Dance/Draw

by Helen Molesworth, Paul Chan, Catherine Lord

Dance and the visual arts have had a longstanding inter-relationship, but until now there has been no authoritative portrayal of their shared characteristics. Dance/Draw assembles works by around 40 artists, in an attempt to locate a place and a language in art history for the interactions between contemporary dance and the visual arts over the past 40 years. The idea of "the line" in its broadest sense is deployed as the conceptual anchor for this history. While modern dance deviated from the strictures of ballet en pointe, adopting everyday gestures and spontaneous childlike play into its vocabulary, contemporary drawing likewise discarded the confines of technical perfection to leap beyond the (picture) frame. In both instances, the line was liberated from an aspiration towards perfected form, in order to appear in space as a mobile, open-ended, socially integrative element. Dance/Draw provides a fascinating conceptual take on this liberating paradigm shift, looking at works by William Anastasi, Janine Antoni, Ruth Asawa, Charles Atlas, Jérôme Bel, Trisha Brown, John Cage, Paul Chan, Liz Collins, Louise Fishman, William Forsythe, Gego, David Hammons, Mona Hatoum, Eva Hesse, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Senga Nengudi, Cornelia Parker, Howardena Pindell, Yvonne Rainer, Daniel Ranalli, Fred Sandback, Amy Sillman, Cecilia Vicuña, Faith Wilding and many others.

176 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2011

About the author

Helen Molesworth is Chief Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston. She edited Louise Lawler's "Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (looking back)", published by the Wexner Center for the Arts and distributed by the MIT Press.

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

704.94979 D173 2011