Continuous Replay
dal 16/11/2000 al 24/12/2000
Segnalato da
16/11/2000
Continuous Replay
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive BAM/PFA, Berkeley
The Photographs of Arnie Zane. Best known as a cofounder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Arnie Zane actually began his exploration of the human form through photography rather than dance. Continuous Replay, on view in the museum's Theater Gallery, examines Zane's photographic oeuvre both before and after he rose to fame as a choreographer with Bill T. Jones. The show provides fascinating insights into the intersections of these two very different modes of expression and how each informed the other within Zane's vision.
The Photographs of Arnie Zane
Best known as a cofounder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Arnie
Zane actually began his exploration of the human form through photography rather
than dance. Continuous Replay, on view in the museum's Theater Gallery,
examines Zane's photographic oeuvre both before and after he rose to fame as a
choreographer with Bill T. Jones. The show provides fascinating insights into the
intersections of these two very different modes of expression and how each
informed the other within Zane's vision.
Zane met Jones in 1971 and the two became partners in both life and art until
Zane's death from AIDS in 1988. The earliest photographs in the exhibition date
from 1971, though in appearance they could have been Pictorialist images made at
the turn of the twentieth century. Printed in sepia tones, they are posed, highly
theatrical depictions of Zane's circle of friends. Even so, they reflect a great deal of
interest in the movement and postures of the human body expressing itself.
Zane's real strength was in the genre of portraiture. (Even his first dance solo, in
1973, was titled "First Portrait.") By the mid-1970s, Zane began exploring
nontraditional subjects in his portraits, for example, creating tightly cropped,
frontally posed images of an aging eccentric. Zane also began to work on a series
of nude torsos of Jones, other dancers, neighborhood toughs, and various
acquaintances. He hoped to convey through gestures and attitudes the interior lives
of his subjects.
As Zane blossomed as a choreographer, he also experimented with time and space
in his photography. He made serialized images, projected them as slide pieces,
and created video works. He found that through repeating images he could
construct a rhythm and build momentum in a way akin to dance. The dance
company itself began incorporating projections into some of its pieces.
The exhibition and accompanying catalog revisit Zane's work and find in it a
sustained investigation of the body, the production of identity, and the rhetoric of
difference. It is confrontational in the manner of the dance company's noted works,
and always aware of the expressive value of gesture and the relationship between
sight and knowledge.
Continuous Replay: The Photographs of Arnie Zane is an exhibition organized by
UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside, and
supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Ben
Thompson, and Tony Culver.
Mark Petr, Former Assistant Curator
The Theater Gallery is open seven days and always free.
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