\\A Minimal Futu Re?" Art As Object 1958-1968

ANN GOLDSTEIN

Essays by DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN, JONATHAN FLATLEY, CARRIE LAMBERT, LUCY R. LIPPARD, JAMES MEYER, and ANNE RORIMER

\\A MINIMAL FUTU RE?" ART AS OBJECT 1958-1968

The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England This publication accompanies the Director of Publications: Lisa Mark Library of Congress exhibition "A Minimal Future? Editor: Ja ne Hyun Cataloging-in-Publication Data Art as Object 1958-1968," organized Assistant Editor: Elizabeth Hamilton by Ann Goldstein and presented Designers: Lorraine Wild A minimal future? : art as object at The Museum of Contemporary Art, with Robert Ruehlman and Stuart Smith 1958-1968/ organized by Ann Goldstein; Los Angeles, 14 March-2 August 2004. Printer: Dr. Cantz'sche Druckerei. introduction by Ann Goldstein; essays Ostftldem-Ruit. Germany by Diedrich Dtederichsen . let al.]. "A Minimal Future? Art as Object p. em. 1958-1968" is made possible by the sup- e 2004 The Museum of Contemporary Art, Exhibition organized by Ann Goldstein port of The Sydney Irmas Exhibition Los Angeles and presented at the Museum Endowment; Audrey M. Irmas: the Henry 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Luce Foundation; Maria Hummer and California 90012 March 14-August 2, 2004. Bob Tuttle; Genevieve and Ivan Reitman; Includes bibliographical references. The Andy Warhol Foundation for the All rights reserved. No part of this book ISBN 0-262-07251-3 (he: alk. paper)- Visual Arts; the National Endowment may be reproduced in any form ISBN 0-914357-87-5 (softcover) for the Arts; Bank Julius Bar; Kwon by any electronic or mechanical means 1. Minimal art-Exhibitions. 2. Art, Family Foundation; The Jamie and Steve (including photocopying, recording, American-20th Century-Exhibitions. Tisch Foundation; The MOCAProjects and information storage or retrieval) I. Goldstein, Ann. II. Diederichsen, Council; Donald Bryant; The Capital without permission in writing from Diedrich. III. Museum of Contemporary Group Companies; Susan and Larry Marx; the publisher. Art (Los Angeles, Calif.) Betye Monell Burton; Mary and Robert Looker; the Pasadena Art Alliance; ISBN 0-262-07251-3 (he: alk. paper) N6512.5.M5M56262004 the W.L.S. Spencer Foundation; Kathi and ISBN 0-914357-87-5 (pbk; for sale 709'.04-dc22 HARVARD Gary Cypres; Frances Dittmer Family at MOCAonly) FINEAATS Foundation; Dwell; and the Fifth Floor 20030664B1 UBAAogy Foundation. Printed and bound in Germany JUL02 '01 Promotional support is provided by KJAZZ88.1 FM.

front cover: cover of Arts Magazine, frontispiece: larry Bell, Ghost Box, IftIles Iu-nd March 1967 1962-63 MORE OR LESS MINIMALISM: SIX NOTES ON PERFORMANCE AN D VISUAL ART IN TH E 19605 CARRIE LAMBERT

