The Myth of Movement: Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown Dancing on the New York City Grid, Amanda Jane Lamarra Graham

Transcription

1 The Myth of Movement: Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown Dancing on the New York City Grid, by Amanda Jane Lamarra Graham Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Supervised by Professor Douglas Crimp Program in Visual and Cultural Studies Arts, Sciences and Engineering School of Arts and Sciences University of Rochester Rochester, New York 2014

2 ii Biographical Sketch Amanda Jane Lamarra Graham was born in Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia. She attended Bard College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology. She attended York University and graduated with a Masters of Arts in Communication and Culture in May She attended Brooklyn College and graduated with a Masters of Science in Education in September She worked as a community organizer in Dorchester, Boston and a public school art teacher in Brownsville, Brooklyn. She began doctoral studies in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies in She was awarded the University of Rochester Provost s Fellowship and the Raymond N. Ball Dissertation Fellowship in and received the Master of Arts degree from the University of Rochester in She pursued her research in Visual and Cultural Studies under the direction of Douglas Crimp. The following publications were a result of work conducted during doctoral study: Re-Covering the Hiroshima Maidens in Effie Gemi-Iodanou, Rob Matthew, Ellen McInnes, Stephen Gordon, and Rhiannon Petitt, eds, The Archaeology of Medicine, Healing, and Performance: Interdisciplinary approaches to medicine and material culture (Oxford: Oxbow Press, 2014) Out of Site: Trisha Brown s Roof Piece. Dance Chronicle (March 2013) Art Scholarship Gets Personal: Pain, Participation and Nadia Myre s Scar Project in Amanda Gilvin, Craig Martin, and Georgia Roberts, eds, Collaborative Futures: Critical Reflections on Publicly Active Graduate Education (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012)

3 iii Made Me Think of You: Borrowing Books From Don Draper s Library. Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (May 2012) Assisted Breathing: Developing Embodied Exposure in Oscar Muñoz s Aliento. Latin American Perspectives, Arts, Culture, and Politics, Part 2: Representations of Resistance in Latin American Art (May 2012) Abstract Division: Tracing Nadia Myre s Scar Trajectory in Nadia Myre, En[counter]s. (Montreal: Galerie Art Mûr and Musée d art contemporain des Laurentides, 2011)

4 iv Acknowledgements To locate a single point of genesis for this dissertation is a difficult, if not fruitless, task. But if I were to try I would guess that this dissertation began to gestate in Fall 2009 when my friend Sharon McGauley and I went to see Lucinda Childs s Dance at the Joyce Theater. I had already gone to a performance of Dance for my thirtieth birthday that July at my undergraduate alma mater Bard College. Although I loved the show at Bard s Richard B. Fisher Centre for the Performing Arts (enough to seek it out a second time) the production at the Joyce was more interesting because, for one, I was fortuitously seated beside my then professor and future advisor, Douglas Crimp. At the time I was enrolled in Douglas s course Dance, Art, and Film. I took the course in hopes of writing my final paper on Dance, but Douglas and I had not planned to meet at the Joyce and we certainly had not anticipated sitting next to each other. Before the performance Douglas turned to me and whispered, You know, Amanda, Sol LeWitt was influenced by Edweard Muybridge. That s all it took. For the duration of the show I focused on the relationship between LeWitt s film, prominently featuring a grid, and the dancers movements on the stage and scrim. I thought about how Muybridge used the grid in his early photographic studies and how Lewitt and Childs employed the grid so differently in their multimedia production. Eventually, I did write a paper recording my observations about the grid in Dance and presented an abridged version of it at the 2010 IFA/Frick Symposia.

5 v Douglas s comment speaks to his unfailing knack for saying the right thing at the right time. Because of his feedback and guidance I have continued to make connections between seemingly disparate artists and artworks. Yet, over the course of writing my dissertation Douglas always encouraged me to do scholarship premised on rigorous historical research. I have learned that the most compelling arguments are those that arise from evidence organically rather than those that are forced. I thank him for helping me to understand that, and for encouraging my love of watching dance live a favorite pastime further cultivated by this project. Each member of my dissertation committee has also undoubtedly impacted the evolution of my research and writing. Joan Saab s course The Politics of Space was my first introduction to theorists including Rosalyn Deutsche, Henri LeFebvre, and Michel DeCerteau. Since, these thinkers have become key to how I approach dance, visual art, and the world. In moments when my sanity was dwindling during exhausting writing stints and an emotional job application process, Joan s humor, forthrightness, and empathy helped ground me. Rachel Haidu s course on postwar art also pointed me toward texts that guided this dissertation. In Carrie Lambert-Beatty s book, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s, I found a piece of scholarship that keenly forges art history and dance studies. This is a convergence that I hold dear. I am grateful that Rachel directed me to Lambert-Beatty s work and that she and I share the excruciating and exhilarating experience of taking classes at Rochester s Garth Fagan Dance studio. Robert Doran has been a reader and friend these last years. I am sincerely grateful for his

