Book-Art
Anthologies
Alternative Publishing

Artists' Self-Books (1969)

Among the more valuable traditions established in the late sixties was the practice of consequential vanguard artists creating imaginatively designed books primarily about their own work and aesthetic position—not only Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenberg, but Andy Warhol’s Index (1967), Iain Baxter’s A Portfolio of Piles (1968), Dick Higgins’ foew&ombwhnw (1969), and John Cage’s Notations (1969), among others. (The last book, by accepting within its own frame everything offered by selected other composers, is perhaps aesthetically more self-appropriate than Cage’s two collections of essays, despite the patent compromise, in Notations, of such an unenhancing convention as presenting the contributions in alphabetical order.)

Merce Cunningham and Frances Starr’s Changes: Notes on Choreography (1969) resembles its predecessors in the crucial aspect of being as much like as about Cunningham’s dance. The inside front cover has overlapping lines of crossing type on top of a photograph, a form reminiscent of the beams of light passing over dancers in Winterbranch (1964). A page in the middle has a column of type running down the center, superimposed over both a photograph and the program of Variations V (1965), very much like the disconnected simultaneity of the piece itself. The structure of the entire book is as concentrated in discrete detail (the page) but as plotless and non-climactic in overall form as Cunningham’s choreography. While materials relevant to a particular piece are generally grouped together, the fragments are not presented in chronological order, the author avoiding one compromise of convenience. Need one say that this is not the sort of self-book that either George Balanchine or Martha Graham would publish.

Just as Cunningham’s Walkaround Time (1968) freely mixes movement, sound, stillness, and lights and decor, so Changes mixes with similar freedom shrewdly chosen photographs, reproductions of performance programs and handwritten notes, rough sketches and diagrams, neatly typed remarks that were apparently transcribed recently (on the same multiple-font machine that Cage favors), letters written to friends, scribbled replies to a questionnaire, aesthetic declarations, etc. etc. (“Dancing has a continuity of its own that need not be dependent on either the rise or fall of sound, or the pitch and cry of words. Its force of feeling lies in the physical image, fleeting or static.”) Contained within this unpaginated potpourri are also some edifying descriptions of how chance procedures can be adapted to the gamut of choreographic variables.

In general, the pieces strike this non-dancer (but sometime football player) as thoughtfully and thoroughly planned, even in their allowances for various degrees and kinds of indeterminacy (as in professional football, which is, one hears, Cunningham’s favorite spectator sport). Only an artist as unpretentious, unevasive and succinct in his prose as Cunningham would admit, on one hand, that a 1944 dance, Root of an Unfocus, “was concerned with fear,” or that in a more recent aleatory work “I find No.9 and No. 10 were not used, did not come up as possibilities; and upon examining them carefully, I am relieved they did not.” (The obvious point lost in the shuffling discussion is that while chance methods have the virtue of producing results beyond the conventions of premeditated choreography, not everything aleatory would be equally successful.)

“Dancing is movement in time and space,” he announces early in Changes, and his book, by analogy, is filled pages between the frame of covers. Populating this field is the achievement of the writer and designer Frances Starr, who brilliantly adapted Cunningham’s compositional syntax to the bookish medium (that, need one add, more desperately requires stylistic resuscitation than, say, the ballet.) It is true that texts printed upside-down provide a bit of a nuisance for the reader, while in the middle of the book is reproduced a program whose year-date is perversely blocked out or omitted despite Cunningham’s handwritten inscription, “I date my beginnings from this concert.” Nonetheless, scattered between the covers is much genuine information and explanation unavailable elsewhere.

This book-composition is also a highly contemporary way for an artist-still-in-progress to forge a permanent but incomplete record of his own career. However, since this volume eschews an explanatory preface or recapitulating afterword, the reader is left the task of interpreting significances from the evidence presented. He who does not comprehend Cunningham’s choreographic imagination is not likely to understand this book, for Changes demands the sort of perceptual procedures honed on Cunningham’s dance, not to speak of Cage’s music and perhaps William Burroughs’s fictions, too.

For these reasons, though almost every Cunningham work is displayed, the book simply cannot serve as an effective introduction for those millions who have heard (or read) but not seen—perhaps nothing so far performs this initiating role as successfully as Calvin Tomkins’ chapters in the paperback edition of The Bride and the Bachelors (1968)—and Changes has considerably less academic information than the Cunningham issue of Dance Perspectives (Summer 1968), while the intrinsically justifiable lack of page numbers (and thus of an index) in Changes makes information retrieval a bit arduous.

This book was first announced as a collection of the essays on dance matters that Cunningham has published over the years. As someone who has gone to considerable effort to ferret several of them out of obscure and defunct journals, I was anticipating a more convenient form of hardbound storage. However, as much as those essays are too valuable to lie forgotten, here is a different book entirely, less a guide to individual Cunningham ideas or dances than a key to his characteristic imagination. As an artist’s bookish essay on his own endeavors, Changes is a masterpiece of its particular kind.

P.S. On second thought, perhaps Cunningham’s willingness to use the convention of bound, evenly cut, equi-sized pages parallels his current commitment to a permanent company; for both are archaic conventions that, in our times, are likely to induce historically conservative, if not aesthetically constrained procedures. This observation inspires conjecture over what kind of book-about-himself a post-Cunningham dancer might want to produce—say, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, or Kenneth King?