Meredith Monk - Interdisciplinary since the 60's

Meredith Monk, '16mm Earrings', 1966, performance, still. Courtesy the artist.

The first work to interrogate this style was her solo performance 16mm Earrings, made when Monk was 23 years old. Describing it as a personal breakthrough in terms of how it shaped her later work, 16mm Earrings is a matrix for Monk's practice: a heady collision of sound, film, dance and voice. Working with various fragments and fictional scenarios - including a reading of Wilhelm Reich's text 'The Function of Orgasm' (1940); a series of 16mm films projected onto Monk's body and onto customised screens; a rendition of 'Greensleeves', slowed, looped and expanded; and a paper effigy of Monk that burns at the climax of the performance - 16mm Earrings comprises of an eccentric and personal syntax of gesture and image, where the former attempts to physicalise the latter.

Last night at LaMaMa, Monk talked about her career and how that career became so close to the LaMaMa Theatre and together, amongst other movements and artists (Monk being one of those avant-garde generation of artists at the time), helped shape the world of Performance Art as we know it. She talked about the needs and the impulses that led her to make such a different range of works, since thinking how to abolish the usual and common place of the spectator, to re-thinking the use of the voice as a tool and mean to achieve other results such as sculpture, installations, performances, choreographies, happenings... New York was the place where "painters were making sculptures, sculptors were writing poems, poets began to write plays, musicians were making movies, etc..."; everything was happening at the same time and it was a matter of life or death, things had to be done.
Amongst many other things a revisiting some of her early works the talk ended with the news of a new generation of artists wanting to "save" and "revisit" Monk's vocal's pieces in a new work that contains remixes and re-interpretations of some of her famous works. Is this a prelude to what contemporary art is turning into? Make it commercial, make it big, revisit the abstract and misunderstood work of the past and turn it into new-hype-avant-garde masterpieces?

'No to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make-believe no to the glamour and transcendence of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved.'
From 'No Manifesto', 1965, reprinted in Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2006, p.263.