The art of a lifetime

Filmmaker Yvonne Rainer will deliver a presentation at the MFA Visual Studies Graduate Visiting Artist Lecture Series Thursday, ornately titled: “Where Is The Passion? Where Is The Politics? Or, How I Became Interested In Impersonating, Approximating, and End Running Around My Selves and Others and Where Do I Look When You’re Looking at Me?”

“The title is a piece of art in itself, it seems like,” said Sean Carney, assistant to the dean of the Portland Northwest College of Art’s MFA Visual Studies program.

Portland State’s MFA Studio Practice program teams up with the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s MFA Visual Studies department to bring us Rainer’s lecture. It promises to delve into interdisciplinary models of art and self-exploration, highlighted with anecdotes from Rainer’s decorated journey as an artist.

In an event as unique as its title, Rainer will discuss, among other topics, her transition from modern dancer to political independent filmmaker.

“Her important work as both a choreographer and filmmaker radically infuse political and conceptual consciousness into the fields of dance and independent filmmaking,” said Arnold Kemp, chair of the MFA Visual Studies Program at Pacific.

After a 15-year career as a choreographer and modern dancer, Rainer made seven independent feature films from 1972–2009. She returned to dance in 2000 following a commission for the White Oak Dance Project.

Taking abstract twists on topics ranging from women’s identity to war to soccer, her films use intricate visual styles and evoke a personable relationship with her audience. Her years of dance provide a wider artistic framework from which she can better reach out to the public.

“While Rainer’s dance and filmmaking follow their own distinct pathways, both her dance compositions and films employ distancing strategies and disjunctive acts, such as fragmentation, and set up complex juxtapositions that interrupt the flow of narrative and time,” Kemp said.

Rather than focus on the Abstract Expressionism model of filmmaking so popular in 1970s New York, where she began her career, Rainer’s pieces began to “reflect the ordinary movements of everyday life, and her dance compositions dispel the distance between performer and audience,” according to Kemp.

At the lecture, audiences will find themselves surrounded by humerous interpretation, autobiographical narration and Rainer’s ability to entrap an audience with political undertones. Her bounty of visual and auditory techniques, along with her comedic streak, will be brought to the stage.

One of her more famous films, The Man Who Envied Women (1985), uses comedy to expel artistic and intellectual pretension. Although many of Rainer’s films have covert feminist messages, Privilege (1990) is her only film that tackles women’s process of self-identification, all the while shedding light on how this process is shaped by aging.

Her lecture will highlight how incorporating political themes like these into multimodal artwork is useful to artistic expression.

“Her prodigious output over the past forty years crosses several spheres of art-making,” Kemp said.