I’ll start by saying that I was excited to experience something similar to what we are talking about in class in the actual gallery space. The gallery space kind of puts it in context (even though I know that the relationship between installation art and museum/gallery spaces is complicated).
Admittedly, I was a little suspicious of how bringing a painting to life in dance was going to work, but I was pleasantly surprised. The performance of the short dance pieces next to the paintings in a full gallery totally made sense. During this piece, I was really thinking a lot about how we as the audience were interacting with the situation.
I was annoyed about all of the people creaking around and moving around to take photos. I know that documentation is part of the problem with performance like this, but in my mind the efforts to document the experience took away from the experience. That aside, I think making the very 2dimensional paintings (especially since Gambrell seemed to really engage with some more formalist ideas about painting) super 3dimensional and bodily was very interesting. I think this performance felt more similar to Yvonne Rainer’s minimalism. I think there wasn’t so much going on during the performance that we got to see. I don’t mean to say that it isn’t very nuanced and complex –and I think that by getting to talk with Gambrell so extensively before this piece changed how I would have perceived it otherwise –but I felt like the thing this collaboration was trying to achieve was relatively straightforward.
The goal was to bring the paintings into the 3 dimensional (or
4 dimensional) space, and this happened. The experience felt relatively unified.
My experience as a spectator was a little bit uncomfortable, but only so in
moments when I felt like my singular participation was going to be required.
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