You don’t hear much about the avant-garde anymore. Identity politics and globalization have changed how art is made in the past few decades, and the avant-garde -- a product of 20th-century modernism -- has been downgraded from moral imperative to historical category. For the filmmaker and choreographer Yvonne Rainer, however, the concept of the avant-garde, despite its disappointments, still inspires.
Rainer has come to represent the last surge of the dance avant-garde. Born in San Francisco to immigrant anarchist parents, she entered dance after brief forays into visual art and theater (her method-acting teachers complained that they could see her thinking). She began her serious dance training in New York, studying with choreographers as diverse as Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and the ballerina Mia Slavenska. As a member of a two-year workshop based on the composer John Cage’s principle of chance methods, she became a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater when the workshop started giving public concerts at the Judson Memorial Church, on Manhattan’s Washington Square, in 1962.
Through the early 1970s, Rainer was a mainstay of New York’s postmodern-dance world, best remembered for her minimalist “Trio A.” As she explained in a 1965 manifesto -- a favorite form of her Dadaist and Surrealist forebears -- she rebuffed all that her modern-dance predecessors had held near and dear. She said “no” to everything that then constituted dance, from spectacle to virtuosity to glamour, believing as she did that the slate could indeed be cleaned and inscribed anew.
By the early 1970s, Rainer was turning to film, where she could explore her newfound interest in language and emotion. As she began reading feminist theory in the mid-'70s, her films became increasingly political. Like her dances, the films themselves became theory-texts. Rainer’s acute visuality, matched by her intellectual rigor, has earned her critical acclaim and, in 1990, a MacArthur genius award. Rainer’s oeuvre is a rarefied universe, marked by her intense, relentless ambitions for both art and society.
“Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961-2002,” on display at the University of the Arts’ Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, in Philadelphia, is an unprecedented opportunity to observe the full trajectory of this remarkable auteur. Sid Sachs, the curator, has assembled the retrospective, which features vintage photographs, posters, manuscripts, films, and notebooks, as well as two new video projects. “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid” (2002) is Rainer’s first installation. “Rainer Variations” (2002) is a “faux documentary” by the videographer Charles Atlas, who created a perfectly prankish portrait of the artist with footage from real interviews, films, and performances, as well as simulated interviews and a staged rehearsal of “Trio A” with the Martha Graham impersonator Richard Move. The show continues through November 30.
Rainer’s installation is a sly gesture (as all her gestures are) toward her own artistic genealogy as a dancer/choreographer and filmmaker in the form of a literally moving image. Cloistered in a small, circular room with seats for just two people, you rotate around your own axis to follow the projected image as it loops along the wall. The content is a hybrid of her most recent dance and her most recent research, into Vienna before World War I. It is a cautionary tale -- a swan song of sorts, for both the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, by implication, the avant-garde.
Today, how do we assess the avant-garde, when even Rainer says she can’t sit through its interminable scenes without wanting to fast-forward? Film has been left behind by the digital revolution. Culture, like the market, behaves globally; national borders are irrelevant. Avant-garde practice -- a dialectical one -- presupposed a stable target to attack, a clear line to transgress. Today, all our targets are circuited and networked. Politics -- the subject of Rainer’s deepest concern -- can no longer be engaged by taking up positions. It’s now a purely relational operation. Manifestoes have been replaced by electronic mailing lists.
Rainer knows all this. She is nothing if not observant. After 40 years on the ramparts unpacking patriarchy, racism, aging, disease, and sexuality, she is still fighting the good fight. We’ve depended on her doing so. So how come I emerged from the installation so despairing?
The endless circling in “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid” is accompanied by Arnold Schoenberg’s emotionally sweeping string sextet “Transfigured Night.” The video is a dense, fragmented collage of moving and static images, along with two sets of aphoristic texts. One (in white) borrows from Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (Volume 1), and Alan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna. The other (in red) quotes the radical innovators Schoenberg, the painter Oscar Kokoschka, the architect Adolf Loos, and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The visuals include a collage of images from turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna and rehearsal footage from the dance “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” which the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation commissioned from Rainer for the White Oak Dance Project in 2000.