6 vi lack of pretension, quirky candor, and sincere inquiries into my methodology and personal and professional ambitions. This dissertation would have been impossible without the dozens of dancers, artists, and curators who consented to interviews. They include former dancers Elizabeth Garren, Judy Padow, and Mona Sulzman, who greeted me in her Ithaca studio with tea and clementines. Conversations with Mona, and her personal archive of photographs, notes, articles, and letters, will forever frame how I understand Trisha Brown s dances and the dance scene in New York City. I also owe a great deal to filmmaker Babette Mangolte who responded to my meandering questions with smart and pointed answers. I now see New York dance history through Mangolte s eyes. Former Trisha Brown Company manager, John Killacky, took time out of his busy schedule to address some gray areas in my research and reflect on Trisha Brown s dance trajectory. Whitney Museum of American Art curator Chrissie Iles shared many of the archival materials she collected and organized for the 2009 exhibition Lucinda Childs: Dance. These materials, especially Sol LeWitt s written deliberations on his involvement with the Dance collaboration, were a revelation. Stanford professor Janice Ross urged me to reconsider how I conveyed the critical and popular response to the U.S. premiere of Dance. Correspondence with Janice helped me identify an important shift in postmodern dance at the end of the 70s. Sharon Lehner and Louie Fleck from the Brooklyn Academy of Music Hamm Archives spent days searching through boxes and databases for the images and articles that I requested. Louie also arranged my Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House behind-the-scenes

7 vii tour. We went backstage (and even under the stage!) so that I could better comprehend how dancers embraced and resisted the space s architecture. Joellin Meglin encouraged me to publish my work on Roof Piece and guided me through the peer review and revision process at Dance Chronicle. I am extremely lucky to have countless friends in and outside of Visual and Cultural Studies who have offered to read, listen, and think with me. Jenevive Nykolak, with whom I attended the Roof Piece performance on the High Line, spent more than one ride along the empire rail line looking over my first chapter. The emoji animals she texts on a regular basis are a testament to the depth of our relationship. Erin Leary was often my first reader. She transformed messy poetry into palatable prose. Erin and I have been in this together since the beginning and I expect we ll be in it together till the end. Many of my colleagues from the 2012 Mellon Dance Studies Seminar at Northwestern University read a nascent version of my final chapter and provided insightful feedback. Jennie Goldstein, my academic doppelganger, has been lovely and generous from the moment we met. She has validated many of my ideas, and offered a couch to crash on during more than one research trip to New York City. The good folks at University of Rochester s Art and Music Library have scanned images, overlooked late charges, and offered an on-campus home for the past six years. Janet Berlo has been an indefatigable supporter of my writing and teaching. She has shown me that writing about art is an art in itself. Allen Topolski advocated for me, and for my class Drawing and Dance. Being at Sage laughing with Allen is better than therapy. Cathy Humphrey and Marty Collier-

8 viii Morris have such patience with clueless graduate students. I hope they will remember me every time they curse the fact that I have crowded their organized shelves with small ceramic animals. The upstairs librarians Claude Noyes and Phyllis Andrews are family. They brought in my mail, took out my trash, and transferred clothes from washer to dryer when I was too engrossed in work to look up. The ladies at the Hartnett Gallery helped me make William Kentridge s exhibition at the University of Rochester a reality. They are all disciplined, mature young women who managed me as often as I did them. Former advisors Monique Tschofen and Michelle Dominy both encouraged me to pursue a doctorate. I would not have thought academia a viable option if it were not for their kind words. My friendships in Rochester have sustained me through six cold winters. Alex Marr, Tiffany Barber, Gloria Kim, Claudia Pretelin, Tara Ahmadi, and my favorite person, Alicia Guzman, have kept me dancing foolishly and with abandon. My parents, Donald and Cynthia Graham, always want to do more. But they ve already done more than they know. They perpetually champion my interests and choices, no matter how unorthodox. Ryan Fitzsimmons s friendship and love helped me through the last (and perhaps most difficult) leg of this race. When I had no more words for the page, I always had words for him. Finally, I thank Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown for their dances. They are wonderful. I think it is rare that dissertation research brings such joy.

9 ix Abstract The Myth of Movement: Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown Dancing on the New York City Grid, The Myth of Movement: Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown Dancing on the New York City Grid, is set in New York City during the 1970s, a decade during which recession struck Manhattan became a post-industrial stage for young artist-innovators. This dissertation focuses on two of these innovators, choreographers Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. Their dances of the period performatively intervened in otherwise overlooked city spaces in order to reveal the architectural and economic topography of the City in flux and the shifting, often porous, demarcation between public and private spaces. My chronological investigation proposes that Childs s and Brown s site situated dances reflected crucial ideological and physical changes in the metropolitan fabric. First concentrating on their outdoor, loft-studio, and gallery and museum performances of the early to mid 70s, and afterward on their dances for the proscenium stage, I establish the growing cultural and economic legitimacy of post-judson postmodern dance. The move to the proscenium may seem like a betrayal of their earlier work, yet I allege that the ideas and methods that Brown and Childs generated in alternative spaces during the first part of the decade patently influenced how they later negotiated the theater.

