Yvonne Rainer

A re-examination of Yvonne Rainer's Parts of Some Sextets, a radical performance and pivotal piece in the American choreographer's career, which led her to theorize her conception of dance in the 1960s, before being revived in 2019.

Parts of Some Sextets, Yvonne Rainer's 1965 performance for ten people and twelve mattresses, represents a turning point in the American choreographer's oeuvre. "My mattress monster," as Rainer calls it, was built in her formative years with the experimental downtown New York group Judson Dance Theater. In this work, she asserted her exploration of "ordinary" actions as well as her disregard for narrative constructions to create an intricate choreography that unfolded with a new scene every thirty seconds.

More than half a century after its premiere, Rainer, in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Emily Coates, directed the 2019 revival of the piece for the Performa 19 Biennial in New York, grappling with the changing contexts of a new presentation of her radical performance. Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 delves into every aspect of this dance, from its original manifestation to its reconstitution.

This book, designed by visual artist Nick Mauss, includes previously unpublished archival images and documents from the 1965 stagings at the Judson Memorial Church in New York and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Texts by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman, and Soyoung Yoon, as well as a new interview with Rainer, pose questions about the trajectories of artworks, performers, and audiences, all while tracing the life—and afterlife—of a dance.

Edited by Emily Coates. 
Texts and contributions by Emily Coates, RoseLee Goldberg, Jill Johnston, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, David Thomson, Lynne Tillman and Soyoung Yoon; conversation between Yvonne Rainer, Emily Coates and Nick Mauss.

It goes without saying that a dance is a dance and a book about dance is a book. Though they may meet at the intersection of Art and Good Intentions, I find myself greedy. I have a longstanding infatuation with language, a not-easily assailed conviction that it, above all else, offers a key to clarity. Not that it can replace experience, but rather holds a mirror to our experience, gives us distance when we need it. So here I am, in a sense, trying to 'replace' my performances with a book, greedily pushing language to clarify what already was clear in other terms. But, alas, gone. This has seemed one good reason to compile a book out of the remains of my performances, letting the language fall where it may. Let it be said 'She usually makes performances and has also made a book.' -Yvonne Rainer

Forty-five years after its publication, Primary Information brings Yvonne Rainer's classic book back into print in an exact facsimile.

In 1974, Yvonne Rainer published Work 1961-73, an illustrated catalog of her performance works up to that point. In these years, as the art world turned toward minimalism, Rainer and her Judson Dance Theater colleagues were engaged in a parallel, and equally radical, redefinition of dance. Stripping dance of its pomp and self-serious virtuosity, they created what dancer and choreographer Pat Catterson has called "the people's dance." Or, as Rainer put it, instead of the "overblown plot" of traditional dance, she explored the "obvious" alternative: "stand, walk, run, eat, carry bricks, show movies, or move and be moved by some thing other than oneself." 

Work 1961-73 chronicles the years when Rainer found herself and her work at the heart of a revolution in dance, performance and art. Written in Rainer's wonderful frank, funny and perceptive prose, and illustrated with photographs, handwritten scores, sketches, press articles and ephemera, Work 1961-73 is a period document and an instruction manual, an archive and a manifesto. 

A sought-after, rare classic, Work 1961-73 is brought back into print in a true facsimile edition by Primary Information; the only change is the small addition of new notes at the back of the book. 

One of the most influential artists of her generation, dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer (born 1934) was a founding member of Judson Dance Theater in New York City and a leading figure in the development of minimalist and postmodern dance.

The scripts of Rainer's five films, presented here along with essays, an interview, and bibliography, demonstrate the evolution of her political consciousness as well as her creative engagement with the contemporary film and cultural scene. These texts challenge the illusionist and ideological presumptions of mainstream culture and cinema.

Film Scripts included:

Lives of Performers
Film About a Woman Who...
Kristina Talking Pictures
Journeys from Berlin/1971
The Man Who Envied Women

The final iteration of Rainer's dance rant A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies, accompanied by texts offering a real-time account of Rainer's creative process.

Choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer has long investigated the ways in which movement can be a political act in and of itself—on the stage, on the screen, or at the lectern. In Revisions, Rainer pushes her interest in embodied activism to a new arena: what she calls the “dance rant.” This volume includes the final iteration of Rainer's latest dance rant, entitled A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies. This performance piece evolved in live presentations in Dublin, Stockholm, and New York before being expanded and adapted in written form here. In this now-completed work, Rainer mobilizes her rage and bafflement at contemporary political events through the guise of Apollo, Leader of the Muses.

Revisions also includes a compilation of emails and diary entries that provide a real-time account of Rainer's process of creating and workshopping a dance. “Pedagogical Vaudeville 3” reveals Rainer's consistent interest in reworking and reconsidering material across multiple mediums, formats, and contexts, and offers a unique glimpse at the working methods of one of this century's preeminent dance artists.

Bookended with an introduction by artist and scholar Gregg Bordowitz and an analysis of Rainer's AG Indexical with a Little Help from H. M. by dance historian Anna Staniczenko, these texts serve not only as a revision of the conventional understanding of five decades of Rainer's production, but also as a timely manual for performance as an act of resistance.

Here Is Information. Mobilise collects key critical writings by artist and curator Ian White (1971-2013), ranging from reviews and catalogue essays to entries from his blog Lives of Performers.

This volume brings together for the first time a selection of Ian White’s hugely influential writing on art and the moving image. It includes essays on animation and visual art, cinema’s relationship to conceptual art, and the idea of ‘liveness’ in performance and film, as well as texts on individual artists including Ruth Buchanan, Gabriel Byrne, Isa Genzken, Peter Gidal, Martin Gustavsson, Oliver Husain, Sharon Lockhart, Stuart Marshall, Yvonne Rainer, Jimmy Robert and David Wojnarowicz.

A Book Knot Book is a 208 pages long performance, the first from the research and publishing initiative Body Text. In this study of language in action systems of meaning-making crash, sparkle and swoon. In a playful voice over A Book Knot Book self-reflects on the materialities and choreographies of publishing, reading and writing. With guest stars in fragments; Monique Wittig, Yvonne Rainer, Cristina Rivera Garza, Amiri Baraka, Will Rawls, David Abram, Thich Nhat Hanh and more. 

Edited and designed by Sara Kaaman. Published with the support of Stockholm University of the Arts.

Can critical thinking spring from both a fortune cookie and Jacques Lacan’s most obscure seminar footnote? Estelle Hoy says yes. In saké blue, overpriced cheesecakes are the starting point for an essay on art writing; shoplifting in Berlin opens to a reflection on the economies of activist practices; fiction allows us to discuss the legacy of institutional critique, queer mélanges, or quiet melancholy. To her, the story of art becomes more nuanced in light of lyrics by Arthur Russell, the posthumous sorrow of Sylvia Plath, or a poem by Yvonne Rainer.

saké blue gathers critical essays, art reviews, and poetic fiction. Written in dialogue with the work of Martine Syms, Marlene Dumas, Hervé Guibert, or Camille Henrot, these texts combine the subjective and analytic, addressing power relations and the force of affect. Hoy spares nothing—and no one, exposing cultural clichés and urgent political issues through fast-paced acerbity. She advocates the work of women artists, mocks stereotypes, questions myths, and champions desire, sadness, and boredom. Simultaneously beautiful, lyrical, and cutthroat, her writing echoes to the reader like l’esprit d’escalier—we think of the perfect reply just a little too late.

“Estelle Hoy practises philosophy as an unsettled but deeply committed query into existing together. She reads, she looks, she writes, to find out something essential about the future and living for it.”
—Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal

“Estelle Hoy's prose slap and bite, saké blue is a sharp pleasure to read.”
—Calla Henkel, author of Scrap

“Hoy’s renditions of all-too familiar scenes are made more visceral than life with sparkling prose and a sly attention to life’s many shifting values that feels more than appropriate for anyone truly interested in art.”
—Natasha Stagg, author of Artless

Edited by Antonia Carrara
With an introduction by Lisa Robertson

Adam Pendleton’s Notes on Just Back From Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer stems from the transcript of the script prepared by Pendleton for Yvonne Rainer to read during their day spent filming at the Ridgeway Diner in Chelsea. The text mixes citations from Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and excerpts from Rainer’s own published works; the film ends with the gospel song ‘I Am Saved’ by the Silver Harpes over the footage of Rainer’s now canonical Trio A, 1978. Pendleton's chapbook plays on the duality of meaning in the word ‘movement’, exploring the synchrony of art and politics, and shared potentials of language and the non-verbal.

Riffing off the title, this volume includes an interview with Carolyn Lazard – an artist whose conceptual and often spare videos, sculptures, installations, and performances explore the full amplitude of relation – by Catherine Damman, plus a feature on New York-based contemporary artist Tishan Hsu, whose practice examines the “embodiment of technology”, and contributions by time-based media artist Silvia Kolbowski, for whom political resistance, the unconscious, and structures of spectatorship are a central concern of all her projects; choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer; and science fiction author Octavia Butler.

