It's Not Personal

Post 60s Body Art and Performance

Susan Best

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350144163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

How does something as potent and evocative as the body become a relatively neutral artistic material? From the 1960s, much body art and performance conformed to the anti-expressive ethos of minimalism and conceptualism, whilst still using the compelling human form. But how is this strange mismatch of vigour and impersonality able to transform the body into an expressive medium for visual art? Focusing on renowned artists such as Lygia Clark, Marina Abramovic and Angelica Mesiti, Susan Best examines how bodies are configured in late modern and contemporary art. She identifies three main ways in which they are used as material and argues that these formulations allow for the exposure of pressing social and psychological issues. In skilfully aligning this new typology for body art and performance with critical theory, she raises questions pertaining to gender, inter-subjectivity, relation and community that continue to dominate both our artistic and cultural conversation.

1

‘Utterly free of human associations’

Impersonality in modern and late-modern art

In an interview in 1979, American minimalist artist Carl Andre described his work as dedicated to the task of making art ‘utterly free of human associations’.¹ He acknowledged the peculiar character of this desire, concluding: ‘It is exactly the absurd impossibility of that task which made my art possible. If I had known that it is impossible to make art devoid of human associations because the essence of art is human association, I never would have been able to do what I have done. Human beings, alas, are the one indispensable necessity for art.’²

‘Devoid of human associations’ is a curious phrase. I assume he is referring to the desire to shear away symbolism and expressiveness in order to emphasize bare materials, often referred to as minimalist literalism. In his writing on the painter Frank Stella, Andre spells this out more clearly. Stella famously said of his own work: ‘what you see is what you see.’³ And according to Andre, all you see in Stella’s stripe paintings are stripes: ‘There is nothing else in his painting’, he insists.⁴ Stella, Andre continues, is not interested in expression, sensitivity or symbolism – just stripes. There should, then, be no associations, human or otherwise. The viewer simply sees the stripes, or in Andre’s case, the bricks. A work like Andre’s Equivalent VIII (1966) which is comprised of ordinary mass-produced materials – 120 firebricks arranged into a rectangle on the floor – would seem to have achieved the barest minimum of human associations (Figure 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1 Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII (1966) © Carl Andre/ARS. Copyright Agency, 2020.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Andre’s desire for an art devoid of traditional human associations is echoed by many artists associated with minimalism, conceptual art, body art and land art. His acknowledgement of the impossibility of eradicating the human element, however, is a rare concession.⁵ Why is this impossible impulse so prevalent in this period and yet so strangely generative?

Typically, the former question is answered by following the approach laid down by the social history of art, which assumes that shifts in art practice, particularly formal ones, can be deciphered as reflections or constructions of historical circumstances. For example, art historian Yve-Alain Bois has argued that in the 1950s American artist Ellsworth Kelly’s dream of impersonality, his rejection of ‘the romantic and modernist conception of art as self expression’, can be partly understood as a response to the atrocities of the Second World War.⁶ He writes:

In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, it comes as little surprise that young painters would ask: what does it mean to be an artistic subject, an author, at the very moment when the humanity of any individual has been cast in doubt by the massive demonstration of the inhumanity of our whole species?⁷

An ethical withdrawal from authorship, agency and intention, it is implied, is a suitable response to wartime barbarity. In a similar vein, Liz Kotz reads the deliberately inexpressive linguistic turn of American art of the 1960s as aiming to not only ‘“wreck” language and wreck art’ but perhaps thereby to respond to the growth of mass cultural words and images supporting the expanding consumerism of that moment.⁸ Like Bois, she sees the emptying out of meaning performed by artists using language as a strong ethical and political stance to take in the face of the dramatic upheavals of the 1960s in the United States.⁹ Dance historian Sally Banes identified this same refusal of meaning in the dance and performance work at Judson Memorial Church in New York in the early 1960s, what she calls ‘a refusal to capitulate to the requirements of “communication” and “meaning”’.¹⁰ Withdrawals of the ego, traditional aesthetic labour and communicative intent are then presented as responses to both the upheava ls and the traumas of the twentieth century. Changes large and small, events catastrophic and merely capitalist and consumerist, are all sufficient to provoke the retraction of the self. Yet the persistence of this aesthetic tone and intention throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century makes these specific historical accounts less than convincing. Surely if the impersonal current recurs and persists, it is not simply a reaction to the immediate historical context.

This chapter considers the recurrent quest for impersonality, focusing in particular on late-modern art, the period that has seemingly set the tone for current practice. I briefly consider some earlier precedents from the modern period, specifically those identified by key analysts of this phenomenon: Yve-Alain Bois and Maria Gough. However, my concern is not so much with the historical coordinates of this impulse, the ‘why’ I gestured to above, but rather with the curious appeal and strange generativity in evidence. Think of the range of strategies that has been invented to counteract the expression of subjectivity and feeling. Serial or modular methods, chance operations, task-like actions, non-composition, revealing the medium, ready-made objects and already made compositions, collective production, delegated production and performance, appropriation – these are just some of the ways in which artists have sought to reject personal expression across the twentieth century.

These art strategies developed to enact or approximate impersonality have now become part and parcel of contemporary art, perhaps not even perceived as operating in an anti-psychological mode. Perversely perhaps, in the final section of this chapter I consider the psychological appeal of the longing for impersonality, using in particular the work of French psychoanalyst André Green who has developed an account of the tendency towards self-extinguishment that he calls ‘death narcissism’. Drawing together everyday forms of surrender, such as falling asleep, along with deep-seated needs for an absence of stimulation, he develops a compelling account of the opposite pole of narcissism – the unmaking of the self.

