Claire Bishop is a Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Installation Art: A Critical History (2005), Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012) (for which she won the 2013 Frank Jewett Mather award), and Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (2013). She is a regular contributor to Artforum, and her essays and books have been translated into 18 languages. Her current research investigates the intersection of attention and technology in contemporary art and performance.

In addition to the accomplishments listed above, Ms. Bishop is a 2018-2019 Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellow. She will present the culmination of her research, "Pragmatic Expediency:  A History of Cunningham's Events," at a day-long symposium honoring Merce Cunningham on January 25, 2019.  

"…the proscenium stage – here I am in one – and its framed picture do not seem sufficient any more. Television has made us look differently – trips to the moon to see the other side. The renaissance perspective arrangement has an archaic flavor. Television, when 'live and real' allows everyone to be seen, at every moment, to his best advantage. […]

Most of my dances have been choreographed with a four-sided visual arrangement. That is, they can and have been presented with audiences on one, two, three, or four sides, and perhaps soon there will be the opportunity to utilize a couple of more—over and under. Television offers excellent space opportunities."[1]

Merce Cunningham’s enthusiasm for new technology is well documented and amply evidenced—from his numerous works for film and video in the 1970s and 1980s, to his embrace of computer software as a choreographic tool in the 1990s and 2000s. While researching Cunningham’s Events in the archives at the Library for the Performing Arts, however, it becomes evident that this openness to new technology was preceded by a keen interest in television. Throughout his interviews and lecture notes from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, television is one of a handful of unexpectedly recurring spatial motifs—the others being sport, outer space, and the street.

When we consider how vociferously early audiences objected to the "difficulty" of Cunningham’s work, especially his interval-free ninety-minute Events, this fascination with television (not to mention space travel and sport) is striking—almost contradictory.[2] On the one hand, these accessible references might have been a concession to render his work more comprehensible to provincial audiences. On the other hand, they are persistent enough to require closer inspection. In television, I want to argue, Cunningham finds a model of spectatorship adequate to his decentralization of stage space. We conventionally think of television as a nonstop flow for a hypnotized viewer. For Cunningham, by contrast, television presents the possibility of an autonomous, mobile eye that decides what to attend to in the moment, actively changing channels, rather than having an experience prestructured or directed by the choreographer.

To understand Cunningham’s innovative approach to stage space, recall traditional proscenium theatre, where the eye is guided upstage, on the model of Renaissance perspective. Classical ballet reinforces this dynamic through symmetrical composition, a unity of elements (choreography, décor, music, lighting, costumes), and a hierarchy of dancers (the prima ballerina flanked by the corps de ballet). Although modern dance stripped back décor and costume, it similarly organized attention in terms of compositional unity: there is a clear focal point within any group of dancers, and stage space is demarcated by minimal means (a Noguchi sculpture, ropes, ribbons, or lighting). In the early 1950s, however, Cunningham broke with the expectation that dancers should "face front," and created works to be seen from multiple sides. He continually refers to the street, as a non-hierarchical visual space in which people are seen from all sides, to explain why his dancers do not face the audience.

Television and sport, by contrast, provide Cunningham with a template for the organization of time by a predetermined length rather than by meter, tempo, and musical phrase (think of a thirty-minute television show or a ninety-minute football match). Television and space travel connote the cutting-edge of modern technology, and are understood to construct the world as an immersive field rather than as linear perspective.[3] Unlike theatre and film, he argues, television is inherently fragmented: although it is continually broken up by commercials, it also takes for granted that we can watch two separate things at once ("While we are seeing the end of one program, we are hearing (and loudly) about another, usually the next on the channel, and then sometimes across the screen comes a news flash about a third to happen next week.")[4] TV thus acclimatizes the viewer to multiple and stratified mode of attention. 

