Judson Memorial Church and the intersections between happening and dancing

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanitsa Fendulova ◽  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
Robert Morris ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
The Many ◽  
Judson Dance Theater

The article examines a short excerpt from the New York scene, namely the period around 1959–1963 in the context of the environment, happening, dance pieces and draws attention to the leading influences of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. We are focusing on the gravitating artists’ circles around the Judson Memorial Church and some of their distinct practices and centers. Among the many, we consider the Reuben Gallery, Judson Gallery, Judson Dance Theater, and artists such as Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, Simon Forti, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Rauschenberg. The text does not aim to provide a complete overview of Judson Dance Theater or the artists` practices, but rather to consider some of their common influences in their period of formation. We will bring the environment and the happening under their contradictions and variability and will consider the first generation of dance reformers at Judson Dance Theater as an influential force for involving visual artists in intermediate zones.

Dance with Camera

2016 ◽  
pp. 22-44
Author(s):  
Jenelle Porter
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Recording Device ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Dance Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Hollywood Musicals ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Judson Dance Theater

“Dance with Camera” explores art works in film, video, and photography from the advent of cinema. Beginning in the 1960s, associations between dancers, filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists flourished at Judson Dance Theater in downtown New York. The interdisciplinary practices explored there influenced the way works discussed in this text use an imagery of dance that threads through Hollywood musicals, avant-garde cinema, postmodern dance, and MTV video. Dance movement is designed for the area prescribed by the camera’s frame; the ephemerality of live performance is fixed in time, and close-ups bring us in proximity to the dance, or in some cases, perform as a partner in an unusual pas de deux. Editing techniques conjure dances impossible in real time. Finally, the camera is not merely a recording device, but serves as stage and audience simultaneously.

Hopps, Walter (1932–2005)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken D. Allan
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Museum ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Joseph Cornell

Walter Hopps was an American art dealer and curator of modern and contemporary art. Best known for organizing the first museum retrospective of Marcel Duchamp in 1963 at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon), Hopps was a pioneering example of the independent, creative curator, a model that emerged in the 1960s in the United States From his start as an organizer of unconventional shows of California painters on the cultural fringe of conservative Cold War-era Los Angeles, Hopps became one of the most respected, if unorthodox, curators of his generation, holding a dual appointment at the end of his life as 20th-century curator at Houston’s Menil Collection and adjunct senior curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Some of his noted exhibitions include: in Pasadena, a 1962 group show that helped to define pop art, The New Paintings of Common Objects; the first U retrospectives of Kurt Schwitters (1962) and Joseph Cornell (1967); Robert Rauschenberg retrospectives in 1976 and 1997 at the National Museum of American Art and Menil Collection, respectively; a 1996 survey of Edward Kienholz for The Whitney Museum of American Art; and a James Rosenquist retrospective in 2002 at the Guggenheim.

Readymades

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Child
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jasper Johns ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
The Status ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Common Understanding ◽  
Bicycle Wheel

In 1916, the French artist Marcel Duchamp coined the term "readymade" to describe a body of his own work in which everyday and often mass-produced objects were given the status of a work of art with little or no intervention by the artist beyond signing and displaying them. He began to produce these works in Paris, beginning with Bottle Rack (1914) and Bicycle Wheel (1913). (Duchamp, however, did not explicitly acknowledge these works until his move to New York in 1915.) These two works present examples of the two distinct types of readymades: readymade unaided and readymade aided. The most well-known readymade is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which was famously refused entry into an exhibition with no entry conditions. Much later, Fountain became symbolic of the emergent shift from modernism to postmodernism in the 1960s, with the group of artists who gathered around the composer John Cage, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, sometimes referred to as the neo-avant-garde. It was during this period that Duchamp’s account of the function of the readymade was consolidated into the now common understanding, which is that "readymade" constitutes an object chosen by an artist and declared to be art.

Sites of Subjectivity: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and Dance

2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-130
Author(s):  
Virginia Spivey
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Object A ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Robert Morris ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
The 1960S

Robert Morris's danceSite(Fig. 1) premiered in February 1964 at the Surplus Dance Theater in New York City. Choreographed and performed by Morris,Sitealso featured the visual artist Carolee Schneemann and several sheets of four-by-eight foot plywood. Although it may seem odd to include these wooden panels among the performers, they assumed an active role in the choreography. Ironically, it was Schneemann who provided the background scenery. Nude and covered in white paint, she sat motionless throughout the performance, recreating the pose and persona of Edouard Manet's famous 1863 painting ofOlympiawhile Morris manipulated the large wooden boards. In a graceful duet with inanimate partners, Morris spun the rectangular planes from a point on the ground, maneuvered them around his body, lifted them over his head, caressed their even form as he slowly moved his hand across one edge, and balanced the panels on his back as he moved across the stage. Not only did Morris never dance with Schneemann, he did not even seem to notice her.In a career spanning over forty years, Robert Morris has produced theoretical articles, paintings, videos, installations, and environmental art in addition to his work in dance; nevertheless, the American artist remains best known for his Minimalist sculptures of the 1960s (Figs. 2 and 3). Like the works of his colleagues Donald Judd and Carl Andre, Morris's spare, geometrical objects of that period were three-dimensional and called attention to issues of site and artistic context. They also resisted past artistic conventions based in subjective methods of composition, expressivity, and metaphor. Morris, however, distinguished himself among this group of visual artists by the emphasis he placed on the viewer's bodily relationship with the art object, a distinction that derives directly from his unique involvement in avant-garde dance.

