5 films, 8mm and 16mm, shown as video, black and white
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/yvonne-rainer-6361" aria-label="More by Yvonne Rainer" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Yvonne Rainer</a>
Five Easy Pieces
Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation 2020
<p><span>Five Easy Pieces</span> 1966–9 is a compilation of five black and white silent short films by the American choreographer, writer, dancer and film-maker Yvonne Rainer. Collectively they represent an important period of experimentation for the artist, during her transition from being a choreographer in the 1960s to a feature-length filmmaker in the 1970s. Rainer titled the collected short films as <span>Five Easy Pieces</span> to reflect the experimental nature of the works, what art historian Carrie Lambert has described as a ‘celluloid sketch-book ... but also complex and telling’ (Carrie Lambert, ‘Other Solutions’, leaflet accompanying Video Data Bank’s DVD <span>A Woman Who…: Selected Works of Yvonne Rainer</span>, Chicago 2005, p.1). The DVD comprises the following films:</p>
time-based media 5 films 8mm 16mm shown as video black white
Five Easy Pieces
duration: 48min
Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation 2020
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<i>Five Easy Pieces</i> 1966–9 is a compilation of five black and white silent short films by the American choreographer, writer, dancer and film-maker Yvonne Rainer. Collectively they represent an important period of experimentation for the artist, during her transition from being a choreographer in the 1960s to a feature-length filmmaker in the 1970s. Rainer titled the collected short films as <i>Five Easy Pieces</i> to reflect the experimental nature of the works, what art historian Carrie Lambert has described as a ‘celluloid sketch-book ... but also complex and telling’ (Carrie Lambert, ‘Other Solutions’, leaflet accompanying Video Data Bank’s DVD <i>A Woman Who…: Selected Works of Yvonne Rainer</i>, Chicago 2005, p.1). The DVD comprises the following films:</p>
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<i>Hand Movie </i>1966 (5 minutes, black and white, silent, 8mm) is a film that comprises a close-up shot of a hand, the fingers of which enact a sensuous dance. Art historian Carrie Lambert has described the film as ‘a dance performed by fingers, tendons, palm, wrist and thumb’ (Carrie Lambert, ‘Other Solutions’, leaflet accompanying Video Data Bank’s DVD <i>A Woman Who…: Selected Works of Yvonne Rainer</i>, Chicago 2005, p.2). It was made in hospital, when Rainer was unable to dance after major surgery, and filmed by her friend William Davis.<i> </i>
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<i>Volleyball (Foot Film) </i>1967 (10 minutes, black and white, silent, 16mm). In this film, a volleyball is rolled into the frame and comes to rest. Two legs in sports trainers (‘sneakers’), seen from the knees down, enter the frame and stand beside it. The film cuts to a new angle, repeating the same characters and actions. The work is representative of Rainer’s engagement with games during her period with the Judson Dance Theater in New York, of which she was a founding member. The camerawork is by Bud Wirtschafter.<i> </i>
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<i>Rhode Island Red </i>1968 (10 minutes, black and white, silent, 16mm). This film documents ten minutes in an enormous chicken coop, in which the continuous movement of the chickens is observed as a kind of found choreography and apparently related to an interest in animal movement by Rainer’s peer and collaborator Simone Forti. The camerawork is by Roy Levin. Rhode Island Red is an American breed of domestic chicken. </p>
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<i>Trio Film </i>1968 (13 minutes, black and white, silent, 16mm)<i>. </i>In this film two nudes, a man and a woman, interact with each other and a large balloon in a white living room. The film was performed by Steve Paxton, Rainer’s fellow Judson founder, and Becky Arnold. The camerawork is by Phill Niblock.</p>
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<i>Line </i>1969<i> </i>(10 minutes, black and white, silent, 16mm)<i>. </i>A blonde woman (Susan Marshall) in white trousers and shirt interacts with a moving round object and the camera. The camerawork is by Phill Niblock.</p>
<p>The films in <i>Five Easy Pieces</i> are important because they encapsulate Rainer’s core artistic contribution to the connections between minimalist sculpture and dance – the proposal of equivalence between body and object – through the performance of ordinary movement and tasks in relation to the use of found ‘things’ as props. In 1968 Rainer theorised minimal aesthetics in dance alongside those in the art of her contemporaries in a chart that was published in Gregory Battcock’s publication <i>Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology </i>(Boston, MA 1968).</p>
<p>Rainer’s short films were shown originally in the context of her performances and were screened within a programme organised by the avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton and multimedia artist Michael Snow at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York in 1969. <i>Trio Film</i> was projected onstage (opposite a pornographic film) in Rainer’s performance piece <i>Rose Fractions</i>. The films went almost unseen for a period of time until a retrospective exhibition at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2003. </p>
<p>Rainer is noted for an approach to dance that treats the body more as the source of movement and as physical matter rather than as the purveyor of plot or narrative. Many of the elements she employed – such as repetition, tasks and indeterminacy – later became standard features of contemporary dance. They also resonated with the principles of minimalist sculpture. In 1965 she wrote what has become known as her ‘No Manifesto’ within an essay about dance in the <i>Tulane Drama Review</i>, in which she stated, ‘No to virtuosity, magic and make-believe’: a statement that has been widely cited since, more recently in a riposte by Danish contemporary dancer Mette Invgartsen who published her own ‘YES Manifesto’ in the performance magazine <i>Fraktija</i> in 2004.  </p>
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<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Catherine Wood, <i>The Mind is a Muscle</i>, London 2007.<br/>Carrie Lambert-Beatty, <i>Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s</i>, Cambridge, MA 2008.<br/>Yilmaz Dwiezor, Barbara Engelbach (eds), <i>Yvonne Rainer: Raum, Korper, Sprache / Space, Body Language</i>, exhibition catalogue, Ludwig Museum, Cologne and Kunsthaus Bregenz 2012.</p>
<p>Catherine Wood<br/>August 2018</p>
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Summary
2023-09-27T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT