Feelings Are Facts
A Life
by Yvonne Rainer
The MIT Press
In 1968, Yvonne Rainer wrote “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A.” In this retrospective assessment of her now-legendary four-and-a-half-minute dance Trio A, which premiered in 1965, Rainer carefully aligns her choreography and performance practices with contemporary developments in the visual arts that were then coalescing under the category of Minimalism.[1] “The artifice of performance has been reevaluated in that action, or what one does, is more interesting and important than the exhibition of character and attitude, and that action can best be focused on through the submerging of the personality; so ideally one is not even oneself, one is a neutral ‘doer.’” The dance itself, Rainer seems to say, is nothing more than a series of tasks, each movement devoid of expression and a simple carrying out of an instruction. The performance of these tasks constitutes all that we know about the subjects performing them; the spectator is trusted to understand these movements literally, never metaphorically. By extension, these actions are also the limit of what we ourselves can express about ourselves and what we can know about another self or subject.
The passage is quoted (in a footnote) in Rosalind Krauss’s Passages in Modern Sculpture. Written in 1977, the book is a genealogy of the transformation of the subject in 20th-century sculptural practices. Through a variety of structural operations, Krauss argued, modern sculpture freed itself from a history of idealism, and instead began to explore the externality of meaning: the public nature and objective, time-bound construction of subjectivity. This shift was manifested in Minimalism’s radical divergence from a tradition of art imbued with transcendental meaning—think of the smooth marble curves of Canova’s Neoclassical idealizations as much as the Greek figures that inspired him—toward a theory of art objects as contingent on the viewer’s perception of them in real time and space. This literalism appeared to eclipse the unconscious, to deal only with objects, bodies, and philosophy, and, most dramatically, to exclude emotion. This is the crux of Minimalism, as Hal Foster would later name it: the particularly 1960s brand of resistance—to both the overwrought pretensions of abstract expressionism and the increasingly dematerialized image world of postwar culture. This was the American avant-garde.
And Rainer was there, in the thick of it. She studied with Merce Cunningham, hung out with Robert Rauschenberg, and participated in happenings orchestrated by Dick Higgins and Allan Kaprow. She founded the Judson Dance Theater with Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton. First Al Held and then Robert Morris was her lover. Yvonne Rainer’s life is like the gospel to anyone who longs for the glory days of the downtown scene. Her art is more elusive; now, it exists mostly in documentation, like so much performance art of that moment. And these days, it gets harder and harder to imagine what “that moment” must have felt like.
Nostalgia, however, has little to do with Rainer’s recent memoir, Feelings are Facts. Written in a tone recalling the matter- of-fact register of her early writings, but discarding for the most part their polemics, Rainer’s book performs an autopsy of the artist’s emotional life. Ranging over her working-class childhood in California in the 1930s and 40s (spent mostly in orphan- ages and foster care with her brother due to her mother’s mental and physical heath), to her coming-of-age in bohemian circles in Berkeley and Chicago, to the beginning of her artistic practice in New York in the late 1950s, the book is a montage of letters, diary entries, family photographs, recollections, and retrospective analyses. These emotional documents are interspersed with records of her art: film scripts and stills, performance scores and photographs, and critical texts.
In the dynamic exchanges between past and present, and between the personal details of emotional life and the documentation of artistic practice, Rainer reopens the question of the subject in Minimalism, but also more broadly in 20th-century American culture.
In the memoir’s opening lines, Rainer launches us directly into her aggressively bohemian life in San Francisco in the early 1950s, during which her penetrating observations of ordinary minutiae and her acute sensitivity to the world around her collided with the vulgar sexuality of post- war American masculinity. It is September 1952 and she is looking at photos of Jayne Mansfield “lying on the floor, mouth open in an ecstatic expression while a guy goes down on her and people look on.” Rainer’s viewing companions are two men, one of whom she has “occasional sex” with. A diary entry from August 1952 diagnoses their affair: “I feel very different now. Yes, very different from the first time. No, mommy, I dint have no orgasm but it was fun nice. It was great, man.” Sex and posturing about sex are formative for Rainer, and her erotic life threads and weaves throughout her narrative. She circles around it, chases it, hates it, uses it, abuses it, and loves it: sex is a keen source of plea- sure and a locus of painful experiences.
