Douglas Dreishpoon chaired a panel at the 99th annual CAA conference titled Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn't Focused on Art. Next to him on the dais sat Petah Coyne, Philip Taaffe, Vija Celmins, Robert Gober and Janine Antoni, an A-List panel by any measure. The topic at hand was the issue of what these highly successful artists do in their down time -- on the face of it not an earth-shattering subject but in fact a matter of fairly deep importance to those of us committed to this art-making life who are also required to deal with day-jobs, children and so forth.
The discussion was enlightening for a number of reasons, easily worth the price of admission. It was bookended however by two presentations of sorts that especially bear noting and that, for me, eclipsed the rest.
Petah Coyne came prepared with stories from childhood and from her daily life that at times only obliquely related to the panel subject, but that projected very vividly from the rostrum as part of a PowerPoint presentation she delivered in a very natural if well-rehearsed manner. She ended the segment about each work she discussed with the title of the book she most closely associated with it; obviously in her off-time she's a reader. The repetition of this closing and the arcane book titles themselves lent a very appealing oddness to her presentation, in my opinion an oddness much in keeping with the appeal of some of her works.
Her presentation at CAA for the most part added to my memory of the experience of her installation at MASS MoCA, while opening even more questions that will likely never be answered. My lasting impression is of Coyne's mastery of association between remembered experience and material.
If listening to Coyne was like looking down a tunnel bored into memory itself, lined with stories, great piles and hanks of hair, silk flowers and taxidermy, listening to and watching Antoni was like being gently shooed into moment-to-moment now-ness.
Janine Antoni was last to hold forth on her down-time activities. She started off by talking about Jung and Active Imagination, then segued into something she refers to as her obsession which she called 5Rhythms. This movement meditation practice was devised by Gabrielle Roth during the 1960's. Antoni described some of the basics, then descended the dais and, pre-wired with remote mike, gave a live demonstration while talking about each of the five rhythms.
From my notes the rhythms are Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness. Each rhythm, which manifests itself in dance, is a kind of movement with its own characteristics. For example Staccato is distinguished by 'heart, breath, beat,' while in Chaos "The thinking brain drops into the body," and Antoni tells us that images come to her in Stillness.
She made it clear at the outset that 5Rhythms is a meditation and that manifesting it performatively is not really in keeping with its nature and intention. Just the same it made for a highly compelling performance, perhaps in part because Antoni is so clearly at ease with her body and, by extension, with herself. Very little if anything was self-conscious about her dance as she transitioned from one rhythm to the next, explaining very naturally if at times a bit breathlessly about the meaning of each.
What fascinated me most was the way Antoni transformed the site from a somewhat ruptured matrix of two- or three-hundred-odd spaces of disparate focuses, concerns and ambitions into a single roughly unified performance space, tattered at the edges to be sure but holding a solid core of focus, admiration, contemplation.
As proof consider that she was dancing at audience level, making viewing beyond the nearest three or four rows difficult. Yet in this audience that a half-hour before was shouting "LOUDER!" at Vija Celmins, probably one of the gentlest souls on Earth, no one stood up for a better view, sidled in close with a camera, or otherwise behaved disruptively.
By the time Antoni completed Stillness a new tone had set in, lingering well into the question-and-answer session that followed.
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