10 x The choreographic structures that Brown and Childs employed during the 70s, in particular grids, were indicative of experimental choreographic formalism and a relevant response to the choreographers urban environment. Dancing in the metropolitan grid and on aesthetic grids, I argue that Brown and Childs illustrated the symbiotic relationship between bodies and the landscape. Each of my chapters is a case study of one of their grid dances. In chapter one I discuss Brown s Roof Piece (1971, 1973, remounted 2011); in chapter two Childs s Calico Mingling (1973); in chapter three Brown s Locus (1975); in chapter four Childs s Dance (1979, remounted 2009). By alternating between dances by Brown and those by Childs I attempt to demonstrate the confluence between their choreographic concerns over the course of the decade and highlight their divergent techniques.

11 xi Contributors and Funding Sources This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Professors Douglas Crimp (advisor) and Rachel Haidu of the Department of Art and Art History and Program in Visual and Cultural Studies and Joan Saab of the Department of Art and Art History and Program in Visual and Cultural Studies and Robert Doran of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. Graduate study was supported by a Provost Fellowship from the University of Rochester and a Raymond N. Ball Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Rochester. Dissertation research was also supported by a Susan B. Anthony Institute Research Grant, The Pittsburgh Foundation s Walter Read Hovey Memorial Fund Award, the Society of Dance History Scholar s Selma Jeanne Cohen Award, and a University of Rochester Celeste Hughes Bishop Award. All work for the dissertation was completed independently by the student.

12 xii Table of Contents Introduction A Love Letter to New York City 1 Chapter I Out of Site: Trisha Brown s Roof Piece 27 Chapter II Radical Removal: Lucinda Childs s Calico Mingling 87 Chapter III Space Travel: Trisha Brown s Locus 143 Chapter IV The Postmodern Proscenium: Lucinda Childs s Dance 185 Epilogue Later Stages 243 Bibliography 254

13 xiii List of Figures Figure Title Page 0.1. Industrial Tribeca scene, still from Chantal Akerman s News from Home (1976) 0.2. New York City subway car interior, still from Chantal Akerman s News from Home (1976) 0.3. Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry, still from Chantal Akerman s News from Home (1976) 0.4. Sol LeWitt, Muybridge II, 1964; painted wood, photographs, and flashing lights, 9 1/2 in. x 96 in. x 10 1/2 in. (24.13 cm x cm x cm); Collection SFMOMA; The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 0.5. Plate 137: woman descending staircase, Eadweard Muybridge s Animal Locomotion (ca. 1887). Eadweard Muybridge Collection, University Archives, University of Pennsylvania University Archives: Removing machinery from a West Broadway factory loft (early 1970s). Photograph by Allan Tannenbaum Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Performed by Joseph Schlichter at 80 Wooster Street, New York on April 18. Photograph by Peter Moore Spectators watching Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Performed by Joseph Schlichter at 80 Wooster Street, New York on April 18. Photograph by Peter Moore Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Performed by Joseph Schlichter at 80 Wooster Street, New York on April 18. Photograph by Caroline Goodden

14 xiv 1.5. Roof Piece, Photograph by Babette Mangolte Trisha Brown in Roof and Fire Piece, (film still). Film by Babette Mangolte Trucks in SoHo, Posted on sites: and (no photographer listed) West Broadway at Houston, 1970 s. Photograph by Straatis on Flickr The space between dancers. Roof and Fire Piece, (film still). Film by Babette Mangolte Carmen Beuchat in Roof and Fire Piece, (film still). Film by Babette Mangolte Invitation poster for Roof Piece, By Trisha Brown West Broadway, the former gallery building converted to luxury lofts and penthouses, with DKNY store on first floor, Photograph by Shael Shapiro Canal Street, Author s photograph Spring Street, Author s photograph Map of Trisha Brown dancers on High Line, Courtesy of Art Production Manager Jordan Benke Roof Piece on the High Line, Dai Jian performs on the Paul Krich Building. Photograph by Babette Mangolte Roof Piece on the High Line, Nick Strafaccia performs on the west side of the High Line. Photograph by Babette Mangolte Calico Mingling, 1973 (film still, frontal). By Babette Mangolte. 136

15 xv 2.2. Calico Mingling, 1973 (film still, aerial). By Babette Mangolte Calico Mingling shadows in Google SketchUp. By Ryan Fitzsimmons Robert Moses at the dedication of Robert Moses Plaza. Photograph by Neal Boenzi, New York Times, June 3, Photograph of Robert Moses marker, created by WI219 (for Wikipedia) on October 11, Lucinda Childs s diagram for Calico Mingling, 1973 (section) Lucinda Childs s diagram for Calico Mingling, 1973 (section and key) Lucinda Childs s graph paper dance diagram for Calico Mingling, Published in Laurence Louppe s Traces of Dance: Drawings and Notations of Choreographers Lucinda Childs s dance diagram for Radical Courses, 1976 (section and key) Lucinda Childs s dance diagram for Transverse Exchanges, 1976 (section) Calico Mingling performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. From left: Childs, Janice Paul, Judy Padow, and Susan Brody. Photograph by Babette Mangolte Lucinda Childs and Co. Concert of Dance flyer, The Whitney Museum of American Art Archives Robert Moses Plaza in the 1970s (no date on photograph from Fordham Archives (right) and in 2012 (left)) Photograph and justaposition by Ian McKenna. Published in The Fordham Observer, October 4, Robert Moses Plaza, cell phone photograph, photograph by Linda Loschiavo, Courtesy of Patrice Kane Summer Workshop participants at the dance deck in Kentfield, California. From left to right, standing: Shirley Ririe, Trisha Brown,

