Being Watched

In her dance and performances of the 1960s, Yvonne Rainer famously transformed theperforming body--stripped it of special techniques and star status, traded its costumes and leotardsfor 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 thecrucial site of Rainer's interventions in the 1960s was less the body of the performer than the eyeof the viewer--or rather, the body as offered to the eye. Rainer's art, Lambert-Beatty writes, isstructured by a peculiar tension between the body and its display. Through close readings ofRainer's works of the 1960s--from the often-discussed dance Trio A to lesser-known Vietnam war-eraprotest dances--Lambert-Beatty explores how these performances embodied what Rainer called "theseeing difficulty." (As Rainer said: "Dance is hard to see.") Viewed from thisperspective, Rainer's work becomes a bridge between key episodes in postwar art. Lambert-Beattyshows how Rainer's art (and related performance work in Happenings, Fluxus, and Judson DanceTheater) connects with the transformation of the subject-object relation in minimalism and withemerging feminist discourse on the political implications of the objectifying gaze. In aspectacle-soaked era, moreover--when images of war played nightly on the television news--Rainer'swork engaged the habits of viewing formed in mass-media America, linking avant-garde art and thewider culture of the 1960s. Rainer is significant, argues Lambert-Beatty, not only as achoreographer, but as a sculptor of spectatorship.

Carrie Lambert-Beatty is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.