ROGER COPELAND
I think I am a reinventor. I don't think there is anything left to
invent. I think there are only new combinations of things. And a
new way of looking at something and a new way of showing
somebody else to look at something, and that's a kind of re–
invention.
Dance As An Art Object
113
Gordon's ideas about reinvention bear a striking resemblance
to Marcel Duchamp's concept of the "unassisted readymade."
Unlike the pioneers of modern dance, the postmodernists didn't
invent a new movement vocabulary; often they simply transplanted
what Yvonne Rainer called "found movements" into an "art con–
text" (where, like found objects and readymades, these "pedes–
trian" movements were involuntarily stripped of their worldly func–
tion and "estheticized"). Thus-according to this argument-the
context (rather than the content) determines whether or not the per–
ceptual object is a work of art. (As Allan Kaprow once put it, "The
framework tells you what it is: a cow in a concert hall is a musician,
a cow in a barn is a cow.")
It's often said that this sort of relativism plays havoc with the
art-historical values represented by the museum; but ironically, just
the reverse is true. The idea of the readymade, the found object or
movement-indeed, the" art context" itself-is possible
only
in the
age of the museum (which, as Malraux has demonstrated, is a quin–
tessentially contemporary phenomenon). The museum, in other
words, can be defined as a space in which objects (many of which
once served some sort of function) are estranged from their original
environments and relocated in an "art context." Subsequently, their
sole "function" is to be looked at. Duchamp's great achievement
was to suggest that the museum is really a state of mind, that we
"museumize" his readymades when we learn to look at them in a
disinterested, nonfunctional way. (This state of mind may be facili–
tated by the museum, but, theoretically, it can be achieved any–
where.)
Traditionally, it was assumed that the art object imposed the
proper "esthetic attitude" (involuntarily) upon the perceiver.
Duchamp-and many of the postmodern choreographers-place the
burden of achieving this attitude more squarely on the viewer.
In
Lucinda Child's
Street Dance
(1965), for example, the audience was