16 xvi June Ekman, Sunni Boland, Ann Halprin, Lisa Strauss, Paula Pera, Willis Ward; seated: Jerrie Glover, Ruth Emerson, unknown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, A.A. Leath, unknown, John Graham. Anna Halprin Papers/Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco. Photograph by Lawrence Halprin Merce Cunningham performing on the Halprin dance deck, Kentfield, California, Photograph by Lawrence Halprin Locus, Photograph by Babette Mangolte Sanctuary of Judson Memorial Church (after restoration). No photographer or year listed. Image posted on Judson Memorial Church website: Judson.org/OurBuilding Drawing by Rudolph von Laban from Sketches of the 'Scales', 1926, Laban Centre Archives. Lines illustrate how flows of energy extend from within the moving body into its kinesphere Trisha Brown, notation used in preparing Locus, TRISHA BROWN WAS Untitled (Locus), Trisha Brown, notation used in preparing Locus, nd solo Untitled (Locus), Robert Morris s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. Photograph by Andrew Russeth. May 18, Front and back of promotional postcard for Brown Company Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lepercq Space performance. On front Brown and Sulzman perform Locus, Photograph by Babette Mangolte. Here, neither dancer is facing toward Mangolte, but they are both facing front. Courtesy of Mona Sulzman Poster for Locus premiere, x23.5 in. Photographs on poster by Babette Mangolte. Courtesy Mona Sulzman Detail of Brown s feet dancing on her polished studio floor Dianne Madden performing her solo of Locus in the Museum of Modern Art s atrium. January Photograph by Andrew Russeth. 184

17 xvii 4.1. Lepercq Space circa 1973 (no photographer listed), posted on BAM Blog: This Week in BAM History Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House. Photograph by Bengt Waselius (no year) Cover of the Brooklyn Academy of Music s Next Wave Festival audience magazine, Volume2, Number 4, December 1984, On the Next Wave: Einstein on the Beach. Photograph of Sheryl Sutton (left) and Lucinda Childs from the original production of Einstein on the Beach. Photograph by Babette Mangolte. Courtesy of Brooklyn Academy of Music Archives Rehearsal of Second Hand, 1971, Westbeth Studio, New York, Left to right, foreground to background: Meg Harper, Douglas Dunn, Susana Hayman-Chaffey, Ulysses Dove, Carolyn Brown, Yseult Riopelle, Chase Robinson, Sandra Neels, Ed Henkel, Valda Setterfield, Merce Cunningham, with John Cage at piano. Photograph by James Klosty Doris Humphrey diagram, Figure walking on a diagonal to demonstrate weak and strong points on the stage Doris Humphrey diagram, Invisible diagonals demonstrating weak and strong points of the stage Dance, Multiple projections on the scrim. Photograph by Sally Cohn, Sol LeWitt, Incomplete Open Cubes, Installation view, San Francisco Museum of Art. Collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund Lucinda Childs, Dance, Split screen. Photograph by Nathaniel Tileston Lucinda Childs, Dance, Childs totemic projection. Photograph by Nathaniel Tileston Lucinda Childs, Dance, Dancers on the grid. Photograph by Nathaniel Tileston

18 xviii Lucinda Childs, Dance, Dancers on stage and screen. Photograph by Nathaniel Tileston Sosnoff Theater, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. (no photographer listed, Fisher Center website) Lucinda Childs, Dance, Childs and Scranton. Photograph by Sally Cohn, Lucinda Childs, Dance, In the midst of movement. Photograph by Sally Cohn Trisha Brown, Glacial Decoy, Photograph by Babette Mangolte. 253

19 1 Introduction A Love Letter to New York City In 1976 Chantal Akerman and Babette Mangolte made a film called News from Home. 1 The 16mm, eighty-five-minute color piece is at once a documentary about public nondescript sites in New York City desolate Lower Manhattan streets, graffiti-covered subway cars, Midtown parking lots and a cinematic reflection on a young artist s changing understanding of home. News from Home s long-duration, fixed-frame scenes of the recession-struck New York City of the 70s evoke a feeling of being in and outside of the city at once. The soundtrack of the film, primarily composed of Akerman s voice intermittently reading letters from her mother (full of banal local gossip, commentary on health issues, and questions about Akerman s life in the city) exists in stark juxtaposition with crisp shots of Manhattan, filmed primarily from eye-level. 2 Together, the apparently incongruous sound and image tracks express Akerman s simultaneous feelings of alienation both from her Belgian family and from New York City, as well as her love for both. Although the camera rarely pans right to left or moves forward with its handler into crowds, the film nonetheless immerses its viewer deeper into the metropolitan fabric as it progresses. As Akerman s still shots of the city accumulate, the fractured landscape begins to cohere and even make sense. We follow Akerman, her cinematographer friend Mangolte, and their Pentax camera from one location to the next a short street in industrial Tribeca, Vestry Street, a subway platform and then the interior of a subway car 1 Babette Mangolte was technically the cinematographer for Akerman s project, however the women walked around the city and filmed together. 2 The film was released in 1976, and Ackerman and Mangolte filmed the image track that year. However, the letters that Akerman reads are from are from a seven-month period in 1972 and 1973, during her first extended trip to New York. The film is postdubbed.