1 LISTINGMINIMALISM TRISHA BROWN, LUCINOA CHILDS, SIMONE FORTI, DAVID GORDON, DEBORAH HAY, STEVE 1 Yvonne Rainer, interview with the author, New York, 23 February 2003. PAXTON, YVONNE RAINER: Is this a list of Minimalist artists? It would certainly be possible, even practical, to say "no." In the 1960s, while their visual-art counterparts were producing objects, these artists were staging performances. Most presented their work as part of the performance collabora- tive Judson Dance Theater, and their training was predominantly in dance and choreography, not painting or sculpture. They have a secure place as dance history's founding postmodernists, while generally receiving only passing discussion in the texts and exhibitions that have consolidated Minimal art as a movement. And they themselves resist being assimilated into a Minimalist taxon- omy: "I can no longer go along with being the token Minimalist dancing girl," Rainer insists.' Then again, the painters and sculptors whom art historians consider quintessential Minimalists also initially rejected the nomenclature. And the relationship between their visual art of the 1960s and the dancers' contemporaneous and similarly stripped-down works-where running and walking replace spins and leaps, and standing still or eating a pear are valid choreographic choices-has long troubled the history of Minimalism. As new histories are written and new exhibitions mounted, the questions return: should we add these dances to the critical edifice built up around Minimal painting and sculpture of the 1960s? And would the structure hold if we did? Simone Forti Huddle, performance at Loeb Student Center, New York University, New York, 1969 Photo by Peter Moore, 0 Estate of Peter Moore / VAGA,NYC 2 PERFORMANCE:IN, OUTOF, AROUNO,ANO BEFORE There have been, roughly speaking, four approaches to the intersection of performance an, Minimalism. Intuiting that what mattered in Minimal visual art was less the object as such and mor the object as viewed by the beholder, some of its best critics-Michael Fried, Rosalind E. Krauss, an Annette Michelson, most influentially-have seen Minimalism as innately linked with performance The idea that a work's significance emerged from the situation of beholding rather than being imma 2 See Nichael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Mimmol Art: A Cnticol Anthology, ed. Gregory nent to the object itself caused Fried in 1967 to label the new art "theatrical." a development h aettccck (1968; reprint, Berkeley: University decried but Krauss and Michelson celebrated as an art-historical turning point. The result of this tur of California Press, 1995), 116-47. First published in Artforum 5, no. 10 (summer has been traced in different ways by writers such as Douglas Crimp and Nick Kaye, who find i 1967): 12-23; Annette Michelson, "Robert Minimalism's theatricality a source for the emphasis on performance and the performative, which the Morris: An Aesthetics of Transqres sion," in Robert Morris, exh. cat. (Washington, DL: see as fundamental to the art of the 1970s and 80s, from feminist body art to photographic apprc Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1969), 7-79; and priation.' This approach makes Minimalist theatricality the wellspring of the art that followed it. Rosalind E, Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Aside from the fundamental difference of opinion between Fried on the one hand and Michelso Press, 1977), and Krauss on the other, a crucial distinction between their views on Minimalism is that the latte

3 See Douglas Crimp, "Pictures." October. were interested in not only the phenomenological situation described as theatrical but actual pel no. 8 (spring 1978): 75-88; and Nick Kaye, forma nee-based art as well. Michelson's elaboration of the temporality and embodiment of Minim' Postmodernism and Performance (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994). A different and art in sculpture, especially that of Robert Morris, was the product of her intense involvement dui subtler version of the argument, with Less ing the later 1960s not only with Morris's work but also with that of Rainer and other dancers. An emphasis on the concept of performance, is made by Hal Foster when he describes the Krauss, who acknowledged Michelson's importance for her own thinking on these issues, used Rainer way MinimaLism's"analysis of perception ... work and other performance-based examples in her influential explication of Minimalism in Passaq: prepared a further analysis of the conditions of perception" in feminist art and institutional in Modern Sculpture (1977). In this sense, Krauss and Michelson were also involved in a third ite critique in the later period. See Foster, "The Crux of Minimalism," in The Return of the Real: ation of performance and Minimalism's critical entwinement, the recognition of their shared aesthet The Avont-Gorde at the End of the Century concerns in the Minimalist moment. Early on, Barbara Rose gave special attention to the similar (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996), 59. ties between recent avant-garde dance and the painting and sculpture she called "ABCArt" in a influential 1965 essay by that title,' but it was Rainer's "A Quasi Survey of Some 'Minimalis 4 Barbara Rose, "ABCArt:' in Minimal Art, 274-97. First published in Art in America 53, Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Tr no. 5 (October-November 1965): 57-69. A," published in the movement-defining anthology Minimal Art, compiled by Gregory Battcock !

5 Rainer, "A Quasi Survey of Same 'Minimalist' 1968, that did more than any other text to indicate the convergence of practices at that momen Tendencies in the Iluantitatively Minima! Dance Drawing in part on Rose's analysis of Minimal art, Rainer charted the parallels between recent objec Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A,~ written in 1966 and first published and dances-likening Minimalism's literalness, for instance, to the quotidian, task-like quality, in Minimal Art, 263-73. Rainer indicated the movement she sought in her dances, and comparing factory fabrication of objects to "enerr significance of Rose's essay for her formulations. interview with the author, 23 February 2003. equality and 'found' movement" in recent performance.' In large part because of this essay, Rainer is the dancer best known in art circles as part of tt 6 See, among many other significant works, Sally Banes, Democracy's Body: Judson Donce story of Minimalism (hence the "token dancing girl" problem). But, due in large part to the pil Theater, 1962-1964 (Durham, North Carolina: neering scholarship of dance historian Sally Banes, this situation has begun to change.' From Mauril Duke University Press, 1990). Berger's acknowledgment of the seriousness of Morris's involvement in dance; to Thomas Crov 7 Anna C. Chave. "Minimalism and Biography," recognition that key aspects of the emerging aesthetic were first developed by Judson artists; . Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (March 2000): 142-63. Anna Chave's polemical insistence on re-centering female artists, including Rainer and Forti, in tl B See Forti's collection of dance descriptions story of Minimalism, art historians have begun to develop a fourth approach to the visual-art/pe and writings, Handbook in Motion (Halifax. Canada: The Press of the Nova Scotia college formance connection in Minimalism: recovery of the historical influence of dance and dance artis of Art and Design; and New York: New York University Press, 1974). on Minimal art's arnerqence.' Such a recovery is not my goal here. Instead, I will be looking at three examples of dance wor from the 1960s that together suggest a different way to think about the relation of performance ar visual art in the Minimalist moment. This fifth approach might be dubbed the pedagogical one. I a proposing to look at certain performance pieces as "handbooks in motion," to borrow a phrase fro Forti: danced manuals for a critical discussion of Minimalism.' The more we understand about thei the more Minimal art of all kinds will open to criticism and history. These dances are more th, guides to other art, of course. But for their art-historical importance this function is crucial. At on

104 MOREOR LESS MINIMALISM ------~-~

not quite and more than Minimalist, these are, in effect, meta-Minimalisms: contributing not to the question of what counts as Minimalism but to the understanding of what constitutes it.

3 HUDDLE:VERBANDNOUN Here is one such artwork: A tight circle of six or seven people facing inward, linked by arms laced around one another's waists and shoulders. In no particular order, members of the group disengage and slowly climb and slide over the huddle, rejoining it on the other side. Bodies interlace in a thicket of mutually supporting parts as thighs, knees, hips, necks, and shoulders become toe- and finger- holds for each dancer scaling the human structure. The effect is both simple and astonishing: a mass slowly seething, a cluster constantly involuting.

Here is the kind of question it prompts: What verb should we use for Forti's Huddle? Do we 9 Forti, interview by Louise Sunshine, tape say it was first "performed" at Yoko One's Manhattan loft in 1961, or first "displayed" there? For, recording and transcript, 8 May 1994, Dance ColLection, New York Public Library, 40. though audiences have watched Huddle onstage, they have also seen it in sculpture gardens. At its debut, as one of the works shown in different spots in the loft during the remarkable evening Forti 10 Forti, in Simone Forti: From Dance Construction to Logomotion, prod. and dir. titled "Five Dance Constructions + Some Other Things," she has said that "it was more placed like Charles Dennis, 28 min., UCLA National sculpture in a gallery space." She continues to show Huddle in situations where "viewers can be walk- Dance/Media Project, los Angeles, in association with Loisaida Arts, Inc., 1999, videocassette. ing around it."" Like a performance, this artwork ceases to exist when its participants disperse. Like an object, it is there to be circled, departed from, or returned to at one's will. 11 Rainer, notebook, quoted in Banes, Democracy's Body, 15. It is important to note Forti was not the only one who thought about dances as being in some way sculptural. In the here that the repetition Rainer is talking about same year Huddle was conceived, Rainer wrote: "I became involved with repetition thru a concern is literal and exact, as opposed to the varia- tions on movement themes found in more that each movement might be seen as more than a fleeting form, much as one can observe a piece traditional dance. of sculpture for one minute or many rninutes.":' Later, she wondered whether she and others in the 12 Rainer, "Don't Give the Game Away," performing arts were making "theater-objects""; she herself referred to the five-minute dance Trio Am Magazine 41, no. 6 (April 1967): 47. A (1966) as an object, "Now a found object""-all as if to grant ephemeral performance the tem- 13 Rainer, in my "Contents Under Pressure: poral solidity of objecthood. If this is so, here is what Huddle might mean for Minimalism: That art A Conversation with Yvonne Rainer," Documents at this watershed moment was defined not so much by sculpture becoming like performance but by no. 16 (fall 1999): 10. The love duet in Terrain was based on Kama Kala sculpture. Rainer a curious convergence of actions and things. also used poses from paintings in her early dances, and she and many other Judson dancers used still photographs as sources. See my "Documentary's Body: Judson Dance Theater in Hindsight," chapter 1 in "Yvonne Rainer's 4 HOMEMADE:MOVIEMINIMALlSM Media: Performance and the Image, 1961-73" Perhaps rather than claiming that sculpture and performance came together, I should suggest that (Ph.D. diss.. Stanford University, 2002).

