Carrie Lambert Other Solutions How to use the performer as a medium Source: Video Data Bank’s A Woman rather than persona? Is a “ballet Who…: Selected Works of Yvonne mechanique” [sic] the only solution?1 Rainer, 2005 – Yvonne Rainer As a choreographer, Yvonne Rainer was concern this work evinced with physicality most obviously in minimalism, in its various interested in the objective nature of the over personality paralleled that among the versions this orientation manifested as human body, its status as a physical thing. visual artists in Rainer’s New York milieu who phenomenological anti-idealism, ethical Witness the artist’s desire to get “away from were then becoming labeled minimalists— anti-anthropocentricism, or aesthetic anti- the personal psychological confrontation artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and expressionism. with the performer”;2 her concern to “weight Robert Morris—with an art so specific and the quality of the human body toward that of physical that it would preclude metaphorical, From a historical standpoint, though, it was objects and away from the super-stylization metaphysical, or psychological interpretation. the registration in practice of the social of the dancer”3; the recurrence, in her famous Artworks became “specific objects” to shake condition of art in the postwar period: of the dance, Trio A, of moments in which “one part off the high-art connotations of sculpture fact that humanist principles had lost validity of the body becomes an object for another and painting; in dance, bodies were made for art in a late-capitalist United States part of the body to lift”;4 her acknowledgement object-like for similar reasons. Both where individualism and freedom were cards that in her work “people may become object- minimalism and postmodern choreography to be played in the cold war’s ideo-logical like in the way they are manipulated”5; her participated in a period attempt to counter contest, and where humanist themes were contrast between the “imperial balletic body” the assumptions that Rainer’s generation deployed and dissolved in the consumer- of conventional theatrical dance and the way often labeled “humanist” and associated culture stream of images and information; “the body is an object” in her dance of the with the New York School in painting and where, as Herbert Marcuse wrote in 1964, 1960s6; or her request to be treated like a Martha Graham’s expressionism in dance: “the music of the soul is also the music of thing herself when, lying down across the expectations that art reveal the subjectivity of salesmanship.”11 Under these conditions it laps of several audience members, she asked its creator; that it express universal values or would have been meaningless for the avant- them to “please pass me along the row.”7 Or the essential nature of the human condition; garde to counter alienation with a celebration consider her entreaty to one of her dancers, that even in abstraction it transcend the of subjectivity, and in her verbal statements circa 1966: “think of yourself as a barrel.”8 merely material. Frank Stella complained Rainer sounds like the very voice of the about “the humanistic values” old-fashioned post-humanist aesthetic that acknowledged Rainer’s interest in the human body as an viewers insisted on finding in art, “asserting this reality. But because people were her object took form in the famously deadpan that there is something there besides the material, rather than paint or steel, the and pared-down works of this period, now paint on the canvas. My painting is based on choreographer’s words also suggest most considered master-pieces of postmodern the fact that only what can be seen there is clearly the risk this aesthetic ran of confusion dance. In pieces like Parts of Some Sextets there. It really is an object.”9 And Mel Bochner with the coldest technocratic worldview, as (1965) and The Mind is a Muscle (1966- explained two years later that the new art was she advocates the use of the human body 68), unadorned athleticism replaced “dumb in the sense that it does not ‘speak in its literal, neutral, and physical dimension both emotional expression and technical to you,’ yet subversive in that it points to the alone: people as things. virtuosity. Her performers jogged, rolled, probable end of all Renaissance values.”10 and stood. They hauled large, awkward Shared across the arts and among various This essay, however, is about how Rainer objects—mattresses, or one another. The movements of this time, but exemplified refused to let things be. Her refusal is 02 Hand Movie, 1966 nowhere more evident than in five short films” are in fact extraordinary exposures to be Rainer’s. But its attachment to a person films she made between 1966 and ’69. of contradictions within the cool, objective seems beside the point. The hand is neither These were experiments predating Rainer’s model of 60s art—and clues that these an old hand nor a child’s; it is not immediately transformation from choreographer to tensions are what made it significant in the identifiable as either male or female; it bears feature-length, narrative filmmaker in the first place. no identifying—signifying—markers (no nail 1970s, screened for artist friends such polish, wristwatch, rings).14 The neutral mode as Deborah and Alex Hay and Richard Against a pale gray ground, the back of a of the film is also a function of its avoidance Serra, and used as elements in multi-media hand. Its fingertips graze the top of the frame, of all other kinds of signification: none of the performance pieces. Linewas shown to art its wrist-bone the bottom edge. For the next hand’s gestures, even in passing, resemble and film audiences when Hollis Frampton five minutes it is hand and nothing but hand conventional signs (no spreading of index and Michael Snow selected it for a program for the viewer of Rainer’s first film: hand and middle finger to signal victory or peace, at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1969, but the moving, hand turning, hand filling the field of no a-ok circle of index finger and thumb). films then went almost unseen until 2003, vision. The first two knuckles of the middle The hand is at once articulate and dumb. This when they were shown on video at Rainer’s finger bend and straighten. The fingertip is all the more notable since, culturally, the retrospective at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery bobs between unmoving mates, and a tendon human hand holds together the two things of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.12 pops in and out of relief, demonstrating the that artists in Rainer’s milieu were most hand’s mechanics. The fingers rub against eager to drop from art circa 1966: individual Happily, they are now more much accessible, one another, bend forward, lean apart. The personality and interpretable signification. with their release on a DVD produced and hand rotates on its vertical axis to show its Think of the “artist’s hand,” classic metaphor distributed by the Video Data Bank in palm. The fingers keep up their exploratory for the inherence of individual personality Chicago.13 wiggling, each discovering how far it can in the art object; or of the long history of reach and in what directions it can move, attempts to link the seeming arbitrariness Rainer gave the films on this disk the each discerning the shape and feel of the of linguistic signs to the supposedly natural collective title Five Easy Pieces, a borrowing others. Hand Movie is a dance performed by language of gesture; or think of the hands’ that befits her claim that they were not quite fingers, tendons, palm, wrist, and thumb. ability in sign language to convey both full-blown art works, but “exercises.” The linguistic meaning and emotional inflection. silent, 8- or 16mm films of this celluloid The black-and-white 8-mm film, the low level It is in a virtuoso demonstration of minimalist sketch-book are indeed modest, but also of contrast, and the even lighting combine restraint that Hand Movie pries gesture from complex and telling. Each equates bodies with the visual isolation of the hand—from metaphor, hand from human self. and things; each approaches the condition its body, from its mate—to create a vaguely of ballet mécanique that Rainer mused about clinical mood (as opposed, for instance, to And yet, if it is a carefully cultureless hand, in the line from her notebook that is the that which might surround the animated but the very fact that the viewer recognizes it epigraph of this essay. But each ultimately disembodied hand’s horror-film kin). This as such calls attention to the process that refuses this condition, and the films’ resulting mode of studied neutrality, so typical of the the film carefully stymies. That is, the film ambiguities constitute a historically important artistic moment, comes in large part from the enacts—or it causes us to enact—our inability critique of the anti-humanist aesthetic from anonymity of the appendage onscreen. The not to inventory and decode the cultural within. What Rainer called her “short boring hand belongs to someone, and we presume it and biological data of a hand offered to our 03 view. And while the hand may not convey as early as 1966: Hand Movie demonstrates walks toward the ball, slowly but purposefully. information—it does not sign—the way we the impossibility of maintaining Robbe- The feet meet the ball, touch it, or wait for use our hands as information gatherers Grillet’s stance, especially when the object at it to touch them.