Edited with text by Fionn Meade, Joan Rothfuss. Foreword by Olga Viso. Text by Carlos Basualdo, Juliet Bellow, Philip Bither, Roger Copeland, Mary L. Coyne, Douglas Crimp, Hiroko Ikegami, Kelly Kivland, Claudia La Rocco, Benjamin Piekut, David Vaughan. Interviews by Victoria Brooks, Danielle Goldman, Aram Moshayedi.
How Cunningham transformed postwar culture through collaboration
Renowned as both choreographer and dancer, Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) also revolutionized dance through his partnerships with the many artists who created costumes, lighting, films and videos, and décor and sound for his choreographic works. Cunningham, together with partner John Cage, invited those artists to help him rethink what dance could mean, both on the stage and in site-responsive contexts. His notion that movement, sound and visual art could share a “common time” remains one of the most radical aesthetic models of the 20th century and yielded extraordinary works by dozens of artists and composers, including Charles Atlas, John Cage, Morris Graves, Jasper Johns, Rei Kawakubo, Robert Morris, Gordon Mumma, Bruce Nauman, Ernesto Neto, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, David Tudor, Stan VanDerBeek, Andy Warhol and La Monte Young, among many others. These collaborations bring to the fore Cunningham’s direct impact upon postwar artistic practice.
This 456-page volume, published in conjunction with the Walker Art Center and MCA Chicago’s exhibition, reconsiders the choreographer and his collaborators as an extraordinarily generative interdisciplinary network that preceded and predicted dramatic shifts in performance, including the development of site-specific dance, the use of technology as a choreographic tool and the radical separation of sound and movement in dance. It features ten new essays by curators and historians, as well as interviews with contemporary choreographers—Beth Gill, Maria Hassabi, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener—who address Cunningham’s continued influence. These are supplemented by rarely published archival photographs, reprints of texts by Cunningham, Cage and other key dancers, artists and scholars, several appendices and an extensive illustrated chronology placing Cunningham’s activities and those of his collaborators in the context of the 20th century, particularly the expanded arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s. This book is an essential volume for anyone interested in contemporary art, music and dance.
Viola Farber, Carolyn Brown, Merce Cunningham and Barbara Lloyd Dilley in 'Suite for Five' (1956), University of California, Los Angeles, July17, 1963. Photograph is reproduced from 'Merce Cunningham: Common Time.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Surface Magazine
Kat Herriman
Like the iconoclast it celebrates, Common Time is a dynamic force, bringing in multiple voices and generations.
Art Summary
Merce Cunningham: Common Time is the first survey exhibition to measure the late choreographer and dancer’s indelible impact on generations of artists.
NPR
Euan Kerr
[Common Time] at Minneapolis' Walker Art Center celebrates [Cunningham's] dance legacy, and explores his impact on modern music and visual art.
The New York Times
Holland Cotter
Nearly as rich, complex and bewildering as Cunningham’s dance.
The Brooklyn Rail
Elliot J. Reichert
Common Time comes together unexpectedly and unconventionally. This retrospective sets a new bar for exhibiting performance and collaborative collectivity with spirit and dignity.
ARTNET News
Ben Davis
From one end of Common Time to the other, you cannot escape Cunningham’s image, and what shines out is his burning personality as a performer, the sense you get of him as a radiant, centering artistic force.
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Self-described Futurist and content advisor Béatrice Dupire - known for her work with luxury brands, for curating "Yves St Laurent, Forty Years of Creation" and for founding both the International Festival of Fashion Photography in Paris and "Th(e) Influencer" luxury lifestyle think tank - has recently launched an Instagram account pairing images and words she encounters in her daily search for the interesting, the new and the now. The companion to her forthcoming "anticipative vision" website, The IYE,@theiye on Instagram presents immediate and compelling digital collages of word and imagery. We asked Beatrice to pair images from a few of our books. They are below, along with the hashtags she uses to explain them. continue to blog
In 1990, Nam June Paik said, "Merce's dance is a dance without a center, without a focal point, without a story or even sex appeal. It's decentralized, like the canvases of Jasper Johns or Mark Rothko, although it’'s cooler and sparser than Abstract Expressionism. Someday I’d like to film him and his group dancing in a schoolyard, looking down at them from above, on a rooftop, far away. That’s my dream." Reproduced from Merce Cunningham: Common Time, this still is from Merce by Merce by Paik by Charles Atlas, Shigeko Kubota and Paik. Produced in 1978, the video collages manipulated and colorized images of Cunningham dancing with footage of city traffic and a baby's first steps, alongside the subtitle, "Is this dance?" continue to blog
In 1997, Comme des Garçons' Rei Kawakubo collaborated with Merce Cunningham on the dance Scenario. It was a first for both: Cunningham had never collaborated with a fashion designer and Kawakubo had never created costumes for dance or theater. "My creations are not calculated from the start," Kawakubo is quoted in the Walker Art Center's remarkable exhibition catalog (launching in New York tonight at 192 Books.) "The fact that Merce Cunningham has always directed much of his attention to the workings of chance is something that I can appreciate only too well. The dancers intensify the meeting of body and costume; Scenario will become a thrilling synergy between form and space." Pictured here, Lisa Boudreau, Glen Rumsey and Thomas Caley performing Scenario in Paris, January, 1998. continue to blog
