Ramsay Burt. De Montfort University, Leicester
‘Tap Dancing in a Coca Cola World: Andy Warhol and Judson Dance Theater.’
Stream: Repetition and Performance 

This paper examines correspondences and connections between Andy Warhol's work in the early 1960s and that of Judson Dance Theater, focusing in particular on Warhol's 1963 painting Ethel Scull 36 Times and Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer's dance piece Word Words, also from 1963. Both works, I will argue, exemplify similar anti-expressive sensibilities. By examining the role that repetition plays in producing this anti- expressiveness, my aim is to show that these artists chose not to be conventionally expressive in ways that disrupted restrictive, normative ways of performing the self.
Ethel Scull 36 Times consists of 36 individual canvases, each painted a strong or bright colour and silk-screened in black with one of a series of photographs of Ethel Scull; these were taken in a coin-operated photo booth in an amusement arcade in Time Square. Word Words was a piece that consisted of a solo danced by Rainer, danced again by Paxton, and then repeated a third time by both together in unison. By bringing these two works together this paper posits an interdisciplinary space in which to analyse what I argue are most usefully seen as interdisciplinary works. Ethel Scull 36 Times, I suggest, should not just be evaluated in terms of form and colour, paint qualities and effects, as to do so would be to miss the particular way it evokes traces of a performance which was created in order to produce the photographs. Word Words was not just a sequence of abstract movements reduced to their essentials, but a performance which fore-grounded the materiality of two dancing bodies engaged in executing object-like sequences of movement installed in the performance space. It therefore functioned like a contemporaneous minimal sculpture.
I have identified the interdisciplinary orientation of these two works here by contrasting this with a formalist modernist way of accounting for them so as to demonstrate the way in which each piece intervened within dominant modernist critical discourses of the 1960s. This way of looking at the theoretical engagements of some of the art of the 1960s is one that has been developed by art critics and historians associated with the journal October. Indeed Rainer herself has written for October as well as being the subject of essays by scholars published in that journal. I am mainly concerned, however, with the performative nature of these interdisciplinary works and the kinds of subject positions in which the dance work placed an audience member and the painting placed the viewer. This positioning, I shall show, differed significantly from that proposed within modernist critical discourse.
Ethel Scull's husband Robert, a millionaire who had made his money in the taxi business, was a prolific collector of Pop Art. Ethel Scull 36 Times hung on the wall of their Manhattan apartment until they gave it to the Whitney Museum in 1985. Word Words was only performed once, for a small audience in the gym at Judson Memorial Church on 29th January 1963. It survives in a few photographs together with details recalled in later interviews in much the same way that Ethel Scull's performance in the photo booth survives. Any discussion of the performative element of Warhol's painting and the sculptural quality of the dance is dependent on visual and verbal records read in relation to information about their context. Repetition is central to both works. As philosopher Gilles Deleuze, following David Hume, points out: 'Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it' (1994: 90). This paper explores what the dance and painting change in the minds of their beholders. It therefore proceeds as follows: it looks first at these works in their shared context, it then considers two aspects of the way repetition occurs in them, focusing on the significance of the way each mediates temporality, and on the way their repetitions produce difference.
Although I am looking at parallels and correspondences between Paxton, Rainer and Warhol’s practice in the 1960s, I do not wish to suggest any especially significant connections between dancers and painter. There is little connection between Warhol and Steve Paxton, although the latter is probably the dancer mentioned at the beginning of Andy Warhol's 1968 novel A. All but one of the characters in this have pseudonyms; for example Warhol is called Drella (an amalgam of Cinderella and Dracula). Star Phillixter is described as a friend of Robert Rauschenberg, involved with the 'Judson music series' (sic.) and a former dancer with Merce Cunningham (1998: 12). As well as being a founder member of Judson Dance Theater, Paxton danced in Cunningham's company where he became close to Rauschenberg.
Rainer and Warhol were acquainted and knew each other’s work. In his published memoirs of the 1960s, Warhol recalls going to a concert at Judson Memorial Church: ‘I called up David Bourdon and told him to come with me to this beautiful concert there by Yvonne Rainer called Terrain, and later David said it was the most modern dance thing he’d ever been to’ (Warhol & Hackett 1996: 51). There is a photograph of Rainer with Warhol -- wearing his iconic striped T-shirt -- and the art historian Barbara Rose taken at a party in 1964 (reproduced in Rainer 2006: 249). Rainer wrote an article for Arts Magazine in 1967 which compared her husband Robert Morris’s recent sculpture with Warhol’s film The Chelsea Girls. Interviewed in 1972, she admitted particularly admiring two other films by Warhol, his 13 Most Beautiful Women and Henry Geldzahler both made in 1964 (Bear & Willoughby 1972). One of the thirteen women was the Judson choreographer Lucinda Childs whose shoulder was the subject of Warhol’s film Shoulder also of 1964. The main links between Warhol's studio, 'The Factory', and the Judson group were the dance artist Fred Herko and his friend Billy Linich, subsequently Billy Name, who Warhol hired to decorate the 47th Street Factory with silver foil, and who went on to become Factory foreman and fotographer (sic). Linich had done the lighting design for the first few dance concerts at Judson Memorial Church.
