Image courtesy of Afterall Books.

Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle by Catherine Wood, Published by Afterall Books, Central Saint Martins College, October 2007

The Mind is a Muscle is the latest in the One Work publication series by Afterall Books. Each book in the series is an in-depth look, by one author, at a single artwork that has shaped the landscape of contemporary art as we know it today. For Catherine Wood, Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance at Tate Modern, Yvonne Rainer’s performance of ‘The Mind is a Muscle’ at the Anderson Theatre, New York on 11, 14 and 15 April 1968, is one such work.

The Mind is a Muscle is a multipart performance for 7 dancers who perform a routine of pared-down, ordinary or ‘everyday’ gestures on stage; the work also includes choreographed periods of silence, film and text. Fittingly for a whole book dedicated to one 95 minute performance, Wood’s analysis of The Mind is Muscle is detailed, specific and thorough. Importantly, Wood focuses on one particular performance of The Mind is a Muscle - 11, 14, and 15 April 1968- deliberately setting it apart from the many other instances of the same work. In this, Wood sets the specific socio-political, art historical and physical scene for the April 1968 version of The Mind is a Muscle - a scene set in the context of a 1960’s affluent America, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights protests and an exploding art scene but also inextricably linked to Rainer’s mental state, her health, her friends at the Judson Church and her own (stable) financial situation. In setting this specific scene in all its minutiae, Wood provides a close focus for her reader whilst giving weight to the idea that each performance, both of The Mind is a Muscle and of performance in general, has its own unique temporality; that even if repeated, performance is never the same twice.

For the main part Wood uses choreography scripts, documentary photographs, prop lists and evocative descriptions as well as a myriad of theoreticians, including Plato, Karl Marx, Judith Butler, Nicolas Bourriaud, Emile Durkheim and David Graeber, to explore the groundbreaking achievements of The Mind is a Muscle with regards to notions of ‘work’, minimalism, audience, and gestural image making. The result is advanced and interesting enough for those already familiar with Ranier’s work but also accessible enough to provide an in-depth introduction to those who need it. However, it is the new model of art that Wood proposes in The Mind is a Muscle, particularly its relation to audience, that is the most intriguing aspect of the book. Wood encourages us to ‘picture The Mind is a Muscle as a live event...a ritual configuration of bodies, positions and actions within the multiplicity of bodies, positions and actions found among the 18 million inhabitants of New York City at that time.’ Our continuing, embodied and live relation to The Mind is a Muscle, both to the book and the performance itself, is important for Wood because she posits that the real innovation and impact of The Mind is a Muscle is located in the works’ specific living, dynamic and relational tension between materiality and idea. For Wood, The Mind is a Muscle is the first artwork to perform the ephemeral as fact, and to conceive of the event as transmitting culture and knowledge, an event in which meaning is generated collectively.

The underlying critical problem with Wood’s One Work treatise on The Mind is a Muscle (1968), is that it adds to the growing library of ‘works that have made the difference’ in the One Work series such as Bas Jan Aders’ In Search of the Miraculous (1975), Marc Camille Chaimowiczs’ Celebration? Realife (1972) and Joan Jonas’s I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) (1976). With her contribution Wood further solidifies the presumption – clearly evident in the One Work series- that Europe and the US in the 1960’s and 70’s is the pivotal moment for contemporary performance related practice, moreover for contemporary art. Although such canonisation is inevitable with any publication that focuses on one work, it should be recognised that 1960’s Europe and the US is hotly contested as the birthplace of visual art performance. Wood’s recourse to this all-too-familiar 1960’s US moment is a missed opportunity - for Wood, for contemporary art, for the One Work Series - to correct this mid twentieth century euro-American art historical bias and forsakes the importance of more recent, 21st Century, performance related work. More emphasis on how The Mind is a Muscle influences today’s’ contemporary art, i.e. the art of the current century , along with more practical art examples, would have gone someway to setting the record straight.

Despite the predictability of Wood’s choice of One Work, The Mind is a Muscle has plenty to offer. Picking just one contemporary art work that has significantly shaped culture, and writing a wholly focussed and impassioned book-length treatise on it, is a rare and beautiful thing to see in print and as such represents an exciting prospect for any contemporary art enthusiast. The excitement isn’t just in learning more about the author through their choice of artwork or reading about the far reaching social, political and artistic consequences of that work. More than anything else, the One Work series begs an intriguing question ‘Can you think of one contemporary art work that has transformed the way we look at the world, and if so, what is that One Work?’

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

Image: Joe Moran's My Father's Grace, courtesy of Dance Art.

