Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2

Abstract

Nothing could seem further apart than photography and abstract painting, the one wholly dependent upon the world for the source of its imagery, the other shunning that world and the images it might provide. Yet now, in the '70s, over large stretches of the abstract art that is being produced, the conditions of photography have an implacable hold. If we could say of several generations of painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the conscious aspiration for their work was that it attain to the condition of music, we have now to deal with an utterly different claim. As paradoxical as it might seem, photography has increasingly become the operative model for abstraction. I am not so much concerned here with the genesis of this condition within the arts, its historical process, as I am with its internal structure as one now confronts it in a variety of work. That photography should be the model for abstraction involves an extraordinary mutation, the logic of which is, I think, important to grasp. In trying to demonstrate how this is at work I wish to begin with an example drawn not from painting or sculpture, but rather from dance. The instance concerns a performance that Deborah. Hay gave last fall in which she explained to her audience that instead of dancing, she wished to talk. For well over an hour Hay directed a quiet but insistent monologue at her spectators, the substance of which was that she was there, presenting herself to them, but not through the routines of movement, because these were routines for which she could no longer find any particular justification. The aspiration for dance to which she had come, she said, was to be in touch with the movement of every cell in her body; that, and the one her audience was witnessing: as a dancer, to have recourse to speech. The event I am describing divides into three components. The first is a refusal to dance, or what might be characterized more generally as a flight from the terms of aesthetic convention. The second is a fantasy of total self-presence: to be in touch with the movement of every cell in one's body. The third is a verbal discourse through which the subject repeats the simple fact that she is presentthereby duplicating through speech the content of the second component. If it is interesting or important to list the features of the Hay performance, it is because