Being watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s

Abstract

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

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