Other solutions

How to use the performer as a medium rather than persona? Is a "ballet
mechanique" the only solution?
--Yvonne Rainer

As a choreographer, Yvonne Rainer was interested in the objective nature of the human body, its status as a physical thing. Witness the artist's desire to get "away from the personal psychological confrontation with the performer"; (1) her concern to "weight the quality of the human body toward that of objects and away from the super-stylization of the dancer"; (2) the recurrence, in her famous dance Trio A, of moments in which "one part of the body becomes an object for another part of the body to lift"; (3) her acknowledgement that in her work "people may become object-like in the way they are manipulated"; (4) her contrast between the "imperial balletic body" of conventional theatrical dance and the way "the body is an object" in her dance of the 1960s; (5) or her request to be treated like a thing herself when, lying down across the laps of several audience members, she asked them to "please pass me along the row." (6) Or consider her entreaty to one of her dancers, circa 1966: "Think of yourself as a barrel." (7)

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Rainer's interest in the human body as an object took form in the famously deadpan and pared-down works of this period, now considered masterpieces of postmodern dance. In pieces like Parts of Some Sextets (1965) and The Mind is a Muscle (1966-68), unadorned athleticism replaced both emotional expression and technical virtuosity. Her performers jogged, rolled, and stood. They hauled large, awkward objects--mattresses, or one another. The concern this work evinced with physicality over personality paralleled that among the visual artists in Rainer's New York milieu who were then becoming labeled as Minimalists--artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris--with an art so specific and physical that it would preclude metaphorical, metaphysical, or psychological interpretation. Artworks became "specific objects" to shake off the high-art connotations of sculpture and painting. In dance, bodies were made objectlike for similar reasons. For both Minimalism and postmodern choreography were part of a period attempt to counter assumptions that Rainer's generation often labeled "humanist" and associated with the New York School in painting and Martha Graham's expressionism in dance: expectations that art reveal the subjectivity of its creator, that it express universal values or the essential nature of the human condition, that even in abstraction it transcend the merely material. Thus Frank Stella complained about "the humanistic values" old-fashioned viewers insisted on finding in art, "asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object." (8) Stella and figures like Mel Bochner, who two years later explained that the new art was "dumb in the sense that it does not 'speak to you,' yet subversive in that it points to the probable end of all Renaissance values," (9) may have been aided in their articulation of the nature of the shift by period writing such as "The End of the Renaissance?" Leonard Meyer's 1963 essay in the Hudson Review (a piece that Andy Warhol, for one, had referenced with approbation). (10) Meyer saw the avant-gardism of figures such as John Cage and Alain Robbe-Grillet springing from a new and explicitly antihumanist foundation. "Man is no longer to be the measure of all things, the center of the universe. He has been measured and found to be an undistinguished bit of matter different in no essential way from bacteria, stones, and trees." (11)

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Shared across the arts and among various movements of this time, but exemplified most obviously in Minimalism, this general orientation was manifested in its various versions as phenomenological anti-idealism, ethical antianthropocentricism, or aesthetic antiexpressionism. From a historical standpoint, though, it appears the registration in practice of the social condition of art in the postwar period: of the fact that humanist principles had lost validity for art in a late-capitalist United States where individualism and freedom were cards to be played in the Cold War's ideological contest, and where humanist themes were deployed and dissolved in the consumer-culture stream of images and information; where, as Herbert Marcuse wrote in 1964, "the music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship." (12) Under these conditions it would have been meaningless for the avant-garde to counter alienation with a celebration of subjectivity, and in her verbal statements Rainer sounds like the very voice of the posthumanist aesthetic that acknowledged this reality. Because her material was the human body rather than plywood or steel, the choreographer's words also suggest most clearly the risk this aesthetic ran of confusion with the coldest technocratic worldview, as she advocates the use of the human body in its literal, neutral, and physical dimension alone: people as things.