Autonomy as a temporary collective experience: Anna Halprin's dance-events, Deweyan aesthetics, and the emergence of dialogical art in the Sixties.
Date
2012-04-17
Authors
Shea, Tusa
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Focusing on the event-based work of San Francisco dancer and choreographer, Anna Halprin, this dissertation argues that relational art and aesthetics is an integral feature of modernism that can be traced to the emergence of dialogue in art practices of the 1950s and 60s. I argue that John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics provided Anna Halprin, and other artists in her circle, with a coexistent experiential site for art’s conception and production. This alternative aesthetic model was based on an embodied, holistic approach to aesthetic experience that was fundamentally different from the Kantian-based formalism articulated by Clement Greenberg. Uncovering this alternative aesthetic model matters, not only because it is a neglected tradition with contemporary theoretical resonance, but because it allows us to see that event-based art produced during the 1960s was not merely deconstructive; it also had a constructive social purpose, namely the modeling of temporary, non-totalizing communal experiences. I analyze this contingent collectivism through an anarchist lens, in order to demonstrate that anarchic principles and models of agency were enacted and kept operational in art communities, networks, and events and, furthermore, were supported by holistic philosophies grounded in concrete experience.
Description
Keywords
Fine arts, Art History, Dance History