there was an effort to elide the activities of looking ot and watching. Rainer, at least, was clear that 14 Forti, in a panel discussion with Trisha the purpose of repetition in her work was to affect the way a dance was seen. This would suggest Brown, Deborah Hay, and Rainer at the BrookLyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York that the intersection of sculpture and performance, object and action, had little to do with the inher- ("BAMdialogue" series public panel discussion, ent aspects of either: materiality on the one hand, movement on the other. If a performance quality- moderated by Jayme Koszyn, 6 June 2001).

temporality-extends in real time the experience of viewing sculpture, and a sculptural quality- 15 Ibid. fixity-counters the fleeting aspect of the dance spectacle, their crossing creates a kind of cultural staging ground at the issue of viewing itself. And this explains something that otherwise seems odd: that Forti credits the inspiration for Huddle to the work of Eadweard Muybridge." How could this dance's organic flow emerge from that photographer's famously frozen instants? Yet Forti recalls that she was particularly taken with Muybridge's sequential images of a man chopping wood, from the rais- ing of the arm to the reverberation of the axe in the final frame. Struck by the special visibility Muybridge gave to the subtlest motions, she thought of Huddle as being a dance "where you can see people climb.'?' Rather than focusing on the dancers' experiences-their freedom from imposed choreography, their physical intelligence in determining the surfaces and weights of the bodies, their modeling of an interactive social unit-we might best approach the piece, as Forti seems to, from the spectator's point of view.

105 LAMBERT above: Yvonne Rainer We Shall Run, performance at Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, 1965 Pictured, from Left to right: Rainer, Deborah Hay, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, SaLLyGross, Joseph SchLichter, Tony Holder, and ALe. Hay Photo by Peter Moore, ClEstate of Peter Moore / VAGA,NYC

beLow: rrtsha Brown Homemade, performance at Judson MemoriaL Church, New York, 1966 Photo by Peter Moore, ~ Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, NYC

106 MORE OR LESS MINIMALISM This would suggest Huddle's kinship with a dance that seems quite different but in which spectatorship, bodies, and images were also recombined. In 1965 Brown choreographed a three-minute movement sequence she would come to call Homemade. In 1966 she attached a film projector on her back with straps taken off a backpack-style baby carrier and, donning this awkward apparatus, performed Homemade while the projector beamed behind her a black-and-white film by Robert Whitman of herself performing Homemade. Jolting and jumping as she moved, coming in and out of sync with her motions, the filmed body joined the live one in an extraordinary pas de deux. In many ways, Homemade corresponds to-or perhaps anticipates-aspects of the discourse on Minimalism. Brown's projector was not unlike Dan Flavin's fluorescent light pieces, for instance, in activating the physical space of the artwork. For, like a spotlight run amok, the bright image played randomly over surfaces all around Brown as she moved, calling attention to the size and character of the space and lighting those shadowed offstage areas viewers would typically bracket out of the performance proper. Moreover, whenever Brown's body turned far enough, the projector's beam would land on members of the audience, illuminating them and blinding them at once. The viewer was thus not an external observer of this artwork but a part of it, in good Minimalist fashion. Indeed, when Krauss introduced the idea of Minimalism's theatricality in Passages in Modern Sculpture, it was with a performance precedent: Francis Picabia's stage design for the premiere of Jean Borlin's ballet Reldche (1924)." Picabia's set comprised an enormous grid of lighting instruments, which acted as an abstract geometrical backdrop for the action until the bulbs were suddenly lit, at which point they visually-and, given the pain the glare would have caused, physically-incorporated the startled viewers into the performance. 16 Krauss, Passages in Modem Sculpture, 207-13. Literally highlighting both the audience and its physical setting, Homemade likewise exempli- fies Minimalism's theatricality. But Homemade also illuminates it. For of course it was not a 17 See my "Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer's Trio A," October, no. 89 (summer spotlight that directed attention in Brown's dance but a moving picture of her body. The light that 1999): 87-112; and "Yvonne Rainer's Media." brought an increased awareness of the actual spatial and physical situation of spectatorship was 18 Rosalind Krauss, "The Cultural Logic of the itself a disembodied image-a specter, a spectacle of the body. Late Capitalist Museum," in October: The Second Here is what the dance asks: Will you watch the live dancer or her larger-than-life image? Which Decade, 1986~1996(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997), 434. First published attracts your vision-the material physicality of the body, or the filmed version flitting about the in October, no. 54 (fall 1990): 3-17. space? The fleeting present or the trace of the past? Homemade is characterized by the constant deci- sion-making it demands of its viewers. And if it does so particularly efficiently, its impulse was not unique in the 1960s, when the interaction of filmed and real bodies, as well as live and past-tense images, was pervasive. Think of Whitman's Happenings, the intricate collage of films and live performance in Elaine Summers's Fantastic Gardens (1964), Roberts Blossom's attempt to define a new medium called "filrnstaqe." Beverly Schmidt's method of memorizing her own filmed dance impro- visations, Rainer's use of projected images, or Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, to name only a few. Throughout the decade, artworks like these established a co-dependence of filmed image and embodied matter that I would suggest is particular to the 1960s." And, while almost non- Minimalist by definition, these mixed-media works enact the flip side of Minimalism's theatricality; the one recognized by Krauss in more recent writings, in which she suggests that Minimalism's literal physicality, its immediacy and phenomenological plentitude, were compensation for "the fallen world of mass culture-with its disembodied media images-and of consumer culture-s-with its banalized, commodified objects.'?" Not only does the title Homemade, intimating the un mediated and nonindustrial, gain new res- onance in this light, but now the work's meta-Minimalist character becomes clear. Homemade and other body-film performances can be understood to have held together two sides of a dialectic in which "Minimalism" itself was a term. They gave play to the flickering image-body against which the physical self had to define itself at this juncture; to the virtuality for which the embodied experience of Minimalist sculpture was reparation. In a photograph by Peter Moore that documents

107 LAMBERT Brown's dance, the film image projected behind her is blank. Presumably due to the technical prob lem of capturing the scene's radically different light values in a still photograph, it is nevertheles: a nice coincidence that here the image space behind the projector becomes a white square, ar emblem of Minimalism itself.

5 WESHALL RUN: HOTAND COLD The three-minute dance Brown performed with her filmed image was a sequence of gestures taker from routine activities, like reeling in fishing line or dialing a phone, that related to specific, pas: events. This is personal history-she says the memories were "those that impact on identity"'"- remembered bodily. However, having accumulated this collage of highly personal movemen material, Brown rendered it "quantitatively minimal." For the motions were "done so small they wen unrecognizable."" Recently, Rainer called artists' personal emotional lives in the 1960s "the under belly of High rninimalisrn.'?' Her phrase cannily implies that even if hidden, emotion lay beneatl Minimalism all along; she hints as well that the personal was Minimalism's soft spot, a zone of vul nerability for the steel-and-sneakers aesthetic. In Brown's literally minimal Homemade gestures Rainer's colleague and friend enacted a similarly dual proposition. Personal identity, embedded ir gesture, had to be minimized to make the work; at the same time, it was the very stuff of which thi work was made. 19 Trisha Brown, notebook, quoted in "Chronology of Dances, 1961-1979," in Trisha Although Minimalism is often popularly associated with simplification and reduction to the "pri Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961-200l, mary:' the performance work with which it is allied is often characterized by this sort of interna ed. Hendel Teicher (Andover, Hass.: Addison Gallery of American Art, PhiLips Academy, duality. One of the most striking examples is Rainer's own We Shall Run, a 1963 work for a group 0 2002), 301. six to eight performers. This is a dance that seems to typify the renunciation that is a recurring them,

20 Ibid. in Minimalist discourse, for in it Rainer restricted the choreography to the type of movement indi cated in the dance's title. In 1967 Steve Paxton would make Satisfyin' Laver, in which ordinar, 21 Rainer, "Skirting and Aging: An Aging Artist's Memoir," lecture delivered people walked slowly in a long procession across the stage; and Rainer jokes that what he did fa at the University of California, Berkeley, walking, she did for running. Both works seem dedicated to an aesthetic-or ethic-of leveling, ir 11 April 2002. Reprinted in Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961-2002 which quotidian movement and the use of untrained performers bring dance down to earth, valoriziru (Philadelphia: University of the Arts, ordinary activity instead of specialized skill. As critic Jill Johnston wrote of Paxton's dance, "that': 2002), 90. you and me in all our ordinary everyday who cares postural splendor.'?' The photograph by Moore tha Rainer used to document We Shall Run clearly conveys the dance's simple, ordinary motion: with it: sharp focus on the three front-most figures, it captures the use of street clothes in lieu of fancy cos tumes, and, if you recognize them, it even shows how painters and sculptors (Alex Hay, Morris, am Robert Rauschenberg) participated alongside highly trained dancers in Judson-era performance. T, underscore the dance's thorough rejection of dramatic excess, Rainer chose the most bombastic musi cal accompaniment possible, having her dancers jog around to the consummately Romantic Tube mirum section of Hector Berlioz's 1837 Grande messe des morts. Nothing could be less like the dance': conspicuous restraint-Berlioz famously required five brass bands as well as a complete orchestra and chorus to get the fullness he wanted in its fanfares. And yet, this is a curious choice, isn't it? As if Frank Stella had put a gilt frame around one a his Black Paintings, or Andre placed one of his Equivalents on a marble pedestal. And We Shall Rur is excessive in another sense as well: Instead of consisting simply of jogging around in a circle->; more conceptually elegant choice if the point were to make a statement about the validity of quo tidian movement-it is composed of labyrinthine running paths and shifting groups, with dancer: crisscrossing and spiraling about the stage in interlaced patterns that are notoriously difficult te

