ART BY TRANSLATION
  • Ralph Lemon, Yvonne Under the Sleeping Gypsy, 2014. Image courtesy the artist

Lecture “Soyoung Yoon : ‘Is it alive, is it real?’”

Graduate Center, CUNY, New York. In the context of The House of Dust exhibition at the James Gallery
September 14, 2016

Participants: Soyoung Yoon, Art History and Visual Studies and Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School.

What is a “productive body”? How does the category of the productive body—or the unproductive body, the obstinate body—change our approach to questions of subjectivity, identity, and corporeality? In this talk, Soyoung Yoon critiqued a newfound fetish for the activity or “liveness” of the human body in relation to choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s most recent performance, The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move? (2014/5). As Rainer questions the practices by which the work of a performer is measured and valued, Yoon asked: What of the invisibility of the performer’s work, in relation to the hyper-visibility of the performer’s body? Introduced by Kaegan Sparks, this evening investigated current concerns in the practice of Yvonne Rainer, a pioneering artist of the downtown scene along with Alison Knowles in the 1960s, 1970s, and continuing today.