Being Watched
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Being Watched by Carrie Lambert-Beatty
How Yvonne Rainer's art shaped new ways of watching as well as performing; how it connected 1960s avant-garde art to politics and activism.
In her dance and performances of the 1960s, Yvonne Rainer famously transformed the performing body--stripped it of special techniques and star status, traded its costumes and leotards for T-shirts and sneakers, asked it to haul mattresses or recite texts rather than leap or spin. Without discounting these innovations, Carrie Lambert-Beatty argues in Being Watched that the crucial site of Rainer's interventions in the 1960s was less the body of the performer than the eye of the viewer--or rather, the body as offered to the eye. Rainer's art, Lambert-Beatty writes, is structured by a peculiar tension between the body and its display. Through close readings of Rainer's works of the 1960s--from the often-discussed dance Trio A to lesser-known Vietnam war-era protest dances--Lambert-Beatty explores how these performances embodied what Rainer called the seeing difficulty. (As Rainer said: Dance is hard to see.) Viewed from this perspective, Rainer's work becomes a bridge between key episodes in postwar art. Lambert-Beatty shows how Rainer's art (and related performance work in Happenings, Fluxus, and Judson Dance Theater) connects with the transformation of the subject-object relation in minimalism and with emerging feminist discourse on the political implications of the objectifying gaze. In a spectacle-soaked era, moreover--when images of war played nightly on the television news--Rainer's work engaged the habits of viewing formed in mass-media America, linking avant-garde art and the wider culture of the 1960s. Rainer is significant, argues Lambert-Beatty, not only as a choreographer, but as a sculptor of spectatorship.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780262516075 |
| ISBN 10 | 0262516071 |
| Title | Being Watched |
| Author | Carrie Lambert-Beatty |
| Series | October Books |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | MIT Press Ltd |
| Year published | 2011-02-25 |
| Number of pages | 384 |
| Prizes | Winner of Honorable Mention, Music and the Performing Arts category, 2008 PROSE Awards presented by the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers 2008, Winner of Honorable Mention, Music and the Performing Arts category, 2008 PROSE Awards presented by the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers 2008 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |