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of upright posture," which he defines as the ability "to look at things
straight ahead and withstand their thrust." This is a very apt
description of the perceptual conditions that prevail during a
Cunningham performance. The Cunningham dancer must concen–
trate so as not to be affected by the sound that accompanies his or
her movement, and Cunningham's audience must also remain
objectively detached.
If
Cunningham rejects what Arnheim calls the "biologically
lower, precerebral" image of man in modern dance, then so do
Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, the painters who have col–
laborated most often with Cunningham as designers of decor and
costumes. Rauschenberg and Johns are the two painters usually
credited with having done the most to repudiate the neoprimitivism
of the abstract expressionists, substituting a more objective and
impersonal mode of image making.
Abstract expressionism is distinctive for its physicality. Paint is
applied to canvas with the full physical force of the body (in Pollock's
case, the painter literally dances) . Johns and Rauschenberg,
inspired by the example of Duchamp, rejected the direct, unme–
diated physicality of abstract expressionism. This repudiation of the
"bodilyness" of action painting culminated eventually in the "de–
materialization of the art object , " the reduction of the art experience
to pure, disembodied "information."
If
dance is to follow in this
direction, it does so at the risk of its very identity. The same of
course can be said of painting and sculpture, but the renunciation of
physicality by dancers seems-if only symbolically-even more
perverse.
Kenneth King's work of the early seventies exemplifies the
extremity (and perraps the folly) of the postmodern dancer's
dilemma. Kenneth King, by the way, is a supremely talented dancer
with a swimmingly sensuous style, but for a period of several years,
in the late sixties and early seventies, a dance concert by King was
likely to consist of him
reading.
As early as 1966, in his
SuperLecture,
he declared, "I am an anti-body." That same year King unveiled a
work called
Praxiomatics (The Practzce Room),
his clearest statement
about the evolutionary dilemma of dance as an art form.
?-axiomatics
unfolds as an evolutionary journey from body to
mind in wh;ch gesture and action give way to language and thought.
Whirling, trance-inducing movements are gradually replaced by a
stream of verbiage while King unveils an odd looking device called
"The Telaxic Synapsulator." Billed as the first" metamachine," the
