the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Yvonne Rainer

Blurring the Lines: Appropriation, Plagiarism, Homage, Parody

This lecture took place on November 10th, 2009 at 6:30 pm in the Rose Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

A lecture dealing with collage and confusion in Yvonne Rainer’s recent work.

About Yvonne Rainer

Yvonne Rainer made a transition to filmmaking following a fifteen-year career as a choreographer/dancer (1960-1975). After making seven experimental feature films — Lives of Performers (1972), Privilege (1990), MURDER and murder (1996), among others — she returned to dance in 2000 via a commission from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for the White Oak Dance Project. Her most recent media project, a video installation for a traveling solo gallery exhibition, contained dance and texts dealing with art and politics in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Her most recent dances are AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M., a re-vision of Balanchine’s Agon, RoS Indexical, a re-vision of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, and Spiraling Down, a meditation on soccer, aging, and war.  Her recent dances have been performed in New York, Los Angeles, Vienna, Helsinki, Kassel, Berlin, and Sao Paolo. A memoir, Feelings Are Facts: a Life, was published by MIT Press in 2006. Rainer is currently a Distinguished Professor of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine.

Relevant Links

• Readings for this lecture are available on the student login page.