got inserted into The Public School, there is somehow a potential there for all of these insane things to happen.

LW: I guess that is what I could call the reversed process of knowledge production and articulation: the final product is not anticipated in advance, there are no formal prerequisites of what it should be. Apparently this is exactly what enables the production of additional (new?) knowledge, as opposed to re-articulation of the one that has been there before. One might say it happens randomly. However what is interesting to me it is its logical flow: programming a space – questioning it and turning it into a durational programming of knowledge without an end point, basing such programming on participation without expectation, which in a way brings us back to the space, but not in the same terms of it being a frame. Could you maybe elaborate a bit on this?

CW: It has a lot to do with time and where energy is placed within this space of cultural production. Running a school plays around with these relationships – where people are spending time in the space (both physical and discursive) and what they are doing while they’re in this space.

The “production” of The Public School is happening in the instantiation of the class. People are talking on the website and figuring out what it should be. The committee is helping facilitate that process and then the class happens. It goes like this basically: People propose a class, people talk about the class, a class is scheduled, that class spins off into other classes. So the programming takes place among many different people who are communicating and relating in various forms.

LW: So The Public School could not be seen as a project of relational aesthetics?

CW: Well, we spent a lot of time thinking about relational aesthetics within the context of a few classes. I don’t find Bourriaud very convincing or the projects he supports to be incredibly exciting or that different from other forms of artistic production. But that is, of course, a huge oversimplification that we’ll have to skip going into detail with at the moment.

LW: Could it be considered as a critical approach to it?

CW: For me, probably, but not necessarily for other people. Because not everyone involved in the project knows or cares about what relational aesthetics is. And maybe they shouldn’t! It is a very specific thing to talk about, which might not relate to so many folks.

LW: What about collaborative aesthetics?

CW: What is that?

LW: I don’t know, we can just come up with that now.

CW: Yeah, well, maybe it is something that dialogical aesthetics relates to – relocating where art happens. In the given case, art happens in the space of a certain dialogue, collaborations between people.

The question of friendship is also interesting here. I’ve been trying to figure out, first what exactly friendship is, and then how it (although “it” isn’t the right word) operates as a basis for a certain kind of collaboration. This is still very much unworked in my mind, but I think it is important to focus on relationships that resist territorialization by current dominant systems, whether they be economic, cultural or political.

LW: But you realize that in a way The Public School is becoming an institution, even though it does sort of deconstruct more traditional ones and provide alternative solutions.

CW: Of course, without a doubt. But this issue is at the forefront of many conversations that we have, so there is certain self-awareness that is productive in defining the project. The other thing is that the project has no money, no support and no real plan for moving forward. There is nothing to hold on to at The Public School other than an indeterminate shared idea of what it is and the practice of that idea. And that is the difference: institutions generate techniques to maintain their own institutionality. They build technologies to generate themselves, to keep themselves going. The Public School at its core doesn’t build technologies to keep itself going, but to, perhaps, unwind itself. I haven’t really thought about it in any specific terms, but it doesn’t have the same motivation or ability to generate all these techniques to keep itself going as a static whole. And where is it centered? When one school closes down, does that change The Public School? The Public School is both instantiation in a specific city and something that is bigger than that. But what that bigger thing is, isn’t unified or concrete. What keeps it going are the people who are involved in it. There are around 30 – 40 people on the committees. There are 4,000 – 5,000 “students” (people who have set up accounts on the website). It is hard to institutionalize a diversity like that when anyone of those people in anyone of the cities can swoop in and participate at many different levels.

That being said, The Public School has relationships to institutions. For me it is interesting to work adjacent to and beside institutions, but not with the goal to take them over or replace them with another hegemonic force. Perhaps we are an alternative. Perhaps The Public School could destroy certain entrenched ideas, but that is extremely hard to predict. It seems more productive and important to continue to develop positive actions for people to escape or leave those things that they find stifling or limiting, whether creatively or politically. At this point, The Public School is not going to replace higher education. It isn’t a model that works with the idea of taking down dominant power systems as a whole. It works at a much smaller scale, which may be where change needs to take place.

LW: We are framing our current issue of Legwork around the idea of virtuosity. For me what is interesting within The Public School is that it (and maybe I should say in a virtuosic way) combines two moments of mastery and dilettantism. It is floating in between them.