Retroactively compiled from the curators*’ footnotes to the exhibition handout of the 2021 exhibition Zeros and Ones, at KW Berlin.

Dedicated to the Sadie Plant book of the same name (Zeros + ones: digital women + the new techno culture, 1997), the issue embodies a (cybernetic) reading & writing machine, as it co-authors artists’ work.

* Edited with Kathrin Benthele, Anna Gritz, and Ghislaine Leung - the edition has 180 pages, 4 colour plates, two bookmarks, an otherwise unavailable postcard donated by the Stanley Brouwn estate, and… SIXTEEN possible covers, reproducing a work by Lutz Bacher.

This volume surveys Paul Chan's publications and works made between 2010 and 2022 following his return to artmaking. The exhibition takes as its organizing principle the notion of the "breather," a word that can signify a moment of rest or pause but can also reference a purposeful redirection toward other activities.

Chan's turn to publishing through the founding of his independent press Badlands Unlimited represented a type of "breather." Badlands for Chan embodied a radical break that seeded new ideas and ways of working. The term is also what Chan titles a recent major body of work. Breathers is an ongoing series of pneumatic sculptures and installations that he considers a new genre of moving-image works. Tacitly and overtly, the metaphor of the "breather" underscores each of the works in the Walker Art Center exhibition, which, with the artist's input, is conceived in four sections. The exhibition catalog includes scholarly contributions by Chan; Pavel Pys, Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center; and Vic Brooks, Senior Curator of Time-based Visual Art at Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (EMPAC).

Paul Chan (born 1973) is an artist, writer and publisher who lives in New York. Chan is the winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in 2014, a biennial award honoring artists who have made visionary contributions to contemporary art. Chan founded the independent press Badlands Unlimited in 2010. Badlands has published over 50 books, including the works of Yvonne Rainer, Calvin Tomkins, Lynne Tillman, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carroll Dunham, Claudia La Rocco, Dread Scott, Martine Syms, Craig Owens, Petra Cortright, Cauleen Smith, Ian Cheng, Rachel Rose, Aruna D'Souza and many others.

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Steve Paxton / Drafting Interior Techniques, a retrospective exhibition, in Culturgest, Lisbon, March-July 2019, co-curated by Joao Fiadeiro and Romain Bigé.

American dancer, choreographer and improviser Steve Paxton (b. 1938) has continuously been shaping the face of dance for more than six decades. Starting his dance career in the 1950s, he danced with José Limon and the Cunningham company, contributed to found the Judson Dance Theater and post-modern dance, invented two dance techniques (Contact Improvisation and Material for the Spine), while writing extensively about movement (more than a hundred articles since 1970) and relentlessly performing improvisation around the world.

Drafting Interior Techniques is the first retrospective look taken at his work and legacy. It is built around one of Steve’s obsessive questions: what is my body doing when I am not conscious of it? This question is a mantra through the exhibition, which offers the visitors to wander into the dancer’s workshop, not only to see dance, but to look at movement with the eyes of a dancer.

Contributions: Delfim Sardo, Romain Bigé, João Fiadeiro, Julie Perrin, Daniel Lepkoff, Bojana Cvejić, Alice Godfroy, Nancy Stark Smith, Hubert Godard, André Lepecki Yvonne Rainer, Martin Nachbar, Ramsay Burt, Bebe Miller, Patricia Kuypers.

A single black-and white photograph taken by Babette Mangolte has come to epitomize New York’s downtown art scene of the 1970s. The dancers performing Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece characterize perfectly the wild spirit of the time. Choreographed as an echo of movement unfolding across SoHo’s rooftops, the dancers mimed the chimneys, water towers, and fire escapes which surrounded them across that skyline. Influenced early on by Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and the work of Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, Mangolte began studies in 1964 at the renowned École nationale de la photographie et de la cinematographie in Paris, one of the school’s first female students. In 1970, having become disillusioned with the film scene in France, Mangolte moved to New York and became involved in the avant-garde film and dance milieus of the Kitchen and the Anthology Film Archives. 

Selected Writings, 1998–2015 is a collection of texts by Mangolte in which she reflects on her practice as a photographer and filmmaker and her collaborative work with filmmakers, artists, dancers, and choreographers. She provides insights into the techniques and methods she created as well as her relationships with notable collaborators such as Marina Abramović, Chantal Akerman, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer. 

Copublished with Kunsthalle Wien on the occasion of the exhibition “Babette Mangolte: I = Eye.”

A monograph / artists' book that engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances.

The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories. Published following the exhibition “Patriarchal Poetry” at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27– November 24, 2013.