Rainer wields memory as a tool and a weapon. About Fred Herko, a friend she performed with in 1962, she writes: “Fred Herko was an extremely gifted dancer. Trained in ballet, he performed in Broadway musicals, with Jimmy Waring, and in some of Warhol’s early films. He also taught a ballet class, which I took…. Perhaps everything was too easy for him. By 1964 he had burned himself out on amphetamines and under the influence jumped out a window to his death. For years I thought of Freddie each time I executed a particular leg warm-up during my daily barre workout.” For all his talent, Fred is a casualty. But Rainer rescues him in her personal mnemonic of form: she mourns him daily in her movements, his particular life inseparable from the articulation of these bodily actions. The connection between physical movement and an automatic feeling is far from a traditional, Romantic ideal of the affective dimension of art. Rather, it begins to articulate consciousness as a constant pressure building within the endless compilation of tasks.
By the middle of the 1960s, Rainer had perhaps established herself as an artist, but, plagued by depression and self-doubt, she began to delve more deeply into her own psyche in therapy. Explaining her adoption of a former shrink’s adage “feelings are facts” as an artistic mandate in 1972, she writes: “Ignored or denied in the work of my 1960s peers, the nuts and bolts of emotional life shaped the unseen (or should I say ‘unseemly’?) underbelly of high U.S. Minimalism. While we aspired to the lofty and cerebral plane of a quotidian materiality, our unconscious lives unraveled with an intensity and melodrama that inversely matched their absence in the boxes, beams, jogging, and standing still of our austere sculptural and choreographic creations.” Feelings are Facts is a compendium of moments of embarrassment, shame, and failure. In a particularly self-lacerating passage, Rainer recalls failing to speak up for her neighbor in a San Francisco boarding house. The neighbor is confronted by a married couple also living in the house for having her boyfriend in her room. Rainer recounts sitting in her own room and trying not to listen through the paper-thin walls, burning with fear and loathing at her own impotence: “Even when the harpy’s voice filtered through and I heard ‘She wouldn’t do such a thing,’ even then I couldn’t bring myself to tear open the door, as if on cue, and scream ‘That’s not true; I have men up here all the time!’ But I couldn’t move. The horrid pair stayed there until the boyfriend left. I remained still, stunned by what I had heard, appalled at my loss of nerve.”
Among the detailed descriptions of ordinary life, Rainer intersperses fragments of her work—photographs of dances, film scripts, manifestos. These form layers across the biographical narrative that function less as explanations than as the resurfacing and repetition of compulsions in both life and art. The intimate relationship between art, emotional life, and history is central to Rainer’s project. Retelling the fraught drama of her relationship with Bob Morris—fueled by her jealousy and his infidelities—Rainer deftly juxtaposes the biographical anecdote “Things got contentious enough so that Bob started going to my shrink, Dr. Schimel” with the script from a scene from her film The Man Who Envied Women (1985):
(Two women walking on a crowded street):
Woman #1: So his shrink says to him, “If you’re going to fool around with other women you’d better become a better liar.” So he did.
Woman #2: Did what?
The montage structure of the memoir gives the seemingly generic scene a specifically personal referent, while at the same time preserving its insistent banality, still a send-up of the clichéd conventions of heterosexual dynamics in 1960s America. Part of Rainer’s achievement is her ability to dramatize ambivalence, to simultaneously take on and lampoon conventions.
By her insistent self-criticism, Rainer nearly repudiates her much revered “Minimalist” work. “There’s a way in which the psychobabble that colored so much of my juvenile logorrhea has continued to inform my writing and critical thinking. Beyond the anguish of relentless ambivalence and emotional insecurity that is revealed in these diary entries, I can see a more solid skepticism about self and society being formed.” Rather than any celebration of those early dances, Rainer seems to cannibalize them for her later work. Her writing in Feelings are Facts wills together the interior depth of the psyche and the historical conditions of American culture, offering compulsive memoirization as one kind of public subjectivity available within our privately individualist culture. Rainer posits the unconscious and the emotional as both absent from and constitutive of the social. It is as if she is begging us to doubt the facts…
1 For a discussion of Rainer’s relationship to minimalism, see Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, (1968; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and James Meyer, Minimalism, (Yale University Press, 2002). The last decade has seen a rise in critical and historical interest in Rainer’s work. the recent excellent scholarship on Rainer, particularly her dance and performance practices in the 1960s, includes essays by Douglas Crimp and Carrie Lambert-Beatty, among others.