CW: I don’t know if we are trying to master something. We are trying to learn something, but I am not sure if we know what it is. Or I am not sure if we learn it! It is a sort of accumulation. I feel like knowledge is gathered in the space and across the schools, but very rarely does it happen that there is a clear proposal to learn something and that people actually learn it because the space allows for things to become more abstract, to go another direction based on participation.

LW: But that’s what I am saying. I was trained as a philosopher, and now that I got out of academia and into the real world, I see that this is the only way mastery can happen. This Enlightenment ideal of knowledge gain that ‘real’ institutions are trying to provide is not possible. It is an oxymoron in a way. Therefore, for me, what I see happening in The Public School has more to do with mastery than in an academic institution.

CW: Okay, now I see what you meant. Yes, it is more operative than instrumentalized. The Public School does rely on people that have been studying philosophy and other disciplines within an academic or professional context. I think it is difficult to abandon these forms completely. And as I mentioned, you aren’t necessarily going to learn things in the same way as you would getting a Ph.D. It is not an infrastructure for that form of knowledge. This is not good or bad; it is simply a fact. What is exciting is to see how knowledge can work within a different pedagogical container like The Public School, and how it can seep outside of the institution.

But not an organizational logic that works from above. One of the things that we often face is that many people email us asking if they can use our website because they see it as a good tool. But for us The Public School is not a tool. It is all this other stuff I’ve been rambling on about.

It is an everyday practice and ongoing (and shifting) sets of relationships. There are no dominant expectations, no ideology and no grand plan. But there is a thickness and opacity that you feel once you get involved.

http://berlin.thepublicschool.org/

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It is rather fun to live in our time, the condition of which has been described on numerous occasions as one dominated by simulacra. The logic of representation referring to nothing behind it but representation itself goes well with the dominance of immaterial labor in the capital of the everyday.  Thus we can presuppose that the real virtuoso of our times is the one who is able to perform immaterial labor in a relevant way. Medium is a phantom; an object is a phantom, and the boundaries between them are blurred.  If there were any at all.

The following diagnosis has been mentioned several times before: it is not the material manifestation of objects that counts, but the act of performing that manifestation.

Intrigued by the particularities of the Zeitgeist, Legwork invited immaterial labor virtuoso Doug Popovich, a brand and marketing communications geek and artwife based in NYC, for a chat.

Speaking of boundaries being blurred: throughout the talk we curated images of Economy of Dissonance, a recent work by artist Alex Auriema, which is now on exhibit at Transient Spaces (a project organized by Uqbar art space) in Berlin.

As if you were an artist in Berlin

“After the wall fell it provided a place for Germany to become a center point again. It provided a place to recreate and reinvent itself. Berlin was the perfect example, the influx of available real estate from the former East making it very easy for someone to come over and start something. So that is what Berlin still feels like to me. People can start something here.”

“So it attracts artists and creators who want the space and time to create. But how do they survive in the sluggish economy of Berlin? They can help in the creative industries.”

“The reality is mobile now. The quality of hand-held access is exploding, with phones are getting better, internet speed getting faster. There is more access to 3G and 4G networks and consumer adoption of more sophisticated handsets is happening. Which means that what was primarily computer-focused and at-home interaction with the web has migrated to laptops and is now migrating to hand-held mobile and smart devices. This migration to a technology that is related to but evolved from original web technology means marketing people need creatives in order to re-contextualize what works on a laptop screen to a mobile device that is tiny. And in another different way you have to re-contextualize it for an iPad device that is not keyboard but touch-based. This is a triple perfect storm for advanced design for our three-screen world. The hand, the lap, the livingroom.”

“The amount of screens that people are managing everyday and the size to which they have access to content is changing and for that they need people who can change that content and make it look great. Artists can do that. Artists can learn how to program.”

“At parties we’ve met people who are building their own applications, whether for iPad or mobile smart phones. And that is how they are already working in marketing.”

“What are artists doing here? They want time and space to make things possible and see their art happen: Berlin is a great place for that. If they have to work six-, eight- or ten-hour days on a job to make their money, then telecommuting for these industries is a great option .That is what attracts them: Berlin is a community of arts and possibility.”

