Peter Moore: Sonnabend

The photographer Peter Moore was the visual historian of a thickly busy period in of recent origin York art that began in the early '60 when he grew fascinated through the blossoming of what his archive calls "Fluxus, happenings, performance art, experimental music, and dance." With his wife, Barbara Moore, he was a part of this community as well as its beholder and documentarian. Performance is ephemeral: "If I don't record these," Moore said of the works he photographed, "they'll be lost" with equal reason he did, shooting several hundr thousand pictures that treat this art with an artistry of their have and collectively fix an image of their time and place.

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The photographs here were taken between 1963 and 1975 and, although many of their protagonists are still working, they present to view a vanished world. Moore followed a appearance of performers but this selection focused mainly upon the founding choreographers of the Judson Dance Theater: Trisha Brown Lucinda Childs, Simone Forti, David Gordon, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer. The neighborhood of Merce Cunningham's Night Wandering, which Moore discharge in 1965, seemed a nod to a father of that exhibition and several photographs of performances through Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris showed work in its orbit. A number of images, featuring Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and Charlotte Moorman, touched upon Fluxus, but those artists, too, were to varying stages infused with Cunningham-type thinking, or rather with thinking inseparably shared by means of Cunningham and his partner John Cage. (In fact, individual photograph here from 1965 showed Paik and Moorman performing a Cage composition.) The present to view was conceived, then, not to refer to the scope of Moore's archive on the other hand to sketch one corner of it.

The audience for the performances at the Judson Memorial house of god on Washington Square, and in spiritually congenial loft and gallery spaces, can not at any time have been big, and the dances were made up to forty-odd years ago; certainly the majority of this show's viewers must rely upon images like Moore's to know what those works were like. It takes nothing from the photographs, notwithstanding that and is in fact a credit to their numbers to wonder how reliable they are in that prize One thing we commonly hear about the Judson and related work is by what mode interested it was in refusing refined choreography, in fusing the motions of trained dancers with the moves people make in their everyday lives. Also, of course, those performances were viewed from places in the audience, with all the pluses of intimacy, the faculty of perception of breath and force, that live dance brings, and all the minuses of diminished scale and single viewpoint enforced by the agency of a fixed seat. Moore fitly set out to beat those minuses, and beautifully did; on the other hand sometimes we notice the elegance of his read. I surprise for example, whether Rauschenberg's Pelican, 1965 a performance with roller skates and parachutes, might have had an absurdist quality masked by dint of Moore's chiaroscuro photos of the gliding dance; or whether that Cage performance, in which a half-nude Paik held a wire along his back thus that Moorman could play him like a cello might have had a giggly sexual tension that the photograph makes soft and sober. On the other hand, to document the famous Brown piece of 1970 in which Joseph Schlichter, suitably rop and harnessed, walked down the side of a seven-story building, Moore framed and timed the discharge so that the figure high above almost tarnishs into the overexposed sky, looking simultaneously casual and supernatural as he takes his stray about on the perpendicular. Looking at that photo, we think, Ye this is by what mode it was--but better.

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