Coinciding with MOVE at the Hayward Gallery, the BFI devoted its Studio Space to Yvonne Rainer’s work and influences, in a programme of videos which explored the interaction of moving image works with choreography, with work by international artists accompanying pieces from Rainer’s series, Five Easy Pieces. Two themes emerged from the selection I saw: language and linguistic structures in video, and movement, in physical and social space. These areas are linked through the logic of the score, prominent in experimental music and dance as well as in conceptual art, exploring the political and aesthetic implications of art based on instructions. Thus the linguistic is inscribed within the works, despite the absence language in the form of voiceovers, dialogue or subtitles, through the score that sets them up.
Exploring movement on a human scale were videos such as Prune Tourne, by Michel François, which followed a woman with long reddish hair spinning; plus two videos of ‘obstructed’ piano playing, the first showing a hand playing while wearing splints, the second, Audience by Bea McMahon following a recital on a piano covered by slobbering snails. These, along with Rainer’s video Volleyball, used a score, or instruction, for the video and followed it through in a deadpan, unvarnished manner reminiscent of her interest in ‘task-like’, quotidian actions. Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) also comes to mind, a video which shows hands moving in a continuous flow, so that “No part …is any more important”.
In contrast, some of the videos rejected detached coolness, instead using the body to expressive or political ends. Head Hand, by Sonia Kurana showed the artist’s hand caressing and pummeling a black man’s head, supposedly representing a multi-layered negotiation with race, gender and sexuality. Rainer spoke of being opposed to the exhibitionism and narcissism of the body as it is used in most dances, but stressed it was “also true that I love the body- its actual weight, mass, and unenhanced physicality.” These videos brought out the idea that the corporeal, fleshy aspect of the body could act as limit, an opposition to the “pseudo-world” of the spectacle, as Carrie Lambert puts it, acting politically against the endless production of images. She quotes Rainer: “My body remains the enduring reality”, a phrase which suited the screening, with its focus on bodies spinning, touching and feeling their way through physical space.
Another thread running through a group of other video was the human mass, and its movement through physical and political spaces. Yael Bartana’s well-known piece Kings of the Hill silently observes men in Israel driving gas guzzlers up and down steep sand dunes, in an improvised collective dance of negotiating the uneven terrain. Movement here appeared at first to be unconstrained, almost playful, with no boundaries, roads or officials in place to control it, but within that was an ominous undercurrent of containment, a sense of movement only within the allocated space. The Flag, by Koken Ergun, shows the effectiveness of modern brainwashing at mass youth rallies in Turkey, in good socialist realist style: little bodies choreographed from childhood into their allotted place in the dance and in the wider culture. Language in this video was exposed as an instrument of nationalism, fully exploited for its powers of persuasion, emotive storytelling and nation-building.
The capacity of language to create and solidify national identities obviously includes its capacity for activating the opposite impulse: exclusion, segregation and singling out due to language differences. Anri Sala’s video Lak-kat showed young boys in Senegal trying to pronounce words in Wolof which related to variations in skin hue: from dark black to whitey, all words associated with colonialism and its implicit valuation of these colours. Language here sets people apart, and values them accordingly; naming becomes a function of social positioning.
Seen in relation to MOVE: Choreographing You, the moving image works seemed to cast a more sombre shadow, as if to remind the viewer that despite the playful aspects of participation and dance, bodies are equally subject to exclusion, coercion and separation; but also that possibly this is where their agency also lies, as capable of generating their own language against the social and political structures which would limit its movement.