20 2 near Christopher and Canal Streets, the four corners of Fifth Avenue and 46 th Street, Tenth Avenue, and finally the deck of Staten Island Ferry. 3 Manhattan is all honks and subway rumbles until the ferry pulls away in real time and the island metropolis slowly disappears into gray fog. With each new street corner we see Manhattanites navigating the city by foot, automobile, and subway. While the camera captures their fleeting curious glances, the film is less about any one of them than it is about their movements through, and perception of, the urban spaces that they share with the filmmakers. The structure of the film is contingent upon the spatial coordinates of the city and a depiction of Akerman s own New York experience. Kenneth White writes that when Akerman s camera is enmeshed in Manhattan s street-level grid, it responds to the architectural logic of this specific urban environment. 4 The perspective of north-to-south and east-to-west streets of New York, he argues, provides Akerman s structure: the city is her predetermined system of production. 5 From sidewalk, car, subway, and ferry, the film reveals the city s systematized design and chaotic content. Yet Akerman s film is not about the city alone. It is also reflective of her personal and corporeal relationship with its topography. The city is telling her story even as she is telling its own. Jennifer M. Barker notes this symbiosis between city and subject when she remarks, Through forms of architecture and urban planning, and through forms of being in architecture and urban spaces, subjects 3 Figure 0.1 Industrial Tribeca scene, still from Chantal Akerman s News from Home (1976). Figure 0.2 New York City subway car interior, still from Chantal Akerman s News from Home (1976). Figure 0.3 Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry, still from Chantal Akerman s News from Home (1976). 4 Kenneth White, Urban unknown: Chantal Ackerman in New York City, Screen 51: 4 (Winter 2010): Ibid., 372.

21 3 of the city write and are themselves written in spatial and corporeal terms. 6 In News from Home, Akerman writes herself spatially. Akerman composes a formal yet abstractly autobiographical narrative by choosing her shots in collaboration with the city and relying on the city grid as an apparatus, like [her camera s] fixed frame and focus. 7 News from Home is, as Michael Koresky writes of all of Akerman s films created in New York during the 70s, a love lette[r] to the city as well as an evocatio[n] of isolation. 8 But, as Akerman suggests with her film, loving New York City is an inherently isolating experience. Navigating the street grid along with tens of thousands of strangers is contradictorily as lonely as it is comforting. In the city, Akerman and her fellow pedestrians often travel alone but are at the same time surrounded by countless anonymous faces. New York s grid not only structures individuals perception of the city they live in, as White contends, but it also counterintuitively connects New Yorkers, its design facilitating their community. This dissertation seeks to explain how New York s grid choreographs city dwellers movements through the city. As former Manhattan Borough President and current City Controller, Scott M. Stringer, remarked of the city grid, The grid does not limit us. It gives us a foundation to adjust to and a way to navigate Manhattan. 9 The way New Yorkers relate, I argue, is thus contingent on this foundation. 6 Jennifer M. Barker, The feminine side of New York: travelogue, autobiography and architecture in News from Home, Identity and Memory: the Films of Chantal Ackerman, ed. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University, 2003), Kenneth White, Urban unknown: Chantal Ackerman in New York City, Screen 51: 4 (Winter 2010): 368, Michael Koresky, Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Ackerman in the Seventies, The Criterion Collection January 20, 2010, (accessed January 6, 2014). 9 Sam Roberts, 200 th Birthday for the Map that Made New York New York Times, March 20, 2011,

22 4 Like Akerman s film, this dissertation is a love letter to New York City in the 1970s. It is a love letter that takes as its impetus the contention that the New York City grid, and grids more generally, connect and enable human relationships even as they divide them. It is a love letter in the form of a close historical and theoretical study of a particular community of New Yorkers, a group of visual artists, filmmakers, and most importantly dancers, who came together to transform their city s cultural, geographic, architectural, and economic landscape and ultimately (to a greater or lesser degree) dispersed because they were successful. Examining the period between 1971 and 1979, my project demonstrates how avant-garde choreographers especially Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs made dances directly or indirectly informed by New York s urban landscape of the time. These dancers, who were both young and in the nascent stages of their solo choreographic careers in the early 70s, had performed together in the 1960s with the pioneering group of performers affiliated with the Judson Dance Theater. Their styles and approaches were (and are) distinct, but they are occasionally compared because of their respective dance repertoires conceptual complexity and formal innovations. Even though Brown and Childs have received critical acknowledgment and inclusion in the New York art historical canon by dance and art historians and critics including Sally Banes, Ramsay Burt, Susan L. Foster, Anne Livet, Susan Rosenberg, Henry M. Sayre, and Susan Sontag there is no indepth scholarly study of their work. 10 When Brown and Childs choreography is discussed 10 Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987); Ramsay Burt, Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006); Anne Livet, Contemporary Dance (New York, NY: Abbeville Press, 1978); Susan Rosenberg, Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art, October Spring 2012, No. 140: 18-44; Susan L. Foster,