As if there were no division between art practice and the world

“I think that such a division — like anything — is installed, created. There are always people who want to live the life of the bohemian. But the bohemians of today need to pay for their tattoos and their beer. They are willing to sacrifice for their art. But also they are still very interested in living in this new connected world of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. Of course there are still artists who are not linked in or connected. But they are less and less, because artists like to have a community where they can have a dialogue.”

“But there will always be a struggle. I call myself an art wife. I am not an artist. I work in creative services, production management, and marketing communications. But my partner of 16 years is an artist. I’ve seen his struggle first hand. What is it to take a job that he feels overqualified for or that he feels is a waste because it does not really add anything to or even harm the art dialogue moving forward. That is the other struggle: how do you end up spending a third of your life working for a business and what does that take away from your potential as an artist? This struggle will always be that way.”

“If you look up why they call artists bohemians you will find that in Paris in the ’20s, artists used to live in the same areas as the gypsies. It was the cheapest. (Historically, gypsies originating in India migrated through Bohemia to enter Europe.) There they could live on as little as possible to be able to afford to practice their art. Now there is all this luscious, sexy technology, but that mentality is still there. The mentality of willing to spend less on rent, and sometimes even food, to be in a community of artists and to have a better chance of manifesting their lives the way they want them to be. It is not about not having money. It is about being in a place where one can be an artist.”

And to treat your creative practice as if it were business? After all, as the Financial Times has recently stated, “We are all marketers now.”

“Oh absolutely. It is all about your own brand. Andy Warhol talked about 15 minutes of fame. But the real frightening success stories are people who continue that lime light over a lifetime, so much so that the brand eclipses the art. Take for example the Damien Hirst brand. He started as a bad boy artist, got picked up, and people now for whatever reason align themselves emotionally to that brand.”

“You can call it collecting, but it is all business. Saatchi calls it collecting and he loves art, but it’s all business. No surprise he comes from/made his money in advertising and branding. All he is doing is pure capitalism: buy low, sell high.”

“So what happens when an artist has to make T-shirts and sell them at Mauerpark? They get to experience generating some business. They go out there every Sunday and work there. If it is successful, they need to buy more T-shirts and to hire some assistants. So all of a sudden they are no longer making art. They are in the business of selling T-shirts. This can be a sad outcome for an artist. And how is this really different from Murakami paying minions in his factory to make his work?”

“At one point you step away from the creative process into a reality that is commoditized and you have to sell. So the business of art – the art world as it were — is really a sad, frightening reality.”

“The danger is once you’ve built your brand, how do you maintain the integrity of your brand as an artist? I know people who will do a job or will sell a certain type of work, but not really sign their name to it because it’s a bread and butter job. It’s not the art they want to be doing, their brand per se. Their name isn’t associated with some of the work they execute.”

“Look how many brands overextended themselves into licensing agreements in the ‘80s and ‘90s that now don’t have the luster they used to have. Because they were everywhere. It is one thing to do high-end eye glasses and high-end perfume, but Martha Stewart, for example, is very sophisticated and savvy because she developed multiple levels of her brand. It holds a high level in K-mart (a low-level big box mega-store), but it still has the high authority recipe for living at the magazine/omnimedia level.”

Integrity through multiplicity? Not a textbook example.

“That multiplicity happens everywhere in American business.”

“On the one hand there is your name and your brand; on the other there is trust in your integrity. You have to guard those.”

“You are describing the way businesses have been historically dealt with or brands have been built, as opposed to how it could be done now. For example, people were building buildings, some of which were falling down. As a response designers and engineers analyzed causes of these problems, and created standards, and formed guilds and professional licensing organizations. Those were the best solutions at that time, but it doesn’t mean one cannot come up with a better one now.”

“Collaborations are happening everywhere. We see collaborations in brands. We see cross-promotional licenses all the time, and not only in sports where they started. Annie Leibovitz collaborates with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Oh, and he has a foundation now, which means that of course he wants to maintain his brand and to keep his brand vibrant enough to help support his dance center. Annie Leibovitz needs more money because of her financial/legal drama. She’s not only in that LV ad, but doing HP printers, too. At what point does the brand take over and need to be fed?”

