Pendleton’s Rainer

Adam Pendleton's decision to shoot his 2016 portrait of Yvonne Rainer in black and white opens up the possibility of a formally seamless appropriation and reframing of the 1978 black-and-white film of Trio A, Rainer's most famous choreographic work, first presented in 1966. Pendleton's appropriation, nesting, and recoding of Rainer's film footage - using most of Trio A - functions through a systematic signification of seaming that is communicated by the heavy sampling of this recorded dance. Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne tiainer premiered at Anthology Film Archives on Jan 9,2017 as part of the commissioning biennial Performa, and it now exists in a gallery-distributed edition. Featuring the legendary theorist-performer of Minimalism's heyday, Pendleton's film both honors Rainer's brainy, unabashed feminism and stands for a new generation confronting Minimalism's seventies episteme.