108 MOREOR LESS MINIMALISM learn. Despite the simplicity of the jogging motion it deploys, WeShall Run is so complex as to per- versely resemble the requiem's interwoven melodies, repeating lines of text, and groupings of voices and instruments. Following this line of thought, we might even find a grammatical rhyme between the highly sec- ular dance's announcement-"we shall run"-and the pervasive future tense, typically translated with the solemnizing "shall," ofthe Latin requiem's description of the coming day of judgment. But more significant, given the emphasis on the viewer in Minimalism, is that though Rainer's quotidian movement differs in almost every way from the Romantic composer's enormous, building crescendos, it does not simply substitute a cool disengagement of viewer and dancer for the sweeping, involving effect of Berlioz's music. The ordinary jogging movement, something we our- selves might have done on the way to the theater, is a device of identification. As Johnston said, "that's you and me." As different as this mode is from Romantic empathy, the audience experiences both at once in We Shall Run-intersection as well as divergence. This internal complexity and com- plementarity has a visual echo in Moore's photograph. On the right, a crowd of running men and women are led by the trio, whose literally focused features and squared-off facing seem to pun on both their demeanor and their buttoned-up attire. But on the left are two figures in profile, wear- ing sweatpants and l-shirts, blurry as the ghost images in spiritualist photography. Their fuzzy outlines convey speed and abandon in contrast with the others' disciplined jogging; they emerge from the group on the right like liberated alter egos, embodying the play of restraint and exuber- ance in the dance itself.

22 Jill Johnston, "Paxton's People," in 6 MORETHAN: NOTQUITE Marmalade Me (1971; reprint, MiddLeton, With We Shall Run's internal complexity, even compromise, I might seem to have located at least one Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 155. First published in The Village Voice, clear difference between performance and visual art at that moment. Then again, many writers have 4 April 1968, 32. pointed out seeming contradictions within key examples of Minimal visual art: the provocative, lit- 23 Rainer, "Don't Give the Game Away," 47. erary titles of Stella's Black Paintings, for example, or Judd's use of color. And here is where We Shall Run becomes meta-Minimalist. Rainer's use of juxtaposition and tension in performance might be understood to further adjust our vision to Minimalism's play of opposites- to help us see the way the photographs of even Morris's plain, grey plywood exhibitions present a visual playground of forms, with objects hanging from the ceiling, running up the wall, tilting as if in a fun house mir- ror. Or to help us find, with Rainer herself, a largely overlooked aspect of Minimal sculpture: its funny bone. "I am still able to see them as stolid, intrepid entities that keep the floor down," she wrote of Morris's works in 1967, "and then I lauqh.'?' Minimal art is currently being reassessed, with new critical perspectives, historical research, and exhibitions. Performance can be a tool for this reassessment as well as an element within it. Dance has been peripheral to Minimalism for reasons of excess (performances like WeShall Run, Homemade, and Huddle have more internal differentiation and provide more interpretive space than any contemporaneous work by Minimal painters and sculptors) and for reasons of lack (they do not have the relation with modernist art legacies, the objecthood, or the border with design that would put them at the center of Minimalist discourse). But their dual difference, their more than and not quite, allows these dances to open up aspects of Minimalism's temporality and visuality and to reframe its internal complexity. In the end, it is not the likeness of dance and visual art in the 1960s so much as the misfit between them that is the reason to find slots for dance artists in the Minimalist roster, to rebuild Minimalism with performance.

109 LAMBERT