Joe Moran ‘My Father’s Grace’
Wilkinson Gallery
London 8th / 9th January 2008

My Father’s Grace was devised and performed by Joe Moran and represented the finale of Dance Art, a short season of dance co-produced by Intimate Contenders and Falling Wide in London gallery spaces from October 07 – January 08. The piece consisted of Moran himself dancing a 40 minute solo in the empty ground floor gallery of Wilkinson Gallery to an audience of approximately 30 people.

As a performance My Father’s Grace was stark in its gestures and appearance. Moran wore basic, casual red training clothes, used no props and only the basic gallery lighting. He also kept all dance moves down to only the most necessary. The soundscape for the work was also minimal, including separate sections of electronic pulses, natural sounds and one light folksy tune. Despite this starkness Moran’s choreography was varied throughout; long periods of lying deathly still were combined with primeval style writhings on the floor interspersed with flowing movements that ended abruptly with strangely closed, strangulated gestures. His was indeed a skilled, knowledgeable body performing highly emotional, personal feelings of death, mourning, mental anguish and joy. However, how Moran’s movements related to the audience, or to the visual art context of Wilkinson Gallery, is not clear.

Dance Art’s aim is to explore dance’s interface with the visual arts, to celebrate the porosity of dance as a genre, and so it is a shame that My Father’s Grace did not grey the boundaries of visual art and dance or utilise the context of Wilkinson Gallery more overtly. This lack of address is also unfortunate on a critical level. With no specific narrative or formal elements tying the work to the gallery context it is easy to believe that the presence of My Father’s Grace amongst the bare walls of Wilkinson Gallery is convenient or circumstantial; it presents dance as something simply akin to a curatorial and financial 'gallery filler' in between periods of exhibition de-installation or commercial shows.

The lack of acknowledgement of the visual art context is also unfortunate because Moran’s approach to mark making as physical gesture, including his stated desire to show ‘instinctive meanings inherent in the moving body’ in order to explore ‘natural intimacies between performer and audience’ suffers when seen within a contemporary visual art perspective. In contrast to contemporary dance or interdisciplinary works that thrive in occupying the shared territory of dance and visual arts - by choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Jerome Bel, Xavier Le Roi and artists Pablo Bronstein and Kelly Nipper- Moran’s insistence upon meaning as embodied, and therefore primal (original, basic and simple), together with its unmediated translation to the audience, comes across as problematic and indebted to a removed and purist twentieth century narrative of formal modernism; of autonomy, abstraction, material meaning and form. With this approach My Father’s Grace enacts Moran’s body-in-performance as a modernist art object; as inherently meaningful - and intellectually and economically ‘valuable’ - in and by its formal materiality. Moran’s performance then - contrary to his desire to explore ‘natural intimacies’ between dancer and audience- highlights the interaction between audience and performer as heavily mediated, unnatural and hierarchical, by setting itself up as an art object that is distant, removed and insistent upon its autonomy. In this sense Moran’s performance compounds the (mistaken) belief that the body, its gestures, skill and abstraction can only be worshipped from afar, or translated by experts.

Despite these underlying critical failures there were moments of joy in My Father’s Grace. By alternately turning the gallery lights off and on in the first section Moran created a pitch black ‘off stage’ facility that enabled an ‘invisible dance,’ in which the sounds of Moran’s bare feet brushing the gallery floor were the only evidence as to his movements. Although I think it unlikely that this basic light show was a deliberate witty reference to Martin Creed’s famed conceptual Work No. 227 ‘The Lights Going On and Off’ (2000) it was none-the-less effective in highlighting the performativity of unseen or invisible dance movements. This invisibility, combined with the long moments of lying down in stillness, neatly challenged the expectations of an audience who had paid £12 each to see Moran’s choreography.

Another highlight of the evening was ‘In Land’ (2006) a video shown alongside My Father’s Grace in the Wilkinson Gallery lobby. It depicted two people linked together whilst rolling slowly and laboriously over a grassy landscape. Despite the necessarily removed or surface interaction implied by the video monitor, the sheer materiality of the two bodies and the physical exertion involved in rolling over the grassy mounds was clearly at stake in this work and beautifully at odds with the effortless nature of the depicted pastoral scene. In contrast to My Father’s Grace, In Land used the natural landscape in which it was filmed to enact recognisable mark making and meaning in physical gesture. And so on the night it was with In Land - a work that celebrated the embedded, unskilled, less-seen and unglamorous aspects of physical performance; the lumpen physicality and weight of the body and the strenuous effects of gravity upon it that are vital in order to make movement, be it dance movement or not - that Moran proved dance can speak a distinctly twenty first century visual arts language.

