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Themesicon: navigation pathArt and Cinematographyicon: navigation pathAkerman
 
 
 
 
 

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concrete everydayness in performance, to the choreographer and dancer's minimalist mandate that performance emphasize movement at the expense of psychology. Akerman's moving the mattress around her room in «Je tu il elle,» and Rainer's use of valises and boxes in the performance «Grand Union Dreams» (1971), are examples of task-oriented performance in which the object, rather than being the butt of an action called for by character or plot, is a prop to objectify and banalize gesture and movement.

The affinities among minimal art, performance art, and minimalist and structural film clarify how strategies of real-time representation, repetition, and seriality engage the spectator's body, a critical step for a corporeal cinema. Two major formal tendencies, both committed to engaging the spectator's awareness of his or her own physicality and perception are rehearsed again and again in '60s and '70s art. In the first, an excess of information, given through a multiple input of issues, shapes, gestures, and media, divides one's attention. The Fluxus group's and John Cage's performances, Allan Kaprow's happenings, and New American dance (Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Lucinda

 

Childs, Merce Cunningham) all advance the recognition that simultaneity—a co-presence of events internal and external to the text—can effect a nondirected field of spectator response, frustrating the acknowledgment of authorship and intention. Silence, for instance, becomes a composite of aleatory audience sound and, to Cage, emptiness, just as multiple images open the terrain of non-intentionality. [15] Spectatorial focus is dispersed over a fractured surface. In the second, minimalist tendency, simplified shapes, single events, and series of repeated images or forms seem both to block interpretation and to mock the immediacy of apprehension proposed in modernist art. The spectator's extended gaze over holistic forms displaces the burden of decentering entirely onto his or her perceptual and physical relation to the art object. Duration is a major factor in minimalism's continuous exchange between abstractive, conceptual procedures and sensorially based experience. The insistence on simplified forms, or on seriality, makes the experiential time and space of the spectator's confrontation with the work as obdurate as the forms presented; the work «works» solely through the viewer's persistence

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