Within that dance, Rainer quotes herself as well. “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” was a reader’s digest of her choreographic career. Scattered throughout were deathbed utterances from the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Henry James, and Pancho Villa, continuing the 68-year-old Rainer’s research into aging and mortality. Among the lines we hear the dancers utter: “I’m scared,” and “The world is real, but unknowable.”
The journey to Vienna is a return to Rainer’s avant-garde roots. What she finds is a disintegrating elite propped up by escapist art and an emerging avant-garde powerless to stem the rising tide of fascism. There is no happy ending, nor any comic relief.
Inserted into this story -- quite literally -- is Rainer’s own choreography, and it, too, gets called into question. What did the ‘60s avant-garde accomplish? In a gallery note, she suggests that the dance footage can be read “as both the beneficiary of a cultural and economic elite and as an extension of an avant-garde tradition that revels in attacking that elite and its illusions of order and permanency.”
Rainer’s latest work also suggests that she thinks the social disintegration of Vienna bears more than a passing resemblance to contemporary America. As the fragmented aphorisms gradually gather their narrative force, we recognize the nostalgic resistance to change, the substitute of eye candy for art, the blind eye to suffering, the uncertainty and impotence, the growing nationalism. In the midst of it all we are reminded, “The function of art is to shake us out of our complacency and comfort.”
The installation continues Rainer’s longstanding analysis of the avant-garde as an adversarial aesthetic. As her work became more political, however, her strategies, adapted from John Cage, yielded to the needs of social analysis. Eventually she would forgive Cage for his sunny, apolitical remarks about life being “excellent,” but for herself, as she explained in a 1981 essay, the point is not to discover how excellent life is, but to “more readily awaken to the ways in which we have been led to believe that this life is so excellent, just, and right.” Rainer may question the social efficacy of avant-garde transgression, but she still holds out the possibility that some part of it can be salvaged to invigorate social struggles.
When Rainer turned her attention from the aesthetic to include the political as well, it was with skepticism. As reflected in a 1976 interview, she refused to accept the facile formula, then popular in cinema studies, that posited some vague, “active” spectator who would ipso facto change the world.
That skepticism has served her well -- kept her sharp and kept her wondering: How does social change happen? What place does art have in that process? At its core, her project, as she once wrote, is to expose “the signs that constitute and promulgate social inequities.”
Rainer distinguished between irony and cynicism. “Through irony we reveal social contradiction and inequity, and point to agencies of resistance,” she said in a 2001 symposium. “I associate cynicism with despair, with disillusionment that comes from romantic expectations. Irony is based in skepticism and struggle rather than idealism and short-term dreams of success.” That she has sustained a state of perpetual resistance for four decades is heroic -- and, she has said, also “wrongheaded, misguided, naive, ineffectual, enraged, sublimated.”
Her continuing fascination is with performing: pretending, dissembling, acting out. But instead of colluding with the illusion of narrative representation and all that it hides, she chooses to reveal the magic tricks. She questions the assumptions about who’s speaking and what’s spoken. Her work is about the real, but it is not realistic. It’s a world of sliding pronouns, fluid identities, and visual ventriloquism.
For example, multiple actors play a single character; historical personages show up in contemporary scenes; actors break out of character to directly address the camera, as does Rainer the director; images and voices do not match; and point of view is constantly shifting.
Rainer interrogates the status of truth but never goes so far as to say there is no truth. She was slouching toward autobiography long before it became the discourse du jour, and she preferred film because the illusion of everyday life is so much more embedded in the form -- all the better to subvert it. A ‘60s formalist, steeped in the modernist tradition of form over content, she’s also political. She’s been able to have her cake and eat it, too.
