How To Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America

[ 5 ] Action Is Finding Subjectivity: Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor

[  ] Action Is Finding Subjectivity Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life. . . . What matters most is the revelation contained in the act. (Harold Rosenberg quoted in Hilton Kramer 1999) Painting relates both to art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two). (Robert Rauschenberg 1959) Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists. (Allan Kaprow 1958; emphasis mine) Characterizing the movement in the visual arts left in painter Jackson Pollock’s wake, critic Harold Rosenberg and artists Allan Kaprow and Robert Rauschenberg addressed the potential of art to spark change through the juxtaposition of the real and the imagined. They envisioned artistic action not as a means toward “suggestion” through representational mimesis, but as a constitutive endeavor unto itself, serving as both a segue between contingencies in art and life and as an act of discovery or revelation. Redefining the artistic act had consequences for viewers too. If artistic action was to “find” objects in the world and redesignate their uses, the viewer’s was to participate in the work of making meaning, which included reconsidering assumptions about the nature of life and art and the relationship between them. Drawing on this context, this chapter examines the significance of kinesthetic acts of the imagination that likewise investigated the possibilities of “finding,” or conditions of “foundness” as forms of artistic “fieldwork.” These licensed art making and subject formation in ways . 151 . How to Do Things with Dance . 152 that troubled artistic and social status quo. I focus on the early work of two choreographers, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, who deployed foundness both in their literal use of “scavenged” materials and as a governing trope through which to conceptualize the meanings of their work. Stripped of the universalist trappings of heroism, collective significance, and claims of transcendence, “foundness” led to the mobilization of a more elemental yet integrated self, “not just a body but a whole person” (Cunningham quoted in Belgrad 1998, 162). It also manifested seemingly stable binaries (like real and imagined, normal and strange, cogent and absurd, and known and unknown) as fluid, enacting ontologies that complicated conventional conceptions of identity.1 For these reasons, Cunningham’s and Taylor’s artistic results registered in more ways than one, as forms of action that both were different and looked different than the norm. Their practices of foundness asserted the wholeness and completeness of any body, demonstrated the body’s intrinsic capacity for movement, and rendered the world as strange. Resonating with contemporary biological and social scientific findings that posited the mutability of identity, these practices contributed to emerging formations of counternormative subjectivities, albeit under cover of stylization. They also functioned as forms of aesthetic and social agitation, defamiliarizing the everyday in terms of what people “should” look like and how they “should” behave. That said, it would be inappropriate to read Cunningham’s andTaylor’s significations as wholesale indictments of prejudice—sexual, racial, or otherwise. For one reason, their privilege as white males worked to their advantage. It allowed for tactics of elision identified with modern dance universalism, which glossed over difference with the goal of cultural integration , on the one hand, and for presenting expressive opportunities that were not available to choreographers of color at the time, on the other. This is not to say, however, that just because Cunningham and Taylor reproduced some of the dominant power relations inherent in modern dance universalism in their work, they were not subject to their effects—namely the forces of normalization associated with the culture of containment. This is made clear here by discussion of the critical discourse that surrounded the choreographers and their work, which took modern dance universalism as proxy for normativity. For another reason, the very components of their approaches limited Finding Subjectivity: Cunningham & Taylor . 153 the trajectory of their actual political import. It was easy, for example, for audiences to write off their real significance, first of all because the artists...