23 5 by the rare historian, their dances are often all too simply deemed minimalist or, as Banes wrote in her 1983 From the Judson to BAM: Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs for the Brooklyn Academy of Music s Next Wave Festival magazine, Both fall into the category of what may be called analytic postmodern dance the branch that in the 1970s was concerned with (re) defining dance by emphasizing choreographic structure and movement per se. 11 However, as I will argue, the choreographic structures that Brown and Childs employed during the 70s, in particular grids, were not only reflective of experimental choreographic formalism, they were also a relevant response to the choreographers urban environment. In The Grid Book art historian Hannah Higgins argues that grids have long been a ubiquitous cultural organizing principle. Although grids are often equated with modernity, and one could even argue that the grid is the dominant mythological form of modern life a visualization of modernity s faith in rational thought and industrial progress comprising everything from the urban landscape to the power grid, from modernist painting to the forms of modern physics, Higgins s primary contention is that grids were social forms long before the advent of industrialization. 12 Higgins s transhistorical investigation of everything from bricks and tablets to technology networks and relativity illustrates the grid s versatility and malleability. Higgins imbues the grid Walking and Other Choreographic Tactics: Danced Inventions of Theatricality and Performativity, SubStance 31: 2&3 (2002); Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989); Susan Sontag, A Lexicon for Available Light in Where the Stress Falls (New York, NY: Picador, 2002). Teicher, Hendel. Danse et Dessin/Dancing and Drawing: Trisha Brown-Hendel Teicher : entretien/interview. Trisha Brown: Dance and Art In Dialogue, , ed. Hendel Teicher. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, Sally Banes, From Judson to BAM: Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs in The Audience Magazine of BAM s NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL, Volume 1 Number 2 October, 1983: Hannah Higgins, The Grid Book (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009): 6.

24 6 with formal and historical flexibility, thus showing the form s properties beyond the visual even when visually rendered. Her description, for example, of a gridded painting by Piet Mondrian reads: In time, the edges of the black lines swell and flex in a choreography of convex and concave pulsations that stretch and bend the fields they contain. 13 Our eye experiences the time-based, if silently discursive, rhythm of the grid, far from the geometricized, ordered, and merely flat surface proposed by Krauss. 14 Here and throughout her book, Higgins takes issue with Rosalind Krauss s influential 1979 essay Grids, where the art critic and theorist proposes that grids are emblematic of modernity. Krauss initially wrote the essay for the catalogue of the Pace Gallery s Grids: Format and Image in 20th Century Art in She published it in October the following year. In 1985 Grids appeared as the first essay in her collection, The Originality of the Avant- Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Krauss asserts the importance of the grid s staying power as a medium for some of the greatest works of modernism; and an ideological success in the essay. 15 She argues the grid resists development by illustrating its autonomous self-referential nature and art-historical ubiquity. Rather than formally analyzing specific gridded artworks (Mondrian s painted compositions comprised of bold intersecting lines are the one brief exception), Krauss prefers to write about the universal function of the grid in the art of the twentieth century, and the form s relationship to semiotics, structuralism, and nineteenth-century optical studies. The photographic 13 Ibid., Ibid. 15 Rosalind E. Krauss, Grids in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985): 12.

25 7 reproductions of gridded artworks, including Mondrian s Composition IA (1930) and Composition 2 (1922), Caspar David Friedrich s View from the Painter s Studio (c. 1818), Odilon Redon s The Day (1891), Robert Ryman s Yellow Drawing Number 5 (1963), Agnes Martin s Untitled (1965), Jasper Johns s Gray Numbers (1958), and Joseph Cornell s Nouveaux Contes de Fees (Poison Box) (1948), serve as an image archive illustrating, juxtaposing, and substantiating the text s argument. If Krauss s contention with regard to the grid holds true, then imposing language upon the form is a moot point because it is a structure that exists outside of the written and aural, in a selfmade space of visual abstraction. Notably Krauss and Higgins pursue their antithetical readings of the grid by way of French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who proposed that grids are fundamental for cultural cohesion. For Lévi-Strauss, grids are mythical structures that determine the limits and possibilities of the social sphere. He writes, Every myth proposes a grid, definable only by its rules of construction. For the participants in the culture to which the myth belongs, this grid confers a meaning not on the myth itself but on everything else: that is, on the images of the world, of the society, and of its history, of which the members of the group are more or less aware, as well as on the images of the questions with which these various objects confront the participants. 16 According to Lévi-Strauss, the grid is a spatialized projection. As participants in any given culture we construct specific grids to order the theories and beliefs we value. Conversely, these grids determine how we experience the world. In particular, Lévi- Strauss argues that grids, or social ordering agents, make sense of inherently 16 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985):

