ABSTRACT
The very particular form of collaboration contrived by Nam June Paik in his video Merce By Merce by Paik introduces Marcel Duchamp and Merce Cunningham as collaborators across time. The intersubjectivity of their connection resonates with the collaboration between Donya Feuer and Ted Hughes across space (in Chapter 15). The idea of pedestrian movement as a form of danced ready-made resonates with Chapter 14 in which the movement of the task is examined within the historical continuum of labor. It seems to me that if Merce Cunningham was interested in this time in something that could be called video dance the very notion of television is manipulated by Paik to interrogate clichés about dance and important notions of appearance and disappearance that are germane to dance as viewed through a phenomenological lens. There also appears in this essay a concern with the critical discourse on Cunningham that it seemed to me was represented in the video (linking this essay to Chapters 2–4). It is the notion of replay that video brings to live performance through which the play with temporalities between Marcel and Merce becomes possible and a larger aesthetic reflection is undertaken.
Therefore, everything seen — every object, that is, plus the process of looking at it — is a Duchamp.
–John Cage 1