That Louis Vuitton ad is amazing. It articulates two artists and their faux relation/reverence to the bag as art. Where as actually they show two brands on one line with the third one. No coincidence here — if I’m not mistaken, LV after all was the first one to pull their logo out of the inside of their products, to multiply it and to serve as an added value in itself. Faces are yet another brand, aren’t they?

“You know, ironically I take labels off their jars before I put them into the refrigerator. I don’t like to be inundated with brands and their request for a dialogue. A few years ago, it was said that an average person receives about 3000 requests for a dialogue on a daily basis. I’m sure that’s doubled by now with internet and with smart phones.”

“Acknowledging that people are getting overloaded with the request for dialogue, one needs to make sure that their requests for dialogue are ever more relevant.”

“Going back to your collaboration, I think it was interesting that you had this function where a lot of people showed up. And that you interacted with them. So you kept it very relevant and personal. They were a part of the function and they were a part of the energy of the collaboration. If I had to explain what Legwork is, I’d say I have some friends who are artists, they come from completely different fields and they collaborate on experiential pieces and on dialogue. They ask what a dialogue is. Some of them might include dance, some of them might include art, some might include performance, some of them writing.”

“You don’t have to be so regimented to say two brands work together to produce something. We see it all the time. Ice cream with M&M’s. So you guys are different fun things mixed together.”

A little bit of Ben & Jerry’s, a little bit of Oreo cookies.

“And a bit of Martha Graham, and a little bit of Martha Stewart. There was some cake, and the balloon wall was definitely Martha Stewart. Knowing some of the backstory, I really liked the assistance on the web on how to make the balloon wall, make the forms, how to blow up all the balloons…”

A recipe for success

“Consistently communicate who you are as an artist and who you want to be. True, the flavor of your art can change. But you should be supporting it with all collateral touchpoints that are appropriate. And always have cards. If you had a good dialogue with someone, cement it with a take-away. Just continue that dialogue.”

“You can do many different things and work with different media. But you shouldn’t do different things in the way you communicate your work to somebody. If you have an event it can have its own stuff. But if you tell someone about the event you want to make sure that you are projecting the elements of it that move your brand. Make sure you are singing on key for whatever your brand song is. By the way ‘brand songbooks’ are the big thing now in all the agencies I work with.”

Can a postcard or a business card become an art piece?

“Of course it can. You have ten thousand business cards, one thousand announcement postcards, hundreds or tens of prints, all in support of the singular painting/art object. But all those touchpoints — from selling your painting to giving away a postcard or a business card — are on the spectrum of communicating your art. So technically, yes, if you have ten thousand business cards they are ten thousand pieces of representation of your brand. They all could be art, their design could be art, and people could want that business card because it is so beautiful.”

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A brief interview between Legwork and Erik Svedäng¹

Blueberry Gardey by Erik Svendäng

Legwork: Mr. Svedäng, the theme of this Legwork issue is “Virtuosity” and I think your perspective might be rather interesting in this conversation regarding our collective struggle to create [seemingly] accessible means for performing superlative identities. Your field seems like an incredibly telling production in recent history, as the realm of the virtual closes in on our relational behaviors. At any rate, I’m thinking you might not mind answering a few questions I have put together for you.

For the Internet record, virtuosity is
1. The technical skill, fluency, or style exhibited by a virtuoso or a composition.
2. An appreciation for or interest in fine objects of art.
[I personally prefer the first definition. You can think about the term however you like.]

Erik Svendäng: I’ll try to answer your questions as truthfully and straightforward as I can. I don’t really like discussing exact definitions of words like ‘virtuosity’ (it has been around for so long, collecting a lot of baggage) so I’ll use it in a very relaxed and pragmatic way. Please tell me if you think that I’ve crossed some kind of line.

LW: Is there potential for virtuosity in this?

ES: Yes. But a real piano has magnitudes of more potential (you can use 10 fingers, hit the keys in different ways and so on).

LW: When working, do you think about the virtuous potential of your users/players [how do you like to refer to these people?]? If so, what sort of matrix do you create for the potential virtuoso to navigate? Do you imagine a narrative of virtuosity?