26 8 contradictory yet culturally foundational stories, like those proposed by science and religion. Lévi-Strauss s grid is inextricably bound to myth. For him, writes Higgins, myths are not lies by this account, but rather tools used to efficiently structure information on behalf of society. 17 Although Krauss s reading of myth is central to her volume, where it is prominently featured in the title, she hardly considers the social context of myth. Craig Owens scrutinizes Krauss s apparently intentional oversight in his 1985 Art In America essay Analysis Logical and Ideological. In particular, he alleges that Krauss employs the term myth as a means of avoiding ideology. Perhaps even more than its content, the acerbically critical tone of Owens s article betrays his condemnation of Krauss s project: Stuart Hall has compiled a list of concepts which have done duty, in American social theory, for an absent concept of ideology norms, values, the central value system to which [Gayatri] Spivak has added the pre-psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious as a continuous and homogenous part of the mind that is simply not conscious. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths allows another term to be added to this list, for in these essays the empty place of ideology is occupied by the term myth. Krauss s concept of myth is derived from Claude Lévi-Strauss s functional definition: The purpose of myth, he wrote in The Structural Study of Myth, is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is a real one. However, in her paraphrase of Lévi-Strauss s definition, Krauss makes one inadvertent but significant amendment. In the essay Grids, written in 1978 and reprinted as the first essay in the collection (presumably because it both introduces the structural definition of myth and Krauss s method of unmasking it) she writes, The function of myth is to allow both views to be held in some kind of paralogical suspension (p. 13). What Lévi-Strauss regarded as a logical model no doubt because of his (ideologically overdetermined) attempt to disavow the difference between primitive and scientific thought Krauss treats as para-, but not ideo-, logical, thereby reinstating the logic/myth opposition which Levi- Strauss sought to dissolve Hannah Higgins, The Grid Book (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009): Craig Owens Analysis Logical and Ideological, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, eds. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, Jane Weinstock, Simon Watney (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992): 273. This essay was first published in Art in America 73 no. 5 (May 1985).

27 9 Lévi-Strauss s myth and grid may be ideologically overdetermined, but they are clearly cultural products and processes, made and unmade by society. Krauss s reading of myth and the grid is worse than ideologically determined. As Owens points out, Krauss s interpretation is dangerous because it divides society from the forms it produces. As such Krauss s myth and grid lack historical specificity and malleability. Nowhere in Krauss s Grids is this issue more apparent than in its final lines: Indeed, as we have a more and more extended experience of the grid, we have discovered that one of the most modernist things about it is its capacity to serve as a paradigm or model for the antidevelopmental, the antinarrative, the antihistorical. This has occurred in the temporal as well as the visual arts: in music, for example, and in dance. It is no surprise then, that as we contemplate this subject, there should have been announced for next season a performance project based on the combined efforts of Phil Glass, Lucinda Childs, and Sol LeWitt: music, dance, and sculpture, projected as the mutually accessible space of the grid. 19 Krauss s oddly abrupt closing statement forges a relationship between the temporal arts music and dance and the grid. 20 Krauss evidently had not seen the collaborative production when she wrote her essay, but she nonetheless assumes that its grid would bear a resemblance to the gridded visual artworks that she discusses. Furthermore, Krauss predicts that the grid in Dance will be paradigmatically antidevelopmental. Here, she fails to consider the grid s particular role in the temporal arts and denies the social underpinnings of performance as she did those of painting. She is unshaken by the fact that music, and dance especially, are arguably more inherently social than painting and 19 Rosalind E. Krauss, Grids in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985): There is no sculpture per se in Dance, but LeWitt s film could also be considered a temporal art. Krauss mistakenly indicates that Dance was still in its nascent planning stage. Moreover, her mistake demonstrates that she is somewhat ignorant of her subject matter. To connect the grid with the performance so early on is presumptive. How could she have known how the grid would function in the production if LeWitt was yet to complete his film?

28 10 drawing. The mediums (in their live forms) are generally premised on the presence of the artist(s), and their planning and production is normally conditional on human interaction. Nonetheless, Krauss determines that their involvement with the grid reduces them to formulaic stasis. My dissertation is an examination of Dance as well as many other performances by Childs and Brown that incorporated visible and invisible, real and imaginary grids. In many ways it picks up where Krauss s ambiguous argument ends. While Krauss compellingly begins a discussion about the grid s role in modern dance, and thus, in my mind, the mythical structure s relationship with bodily movement more broadly conceived, her comments are cursory at best and, at worst, misinformed conjectures. Nonetheless, Krauss s essay (and its conclusion in particular) motivates me, much like it did Higgins, to pursue a historically grounded study of grids. However, while Higgins s scope is transhistorical and her objects numerous and varied, my dissertation focuses solely on dance in New York during the 1970s, the decade in which Krauss initially published her Grids essay. The 1970s were a time when New York artists and dancers collaborated to create performances like Dance that were every bit as much, if not more, popular with the art world as they were with the dance world. It was a historical moment when performances often took place in dancers and artists live-work studios and in the streets. It was a period when the City, in the throes of recession, became a post-industrial stage for young innovators. New York performance artist and filmmaker Joan Jonas explained her

