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
Hbk, 9 x 11.75 in. / 456 pgs / 250 color / 150 bw. | 4/25/2017 | In stock $49.95
Published by The Song Cave/Merce Cunningham Trust. Edited by Frances Starr.
On the occasion of Merce Cunningham’s centennial comes this handsome new edition of his classic and long-out-of-print artist’s book Changes: Notes on Choreography, first published in 1968 by Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press. The book presents a revealing exposition of Cunningham’s compositional process by way of his working notebooks, containing in-progress notations of individual dances with extensive speculations about the choreographic and artistic problems he was facing.
Illustrated with over 170 photographs and printed in color and black and white, the book was described by its original publisher as “the most comprehensive book on choreography to emerge from the new dance … [which] will come to stand with Eisenstein’s and Stanislavsky’s classics on the artistic process.” By the time these notebooks were published, Cunningham had already led the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 15 years, and had collaborated with Cage and others on milestones such as Variations V (1966) and RainForest (1968), the latter with Andy Warhol, David Tudor and Jasper Johns.
Along with his essay collection Dancing in Space and Time (1978), Changes is one of the most significant publications on Cunningham’s enduring contributions to dance, which developed through collaboration with John Cage to incorporate formal innovation with regard to chance, silence and stillness.
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.
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.
Published by Damiani. Afterword by Nancy Dalva. Composition by Trevor Carlson
In Beyond the Perfect Stage, Stephanie Berger captures the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing in a series of site-specific “Events” from 2008 to 2011 from a multiplicity of perspectives, creating a photographic choreography that combines the “Events” in a new way. The Cunningham dancers warm up and then perform in various situations—as Cunningham called the galleries and the especially constructed stages for each “Event”—including Richard Serra’s steel sculptures, Dan Flavin’s neon light installations, Sol LeWitt’s Minimalist white boxes and the vast Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory. Berger captures Cunningham’s evanescent art, constructing a new experience while at the same time preserving the original, thus operating very much within the aesthetic framework Cunningham himself proposed. Vivid, immediate, unmediated yet curated, her photographic “Event” contextualizes the dances in a personal but entirely available form.
A Pictures Book for John Cage Xmas 1984 is a facsimile edition of a spiralbound notebook filled with choreographic notation by Merce Cunningham (1919–2009), a leader of the American avant-garde throughout his 70-year career and one of the most important choreographers and dancers of all time. This previously unpublished document is one of the most extensive elaborations of Cunningham’s choreographic notation in print, offering a rare glimpse into his methods, and in particular the stage work Pictures (1984). Originally presented as a holiday gift from Cunningham to his lifetime partner, John Cage, this lovingly reproduced edition now in turn serves as a gift from the John Cage Trust to the Cunningham Dance Foundation, on the occasion of the dance company’s final performance, New Year’s Eve 2011. With exquisite color notations that blend drawing and dance, it will also make a perfect gift for any fan of modern art or music.
PUBLISHER The John Cage Trust
BOOK FORMAT Slip, spiralbound, 6 x 9 in. / 80 pgs / 39 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 5/31/2012 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2012 p. 101
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781935202790TRADE List Price: $45.00 CAD $55.00
Mikhail Baryshnikov, a photographer most of his adult life, has turned his lens on dance, and here pays vibrant homage to the work of master choreographer Merce Cunningham. In his introduction to Merce My Way Baryshnikov writes, "Watching Cunningham's dances through the eye of a lens is a lesson in the extremes and restraints of a dancer's body... to a dancer, such nakedness is revelatory." This volume offers 85 of Baryshnikov's striking, never-before-published color images, in which he seizes the essence of Cunningham's choreography by anticipating the dancers' motions and capturing the streaming fluidity of the dance. His images are radiant and electric--blurring motion, past, present and future into a single frame. Featuring images of six recent Cunningham dances, the book is a revelation for all those who revere dance--and the work of these two masters.
PUBLISHER The Baryshnikov Foundation
BOOK FORMAT Clth, 11 x 9.75 in. / 128 pgs / 177 color.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 2/1/2009 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2009 p. 38
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780982172605TRADE List Price: $45.00 CAD $55.00
The book on Mr. Cunningham aims at, and is, as complete and clear a portrait of the modern dance choreographer and his epochal work as has ever been published... The surprise of the Cunningham book is the grace with which it almost definitively sums up Mr. Cunningham's 63-year life in dance ... Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years is a compelling portrait of a simple yet complex man and an artist who has seldom faltered in his explorations of life and art on the simplest and most complex levels. --Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times “What emerges from this dispassionate, scrupulous account is much more than the chronicle of fifty years in the amazing and creative life of Merce Cunningham... Kudos to David Vaughan who has given us a noble work. As archivist for the Cunningham company for twenty years, he knows better than anyone how to turn this book about a great artist and about the art of this century into a work of art in itself.” --Mikhail Baryshnikov Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years celebrates the career of one of the most important artists of the twentieth century from his first innovative and explosive solo dances to the present. This unique book incorporates images of performances by many world renowned photographers, including Imogen Cunningham, Barbara Morgan, Annie Leibovitz, Peter Hujar and Arnold Eagle.
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.5 x 12 in. / 320 pgs / 242 reproductions.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION Contact Publisher Catalog:
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893816247TRADE List Price: $75.00 CAD $90.00
Published by Aperture. Essays by David Vaughan and Merce Cunningham.
Known worldwide for his remarkable, groundbreaking choreography, Merce Cunningham has a secret: he also draws. For the first time he opens a door into his fantastical animal kingdom with Aperture's publication of Other Animals. Cunningham, an obsessive observer with a colossal sense of humor, revels in nature with the same childlike vision and expressiveness that infuses his dances. Like his dances, his drawings are impressions, inventions, gestures and interactions. Cunningham introduces us to a bird riding a turtle, a bizarre hybrid creature wearing a fashionable sweater and an ostrich that rivals the gracefulness of his dancers. The drawings are collected in a beautifully produced, colorful volume, with selected entries from Cunningham's journals and photographs of some of his dances and their notations. These drawings offer a key to understanding how Cunningham renders his vision of the world through dance--and how his vision is translated into costuming through his collaboration with designers such as Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garconnes.
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8.5 x 9.75 in. / 96 pgs / 70 reproductions.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION Contact Publisher Catalog:
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893819460TRADE List Price: $22.98 CAD $25.00
Published by Walker Art Center. Artwork by Merce Cunningham. Contributions by Thelma Golden, Meredith Jones, Laura Kuhn.
Recogninzing the importance of performance in 20th century avant-garde art, this catalogue traces the careers of three artists who have each made a significant contribution to that history. Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk and Bill T. Jones.