Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle
Written by Catherine Wood, published in 2007 by Afterall Books
1. Picture the Scene
page 2
Using the physical and conceptual frames of the theatre as a model of community, Rainer staged the process of cultural creation in action and so addressed, with a view to potentially changing, the social conditions of agency and experience.
page 9
The way that Rainer and some of her Judson peers directed movement proposed that choreography might be a kind of readymade aesthetic to be 'found' in city streets. Rainer's choreography of primary gestures and interrelations transposed elements of New York City's complex network of pedestrian activity into the theatre frame and so dramatised the question of individual agency and society―on a personal level by positing mind as muscle, and publicly by investigating relations between the self and the group or crowd. In its mute physicality, The Mind is a Musle staged a shift away from the notion that meaning comes about through individual expression of interiority and instead proposed a form of meaning that could be generated collectively and was readable at surface level.
2. Anybody and Everybody
page 12
The most important thing that the Judson space provided, as Rainer described it, was 'an alternative to the once-a-year, hire-a-hall mode of operating that had plagued the modern dancer before.' This had combined artistic and practical effect. On the one hand, the conflation of workshop and presentation space into one site no doubt contributed to the 'process' look of the choreography. On the other hand, when it came to presenting the work, there was no transition to an elevated 'stage' space: the public presentation of work did not sever the dancers' activities from their everyday working process, which literally took place on the same floor plane.
page 14
Regardless of her associations with Minimalism, Rainer's attentions to the problem of negotiating her subjectivity in the world, to the situation of performance rather than just the spectacle, her involvement with non-dancers as well as those who were professionally trained and her manipulation of the conventions of a particular cultural form combined to frame her activities within the broader context of Conceptual art practice. It is within that broad artistic 'game' or dialogue that she took, as a basic structure, the specific rules and format of the more tightly defined game called 'dance'.
page 15
...she herself related her dances to object-sculptures, comparing the 'energy equality' and '''found''movement' in her work to their 'factory fabrication'; her 'task or task-like activity' to their 'literalness'.
page 16
In the work of both Morris and Rainer, presentations of the body-as-object or object-as-body tested a continuum between inertia and movement or between the individual and the industrial, often with laconic, deadpan humour.
page 18
The question of democracy is commonly figured in her work at two levels: one, in terms of a fairly literal notion of how the work has involved group participation, creating tableaux of egalitarian relations between bodies performing tasks that defy any form of hierarchal organisation; and another at which the art object is posited as a contingent point of negotiation, rather than a transcendent or fixed entity....While forms of chance improvisation had played a key part in the genesis of this new kind of choreography....Rainer would transpose the notion of improvisational decision-making into its formal representation, therefor representing a particular version of democratic participation within parameters strictly set by the choreographer.
page 20
But in her later work, which culminated in The Mind is a Muscle, Rainer was deliberately shaping or 're-telling' the everyday by creating certain kinds of images from gestural patterns....though her authorial ability to tell a story, so to speak―that Rainer created model forms of social relations that re-imagined prevailing social scripts determining how people might act, cooperate, be, alone and together.
page 21
Rainer's use of the term 'spectacle' prefigures the title and theme of Guy Debord's publication, The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Debord positioned the 'image' as a realm wholly detached from, but dictating to, lived life, defining the spectacle as 'a social relationship between people that is mediated by images'. In Debord's formulation, the abstracted image proposes and alienates the subject's needs to such an extent that 'the individual's gestures are no longer his own, but those of someone else who represents them to him'.
page 24
She created artworks―dances―that, she explicitly acknowledged, she wanted people to want to see. Although boredom and failure were intrinsic qualities within the work, she explicitly invited the frame of cultural entertainment in.
page 25
...her performers walked up and down steps in repeated patterns, and struggled to lift each other, or a bulky mattress, with movements that were strong and clear. The grace of recognisable effort as a number of people danced Trio A together but at their own pace rather than in unison, served as a matrix to foreground not sameness but individuality.
page 26
To grasp the implications of Yvonne Rainer's formulation of a dance language built from straightforward physical actions and developed through patterns of 'interaction and cooperation' between people engaged in task-like activities, it is useful to consider the way in which Rancière describes relations between the social and the aesthetic fields. [The Politics of Aesthetics (2004)]....
It is on the level of the patterns that underlie our everyday life, he argues, that social power structures manifest themselves. Hierarchies are enforced not only through the manner in which people deal with each other and assign social positions, but also through the attitudes that determine how people experience life under the conditions created by a given society.
page 27
Rancière depicts ideology quite clearly in embodied form, describing emancipation and dominance in terms of relations evidenced in bodily positions, gestures and forms of experience. Against this backdrop, he defines artistic practices as 'ways of doing and making' that intervene in the general distribution of 'doing and making', and can therefore create the potential for change in modes of experience....It is precisely by virtue of its performance creating images of a radical literalness that The Mind is a Muscle presents itself as an intervention into the dominant patterns of action, consumption and experience and can be seen as an attempt to address the structures govern the given 'distribution of the sensible' in society at large.
page 28
Her aesthetic was grounded in images of equality and participation, but she was directing the dancers as her 'workers' nevertheless.
...