ES: Yes, I think about it a lot. In different ways for different kinds of games though: The basic case could maybe be called “man versus man”. My iPad game ‘Shot Shot Shoot’ is an example of this, and so is ‘Chess’, ‘Starcraft’ and ‘Go’ – all games of destruction and struggle. Creating this kind of experience consists mainly of designing a space with lots of opportunities for skill (and hopefully virtuosity). The more opportunities the better, since when someone has reached complete mastery of the system they will probably lose interest and switch to another game. This phenomenon is very well observed in the field of game design and has been written about extensively in for example the book ‘A theory of fun’ by Raph Coster.

"Shot Shot Shoot," design, programming, art, sound & music by Erik Svedäng

Secondly, I’ve been able to make some more personal observations regarding skill and virtuosity while working on another kind of project; my iPhone game ‘Kometen’ (made together with my artist friend Niklas Åkerblad). It bends the definition of what is usually called a game by not presenting a goal to the player. Also, there’s no real way to lose or to know how good/bad you are doing.

It might seem like this would limit the opportunities for skill and virtuosity greatly, but I think that’s jumping too hastily to a conclusion. In ‘Kometen’ there actually are big opportunities for improving and learning how to maneuver your comet by taps and swipes on the screen. By seeing the player more as an actor or artist than an achiever or “lab rat”, shouldn’t there be a lot of space for her to express herself skillfully, even without getting constant feedback from the game? I wanted to see if players could judge their own performance and not depend on mathematical algorithms to know how well they were doing. My hope was that the result would be something close to dancing; basically an exercise in graceful and beautiful movement, free from rules and laws to bog it down. I think this is fertile ground for virtuosity, maybe in a purer form than what’s possible with the “normal” games I first described.

"Kometen," by Niklas Åkerblad and Erik Svedäng

LW: I have a sneaky suspicion that virtuosity obfuscates the relationship between user and the system in which the user acts, and that in a way the user and system are indistinguishable as the user becomes the perfect instrument for the system to recruit new users. As a game programmer, do you relate at all to such a dynamic when creating a virtual relational field?

ES: I have some trouble deciphering your question. It sounds a bit like the concept of “flow”, which you might be familiar with? During the state of flow space and time is said to disappear, which seems similar to what you describe as the user and the system being indistinguishable. This usually happens when someone is really into a creative activity, like painting, music performance, and also games (‘Tetris’ might be a good opportunity for experiencing this). I don’t really try to deliberately design “flow” when I make my games but I think it can occur in all of them.

LW: Well, the concept of “flow” does in a way articulate the situation I’m attempting to consider, but I want to address virtuosity less as an idealistic development of a relationship with an activity, and more as an indication of the activity’s ability to distribute its behavior. So, in a way, the concept of “flow” could be a language used by a “meme” as it firmly settles into a person’s personal vocabulary of habitual behavior. If virtuosity is programmatic, perhaps it is used as a device for reality production across activities.

At any rate, I found ‘Kometen’s’ “flow” potential to be strikingly similar to Guy Debord’s concept of dérive, insofar as it contains this utility of playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, but on a virtual scale. Thus, like dérive, playing ‘Kometen’ enables the player an opportunity for letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the development of new habits, to which they will constantly be drawn back, and perhaps a new program for self-actualizing virtuosity. Thus, some considered dérive’s technique to be similar to that of psychoanalysis, a kind of therapy. Do you think ‘Kometen’ has the same potential, and if so, was this your intention?

ES: I think you might be on to something! Many people have told me that they play ‘Kometen’ mainly because it gives them an opportunity to relax. This seems like an obvious effect of its “goallessness” and something that usually can’t occur in our lives since we have so much to keep track of all the time. To achieve virtuosity in anything – be it playing an instrument, arguing convincingly or cutting stones in a beautiful way – we need a safe place where we can make mistakes and lose ourselves in the pure joy of practicing, without having to worry about failure. There is a big requirement of “letting go” involved in this that many adults seem to have lost. Maybe games can help them to re-learn this ability, and thereby helping them to achieve virtuosity in other fields as well.

¹Erik Svendäng was born in 1986, Uppsala, Sweden. He likes to create things. Currently, he is working on a bunch of new games.

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