(nostalgia)/After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid

For this more recent video work, Rainer pairs writings by Viennese luminaries Oscar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ludwig Wittgenstein with footage from a performance she choreographed for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project in 2000. “Beyond the resonance of the title,” Rainer has noted, “the 21st-century dance footage (itself containing 40-year-old instances of my 20th-century choreography) can be read multifariously—and paradoxically—as both the beneficiary of a cultural and economic elite and as an extension of an avant-garde tradition that revels in attacking that elite and its illusions of order and permanency.” The collapsing and displacement of time are also crucial to Hollis Frampton’s seminal (nostalgia), in which photographs from the artist’s younger days are systematically set upon a hot plate and melted away. Each picture is accompanied by a narration of its origins, but the soundtrack and image are slightly staggered, leaving the audience in a perpetual state, as befits the title, of recollection.

Copyright of Yvonne Rainer, courtesy of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Image copyright of Yvonne Rainer, courtesy of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.