Embodiment Abstracted: The Influence of Yvonne Rainer

Friday, Jan 13, 2017 5 – 8 pm

Featuring Yvonne Rainer, Natalie Bookchin, Gregg Bordowitz, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Ralph Lemon, Simon Leung, Jimmy Robert, Meg Stuart

Opening reception: Friday, January 13, 5-8

Exhibition on display through March 4, 2017

Embodiment Abstracted: The Influence of Yvonne Rainer gathers together recent works by artists who take up Yvonne Rainer’s experimental approach to the body as a material in the 1960s and explore its political implications with fresh eyes. Rainer's dance in the 1960s showed us what was possible when ordinary movement was made the material of a work of art. These artists mobilize Rainer’s abstracted version of ordinary movement to create situations or tell stories in which the particular ways bodies perform tasks or give in to gravity, or simply the paths through space that their daily lives require, become as much or more significant than markers of cultural identity or difference. The juxtaposition of these varied practices allows the different valences of a broad-reaching conversation about one of contemporary art’s most important ancestors to be heard.

Top image: Natalie Bookchin, Long Story Short, 2016, 45 mins. (still).