Both television and film also held appeal for their expanded sense of space, more wide than deep, suggesting an idea of dance that is ongoing and incomplete. One of Cunningham’s strongest impressions ("if not the strongest") as a teenager had been watching Fred Astaire in the movies, particularly the sequence choreographed by Eugene Loring in Vincent Minelli’s Yolanda and the Thief (1945).[5] Another example is the mid-60s TV show Hullabaloo:  

"Visually, one of the [most] interesting show[s] on TV is Hullabaloo, comprised of pop singers, musicians, and dancers. The pace of the show is sometimes extraordinary, nothing ever seems to complete itself, the dancing, which is wonderfully lively, appears to go on all the time even though the camera doesn't show it to you all the time."[6]

Recorded in what appears to be an infinitely large studio, Hullabaloo is characterized above all by a mobile camera rather than stable frontality: it alights on one sequence and then moves to another, while the performances continue in multiple locations simultaneously.  

Although Cunningham often referred to his multi-directional use of the stage via Albert Einstein’s dictim that "there are no fixed points in space," a subtler, more contemporaneous point of reference was to the stage as a de-hierarchized "field."[7] He regularly spoke of rejecting two hundred years of proscenium stage, with its frontal organization of performance, and consolidation of sightlines from the royal box to a perspectival vanishing point, in favor of a "field" of attention. Field denotes a landscape of dispersed focus rather than a series of directed lines (i.e. diagonals leading to a focal point). "Vision must expand to allow for the field," he notes in a 1965 lecture, "we have thought to look in one direction for hundreds of years now, but perhaps that will change with television, men in space, and automation."[8] While "field" appears in the title of Cunningham’s repertory works, the Events in particular were thought to produce "a 'field' situation rather than one in which the audience’s attention is continually being rationalized, directed, and focused."[9] The term "field" is most likely taken from media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who argued that the "total electric field culture of our time" reversed nineteenth-century models of attention into an "open 'field' perception."[10] In a 1966 interview, Cunningham expressed agreement with McLuhan’s proposal that television changes logic and compositional form from "linear to field."[11]

A decade ago, Carrie Lambert-Beatty made a compelling argument about television and dance in the 1960s: she suggests that Yvonne Rainer’s choreography, like that of her Judson Dance Theater colleagues, existed in dialectical tension with the new "profusion of things to watch" on television.[12] Judson artists and choreographers were not making work directly in response to television, she argues; rather, a mediated televisual regime of spectatorship was "at a deeper level shaping conditions for these artists’ work."[13] Yet televisuality as a regime of perception is always a negative reference in Lambert-Beatty’s reading of Judson. Rainer, for example, disliked television’s standardization and synchronization of leisure time, and regarded multi-channel spectatorship during the Vietnam War to be an increasingly politicized activity: choosing what to watch was also a question of choosing what not to watch.

Such a critical consciousness is entirely absent in Cunningham, who—like many artists in the early and mid-1960s—embraced television as an arena of new experiences, sensations, and social relations.[14] For Cunningham, by contrast, live television provided a model of presence and ongoing duration (rather than mediation and distance); he even imagined a dance company performing flexible time and space sequences that could be presented on several channels during the same hour—so the spectator has "do-it-yourself continuity via the channel switch."[15] Television thus offered a model of durational continuity, thanks to the spectator’s capacity to change channels. The analogy to a theatrical experience is clear: the audience constructs their own "edit" by switching between different channels (on television) or choosing which dancers to watch (on stage). The shifts of attention required by his ninety-minute Events, Cunningham explicitly noted, are "like the possibilities of television, where you jump from one channel to another, making your own continuity."[16]

Cunningham’s openness to television is typical of many artists in this era; only later, in the 1970s, was an enthusiasm for global connectivity replaced by a denunciation of mass media as atomizing spectacle.[17] By that point, however, Cunningham had begun making works for video and faced a different set of problems, chief among them a reversal of stage perspective.[18] The contrast between his thoughts on video (detailed in the lecture "Dance For Camera") and his notes from the 1960s is illuminating. At this earlier point, television was only a remote fantasy, but it denoted a generative set of possibilities: space, openness, a field of points in space, and a mode of decentralized, continually changing attention. Cunningham’s enthusiasm for an autonomous mobile eye as a model of freedom should not be surprising, as it supports his lifelong preference for dance conceived in terms of individualized, non-dependent social relations. Both constitute a particularly modern, and American, notion of freedom.