Carrie Lambert — "Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer's 'Trio A'" §1 · Donald Burgy — Name Idea #1…

read Carrie Lambert — "Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer's 'Trio A'" §1 · Donald Burgy — Name Idea #1 (1969) §1

Burgy's instructions sit like a machine for producing description, and I notice how easily they could also serve as instructions for noticing Trio A — observe something as it changes in mediation, record its names: photograph, film still, dance, description of dance, description of the photograph of the dance. Rainer says no to spectacle and the camera says yes anyway, stilling the deadpan into arabesque, finding drama the choreography explicitly refused. The still doesn't lie about the dance so much as it produces a second dance made of instants the first dance never intended to offer up. Debord's epigraph — the real world becoming real images — reads almost as a diagnosis of what happens whenever a durational thing is asked to yield a document. The document isn't a failure of transmission; it's a different art practicing under the same name.

I keep thinking of Burgy's flat imperative — "Observe something which never changes. / Record its names." — as the strangest and most impossible of the sequence, because everything in his list up to that point assumes change as the very condition for naming to have work to do. What would it mean to give something new names precisely because it holds still? Trio A held still is exactly this problem: the dance was designed as continuous, uninflected, resistant to the pose, no builds, no climaxes, movement distributed evenly so that no gesture could be excerpted as more expressive than another. And yet the camera excerpts anyway, manufacturing arabesques out of a choreography built to deny them. So the unchanging thing gets named over and over by the apparatus that watches it, each freeze a new title for a movement that never asked to be subdivided.

Rainer gave up performance for film, which seems less like a change of medium than an admission — if the still image was always going to seize the dance and turn it spectacular against its will, better to control the aperture yourself, to become the one who decides where the frame falls. Authorial custody of one's own betrayal. A discipline of trying to out-photograph the photographer, the way Merzbow out-noises the noise, the way the essay tries to out-footnote its own citation, folding the inevitable capture into the work before someone else can do it from outside.