Rainer, Yvonne (1934--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Postmodern Dance ◽  
Classical Ballet ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Judson Dance Theater ◽  
Functional Task

Yvonne Rainer is a key figure of both American postmodern dance and avant-garde feminist cinema. Rainer was a founding member of New York City’s Judson Dance Theater, a hub of postmodern dance experimentation in the 1960s. In her choreography, Rainer rejected the spectacle, virtuosity, and drama exhibited by classical ballet and modern dance, choosing instead to present functional, task-like, neutral movement. Her approach to choreography, which refused to provide easy pleasure, is demonstrated in her "No Manifesto" (1965). Between 1966 and 1969, Rainer began to experiment with film, creating several short works that play with the antihumanist idea that bodies can be equated with objects. In the 1970s Rainer turned her attention exclusively to feature-length experimental filmmaking. Her films in the 1970s and 1980s are works of bricolage that use radical juxtapositions of sound and imagery to create experiences of discontinuity that challenge conventional narrative cinematic structures. Rainer’s first feature-length film, The Lives of Performers (1972), blends fiction and reality by including rehearsal footage from previous dance works, and featuring several dancers from her company, Grand Union, as characters in the film. Rainer’s early films have been described as almost structuralist, owing their inspiration to filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, and Andy Warhol.

Giorno Poetry Systems

2017 ◽  
pp. 145-171
Author(s):  
Daniel Kane
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Radio Station ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Poetry And Poetics ◽  
Jasper Johns ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
Performance Poetry ◽  
History Of ◽  
Downtown Scene

How did music – both in terms of its sound, its lyrics, and its associated recording technologies – encourage St. Mark’s affiliated poets to get their tracks on vinyl and ensure their poetry and poetics became ever more oriented towards a punk-inflected performance aesthetic? This chapter answers this question in part by turning to John Giorno. Giorno, a performance poet active in the St. Mark’s scene since the mid-1960s, who was in many ways downtown’s court jester. Star of Andy Warhol’s durational film Sleep, lover to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, founder of a pirate radio station broadcast from the bell tower of St. Mark’s Church, organizer of L.S.D fueled poetry performance parties at the Poetry Project, Giorno was perhaps the preeminent figure in the downtown scene determined to refigure poetry as populist outlaw happening. This chapter moves further by exploring how Giorno made the move to vinyl and live performance not just because of earlier examples drawn from the broader history of performance poetry, but because he was determined to mark a break from the urbane literariness associated with the first generation New York School poets.

Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregg Horowitz
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Contemporary State ◽  
Robert Morris ◽  
Robert Smithson ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Judy Chicago ◽  
Judson Dance Theater ◽  
As If

All responsible inquiry into the contemporary state of avant-garde art must acknowledge the possibility that no such art exists. Such non-existence would be dismaying news for a lot of people because, despite the possibility that the concept refers to nothing, many writers and artists continue to invest in it as if its capacity to illuminate contemporary artistic and aesthetic practices were a given. If one inclines towards believing that there was an American avant-garde in those years, one is likely to find that Sayre's roster of participating figures includes the expected artists and movements: Carolee Schneeman and Robert Morris, Judy Chicago and Robert Smithson, Fluxus and the Judson Dance Theater, and so on.

scholarly journals Marcel Duchamp og postmoderne improvisasjonsdanstradisjoner, brudd og kontinuitet

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 4-15
Author(s):  
Hilde Rustad
Keyword(s):  
John Cage ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
Merce Cunningham

Abstract Artikkelen drøfter sammenhenger mellom Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) sin tenkning og danseimprovisasjon og kontaktimprovisasjon som tradisjoner. Forskningsprosjektet er tuftet på erfaring utøvere av danseimprovisasjon og kontaktimprovisasjon har gjort, og undersøker forbindelser mellom Duchamp og post-moderne improvisasjonsdanstradisjoner, og på hvilke måter bevissthet om slike forbindelser kan ha betydning for tradisjonenes utøvere. Forfatteren anvender Lindholm og Gadamers (1900–2002) tradisjonsbegrep som analytisk blikk og fortolkningsperspektiv, og får fram hvordan deler av Duchamps tankegods som kan forstås som overlevert via John Cage, Merce Cunningham og Robert Rauschenberg til dansekunstnere som var ansvarlig for oppstarten av postmoderne dans, og som i dag kan forstås som inkorporert i danseimprovisasjon og kontaktimprovisasjon. Tradisjonsperspektivet bidrar videre til å belyse hvordan utøvere kan få en økt forståelse av hva det innebærer å tilhøre en tradisjon, og hvilken betydningen det har å kjenne tradisjonen man tilhører best mulig. I tillegg synliggjøres hvordan postmoderne improvisasjonsdanstradisjoner ved Duchamp har europeiske røtter i tillegg til de amerikanske, og dette gir et utvidet perspektiv og bidrar til et mer komplekst bilde av tradisjonene både innholdsmessig og geografisk.

Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900

1997 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
Lillian Taiz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
Salvation Army ◽  
Public Meeting ◽  
The Many ◽  
Sunday Evening

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”

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