Narcissism and Pleasure: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer

The following is excerpted from Interviews on Art, a collection of more than sixty interviews by Robert Storr with contemporary artists. Yvonne Rainer is a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker who has been recognized as one of the leading conceptual artists of the past fifty years. She emerged in the 1960s as a pioneer of the Judson Dance Theater movement, an avant-garde performance style that blended elements of dance and visual art, and later turned to experimental film. This previously unpublished conversation was conducted on April 9, 2009, at the College of Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts, at Boston University. 

INTERVIEWER

Let me begin by saying that it is a special pleasure to enter into this conversation. Yvonne and I have known each other over quite a long time. We first met in the early 1980s—in effect, part of the protracted aftermath of the 1970s—which was a very different time from now. What we’ve gone through lately, and are about to go through with the onset of recession resembles the 1970s more so than the boom times of the 1980s and nineties: an art world where the terms of making art takes place against a very unsettled and uncertain background. Considering that we are about to speak in front of a predominantly student audience, I would like to begin by saying that I’ve been struck by the way that for the past twenty years or so, people have talked a great deal about careers as if there was some kind of scripted narrative or a scripted scenario for how one begins in one place and ends up in another ideal place. But it seems to me that art has always been much more about working, than about careers and about the specific work that one chooses. Since then you have done many things. Perhaps our conversation might start with the fact of just this variety of paths forward: how you have chosen to work in this way and chosen to work in that way and how have patterns developed rather than how those were patterns foretold or planned. 

YVONNE RAINER

In a nutshell, I kind of fell into dance in the late 1950s and I feel very privileged to have come into the field at a very crucial moment when everything in visual art, music, and dance was about to explode in different directions and reinvent the terms and the boundaries of artmaking. By 1960 I was studying with Merce Cunningham, the long-time collaborator of John Cage, who redefined or, better, threw out the rules about what constituted music, and I began to use chance procedures, which came directly from John Cage’s methods for organizing sounds. By 1965 I was thinking about an evening-length work. I had studied composition with Robert Dunn who was an acolyte of Cage and played the piano for Cunningham’s technique classes. He exposed to us different methods for making dances and organizing movement. For instance, he solicited us to look at other sources of movements than one’s own body. So, by 1965 I was thinking about a long dance called and the first section of that dance The piece is not meant to be in perfect unison: three people perform it in and out of phase. A film of me performing it was made in 1978. It was originally filmed in 16 mm. I still teach it and a large number of people have learned it in various situations and it continues to be taught. One of the main characteristics of this dance is that the gaze of the performer never looks directly out at the audience.