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

My Father’s Grace (2007) was devised and performed by Joe Moran. Technical Manager: Rachel Shipp, Visual Projection taken from the work of Alexander Sokurov. Soundscape and music by Chris Watson and Sufjan Stevens

In Land (2006) was directed by Joe Moran, filmed by Jane Barnwell and Robert Napoletani, danced by Florence Peak and Kirstie Richardson and edited by Ultan Molloy.

http://www.fallingwide.com/
http://www.intimatecontenders.com/

Image Credit: 'Office Party Xmas 2007', Featuring Amanda Hadingue with audience members. Photo by Steff Langley

Office Party Xmas 2007
Christopher Green and Ursula Martinez
12 – 29 December 2007
The Pit, Barbican

See http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?id=6068&pg=766 for details.

Cheesy music? Check. Party nibbles? Check. Social awkwardness? Bucket loads. Christopher Green and Ursula Martinez’s Office Party Xmas 2007 at the Barbican Pit Theatre had all the necessary ingredients for an excruciating night of organised ‘fun’. The artists transformed the theatre into a hellish grey function room complete with bar, dance-floor and plenty of tinsel; and a collection of business stereotypes – a talentless and boorish American CEO, a bossy head of Marketing, a raunchy female secretary – led the roaming crowd through a night of inappropriate drinking, casual sexism, and barely disguised animosity.

The audience members were integrated seamlessly into all of this. Before we entered the party, we were each given a name badge linking us to a department. Now I was Mary from Domestic Support, and everyone knew it. The badges meant we could participate in group activities, but more importantly they meant we were forced into social groupings with people we didn’t know and didn’t trust entirely. It felt just like work.

This social aspect of Office Party Xmas 2007 worked flawlessly. Somewhere between the peanuts on the bar and the Christmas tree by the dance floor, real social dynamics began to take shape. Some of my fellow members of Domestic Support were riled because they didn’t get an Executive badge; personally, I felt some bitterness towards the ‘Creatives’. People I had assumed were actors – a man who wore a bra and manhandled other men on stage, a competition winner who eagerly snogged the heads of department as his prize – were actually audience members whose tasteless behaviour was entirely spontaneous. And the badges meant that we could all address each other by name – not with permission, but with that sinister over-friendliness that only exists between colleagues or strangers.

It was, then, a perfect replica of the self-conscious awkwardness, unpleasant décor and unimaginative music of an office bash somewhere in a business park underneath a motorway flyover. But Office Party was also a platform for some independent acts. Tina C (aka Christopher Green) gave a rousing performance, belting out a couple of songs in-between pearls of her Southern-belle wisdom, and there was a surreal and hypnotic interlude when Robyn Simpson broke down a wall to melt into a dream-like dance sequence.

These independent acts worked best when they segwayed smoothly from the premise of the rest of the evening – that the orchestrated cheer of an Office Party belies the frustration people feel in their jobs. The dance sequence erupted perfectly, for example, from a realistic spat between Robyn from Accounts and the compere of a Christmas-pudding-eating contest. But, with the exception of Tina C, they were less successful as stand-alone performances. When the dancers ‘Two-Ché’ performed their po-faced routine to ‘Lady in Red’, undressing each other to reveal red pubic hair, it was so absurdly inappropriate it reminded us that we were not at a party, but a pastiche of one.

And this is the problem at the core of Office Party Xmas 2007. It worked well as an explication of the ways people package identity – both the meaningless epithets we load on other people (‘Mary from Domestic Support’ isn’t a great conversation-opener), and the lengths we might go to escape our own labels, once encouraged to let our hair down. But the attention it paid to the mundane was also a little smug, and misguided. Catering to the lowest common denominator – as is the burden of office do’s everywhere – Office Party also flattered the knowingess of its audience. Fake disclaimers gave warnings about the subjectivity of ‘fun’, and the cartoonish ridiculousness of the CEO gave us all an intellectual escape route – enough room to sneer. But who were we laughing at? The downfall of the office do is not its lack of taste, but the fact that no-one wants to be there in the first place. These touches felt heavy handed and threatened to break the evening’s suspension of disbelief.

Office Party was most affecting when it avoided the conspicuous nod to irony. A sing-along at the end was both a searing critique of business-psycho-babble and a convincing exercise in togetherness. Here, encouraged to take our roles seriously, the audience saw the desperation of a work community in a different light. But perhaps the show’s reminders of pastiche served another purpose. Midway through the evening a friend confided, ‘I can tell this is a realistic office party – I’m thinking of leaving early.’ But by the end he was setting the dance floor alight and wishing the DJ would play ‘Agadoo’. Could it be that – shockingly – Office Party Xmas 2007 reveals that deep down, we all secretly like that kind of thing? Swap the drunken conversation with your boss, in fact, for the excuse of irony, and we might even pay £15 to do it.

Mary Paterson