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Article Excerpt
The experience of watching Yvonne Rainer's two-hour film Journeys from Berlin/ 1971 (1980) is best described as highly challenging. Combining a wide array of cinematic techniques (shots of exhausting duration, reverse motion bordering on the slapstick, investigative pans across still lifes, asynchronous picture and sound, the layering of visual, audio, and written narrative and storytelling). Journeys addresses suicide as a personal and social phenomenon, the role of women in politics, terrorism as a response to monopolies of power, and psychoanalysis as part of a culture that relies on the repetition of individual and social experience as a mechanism of appeasement and stability, to name just a few themes. By means of its strategies of distanciation no less than its complex and topical content, the film opens a participatory space for the critical assessment and discussion of political and aesthetic conduct in the late 1970s.
Rainer's practice had always been informed by historical avant-garde production, particularly the work and writings of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, the founder of epic theater. Her 1960s dance performances and early films relied on Brechtian strategies of anti-illusionism and "estrangement"--jolting the complacent spectator into a self-conscious state of perception: improvisation and repetition, disjunctive action and score, the projection of texts and images, jump cuts and slow motion, long takes and direct camera address. But whereas Brecht aimed to separate performer from representation and to place both within a political context, Rainer set out to establish an authentic, almost corporeal intersubjectivity, an ontological affirmation of private experience. From the very beginning, her work in dance and performance sought to create an experiential reality that would do away with theatrical artificiality and the illusion of psychosocial coherence. The physical, psychological, and humanist assertion of the subject's presence was part of the artistic Zeitgeist, Minimalist sculpture being the prime example. According to the dance historian Sally Banes, "The phenomenological exhortation 'Zuden Sachen!' ('To the Things!') was echoed in the manifestos by artists in every field." (1)
In 1966, in what has been called the "theoretical groundwork" of her dance and performance pieces, Rainer mimicked a famous chart drawn up by Brecht wherein the playwright juxtaposes the conventions of "dramatic theater" with the innovations of his "epic theater." (2) Rainer's "A Quasi Survey of Some 'Minimalist' Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A" presents a list of traditional dance characteristics to "eliminate or minimize," contrasted with those to substitute for them: "character" for "neutral performance," "performance" for "task or tasklike activity," and "development and climax" for an "equality of parts." Rainer explains, "My Trio A dealt with the 'seeing' difficulty by dint of its continual and unremitting revelation of gestural detail." (3) But Brecht's definition of gesture, or Gestus, included an ideological dimension: the framework on which the meaning of a gesture is based. The Gestus defines communication as a sociopolitical act, and the participants as sociopolitical entities. (4) To Brecht, revolutionary art reveals the ordinary not as ordinary but as extraordinary--the factual, the normal, the nonartificial as determined and historically contingent, just like the commercial products of capitalist culture. Rainer's stripping away of artifice and illusionism, on the other hand, was an effort to achieve pure "embodiment," unmediated "presentness" as an affirmation of subjectivity. (5)
It has become commonplace for art historians and critics to invoke Brecht with regard to Rainer's work, especially her films. (6) Yet the histories of art and film (and on occasion the artist herself) have usually reduced these strategies to a repertoire of formalist tools. Rainer's 1960s dance performances and her early films have typically been read either as affirmations of private experience that avoid empathetic-cathartic illusionism, or as structural-materialist forms of cultural critique that rely less on the materialist politics of production than on the material politics of the medium, on what the film critic Annette Michelson has called the work's "consumingly autoanalytical character." (7) Both approaches align Rainer's art with a trajectory of avant-garde film and theater that includes Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov. Challenging such an undifferentiated account, this essay aims to reconsider the development of Rainer's work in light of her reading of Brecht and the context of her art's production and reception. The discursive lenses of "private," "public," and "counterpublic" provide such a historical and theoretical context. Borrowed from a discourse at the heart of 1960s and 1970s art activism, these categories allow for a differentiation among Rainer's films--as they evolve from "private" to "public" to "counterpublic"--and an assessment of their contribution to avant-garde art and cinema. The categories make possible an articulation and transcendence of the limits of methodological dichotomies such as body and ideology, feminist essentialism and psychoanalytic structuralism, the expressionist and the theoretical, the subjective and the objective. Journeys from Berlin is about or, arguably, it is the facilitation of a "counterpublic" or "proletarian public sphere": an alternative space where experiences are multiple and heterogeneous, impure and constantly embattled, a space that is highly and primarily political. (8)
Like many others in the 1960s, Rainer felt that the self as a physically and psychologically coherent entity was under attack from a variety of factors, ranging from the televised images invading the living room to government surveillance sanctioned by cold-war paranoia. The German philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas defined this phenomenon as the erosion of the private sphere, an arena of "intimacy" where the individual experiences "complete and free inwardness" (gesattigte und freie Innerlichkeit), where he or she is "human" (Mensch) rather than citizen. (9) The public sphere, in contrast, is that arena in which citizens can "confer in an unrestricted fashion ... with the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association and the freedom to express and publish their opinions." (10) For Habermas, both the public and the private spheres were being steadily eroded under the increasingly monopolized ownership of communication media, which severely limits the free exchange of opinion (Rasonnement) and therefore the unrestricted formation of social and individual identity, and which also expands into and thereby compromises the autonomy of the private sphere.
In light of the modern subject's increasing alienation from itself, Rainer consciously fell back onto an assertive corporeality. In 1968, as part of a written statement handed out at performances of The Mind Is a Muscle at the Anderson Theater in New York, the artist famously declared, "Just as ideological issues have no bearing on the nature of the work, neither does the tenor of current political and social conditions have any bearing on its execution. The world disintegrates around me. My connection to the world-in-crisis remains tenuous and remote. ... My body remains the enduring reality." (11) The "enduring reality" of the body was to be communicated via "kinetic empathy": the artist tried to convey the "actual time" and "actual weight of the body," to translate a subjective, unmediated experience from one private individual to another. (12)
By the beginning of the 1970s, Rainer had grown frustrated by the "incommunicability of bodily experience," writing, "Dance is ipso facto about me (the so-called kinesthetic response of the spectator notwithstanding, it only rarely transcends that narcissistic-voyeuristic duality of doer and looker)." In her quest to create a subjective experience that was not mediated through her own experience but existed between the protagonist and the viewer as empathetic individuals on equal footing, Rainer turned to emotion. "The area of the emotions must necessarily directly concern the both of us," she wrote. "The more I get into it the more I see how such things as rage, terror, desire, conflict, et al., are not unique to my experience the way my body and its functioning are." (13)
Film seemed to Rainer to be the perfect medium to articulate the private experience of emotion. She had been attending screenings put on by Jonas Mekas's Film Makers Cooperative and Film Makers Cinematheque (which became Anthology Film...
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