To Be Continued: An Exchange on Tiffany Barber’s “Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching, Dances in the Dark”

“What we see is partly a consequence of who we are”.

—Salman Rushdie

The sentence above leapt out at me while reading Salman Rushdie’s evocative notes to Bjorn Amelan’s first exhibit 7 Paintings in a Garage.¹ Rushdie concludes his introduction to Amelan’s works by saying that “their imagining provokes ours, and in the coming together of the two dreamers we understand the dream.”

This is a tried and true argument: a work of art finds completion through the experience of others because intersubjectivity is at play. This thought seems relevant to the exchange of letters presented below. I could not agree more with Rushdie’s comparison of the collective experiencing of art we call reception with the nonlinear, associative power of dreaming. In the case of this dialogue we are privy to the receptivity of the artist and of the scholar. Whenever either one attempts the articulation of art through language for the end of analysis (and this is always with the risk of simplifying or of over-reading), the experience of reception becomes an intellectual performance of sharable knowledge where the artist and the scholar challenge one another.

While reading Bill T. Jones’s July 2, 2015 entry, titled “Signifying,” in the New York Live Arts blog (Jones 2015), I recognized the cover of the April 2015 issue of the Dance Research Journal. With the immediacy of blog writing, Jones was responding/reacting to some statements expressed in two different articles (Erin Brannigan’s “Dance in the Gallery: Curation as Revision” and Tiffany Barber’s “Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching, Dances in the Dark”) from the DRJ issue, bringing new reflections into the discussion of our present.

In an associative snapshot of then recent events (President Obama’s moving moment of singing Amazing Grace following the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, after the nth acquittal of police officers for brutality against black unarmed citizens), Jones framed in one paragraph our present full of contradictions, marked by events that had been calling our attention to old wounds in America and new questioning.

The article that captured most of Jones’s attention, and eventually inspired the content of the blog entry, was Tiffany Barber’s “Ghostcatching and After Ghostcatching, Dances in the Dark,” an in-depth investigation of Bill T. Jones’s collaboration with digital artists Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar (as Riverbed, the creators of Ghostcatching in 1999), and Marc Downie (in addition to the duo as the Open Ended Group: the creators of After Ghostcatching in 2010).

Paul Kaiser, who is quoted in Jones’s blog entry, was invited to write his own response to the article. What follows in this issue is Kaiser’s letter to the editor and Barber’s response to that letter.

And so a dialogue has begun...

I highly recommend reading, if missed earlier, Barber’s article in the April issue and Jones’s blog entry. By bringing Barber’s article into the conversation of the “now” (news events, programming at New York Live Arts, the meaning of signifying in semiotics, and in his personal memory archive), Jones was echoing one of the questions that the author had rhetorically raised in her article: does race still matter? As Barber passionately revisits the decade that separates Ghostcatching (1999) from After Ghostcatching (2010), trying to identify crucial changes about the politics of bodies and identities in the twenty-first century and entertaining a critical conversation with relevant theories on race in the last decade, Jones also wonders: who are the potential interlocutors of scholarly articles?

I remember seeing Ghostcatching at Cooper Union in 1999 long before my idea of writing a book on Bill T. Jones’s work materialized (2010). I had heard Kaiser talking about Ghostcatching and Biped (the “Riverbed” collaboration with Merce Cunningham in 1999) on a few occasions, including at the conference “Performative Sites: Intersecting Art, Technology and the Body,” at Penn State University in fall 2000. At that time...