Rainer has always insisted on queer bedfellows: art and politics, abstraction and autobiography. More recently, she repositioned herself from rhetorically aligned “political lesbian,” as she put it in 1993, to a practicing one, and the result was MURDER and murder (1996), a postmenopausal-lesbian love story. As a filmmaker, she has gone from the disjunctive tableaus of her first feature-length film, Lives of Performers (1972), which blurred fiction and nonfiction in the story of a love triangle among dancers, to the fully characterized protagonists in MURDER and murder -- from scorned heterosexual woman to lesbian in love.
After making The Man Who Envied Women (1985) -- in which the female protagonist never shows up on screen, literally enacting the figure of the invisible woman then being theorized by feminist critics -- Rainer wrote about her continuing goal to “create situations that can accommodate both ambiguity and contradiction without eliminating the possibility of taking specific political stands.”
Rainer has refused to fix any aesthetic strategy as inherently political and has insisted on the right to switch tactics. When narrative was a taboo practice, considered retrograde by artists and hopelessly oppressive by feminists, she plunged in. “I hate the idea,” she told an interviewer in 1984, “of any representation indicating a correct politics or a correct way to think about things.”
She also stakes a claim for the necessity of historical analysis, as she undertakes in her new installation. If one sees the world as a series of transgressions, then one expects to see movement back and forth. “I am struck by how the boundaries and definitions that constitute radicality and transgression shift from decade to decade,” she observed in 1989. “The former radicals of the ‘60s who fought for legalized abortion now find themselves the defenders of the status quo, while the right-to-lifers set the agendas of front-line embattlement with the law.”
As a movement, the avant-garde has died (Rainer wrote a 1996 essay on “The Avant-Garde Humpty Dumpty”), but the avant-garde gesture survives. For Rainer, her films are a means of energizing her fellow activists. When the prospects for a just society seem at their worst, she is most insistent about the importance of at least keeping the questions about social inequities in play. She told an interviewer in 1980 that “whether or not social change, i.e., revolution, is possible, we must work as though it is.”
Very near the end of “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid,” we are implored to consider the plight of the hapless utopian: “But what are the human rights of those who still believe in defeated art, in defeated ideas?”
Rainer, like her new installation, is a hybrid, both aesthete and activist. Her final avant-gardist gesture is to refuse to choose between art and politics. Is it enough that she continues to make art, that she keeps banging her head against the wall? Maybe that’s as good as it gets.
Rainer has always seemed to remain optimistic. In response to the theory of the hegemonic “male gaze,” she invented a new position for herself, the utopian prospect of the “a-woman,” a willful alternative to cultural definitions of woman. Her heroines have never succumbed to cynicism. She has rejected political or aesthetic prescription. At the end of Privilege (1990), in which she tackles the issues of race and menopause, there’s an intertitle: “Utopia: the more impossible it seems, the more necessary it becomes.”
If the installation suggests despair, or just her usual doubts, the avant-garde still remains an enabling ideology for Rainer. True, the avant-garde did not prevent the rise of Nazism in early 20th-century Vienna, nor did it produce the egalitarian America envisioned by the ‘60s counterculture. But Rainer disavows any romantic expectations of success. What matters, she reassures us in her program note, quoting the playwright and director Richard Foreman, is to “resist the present.”
Of all that is familiar in the retrospective, one errant artifact stands out: a series of drawings by Rainer, after Abraham Walkowitz’s drawings of Isadora Duncan. In 1968 or so, Rainer sat in a library, recreating the lines of force in that legendary dancing body, making notations about its gesture. Early in the last century, the young Duncan, too, had wiped the slate clean, starting from scratch in conceiving what dance, and art, could be. And after many a summer, Duncan realized -- if only reluctantly, kicking and screaming -- the inevitable motion of time. “My Art was the flower of an Epoch,” she wrote to her protégée, Irma, about the students in her Moscow school, “but that Epoch is dead and Europe is the past. These red tunic kids are the future.”
Ann Daly is a professor of performance studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture (Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 13, Page B15