‘Radical Bodies’:
Artistic Consensus

Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York
24.05.17 – 16.09.17

Translated by Duncan Hewitt

If we want to separate out a section of the timeline from the narrative of modernist art, to explain compatibility and consensus between types of artistic expression, the 1960s would not be a bad choice. Take the US for example: following the Great Depression of the 1930s, and after all the controversies of racial identity, the American century finally arrived. The artistic norms of the period had already quietly shifted. This was not only reflected in the fusion and expansion of the creative media employed: the narrative of art history also shifted towards a broad debate about identity politics, mass media and commercial values.

The exhibition Radical Bodies revisits precisely this historical era. The curators have reconstructed the artistic interactions between the dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin and a host of other artists during the period from 1955 to 1972. It was from the debates of this era that the theory of what’s known as ‘postmodern dance’ was born. Inspired by the eclectic nature of performance art, the exhibition is a crossover between many types of artistic media, and strives to demonstrate the entire historical context to the audience.

Regrettably, this type of retrospective exhibition is inevitably limited by being unable to present the expressive strength that is at the core of performance art – its live nature. The exhibition can only transform it, and portray it, from a kind of historical, conceptual point of view. The importance of this transformation lies in the fact that, as well as conveying the sheer expressive power of such art, it can also develop it into material for academic research – providing a space for reflection, over and above the expressive form.

In the 1950s and 60s, modern dance, as an important artistic medium embodying social change, was in the midst of a very significant transformation: the theatrical-style, ‘putting-on-a-show’ type of contemporary dance was torn down from its altar by a group of artistic rebels. They sought a form of dance that would create an interaction with the audience’s sensory experience, and strove to express the reciprocal links between the unadorned human body and the spatial environment, hoping in this way to inspire the masses to reflect on body politics. However, the results of this artistic shift were by no means to everyone’s satisfaction: in 1973 the minimalist composer Steve Reich, in a summary of the relationship between music and dance, wrote, ‘For a long time during the 1960s, one would go to the dance concert where no one danced, followed by the party where everyone danced.’ And he concluded, ‘This was not a healthy situation.’

Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that the artistic consensus that Halprin and others created, based on art, went above and beyond art: it was a contemplative exploration of gender and status, social politics and community activities. And dance, as the leading expressive form of this revolution, also gradually began to enter into art galleries, public spaces, and even streets and alleyways. From 1947, when Halprin created The Prophetess in the wake of the Nuremberg Trials, to 1967, when her Blank Placard Dance, a march of urban resistance, was performed in San Francisco, choreographed activities in public spaces generally focused on fundamental questions of citizens’ rights, becoming more and more politicised as the 1960s went on. The human body, space and elements of everyday life could engage in an extemporaneous dialogue through the form of dance and the lines of movement. This eventually solidified into the basic creative approach of radical 1960s dance.

In her radical creative methods, Halprin sought to construct a model of dance that could connect all kinds of disjointed elements of theatrical dance, including separating storylines from physical movement, and dance postures from emotional prompts. It’s worth noting that this kind of improvised creation not only involved exploring many different media, including sound, space and the body; she claimed it also blurred the distinction between formal performance and the preparatory phase in which the performance was created. The various videos in the exhibition primarily show scenes of the dancers creating and rehearsing, but the impression does not appear in any way different from the final appearance of the dance on stage. The glamorous aspect of performance has been abandoned: what you see is what you get; it’s a style with a certain degree of positivism.

With the constant development of creative media, visual art, installation art and mixed media also entered a period of transformation. It’s intriguing to contemplate what was the key influence of a ‘body artist’ such as Yvonne Rainer on the visual art of people such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Or, to put it another way, what was it these visual artists saw in her choreographed works? Based on the cooperative performances involving the Judson Dance Theater and Rainer between 1962 and 1966, Rauschenberg in 1965 painted a series of portraits of Rainer and the minimalist sculptor Robert Morris; he also made use of the mattresses that were props in Parts of Some Sextets ( 1965 ), in which he participated. In the dance performance the body is like a component part of a sculpture, the ‘posture without inner thought’ described by Rosalind Krauss.

At the same time, this type of creative model also inspired Morris. In the summer of 1961, sometime after the workshop finished, he created Box with the Sound of its own Making. A pre-recorded 3-hour tape was placed in a cubic walnut-wood box, which continuously broadcast the sound of Morris creating the work. This sculpture was closer to dadaist humour, and indeed had entered the space of theatre art, happenings and kinetic art. It was a creation based on a consensual understanding of art. Simone Forti’s Slant Board ( 1961 ) is an even better example of the mutual influence between performance art and visual art. This is a dance prop consisting of two 4 x 8 foot sheets of plywood leaning against a wall, with five ropes tied to the top, and two boxes underneath. During the exhibition this work once again demonstrated its performance aspect, as dancers walked up and down its slope repeatedly for around ten minutes. From a metaphorical and literary perspective, Forti introduced minimalist sculpture into the creation of dance, and demonstrated the commonalities in the expressive capability of each of these art forms.

As well as having roots in mutual influences between artists, this kind of creative consensus is also, in particular, the inevitable response of individual artists to their contemporary social context. Judy Chicago believes that performance art is the art form best able to express the essence of an idea and make it comprehensible – because the vast majority of the audience will tend to use the language of performance in everyday life. Thus, from those such as Halprin and Forti who, as choreographers, intentionally weakened the powerful symbolism of nudity in performance, to Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s installation and performance space Womanhouse ( 1972 ), created under the banner of feminism, they all – despite the differences in their artistic practice – embody the response of the art world to social issues such as body politics and the repression of public opinion. Revolution and rebellion, dismantling and reconstruction, are important overriding themes that have long infused artistic creation. What is needed to create an artistic consensus is certainly not the ‘you applaud me and I’ll applaud you’ type of ‘courtesy’; rather, it is a rational radicalism based on a shared context.