Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) and Robert Morris (1931- ) was and is the American artists who made major contributions to the development respectively of Neo-Dada and Minimalism. A unique common denominator is detected in the early artistic careers of the two artists: Both creative minds were closely related to the postmodern development of dance of the time for about a decade. In the second half of the 1950s, the American art scene witnessed the revival of the element of the body, which was considered to belong to the realm of everyday life. This was part of the 'anti-art' reaction against the formalist attitude of modernist art, which was mainly and plausibly associated with Abstract Expressionism. Based on the belief that the collaboration between Rauschenberg and Morris and the postmodernists in the area of dance was in the core of this phenomenon, this article aims to look into the modes and properties of body movement, which is one of the seminal elements of dance.
In New York around the 1960s a new tendency called 'Gesamtkunstwerk (all-embracing art form or total artwork)' emerged to challenge the hegemony of modernist art, and among the proponents of this movement were artists of various disciplines such as music, dance and visual art. A good example of this would be <Theater Piece No. 1>(1952), a proto-happening piece shown at Black Mountain College. After this work that embodied the conjunction of 'dance as movement' in which everyday life was represented, 'music as sound' and 'art as surroundings,' the practice to combine art and dance was rapidly accelerated: many artists including Rauschenberg and Morris unfolded their creative capacity in the fields of set and prop design, fashion design, choreography and dance.
Rauschenberg became a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1954 and until 1977 he utilized his creativity in the designing of sets, props and costumes for 23 dance pieces in total. He materialized his artistic convictions through the so-called 'artworks as set designs': the sets for <Minutiae>(1954), which were prototypes for his 'Combines'; the dotted backdrop and costumes for <Summerspace>(1958) in which the relationship between man and its environment was delved into. Moreover, in <Pelican>(1963) and <Story>(1964) Rauschenberg performed in person while introducing his notion of 'live set'. Soon after that, he choreographed dance works including <Map Room Ⅱ>(1965) together with Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton of the Judson Dance Theater. Rauschenberg’s dances are the bodily personifications of the concept of 'multiplicity,' which characterizes the entirety of his artistic oeuvre. The body (of an artist), which is an unpredictable and uncontrollable, yet concrete physical entity, is fragmentized over and over whenever time and space changes without failing and simultaneously functions as the image that organically connect, like life itself, the different scenes to one another on the stage.
Morris’s collaboration with dancers was mostly realized through his relationships with Simone Forti, a choreographer, dancer and his ex-wife and with Yvonne Rainer, a member of the Judson Dance Theater. Having shared the interest in the concept of 'embodied response,' Morris and Forti independently gave form to the concept starting in the early 1960s. Morris forged his own sculptural style through which he proposed a new sensibility toward beholding, as he choreographed a number of dance works including <Site>(1964) and <Waterman Switch>(1965). He extended the experience of the intersubjectivity between the dancer and the viewer through the body of locomotive capacity into the phenomenological relationship between a sculpture and a viewer so as to expound the viewer’s bodily perception of the work of art. The impact of such Forti’s works as <Five Dance Constructions and Some Other Things>(1961) upon Morris’s activities mentioned above was tremendous. This is clearly evinced by Morris’s installations shown at the Tate in London in 1971 which rather forcefully enabled the viewer to experience it in person as well as the sculptures of his 'Untitled' Series first shown in 1964. Meanwhile, Yvonne Rainer abandoned such concepts essential to classical dances as spectacle, technique, illusion and transcendence and pursued the choreography of non-hierarchical composition by emphasizing the movements of monotonousness and repetitiveness in <Parts of Some Sextets>(1963) and <Trio A>(1968), and this demonstrates the integration of the performative dimension of Minimalism into the art form of dance.
The dance works of Morris and Rauschenberg defied the dualistic view of modernist art that asserted the dichotomy between mind and body by visually materializing the fact that both the physical movements carried out through the body and the phenomenal experiences sensed through the body were the properties of the body. What should be noted here is that these two artists’ self-involvement in the field of dance was done under the influence of the empirical and behavioristic thoughts of the time that placed less importance on the internal psychological states of the subject of perception than on his or her external actions. Currently, the exchange between art and dance in the 1960s and the factor of 'the body as the actual' that activated it are not in the center of the academic attention. The reason lies in the facts that dance has been neglected due to the belief that it is an art form practiced mainly by women and that Michael Fried’s idea of 'theatricality' has been employed only for the inquiries into the attributes of the art of the time: its site-specificity and institutional critique. It is true that the notion of theatricality is linked to the structure of theater arts. The Performance Art of America, however, did not derive from the avant-garde theatre. Rather, the rise and development of Performance Art is indebted to the marriage between art and other branches of the performing arts such as music and dance, besides theatre. More accurately, Performance Art arose somewhere in the continuum where dance and visual art met through the body. This is why the rapport between dance and art deserves much more attention.
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