Of Serra (to movement) — Abigail Levine

Restagings

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.

Of Serra begins with the forms of Richard Serra’s iconic Prop sculptures—steel plates and rods precariously balanced between walls and floor. The performance makes a substitution of materials—replacing steel forms with human bodies—bringing forward the experience of time, physical effort, and direct, bodily encounter that were essential, but often less observed, elements in Serra’s works. The performance work is a collection of durational solos spread throughout an institutional space that map “the forces of gravity, weight, and motion” from object onto the human body. [1]

[1] Whitney Museum collection text. http://whitney.org/WatchAndListen/Artists?context=&context_id=&play_id=1150

choreographic diagram and photo of Richard Serra's Prop, Whitney Museum collection