{"product_id":"being-watched-yvonne-rainer-and-the-1960s-9780262516075","title":"Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s","description":"\u003cb\u003eHow Yvonne Rainer's art shaped new ways of watching as well as performing; how it connected 1960s avant-garde art to politics and activism. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn her dance and performances of the 1960s, Yvonne Rainer famously transformed the performing body--stripped it of special techniques and star status, traded its costumes and leotards for T-shirts and sneakers, asked it to haul mattresses or recite texts rather than leap or spin. Without discounting these innovations, Carrie Lambert-Beatty argues in \u003ci\u003eBeing Watched\u003c\/i\u003e that the crucial site of Rainer's interventions in the 1960s was less the body of the performer than the eye of the viewer--or rather, the body as offered to the eye. Rainer's art, Lambert-Beatty writes, is structured by a peculiar tension between the body and its display. Through close readings of Rainer's works of the 1960s--from the often-discussed dance Trio A to lesser-known Vietnam war-era protest dances--Lambert-Beatty explores how these performances embodied what Rainer called \"the seeing difficulty.\" (As Rainer said: \"Dance is hard to see.\") Viewed from this perspective, Rainer's work becomes a bridge between key episodes in postwar art. Lambert-Beatty shows how Rainer's art (and related performance work in Happenings, Fluxus, and Judson Dance Theater) connects with the transformation of the subject-object relation in minimalism and with emerging feminist discourse on the political implications of the objectifying gaze. In a spectacle-soaked era, moreover--when images of war played nightly on the television news--Rainer's work engaged the habits of viewing formed in mass-media America, linking avant-garde art and the wider culture of the 1960s. Rainer is significant, argues Lambert-Beatty, not only as a choreographer, but as a sculptor of spectatorship.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCarrie Lambert-Beatty is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50318717092114,"sku":"9780262516075","price":54.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_d3ed0208-bc9d-47b2-b565-8ee10a3636f8.jpg?v=1727560247","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/being-watched-yvonne-rainer-and-the-1960s-9780262516075","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}