Three Elles — 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.

Three 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.”[1] 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.

[1] Whitney Museum collection text. http://collection.whitney.org/object/1774

Photo: Robert Morris's Untitled (3 Ls), Whitney Museum collection, and choreographic diagram