Abstract
This article focuses on two experimental films from the 1960s: Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) and Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead (1968). It scrutinizes the way both works exhibit a hybridized and indeterminate approach to artistic media. It offers an empirical reading of the films’ movement and contextualizes them historically to move on to a theory of medium informed by Deleuze, Levinson, and Rajewsky. How does Rainer’s move from the time-based media of dance and choreography, and Serra’s move from the object arts of painting and sculpture, into the medium of film, advance our understanding of what is at stake aesthetically when boundaries of media are dissolved, transited, or displaced? Dance aesthetics requires that we show how movement gets translated into medium. I propose that the movement of media creates a displacement that is parallel to the displacement from the empirical to the theoretical in this article, where displacement becomes a form of reflection and critique.
Highlights
This article focuses on two experimental films from the 1960s: Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) and Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead (1968)
How does Rainer’s move from the time-based media of dance and choreography, and Serra’s move from the object arts of painting and sculpture, into the medium of film, advance our understanding of what is at stake aesthetically when boundaries of media are dissolved, transited, or displaced? Dance aesthetics requires that we show how movement gets translated into medium
The final question now is this: how does the arrival at a theory of displacement reflect back on the trajectory that the discussion has taken? Dance aesthetics requires that we show how movement gets translated into concepts, and in this article in particular, into medium
Summary
Rainer filmed the 8mm black and white film entitled Hand Movie (1966) with fellow Judson artist William Davis while confined to a hospital bed, recovering from surgery. It was her first film, and the first of a set that would become known as 5 Easy Pieces. Rainer was thirty-two at the time of the filming, and her comment raises issues of gender, age, and the historiography of living artists It illuminates the gap between her original experience and intention in making the film and what historians and theorists retrospectively read into the work, or what she has called “writers’ long-winded attempts to make anything more of the films,” with the present text apparently included in that category. When a viewer considers the exploratory, gently probing and sensate movements of Rainer’s hand, and contrasts them with the forceful grasping of falling pieces of lead in Serra’s Hand Catching Lead, what Douglas Crimp has described as a ”powerful male wrestling art from stuff,“26 a gender performance becomes effectively readable. I suggest that this creative act constitutes a movement between media, where artists working in diverse media act as catalyst for each other.
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