If You Couldn't See Me, Walker Art

“If art is, as Bruce Nauman once put it, whatever an artist does in his or her studio, then what do we call whatever it is that dancers do in theirs—especially when they are making drawings? In other words, are Trisha Brown’s drawings more art than dance, or more dance than art? Moreover, is it possible (or even helpful) to try to discern the difference? The challenges presented by her drawings, nevertheless, elaborate upon those posed by performative practices more generally within the history of postwar visual art, but with a slight change of emphasis. Art history, owing to its preference for enduring objects, has struggled to make sense of the contingency between such objects or images and the activities that produced them—particularly in its efforts to describe the 1960s and 1970s, when those activities often became as much a part of the art as the products that survived.” Extract from IF YOU COULDN’T SEE ME

In this article Peter Eleey discusses the use of drawing in dance practices from the 1960s, focussing on Trisha Brown and including Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer.