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Horizontal Together: Art, Dance, and Queer Embodiment in 1960S New York

Online ISBN:
9781526166494
Print ISBN:
9781526148438
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Book

Horizontal Together: Art, Dance, and Queer Embodiment in 1960S New York

Paisid Aramphongphan
Paisid Aramphongphan
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Published online:
19 May 2022
Published in print:
4 May 2021
Online ISBN:
9781526166494
Print ISBN:
9781526148438
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

Abstract

Horizontal together tells a dancerly story of 1960s art and queer culture in New York through the overlapping circles of Andy Warhol, underground filmmaker Jack Smith, and experimental dance star Fred Herko. In a pioneering look at this intersecting cultural milieu, Horizontal together uses a unique methodology drawing on dance studies, the analysis of movement, deportment, and gestures, as well as queer theory not only to look anew at familiar artists and artworks, but also to bring to light queer artistic figures’ key cultural contributions to the 1960s New York art world. Starting with the analysis of the artists’ own bodies, the book moves to draw out the meaning—and political and cultural power—of the languorous, recumbent male body that is prevalent in the art of the 1960s, yet never analyzed. The latter part of the book demonstrates how dance culture and history forge an underlying formative context for queer artists—Warhol through his collaboration with contemporaneous dance figures such as Herko, and Smith through his channeling of the early twentieth-century choreographer Ruth St. Denis. Building on these points of contact, the book also rethinks the history of 1960s dance, providing space for queer bodies and their new form of “virtuosity” to shine.

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