Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s–1970s

As the title indicates, Erin Brannigan’s new book Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s–1970s is a history of the relationship between dance and the visual arts across three decades. Typically, this relationship has been presented as dance following trends in the visual arts. For example, American dance practitioner Yvonne Rainer is frequently classified as a minimalist; the assumption being that she followed the precepts of the visual arts movement, minimalism. Rainer, of course, contributed to this way of thinking about her work through her much-cited essay of 1968 ‘A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A’. Brannigan’s book is a radical repositioning of dance discourse and practice, proposing that dance is central to the changes that took place in the visual art scene of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in the United States. In other words, she very convincingly reverses the art historical assumption that the visual arts were in the lead of major artistic innovations, with dance simply following in its wake. I was surprised to find that some of the evidence for the importance of dance is already in the art historical literature but strangely has not been properly acknowledged or digested. For example, Brannigan cites prominent art historian Thomas Crow on this issue. In his book The Rise of the Sixties (1996), he provides a list of visual art borrowings from the dance style of Judson Church: ‘serial repetition, equality of parts, anonymous surfaces, suspicion of self-aggrandizing emotion’. These and other de-subjectifying impulses of the 1960s and ’70s are often used to characterise minimalism in the visual arts. Brannigan demonstrates that they are inventions of dance in the first instance. For example, amplifying Crow’s point about the suspicion of emotion, Brannigan examines in depth how choreographer Anna Halprin pioneers the inexpressive task-based work that is such a strong feature of visual arts in this period. In this vein, I was particularly struck by the revelation that the famous adage of minimalist artist Donald Judd to describe a mundane approach to composition, ‘one thing after another’, from 1965, is preceded by dancer and choreographer Simone Forti’s ‘one thing followed another’ from 1960. And that the box form, which is so important for minimalist Robert Morris’s sculpture, begins when he makes dance props for Forti. Moreover, the book makes a major contribution to dance literature of this period, which has tended to focus on the Judson Dance Theater as the key point