This 1970 photograph of Merce Cunningham performing in Canfield at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, is reproduced from Common Time, published by the Walker Art Center to accompany concurrent exhibitions at the Walker and MCA Chicago. It is collaged together with Gordon Mumma's 1962 score for A Choreography for Pianists from MEDIUM SIZE MONOGRAPH. Together with David Tudor and John Cage, Mumma was a member of Merce Cunningham Dance Company's unofficial "house band," which produced some of the most experimental music of the twentieth century. continue to blog
Reproduced from the Walker Art Center's stupendous 456-page catalog to Merce Cunningham: Common Time—which opens with concurrent shows at the Walker and MCA Chicago this week—this image is a composite of Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing Anniversary Event during Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 Weather Project at Tate Modern (interior) and MCDC performing Persepolis Event in highly volatile 1972 Iran (exterior). "What did it mean to perform in Iran in 1972, when the country was governed by an oppressive regime," Hiroko Ikegami asks, citing criticism by Jean Tinguely and others. From the point of view of composer and company musician Gordon Mumma, however, "'What could be viewed as a condoning action from outside the country can in reality be a subversive action if seen from within.'" continue to blog
Merce Cunningham: Common Time is here at last! An extraordinary book in every way, this 456-page catalog to the shows currently on view at the Walker Art Center and MCA Chicago features 400 archival images of the dances, the dancers, the collaborators, the sets, the scene, the costumes, the experiments, the ephemera, the choreography and the choreographer himself. All of the connections are drawn. Printed on numerous deluxe papers, and innovatively designed by curator Emmet Byrne and senior designer Ryan Gerald Nelson, it more than lives up to the Walker's legendary standard of book design. Scholarly essays, interviews, transcripts of conversations, and artist writings are both insightful and invaluable. Robert Rauschenberg's reflection on his 10-year period with the company expresses the joie de vivre that infuses every page: "All of us worked totally committed, shared every intense emotion, and, I think, performed miracles, for love only." continue to blog
TUESDAY, MARCH 21 at 7PM, 192 Books presents Merce Cunningham: Common Time curator and editor Joan Rothfuss in conversation with Merce Cunningham Trust Scholar in Residence Nancy Dalva discussing how Cunningham transformed postwar culture through collaboration. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9 x 11.75 in. / 456 pgs / 250 color / 150 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $49.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $69.95 GBP £40.00 ISBN: 9781935963141 PUBLISHER: Walker Art Center AVAILABLE: 4/25/2017 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Walker Art Center. Edited with text by Fionn Meade, Joan Rothfuss. Foreword by Olga Viso. Text by Carlos Basualdo, Juliet Bellow, Philip Bither, Roger Copeland, Mary L. Coyne, Douglas Crimp, Hiroko Ikegami, Kelly Kivland, Claudia La Rocco, Benjamin Piekut, David Vaughan. Interviews by Victoria Brooks, Danielle Goldman, Aram Moshayedi.
How Cunningham transformed postwar culture through collaboration
Renowned as both choreographer and dancer, Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) also revolutionized dance through his partnerships with the many artists who created costumes, lighting, films and videos, and décor and sound for his choreographic works. Cunningham, together with partner John Cage, invited those artists to help him rethink what dance could mean, both on the stage and in site-responsive contexts. His notion that movement, sound and visual art could share a “common time” remains one of the most radical aesthetic models of the 20th century and yielded extraordinary works by dozens of artists and composers, including Charles Atlas, John Cage, Morris Graves, Jasper Johns, Rei Kawakubo, Robert Morris, Gordon Mumma, Bruce Nauman, Ernesto Neto, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, David Tudor, Stan VanDerBeek, Andy Warhol and La Monte Young, among many others. These collaborations bring to the fore Cunningham’s direct impact upon postwar artistic practice.
This 456-page volume, published in conjunction with the Walker Art Center and MCA Chicago’s exhibition, reconsiders the choreographer and his collaborators as an extraordinarily generative interdisciplinary network that preceded and predicted dramatic shifts in performance, including the development of site-specific dance, the use of technology as a choreographic tool and the radical separation of sound and movement in dance. It features ten new essays by curators and historians, as well as interviews with contemporary choreographers—Beth Gill, Maria Hassabi, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener—who address Cunningham’s continued influence. These are supplemented by rarely published archival photographs, reprints of texts by Cunningham, Cage and other key dancers, artists and scholars, several appendices and an extensive illustrated chronology placing Cunningham’s activities and those of his collaborators in the context of the 20th century, particularly the expanded arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s. This book is an essential volume for anyone interested in contemporary art, music and dance.
