Sarah Michelson
Part 4
Whitney Museum of American Art
About
Design and fabrication in collaboration with Charlotte Sims
“For the full hour and a half of its duration, I was riveted by what I saw: the inner logic of the onstage clocks, Michelson’s own half coach/half interviewee role in the front row and the pared-back pomp of the dancers jumping up and down on the spot.
Was this work a salute to the precision and athleticism of modernist dance? Or was it a neatly concealed perversion of modernist ideals? If it was the former then it was also the latter, and the brilliance of the work lay in acknowledging that.”
Written by Adam Linder, Frieze Magazine
“The term study, cheekily subsequent to what the dance is a study “for,” presumably Devotion at the Kitchen, is both a joke on the idea of dance in the museum (how could dance in the museum, particularly in the Whitney Biennial, be anything but a “study” of a dance, i.e., not the thing itself?) and a proposal: It might mean, “See? This is what devotion looks like.”²
“This dancer lives, with a special intensity and literalism, the internal split that arguably haunts every member of the precariat, every freelancer, every artist—the split between self and image, body and brand. Repetition, seriality: the lot of those individuals who market themselves, who “become brands,” who are expected to give the people what they want, over and over again.
Michelson’s modularity flirts with this expectation and flouts it. Less songs of herself, maybe, than paeans to contemporary anxieties, the portraits may actually be—at least to those members of the audience who get the joke, and who get Michelson—funny, and are perhaps never funnier than when read against Balanchine’s prose poetry.”
Written by David Velasco, Art Forum