Such contradiction erupts continuously in Rainer's work and, in so doing, disrupts the kinds of familiar, abbreviated patterns of characterisation utilised by the narratives of mainstream entertainment.
...
It was against such a backdrop [audience culture: the constant interruptions of television by commercial breaks force it into a fragmentary pattern that requires only a superficial level of engagement.] that Rainer's presentation of people performing tasks in unhurried real time inserted itself into the nascent spectacle culture in order to challenge these abbreviated rhythms....And yet her work does not fit straightforwardly into an idea of alternative culture as pure 'resistance'.
3. Scripts
page 57
By staging the act of spectatorship onstage, as played by the resting dancers, Rainer never lets us forget that what we are watching is a theatrical performance.
page 59
Rainer's work manifests an inherent understanding of the subject's entrenchment in role-play: her uses of language and gesture may appear to offer primary alternatives to performative 'acts', but in fact they fully understand themselves as the performance of roles between acting agents. Her choice of the concentrated performance space that is the theatre then serves to frame different kinds of acting out as 'culture'. Although these acts are firmly connected to everyday practices and behaviours, they are not predictable or stereotypical. Rainer invented new images of how people might walk, move, dance, perform, interact. The Mind is a Muscle may have been 'inauthentic' in Greenbergian modernist terms, not only because it involved rehearsals and took place in a theatre, but also because it proposed a presentation of self that was self-consciously performative. Its enduring significance as an artwork lies in the way in which, from this perspective, it opened up new possibilities for performing the self and sociability that were not culturally pre-scripted.
4. The World as a Stage
page 63
Rainer appears to view the spectator's role as 'active interpretation' rather than as passive reception.
page 66
Although Rainer saw dancing as only 'one factor' in the work, she took dance theatre's particular conventions of movement style and theatre setting as a ready-made ritual, with their attendant expectations and conventions. . . . By the time of the European Renaissance, dance had been transposed into social diversion called 'balletti'. The balletti was characterised by the composition of performers in changing sequences of floor patterns, which oddly enough had more in common with early Judson dance than with their modern namesake. Balletti were not, for instance, performed by professional dancers, but by members of the court who were trained by choreographers and they were presented 'not on raised stages but in the central space of a large hall, with the audience seated above in galleries around three sides of the space'.
page 69
De Certeau uses the example of Charlie Chaplin's absurdly extended manipulation of his walking stick―an everyday object― in relation to his discussion about how the everyday 'user' of the city might subvert its logic in a kind of geographical détournement of passage. Just as Rainer's Hand Movie (1966) created a miniature choreography of moving fingers, everyday pedestrian behaviour was repeated and group activities tested out in every combination in her choreography. Simple rules provided the basis for minimal movements that would build slowly into sculptural patterns in space and time.
5. 'Ne Travaillez Jamais!'
page 78
'In the face of all-consuming market rationality, a movement that has no other purpose than to allow people to gather to reflect on what they can be together is perhaps the supreme figure of an ongoing desire for socialism.' [originally written by Randy Martin, dance theorist]
page 79
According to Marx, the specialisation of work is therefor equally a symptom of alienation, as it isolates the individual who is no longer identified as a member of society, but as the representative of a special trade.
page 85
It is at this point that the double-edged position articulated by Rainer in The Mind is a Muscle becomes most clear. On the one hand, she creates an abstracted indication of the 'labour' that she sees all around her in everyday life, in a manner that she describes as having a 'factual' rather then 'mimetic' quality. At the same time, however, to combine Butler and Rancière's terms, she performatively displaces and reconfigures the premises of the post-war Fordist working culture by representing labour as an aesthetic end in itself, as a form of energy consumption that negates the demands of productivity.
page 87
In Rainer's conception of the mind as muscle, the acting-out of that 'manual labour' and 'everyday work' shunned by the upper classes is provocatively presented as dance―a decadently non-productive activity. Her provocation therefor has a double edge: by staging work as dance, she displaces labour from the context of mundane economic reality into a sphere of a 'non-productive consumption of time'. Yet, by interpreting dance as work, she also displaces ballet and reconnects it to the world of everyday performance.
page 88
The Mind is a Muscle presents enactment of the motions of labour as a fundamentally decorative aesthetic in the representational space of theatre, so as to assert a space that is free from the dictates of capitalism.
...
Rainer's 'work', then, simultaneously played out in a literal form Debord's theory of the all-pervasive spectacle as 'a social relationship between people that is mediated by images', and proposed an alternative to it by inhabiting the image in a primary sense with a new language of gesture.
6. A Flourish: The Economy of Trio A
page 90
In making Trio A, Rainer said she did not know exactly what she was looking for, except that transitions should be unpredictable and should not rely on obvious kinetic development; 'each piece of movement would be very different from every other piece and noting would repeat'.
page 95-96
Rainer created complex images of social relations that challenged other images (advertising images) with consumerist agendas. . . . In creating compelling images of relations between people negotiated via ordinary objects that connected the performers to the everyday masses and to everyday entertainment culture, The Mind is a Muscle opened up 'the interval between identities' that Rancière has said might 'reconfigure the distributions of the public and the private, the universal and the particular'.
