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and banal, which are the stuff of our everyday experience; jerry-built contrivances of unidentifiable utility; animals; the human body in motion. Pictures of living things are usually replaced by the things themselves, actions are juxtaposed not only in space but in time. As in the Combines, subliminal visual and metaphoric associations bind together the most unlikely conjunctions of disparate matter.2

The exhibition and catalogue fulfill the need to clarify Rauschenberg's early collaborative participation in performances, as well as his most recent collaborations, including Set and Reset (1983). Performed by the Trisha Brown Dance Company with sets and costumes by Rauschenberg, music by Laurie Anderson, and choreography by Trisha Brown, Set and Reset is performed in Cleveland during the second of four evenings in New Dance / New vision, the eight annual Fall Series sponsored by the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. The exhibition itself, however, remains documentary. During the opening several students from the Cleveland Institute of Art recreated one portion of Linoleum (1966); in the original production Rauschenberg's twelve foot long rolling chicken coop was inhabited by Steve Paxton who alternately propelled himself along the ground with his arms and ate fried chicken, all while lying on his stomach inside the coop, which was shared by five live chickens. While the facsimile was surely intended to provide one other facet of information about the performance, and was indeed a powerful image, it remained mere simulation.

How preferable it would have been to have had original performances, perhaps by some of the students, presented in conjunction with the exhibition.

Chance and experimental participation by the audience with some of the props did provide authentic experiences. An amplified bedspring from Map Room II (1965) was wired for sound as it was for the performance in which Trisha Brown rolled around on it and Steve Paxton and Alex Hay, wearing automobile tires on their knees, rolled over it. During the exhibition the bedspring was alternately timidly touched and aggressively pounced upon by viewers, providing purposeful experimental variations of sound and amplitude. Comparably, alarm clocks piled high in a shopping cart, from Spring Training (1965), ticked disjointedly and occasionally rang, providing auditory chance experiences.

While the props themselves remain documentary, and use of those props either simulations of segments of pieces or exploratory experimentation, the inherent power of the original performances, and of the documentation itself, is attested by the viewing experience. John Cage, whose scores were frequently a part of these collaborations, philosophically asserts that music, and all of the arts, are capable of inspiring one of heightened awareness.

Visiting this exhibition, viewing the documentary photographs, props, and costumes, reading the descriptions and data, and hearing the amplified bedspring or ticking and ringing of alarm clocks, one is indeed inspired. A passive viewing experience is transformed into one with the potential both for physical action and participation, and further, for heightened understanding and even awareness.

1Robert Rauschenberg, Statement, in Dorothy C. Miller, ed., Sixteen Americans, exhibition catalogue (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), p. 58.

2Nina Sundell, Rauschenberg / Performance: 1954-1984, exhibition catalogue (Canton, Ohio: Holsing Lithograph, 1984), p. 14.

M. Virginia B. Bettendorf is a freelance writer who lives in North Olmsted, Ohio.

Kate Has the Answer

Kate Gallion Performance 4:2 / Playhouse in the Park / Cincinnati / 12 September 1984

By Michele Morgan

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Kate Gallion, 4:2, Performance at the Cincinnati Alternative Theater Festival on 12 September 1984

"What is the purpose of seeing life so negatively?" complained one disenchanted member of the audience attending performance artist Kate Gallion's 4:2. A paraphrase of the above question - why didn't Gallion affirm life for me rather than making me aware of the commercially processed environment I participate in? - contains the answer and also Gallion's artistic intent: awareness of our society's total saturation of the senses in a "barrage", to use the artist's word, of artifacts. Saturation is so total it blunts our powers of meditation. We rarely consider the original life forms of processed meat and ponder the materials combined to develop "foods" we ingest; the motives driving the fabricators of these artifacts are submerged as we are distracted by easily acquired sensate pleasures.

Gallion posits the stage as a microcosm of our environment: a table is bedecked with useless appliances such as a blender, a flashlight, a curling iron and hair dryer; various aerosol sprays, boxes of breakfast cereals, packages of processed meat and cans of "cheese food" crowd a small bust of John F. Kennedy; white crepe paper drapes

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