These superficial connections between the Judson group and the Factory are well known. The art historian Thomas Crow observed:
The values that were to lend a distinctive character to much 1960s art-making – rejection of hierarchy in favor of serial repetition, equality of parts, anonymous surfaces, suspicion of self-aggrandizing emotion – first came together as ethical imperatives in the conduct of the Judson circle. In any full account of the period, the impact of its reflective, proto-feminist variant of avant-gardism needs to be set against the far more prominent example offered by Warhol’s contemporaneous Factory. (1996: 128)
At Ruth Emmerson’s suggestion the Judson Group had adopted collective decision-making processes developed by the Quakers (Banes 1993: 68), and Crow is suggesting a connection between this and the work produced by group members. This democratic spirit was commented upon at the time. Reviewing the first dance concert at Judson Memorial Church in the Village Voice, Jill Johnston titled her piece ‘Democracy’, and called the concert a ‘democratic evening of dance’ with ‘something for everybody’ (1998: 38). The avant-gardism that Johnston identified in the new dance she also recognized in what was beginning to be called pop art.
Warhol’s use of silk-screen to reproduce mass produced objects and images also had a democratizing intention: ‘I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else’s,’ he told Gene Swenson in 1963 (Swenson 1963: 24). Interviewed with Brigid Polk in Emile De Antonio’s film Painters Painting, Warhol claimed that he no longer had anything to do with silk screening his paintings, Brigid did it; and if De Antonio wanted to know about them he should ask Brigid. Warhol didn't of course entirely relinquish control in the way this suggests. Intriguingly, he loaned Sturtevant the screens for his 1964 Flower paintings so that she could make her own replica. This avant-garde de-skilling of the process of art production is analogous to the use of pedestrian and found movement in Paxton and Rainer's works, and to their use of untrained performers. These helped to give their work a flat performance quality that was radically different from the expressionistic work of the leading modern dance choreographers of the day, Martha Graham and José Límon. Similarly the mechanical, impersonal paint surfaces of his silk screen paintings was radically different from the self-expressive and often tortured paint qualities of abstract expressionist paintings.
Word Words was a key work in Rainer's development away from normative ideas about self-expression in dance. When she had first performed her earliest piece Three Satie Spoons during a concert at the Living Theatre in 1961, as she later recalled:
[I]t was as good as orgasm. I knew that was where I lived, that was where I belonged, doing that work and presenting myself physically to an audience. And that, of course, was part of the charisma. That is the urgency, and that pleasure in exhibiting oneself is part of the seduction of an audience. The performer has to experience that in order for the audience to get a sense of this presence or to be taken in by it. (1999: 63)
Elsewhere she called this the ‘voyeuristic/narcissistic duality of doer and looker’ (1974: 238) that she attempted to minimise in her work. She says she first became aware of the 'problem of performance' (Rainer 1974: 68) through discussions with Steve Paxton.[1] Paxton himself later recalled that he often criticized Rainer for having too strong a stage presence (Banes 1995: 233, fn. 20). Word Words explored the performance of flattened, impersonal movement material, danced in a cool, neutral manner.
Paxton and Rainer choreographed Word Words collaboratively, Paxton making complex, Cunningham-like technical moves while Rainer offered 'twisting poses and very tiny, repetitive gestures' (ibid.: 89). The complete sequence, as I noted earlier, was performed twice as a solo and then in unison. Paxton said the title of Word Words was one of his self-reflexive titles: 'They do that business like: the first word is a word, the second is the same but pluralized. It doesn't reflect the dance at all; it is a way of using words' (cited in Bear 1975: 26). Paxton then pointed to a photograph of the piece showing Rainer and himself together, and explained that: 'It's a singularity and plurality play' (ibid.). He suggested that a starting point for the piece was a response that he and Rainer had received when they had unsuccessfully auditioned for a concert at the 92nd Street YW/YMHA. The 'Y' had a theatre with a long association with the kind of expressive modern dance that Paxton and Rainer had renounced. They heard that someone at the 'Y' had said 'those Judson people all look alike to me' (ibid.). Rainer remembers that in order to make the two dancers in Word Words look as much alike as possible, they originally thought of wearing gorilla suits, then Santa Claus suits. Then they thought of using make-up to redraw their faces to make them look alike, then finally settled on the idea of dancing in the nude with g-strings and, at the church's request, with paper covering Rainer's nipples (ibid.: 89).
The use of repetition in the choreography also emphasised the similarities between the two dancers. But when the beholder recognised that movement was being repeated, according to Deleuze's theory he or she also became aware of its difference from the first time. Paradoxically, the more Paxton and Rainer tried to performatively eliminate their differences from one another, the more their singularities became apparent. Far from expressing their individualities in an active, socially valued way, however, their singularities emerged as the passive consequence of their blank, neutral performance.
