ABSTRACT
The proposition that Cunningham is to Graham as Rauschenberg and Johns are to abstract expressionism seems almost too obvious to belabor; but it’s a parallel that most dance writers consistently fail to acknowledge. There’s a simple, if ultimately exasperating, reason for this: Dance critics have a bad habit of analogizing Cunningham to the painter with whom he has the least in common: Jackson Pollock. Of course, Cunningham and Pollock do share some superficial similarities. Neither of them organizes the painting’s visual field around a perspectival “vanishing point.” But comparing Pollock and Cunningham in this way is a little like suggesting a deep affinity between Mondrian and Roy Lichtenstein simply because they both employ similar figure/ground relationships and both renounce the illusionism of three-dimensional perspective.
