Being Watched

<b>How Yvonne Rainer's art shaped new ways of watching as well as performing; how it connected 1960s avant-garde art to politics and activism. </b><p>In her dance and performances of the 1960s Yvonne Rainer famously transformed the performing body--stripped it of special techniques and star status traded its costumes and leotards for 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 <i>Being Watched</i> that the crucial site of Rainer's interventions in the 1960s was less the body of the performer than the eye of the viewer--or rather the body as offered to the eye. Rainer's art Lambert-Beatty writes is structured by a peculiar tension between the body and its display. Through close readings of Rainer's works of the 1960s--from the often-discussed dance Trio A to lesser-known Vietnam war-era protest dances--Lambert-Beatty explores how these performances embodied what Rainer called the seeing difficulty. (As Rainer said: Dance is hard to see.) Viewed from this perspective Rainer's work becomes a bridge between key episodes in postwar art. Lambert-Beatty shows how Rainer's art (and related performance work in Happenings Fluxus and Judson Dance Theater) connects with the transformation of the subject-object relation in minimalism and with emerging feminist discourse on the political implications of the objectifying gaze. In a spectacle-soaked era moreover--when images of war played nightly on the television news--Rainer's work engaged the habits of viewing formed in mass-media America linking avant-garde art and the wider culture of the 1960s. Rainer is significant argues Lambert-Beatty not only as a choreographer but as a sculptor of spectatorship.</p>