Rainer clearly recognized affinities between her own anti-expressive performances and the way Warhol directed performers in his films. The two films which she later said she admired -- 13 Most Beautiful Women and Henry Geldzahler -- were both examples of his filmed portraits or ‘screen tests’. Between 1964 and 1966 most people on arriving at The Factory for the first time were screen tested. Amy Taubin, one of the 13 Most Beautiful Women recalls 'I was escorted into a makeshift cubicle and positioned on a stool; Warhol looked through the lens, adjusted the framing, instructed me to sit still and try not to blink, turned on the camera and walked away'.[2] The screen tests were approximately three minutes long with the exception of Henry Geldzahler. Its subject, a friend of Warhol’s who was a keeper at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was filmed for 99 minutes in two long, unbroken, silent takes. Geldzahler recalls Warhol left him in front of the camera and went away to make some telephone calls 'but he'd come back once in a while and wave at me' (G in Wilcock 1971: n.p.).
Warhol disrupted conventional ways in which narcissism and voyeurism operate in the Hollywood star system by making his filmed subjects perform without an audience. This is also what he made Ethel Scull do on her own inside the photo booth. While Warhol on the other side of the curtain fed the machine with quarters, he supposedly told her 'Now start smiling and talking -- this is costing me money' (Watson 2003: 92). Several commentators suggest the painting glamorised Scull, making her perhaps the first Warhol superstar. Although she later joked about the experience, there was surely an element of cruelty in it. The way Warhol fed on other's discomfort surely inspired the 'Dracula' part of his nickname 'Drella'. As in the screen tests, I suggest, Warhol was putting psychological pressure on Scull so as to confuse her about the boundary between public and private behaviour. This is a boundary that is always already blurred. As Judith Butler notes: 'the body has its invariably public dimension: constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. Given over from the start to the world of others, bearing their imprint, formed within the crucible of social life, the body is only later, and with some uncertainty, that to which I lay claim as my own' (Butler 2004: 21). By in effect compelling Scull to smile and talk when no one was present and thus repeat her public persona in privacy, Warhol denaturalised her performance of self and revealed its constructedness.
So far I have concentrated on the blank, neutral performance qualities in the dance and the artificiality of the performance haunting the painting. These were not only produced by the way Scull and the dancers behaved, but also by the way repetition featured in the dance and painting. As Rainer observed in 1968: 'Repetition can serve to enforce the discreteness of a movement, objectify it, make it more-object-like. It also offers an alternative way of ordering material, literally making the material easier to see.' She then wryly added: 'That most theatre audiences are irritated by it is not yet a disqualification' (1974: 68).  Rainer is, I suggest, referring to the way repetitious performance can seem boring. It puts the beholder in the position of passively watching something they recognise; its familiarity robs it of the novelty it had previously exemplified. The beholder's passivity in this situation makes him or her aware of the work's duration. This situation, as Gilles Deleuze points out, 'is not carried out by the mind, but occurs in the mind which contemplates, prior to all memory and all reflection. Time is subjective, but in relation to the subjectivity of a passive subject' (1994: 91 emphasis in original). If the beholder, as Rainer put it, is irritated by this foregrounding of passive subjective experience, this is because it challenges and disrupts normative modes of aesthetic experience.
Since the Enlightenment, western aesthetic discourse has assumed that cognition of visually-oriented forms is instantaneous whereas it takes time to read prose or poetry. Thus the art historian and critic Michael Fried, writing in the 1960s, drew on eighteenth-century ideas when he argued that one should be able to take in a good painting or sculpture at a glance, although one might become absorbed in its contemplation. Similarly Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, in her 1966 book The Phenomenology of Dance argued that one appreciates aesthetic qualities in dance through a series of instantaneous revelations. In the case of Warhol's painting, however, it is not possible to take in the 36 panels in one glance. It takes time to scan across them, noting the variety of different images of Scull, and the use of repeated or mirrored images, and repeated shades of colour. Moreover, the overall conception of the piece suggests that there is no single, privileged moment that might condense the essence of the woman it portrays. In philosophical terms, it does not represent the rational subject proposed in Kant's writings nor Hegel's account of the unhappy conscience. Rather it seems to rehearse the subject in process of becoming that one finds theorised in the writings of Foucault and Deleuze, and more recently in Judith Butler's work.
Paxton and Rainer's piece also used repetition to critique notions of a unitary subjectivity. As I have argued, it was a piece that exposed the limits of widely held ideas about the essentially expressive nature of dance performance. Judith Butler, in a discussion of ideas about subject formation, has recently proposed that: 'To make oneself in such a way that one exposes the limits of the historical scheme of things, the epistemological and ontological horizon within which subjects come to be at all' is to 'engage in an aesthetic of the self that maintains a critical relation to existing norms' (2005: 17). Warhol's painting and Paxton and Rainer's dance piece, I suggest, rehearsed a process of engaging in this kind of aesthetics of the self by maintaining a critical distance from normative ideas about self-expression. By revealing the limits of these norms, I maintain, these works created possibilities for rehearsing differences that would otherwise have remained inconceivable and imperceptible.

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