Restagings is a body of works that reads modern and post-modern visual art works as scores for performance. Restagings work from an iconic cadre of 1960s artists—Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Walter de Maria—all of whom were closely associated with dance and performance artists of their era. Restagings decode the choreographic logic and somatic ideas built into visual art works.
Historically, minimalist and post-minimalist visual works were recognized for incorporating into the viewer’s experience the gallery site beyond the object’s spatial boundaries. Restagings do something similar for the objects' temporal boundaries: through performance they bring the work of making the work out of its occluded temporal ground and into the figure of the dancer in the gallery, unearthing the bodies and labor implicit in the objects, drawings, and texts and incorporating them into our experience of the original work. As dance is presented and historicized increasingly as visual art, Restagings responds by claiming these visual and conceptual works as dance.
Choreographing LeWitt is a 25-hour performance installation that uses the instructions for Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing # 56 as a choreographic score. A single dancer performs the drawing over the course of five days on a wall mic-ed for sound. As the dancer performs each of the work’s 3,744 lines, both a visual and sonic archive of her movement accumulate in the space.
Maria, Maria is a two-dancer, choreographic and sonic installation based on Walter de Maria’s 360° I Ching/ 64 Sculptures. Two dancers (the Marias) lay down the lines of de Maria’s sculpture, allowing the sculpture to be seen evolving incrementally though never complete. Highlighting de Maria’s work with trumpeter Don Cherry, the rods that compose the sculpture are turned into pitched instruments, which sound as they are dragged into position.
Three Ls (Elles) is a trio that draws a link between Robert Morris’s relationships and work with three seminal dance-performance artists—Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, and Carolee Schneemann—and the principle behind his sculptural work Untitled (3 Ls): to consider the “same form simultaneously from multiple perspectives.” The choreographed work begins with the static forms of Morris’s sculpture and animates them in a tumbling choreographic loop that can be staged in a gallery or public space.
Of Serra (to movement) takes Richard Serra’s Prop, a static demonstration of “the forces of gravity, weight, and motion” and extends it into time. The performance work is a collection of durational solos spread throughout an institutional space that map the effects of these fundamental physical principles from object onto the human body.
Beneath inverts the relationship to bodies that Carl Andre proposed with his floor-bound works—the invitation to walk on top of them. In performance, a single dancer moves herself under each panel, gradually raising and lowering them from horizontal to vertical and back. How does one move under the ground of these works? And what may be found beneath them?
