season, I often rehearsed there with Rudy Perez, who had performed at Judson from the start and later became a pillar of postmodern dance in Los Angeles. Performances at Clark Center were more fully produced and more accepted by the modern dance establishment than the anything-goes escapades in downtown studios. The choreographers at Clark Center were clearly preparing for the stage rather than for a loft space or art gallery. Dancer/scholar Danielle Goldman points out that Ailey and his repertoire used “metaphors of uplift” that were aligned with historic modern dance.68
Banes has noted: “Postmodern dance was seen by many African American dancers as dry formalism, while African American dance was considered by some white postmodernists as too emotional and overexplicit politically.”69 But a handful of dancers—Gus Solomons jr, Laura Dean, Meredith Monk—shuttled between Clark Center and SoHo. They were accepted socially and aesthetically in both milieus. Solomons explains why most black dancers were not drawn to the aesthetic of Grand Union: “Black audiences and artists typically were interested in messages, be they of rebellion, oppression, or emotion. In general, they didn’t see the point in making work that was only about itself and not the human condition as they experienced it.”70 I might quibble with his depiction of downtown dance as not representing the human condition, but his point is well taken.
It wasn’t until 1982, when Ishmael Houston-Jones curated a slate of African American dance artists for a series called Parallels at Danspace Project, that many of us recognized that postmodern dance was attracting more black dancers than it had before. Danspace, a center of downtown (heretofore mostly white) dance, had been costarted by Dilley in 1974. When curating Parallels, Houston-Jones included not only Solomons and others who had crossed the black/white divide long before, like Harry Whittaker Sheppard and Blondell Cummings, but also younger dance artists like Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. This series created space for black dancers to feel welcomed in downtown dance houses. They were part of a vibrant postmodern dance as a new art form.
As author Richard Kostelanetz pointed out, SoHo in the seventies was particularly hospitable to new forms of art.71 While Clark Center nobly upheld the tradition of modern dance, experiments in holography, video art, and book art (and as we have seen, food art) were sprouting up in SoHo or nearby. The Kitchen Center opened in the Broadway Central Hotel in 1971, specifically to nurture the new art form of video.72 In 1973, when it moved to Broome and Wooster Streets, it welcomed music, soon to be followed by performance art and dance. (When the Grand Union performed there in 1974, Kathy Duncan’s review called the troupe a “utopian democracy.”)73 The Kitchen fostered the careers of dancers and other artists who brazenly crossed lines of genre and etiquette, for example Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Eric Bogosian, Molissa Fenley, Christian Marclay, Charles Atlas, and Robert Ashley. (My dance company too was presented there.) With a professional staff to generate publicity and raise funds, it was a more polished operation than either 80 Wooster or 112 Greene. The Kitchen could commission new works and could even send an interdisciplinary band of experimental artists to tour Europe.
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John Cage’s ideas pervaded SoHo like a mist. Visual artists like Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Donald Judd were redefining American art, forming all kinds of hybrids and crossovers. Judd presented Philip Glass and his ensemble at his building on Spring Street, the first of a string of gigs for the Glass Ensemble in galleries and museums.74 Just outside the bounds of SoHo, places like Printed Matter (for artists’ books), La MaMa (for experimental theater), The Living Theatre, and The Clocktower (similar to The Kitchen but more site-specific) added to the mix.
The desire to bust out of cultural or genre straitjackets continued into the seventies, and SoHo provided spaces for that to happen. As sculptor Suzanne Harris said, “We didn’t need the rest of the world. Rather than attacking a system that was already there, we chose to build a world of our own.”75
That world was supported by Avalanche, a maverick art publication that considered itself a sibling to 112 Greene and FOOD, where it was available to peruse. Avalanche advocated new genres like earth art, body art, collaborations, video art, and installation. The cofounders, Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp, were part of the art scene and presented text and images from the artists’ point of view. Grand Union members were often interviewed, and three of Avalanche’s thirteen issues, which spanned the same six years as Grand Union, devoted cover stories to Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Dilley, and Steve Paxton. When Grand Union performed in Buffalo in 1973, Avalanche coeditor Liza Béar, staff photographer Gwenn Thomas, and production person Linda Lawton drove up to Buffalo to shoot and audiotape the performance. They produced a new response form: photographs with dialog bubbles taken directly from the dancer’s improvised conversations.
Excerpt of Avalanche’s comic strip in response to GU’s performance at Buffalo State College, 1973. Design by Willoughby Sharp, photos by Gwenn Thomas, editing by Liza Béar and Linda Lawton, lettering by Jean Izzo. Appeared in Avalanche 8 (Summer/Fall 1973). Courtesy of Liza Béar and the Estate of Willoughby Sharp.
INTERLUDE
PHILIP GLASS ON JOHN CAGE
Artists of all disciplines were affected by Cage’s ideas, either directly or indirectly. I find Glass’s interpretation to be less conceptual than most; he focuses on the interdependence of art and audience. The following is an excerpt from his autobiography, Words Without Music: A Memoir.
I had been immersed in Cage’s Silence, the Wesleyan University Press collection of writings published in 1961. This was a very important book to us in terms of the theory and aesthetic of postmodernism. Cage especially was able to develop a very clear and lucid presentation of the idea that the listener completes the work. It wasn’t just his idea: he attributed it to Marcel Duchamp, with whom he was associated. Duchamp was a bit older but he seemed to have been very close to John. They played chess together, they talked about things together, and if you think about it that way, the Dadaism of Europe took root in America through Cage. He was the one who made it understandable for people through a clear exposition of how the creative process works, vis-à-vis the audience.
Take John’s famous piece 4’33”. John, or anyone, sits at the piano for four minute[s] thirty-three seconds and during that time, whatever you hear is the piece. It could be people walking through the corridor, it could be the traffic, it could be the hum of the electricity in the building—it doesn’t matter. The idea was that John simply took this space and this prescribed period of time and by framing it, announced, “This is what you’re going to pay attention to. What you see and what you hear is the art.” When he got up, it ended.
The book Silence was in my hands not long after it came out, and I would spend time with John Rouson and Michel [Zeltzman] talking and thinking about it. As it turned out, it became a way that we could look at what Jaspers Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, or almost anybody from our generation or the generation just before us did, and we could understand it in terms of how the work existed in the world.
The important point is that a work of art has no independent existence. It has a conventional identity and a conventional reality and it comes into being through an interdependence of other events with people….
The accepted idea when I was growing up was that the late Beethoven quartets or The Art of the Fugue or any of the great masterpieces had a platonic identity—that they had an actual, independent existence. What Cage was saying is that there is no such thing as an independent existence. The music exists between you—the listener—and the object that you’re listening