1 Ways to eliminate personal expression in late-modern art

While Carl Andre framed the motivation for his practice in terms of the exclusion of human associations, other American artists in the 1960s and 1970s articulate their efforts to eliminate the personal or subjective aspects of art in different ways. To name just some of the approaches, they include the evacuation or suppression of the ego; the minimization of agency; the orientation of artworks towards the public, the world and information; and an interest in systems, materials and propositions as generators of work. These aims and desires can be found in the writings of minimal and conceptual artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Mel Bochner and Yvonne Rainer. This selection of artists could easily be extended, partly because this generation of university-educated American artists frequently contributed to criticism and speculation about the nature and purpose of art. Indeed, Harold Rosenberg contends that impersonal art is a corollary of art education conducted in universities, as he puts it: ‘Can there be any doubt that training in the University has contributed to the cool, impersonal wave in the art of the sixties?’¹¹ In this section and the next, I want to sketch in some of the strategies developed by these artists to diminish the personal dimension of art and consider some of the recent interpretations of this anti-aesthetic impulse.

In the case of dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer, her approach aimed principally to suppress the ego. Rainer is often included in accounts of minimalism and conceptualism as her work adheres to their broadly anti-expressive, anti-aesthetic aims. In her classic essay of 1968 with the rather cumbersome title ‘A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A’, she compared minimalism in the plastic arts with her own efforts in minimal or postmodern dance, drawing out some of the ways in which movement in dance could be rendered as impersonal. She coins a particularly apt phrase that is often quoted: the performer should be a ‘neutral “doer”’.¹² Her ‘No Manifesto’, published in 1965, spells out very clearly the kinds of things she thought needed to be rejected to achieve the desired neutrality:

No to spectacle.

No to virtuosity.

No to transformations and magic and make-believe.

No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.

No to the heroic.

No to the anti-heroic.

No to trash imagery.

No to involvement of performer or spectator.

No to style.

No to camp.

No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.

No to eccentricity.

No to moving or being moved.¹³

This series of negations are typically understood as a type of deskilling that aligns with the other reductions and subtractions that characterize this period in the visual arts.¹⁴ Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, the alienation effect, or A-effect, which opposes the seduction of the viewer, is also in evidence. Minimizing identification and what Brecht called ‘crude empathy’ that entangles the spectator with the spectacle allows for a detached audience to match the neutral presentation.¹⁵

Against the spectacle and virtuoso movements associated with classical and modern dance, Rainer poses the performer as simply someone who does things, who acts. This matter-of-fact, ordinary, everyday way of moving is intended to prioritize action. It is in the context of this affirmation of action that impersonality and neutrality are introduced: ‘action can best be focused on through the submerging of the personality; so ideally one is not even oneself, one is a neutral “doer”’.¹⁶

The alienation from oneself described here – ‘not even oneself’ – responds directly to a question posed by a writer about the kind of dance Rainer and her collaborators produced at Judson Dance Theatre in the early 1960s. Rainer reports that the critic reacted negatively to the new dance, querying in particular the mundane quality of movement by asking: ‘Why are they so intent on just being themselves?’ Her riposte indicates the stance to be adopted: submerging one’s personality so that the performer becomes synonymous with the action. The result of this reduction is then what she calls ‘a more matter-of-fact, more concrete, more banal quality of physical being in performance’.¹⁷ She poses this egoless type of dance as in opposition to classical ballet movements such as the ‘grand jeté (along with its ilk)’.¹⁸ These heroic and highly skilled accomplishments of classical dance she dismisses summarily, they have run their course; such ‘displays’, as she calls them, entailed ‘overblown plot’ and were involved with ‘connoisseurship, its introversion, narcissism and self-congratulatoriness’.¹⁹

Rainer’s embrace of impersonality is then very much in accord with a principled refusal of illusion on the one hand – there’s a literalness to her choreography that matches the minimalist focus on unencumbered materials sought by Andre – and a movement away from the concentration on the highly skilled performer as the source or focus of any production. Her version of impersonality does not entail the removal of all reference to the human, as Andre might have wished, a task that would be much harder to conceive when the medium of the art form is the body itself. Rather, she tamps down the expression of the self through a deliberate democratization of dance movement. The movements she used in her classic dance of 1966 Trio A – walking, toe-tapping, kneeling, performing a backward roll, skipping, lying down – are recognizable to all and thereby accessible to all, perhaps even able to be enacted by all, they are task-like, ordinary and ‘found’, as she puts it, certainly not expressive or personal.²⁰

While in comparison to the overblown and specialized poses of classical ballet, her work has a modesty, simplicity and lack of ostentation; nonetheless Trio A is described as a ‘mini-masterpiece’.²¹ In this brief dance-work of approximately ten minutes, while many of the individual movements might be recognizable and everyday, the complex transitions between them, and their assembly into a seamless flow demonstrates a new kind of motile virtuosity. And indeed when Rainer revised her ‘No manifesto’ in 2008, like Andre, she conceded that many things she rejected were unavoidable and that virtuosity was ‘acceptable in limited quantity’.²² However, in Trio A, she achieved a recalibration of the role o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Utterly free of human associations’: Impersonality in modern and late-modern art
• 2 The self, without autobiography: From Nauman to Ulman
• 3 Cool intimacy: Pairs, couples and duos
• 4 ‘Collective effervescence’: Group formation from fusion to virtual togetherness
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright