Lizzy Newman is an artist and a psychoanalyst. She finds a common feature in these two practices: namely, that both are forms of praxis. Both art and psychoanalysis share a relation to knowledge and lack of knowledge, to history and the real, and both create a new kind of know–how using the unconscious. Recently Lizzy has become interested in movement practices, mainly for the type of invisible knowledge they embody.

LIZZY NEWMAN  C/O NEON PARC Gallery

NEON PARC

© Elizabeth Newman 2008

COMMENCE DATE:  MARCH 2008

I DREAM OF TRIO A involves the learning of a dance, Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A from 1965 by myself, a non-dancer - and possibly the re-performance and re-creation of this work into a new presentation. The project is therefore about recent history, about a desire for the past, about not-knowing (how to dance) and therefore also about the creation of a new kind of knowledge that will develop out of the experience of learning, creating and performing. The project embodies a yearning for something past (and therefore absent – a radical moment in culture) and an impossible desire to be somewhere that no longer exists: a place that no longer ‘is’ but nevertheless endures in the dreamy world of a black and white photo.

This project initially began in 2007.  When I learnt about the early dance works of Rainer I desperately wanted to see them, but as no moving record exists, the solution to quell this burning fascination was to recreate one of the works myself. What really excites me about Rainer’s works was the participation in them by non-dancers, by amateurs (lovers) – one of whom was the artist Robert Morris. The bold democracy of these works, the fact that ‘anyone’ can do them (theoretically) appeals to me. I keenly wanted to know what it was that Morris had experienced - I wanted to know what it was like to be Robert Morris, the Robert Morris of the felt works and of Continuos Project Altered Daily. I had seen a photograph of Rainer and Morris together, and later realised that Rainer looked like my older sister, and Morris looked like my father as a young man. The works of Rainer’s that fascinate me are all from the early 1960s, the period of my early childhood. In this way I am conscious but unknowing of some drive to return to this familiar scene that I don’t recognise.

The reductive minimalism of works from this era (Rainer, Morris, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton) thrills me: Rainer made a dance that was all running, while Paxton made one all walking, standing and sitting. In this reductive and pedestrian way these artworks make nothing present. If Trio A were a painting it would be monochrome white. Another interesting feature of Trio A is the way in which its strange movements, its duration, and its calm monotony embody thought: it’s as though one can see thinking happening.