29 11 approach to spatially appropriating Manhattan: My own thinking and production has focused on issues of space ways of dislocating it, attenuating it, flattening it, turning it inside out, always attempting to explore it without ever giving to myself or to others the permission to penetrate it. 21 Unlike many urban developers and politicians most notably the infamous urban planner Robert Moses artists like Jonas and choreographers like Brown and Childs chose not to penetrate the city. But their temporary performative interventions into city space nevertheless transfigured it. Their apparently ephemeral creative gestures (often documented in photographs or film) permanently changed how artists and non-artists alike perceived and experienced the empty spaces in Lower Manhattan. 22 Similar to Jonas and to Akerman, Brown and Childs saw that abandoned city spaces were full of potential. Neglected city spaces functioned as both backdrops and stages for those in the downtown scene. Many artists not only sited their work in city spaces reusing the space for their own creative purposes they also lived and worked in those spaces. Artists with little capital and big spatial needs moved to Lower Manhattan and, as a community, rehabilitated its cast-iron buildings. Their initially illegal and later legal occupation of buildings in Lower Manhattan (discussed in Chapter I) and subsequent involvement in grassroots preservation efforts staved off Moses and his all-or-nothing redevelopment vision. 21 Joan Jonas quoted in Douglas Crimp, Action around the Edges, Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present eds. Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp, with Kristin Poor (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010): 125. Originally published in Joan Jonas with Rosalind Krauss, Seven Years, The Drama Review: TDR 19, no. 1 (March 1975), For more on empty New York City spaces, see Douglas Crimp, Action around the Edges, Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present eds. Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp, with Kristin Poor (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010):

30 12 New York artists and dancers were not only interested in the grid because of its affiliation with city space. The form was also an underlying structural principle for artists associated with minimalism. Minimalist art is typically art that eliminates subjectivity by employing simple forms and variations. However, so-called minimal artists like Sol LeWitt felt the term inappropriate. In his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art LeWitt espouses a witty warning for art critics who label his work minimalist: Recently there has been much written about minimal art, but I have not discovered anyone who admits to doing this kind of thing. There are other art forms around called primary structures, reductive, rejective, cool, and mini-art. No artist I know will own up to any of these either. Therefore I conclude that it is part of a secret language that art critics use when communicating with each other through the medium of art magazines. Mini-art is best because it reminds one of miniskirts and long-legged girls. It must refer to very small works of art. This is a very good idea. 23 Of course, LeWitt, a smart artist well-versed in art theoretical and art historical discourse, knew exactly what critics meant when they suggested his work was minimal. His art was contingent on rules and concerned with process. He used the grid as a generative matrix for his conceptual explorations. The grid was important to LeWitt because it gave him a means of developing complex structures while presenting them in their discrete parts. He claimed he liked the grid most of all because it was convenien[t] ; it stabilizes the measurements and neutralizes space by treating it equally. 24 Despite LeWitt s claim, in his capable hands the grid form was much more than convenient. LeWitt was certainly never an artist who looked for quick or 23 Sol LeWitt. Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Artforum 5 (June 1967), Sol LeWitt, announcement card for Sol LeWitt exhibition at Dwan Gallery, Reprinted in Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Humanist Turn (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013): 68.

31 13 easy solutions. If anything, LeWitt forever recast the grid and its relationship vis-à-vis visual art. In this way, and others, he clearly followed in the footsteps of his greatest historical influence, nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. LeWitt s fascination with the grid as a means of separating and comprehending actual and perceptual space was at least, in part, the result of an encounter he had with Muybridge s 1887 photographs of people and animals performing movement-tasks for the camera, published in the canonical Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. The book, a copy of which was left in LeWitt s apartment by a former tenant, was filled with black and white images of a horse trotting, men wrestling, and woman descending a staircase. These pictures, and their gridded layout, piqued LeWitt s interest in analyzing movement within a fixed structure. 25 The moving subjects in Muybridge s book appear in sequences of twelve and twentyfour. Each page presents a new series: a different individual performing a different action. In each series, Muybridge determines the beginning, middle, and end of the particular action under examination. Through a variety of pseudoscientific formal interventions into the representation of movement, most notably the lattice of black lines that serves as a backdrop for the moving subjects and separates the phases of their actions on the page, Muybridge sought to determine a set of single and apparently objective, relations between individual gestural units. 25 Figure 0.4 Sol LeWitt, Muybridge II, 1964; painted wood, photographs, and flashing lights, 9 1/2 in. x 96 in. x 10 1/2 in. (24.13 cm x cm x cm); Collection SFMOMA Figure 0.5 Plate 137: woman descending staircase, Eadweard Muybridge s Animal Locomotion (ca. 1887). Eadweard Muybridge Collection, University Archives, University of Pennsylvania University Archives: