introduction by Bill T. Jones Arnie Zane (1948-1988) is best known for his seventeen-year personal and artistic partnership with choreographer Bill T. Jones. Their creative interchange defined each other's artistic vision and led to one of the most celebrated collaborations in late-twentieth-century dance. The Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company continues to bear Zane's name and to be inspired by his spirit.Continuous Replay, which is titled after a dance work of Zane's, is the first comprehensive presentation of his photography. Zane took up the camera in earnest in 1971, the year he and Jones met. His photography examines the body's physicality, sexual identity, and potential for beauty and decay. The design of the book and of its associated exhibition--which will travel widely within the United States--reflects Zane's aesthetic strategies and the dynamic interplay between his art and life, photography and dance, his collection of found images and his own photographs, and his self-portraits and images of others. The core of the book consists of six portfolios that present Zane's photographs side by side with his artwork, sketches, performance notes, snapshots of Bill and Arnie, and video stills and photos of the company in action. The portfolios are interpreted through writings by friends, dancers, curators, and historians from the worlds of photography, art, and dance.Essays by Jonathan Green, Susan Leigh Foster, and Christine Pichini commentary by Bill Bissell, Bill T. Jones, Robert Longo, Philip Sykas, and Lois Welk
New York Times Review of Continuous ReplayJune 27, 1999
Turning a Photographer's Vision Into Choreography
By ANN DALY
RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- History has neglected Arnie Zane, co-founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. His partnership with Jones produced the paradigmatic post-modern repertory of the 1980s, but after his death from AIDS in 1988 and the notoriety of Jones' subsequent career, Zane faded into a shadow legend, invoked less as artistic innovator than tragic hero.
Paradoxically, it is an exhibition of Zane's photography -- a solo pursuit predating his entry into dance via Jones -- that promises to revive Zane the choreographer. "Continuous Replay: The Photographs of Arnie Zane," on view through Aug. 8 at the U.C.R./California Museum of Photography in Riverside, outside Los Angeles, traces his oeuvre from 1971, the year he met Jones, to the early 1980s, when he let his photography lapse in favor of a dance career.
The multimedia exhibit features about 100 original prints, as well as slide projections, an interactive Webcam installation and video footage (some newly discovered). Selections from the show and catalog are accessible online, at the museum Website: www.cmp.ucr.edu.
The show and catalog, organized and edited by the museum's director, Jonathan Green, comprise an extraordinary recovery project that fundamentally changes the way we understand "the other half" of the Jones-Zane collaboration. Zane was a dancer neither by nature nor formal education, but he contributed more to the company's esthetic than may have been previously apparent.
Side by side, Jones and Zane cut a dramatic chiaroscuro, and critics were eager to cast the couple as a pair of "opposites attracting." Jones was tall, fluid and black; Zane was short, percussive and white. The former verbal, the latter visual. Zane was the cool structuralist foil to Jones' emotional personal politics.
"Continuous Replay" tells a more complex story.
Zane's genre was portraiture; he even named his earliest dance solo "First Portrait" in 1973. Like himself, his images stood small and square, with a powerful center. Eclectically inspired by Jacques-Henri Lartigue's concept of timeless photographs, the glamour of Richard Avedon and the series of workmen by August Sander, he aimed for what he and Jones called "rough elegance."
If Zane had started out by searching the surface of the human body in the retro-chic portraits of his bohemian circle of friends, by the time he turned his attention around 1975 to Pearl Pease, a wizened eccentric in his Binghamton, N.Y., community, he was looking deeper into the fissures of the body's collapsed, creased and cracked flesh. Ambivalent about exposing his own body onstage, Zane identified with her vulnerability -- and her self-possession -- as an outsider.
Tightly cropped and frontally composed, the images were as provocative as any of Jones' explicitly combative solos. Asking "what is beauty?" was a political as well as an artistic question.
Zane expanded into a series of widely varying nude torsos (including those of Jones, young tough guys from the neighborhood, fellow go-go dancers and other acquaintances), whose gestures and attitudes he used (as had the founders of modern dance) to reveal a person's inner life. With infrared photography, he hoped to plumb the body even further.
Becoming ever more the choreographer, Zane launched the photographs into time (by serializing them) and space (by projecting them). An image repeating itself in a progressively tighter frame gains a momentum akin to gestures accumulating into a dance. By integrating slides into his performances, he explored, both literally and metaphorically, what it meant to "project" a performative presence.
Zane disliked talking about art; instead, he channeled his theoretical rigor directly into the work, which can be recognized, two decades later, as a sustained investigation of the body: the production and location of identity (particularly gender, sexuality and race); the rhetoric of difference; the expressive value of gesture; and the relationship between sight and knowledge.
He was already engaged with a very post-modern set of concerns, yet he approached them with a utopian spirit that the art world left behind in the 1970s. Zane hoped to find a body both physical and "transcendent."
In his catalog essay, Green makes a convincing argument that the results were more performative than photographic. Zane's pictures were staged events -- costumed, directed and repeated. Indeed, his visual experiments prefigured his choreographic vision, which persists in the company still bearing his name. There is the emphasis on diverse body types, on gesture and structural precision. The use of multimedia. (Zane played with found images, Polaroid and Xerox copies of photographs, photo-booth sequences, video and magic-lantern slides.) And the intimate relationship between art and life.
But the most obvious connection is the vocabulary of the pose.
Early on, Zane modeled for art classes and studied film, processes that both depend on the illusion of movement produced by stillness. He often left the frame lines strategically visible in his photos and would also serialize a single image by incrementally cropping it, as if to remind the viewer that in order to exist, an image requires its limits -- that an image, and by implication the viewer as well, is constituted by its frame.
As a choreographer, Zane favored a similar accumulation of discrete gestures, which were effectively "framed" by the poselike moments of stillness in between. These hairline fractures stood outside the flow of movement, and yet at the same time they constituted the flow of movement.
Therein lay Zane's radical critique of the dancing body.
The body, he was suggesting, is indeed the site of knowledge, but that knowledge is not the continuing, seamless, coherent experience that the conventional dancing body would have us believe. Rather, our body-knowledge halts and falters. Lurches along in fits and starts. Doubles back on itself, only to begin again. It is, as Zane titled a dance in 1982, a "Continuous Replay."
Ann Daly's most recent article for Arts and Leisure was about the photographs of Martha Graham by Imogen Cunningham.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
