Adam Milner: 26 Little Dances for Miller ICA, in Isolation

“What if the medium is really a massage?” Hito Steyerl asks in her text, “A Thing Like You and Me.” She describes becoming an image, participating within images, instead of expecting them to represent us. An image is “a thing simultaneously couched in affect and availability, a fetish made of crystals and electricity, animated by our wishes and fears– a perfect embodiment of its own conditions of existence.” [1] If the medium is not only the message, but a massage, do we have the potential to touch each other through the screen?

(Even before isolation, before a global pandemic, nothing was making sense. The night that made the most sense, I danced until the morning. For Valentine’s Day, everyone looked beautiful in black lace and frills or leather, maybe mesh and rhinestones, thick chains and sequins, glitter or snakeskin. As friends and strangers moved to the music, bodies bumped each other. A kiss on the cheek turned into a snagged earring on a lace bodysuit. I hooked someone too. Nobody minded the tangle.)

I learned the term “dance for camera” from a group of dancers I fell in love with in my early twenties. As an undergraduate student at The University of Colorado in Boulder, I often collaborated as part of a collective started by the dancer Tara Rynders. These dancers left an impact on me in how they were so comfortable with their own bodies, their generosity and bravery in wanting to share themselves in the flesh, and the way a couple of them would flirt with me. The term "dance for camera" stuck in my head and felt like an instruction.

While I have gotten some ideas from trained dancers, modern and postmodern choreographers and artists, it is the dance floor where I situate dance: the party, the club, even the awkward wedding reception, the places where dance takes on a life of its own and thrives like an organism. 

I used to be afraid of dancing. I thought dance was about me, what I was doing or not doing, about performing a certain vocabulary of coolness or something. This was before I decided that dance is less about an individual expression, but instead about a collective movement and gesture, a kind of solidarity. These videos of mine began, in some ways, to return to that uneasy feeling of being watched and to remove some of the communal and collective components of dancing that allowed me to participate in the first place: the darkened room, the crowd of people, the alcohol, even the music itself. Could I escape my self-consciousness, even without the collective energy, or could I find a way to carry that collectivity within my body, stored from previous experiences and articulated again while apart? I don’t know, but that attempt feels more important now, while I isolate at home, away from the strangers and friends who give me life. 

The first dances for camera I made were in 2011 and this nearly ten year practice has shifted and evolved over time. The early videos were made for specific people and shared on social media as love letters of sorts. In 1886, Stéphane Mallarmé wrote about how dancing “suggest[s], through the miracle of bends and leaps, a kind of corporeal writing” [2], and I still think of dance this way, as a message or text we can make for each other.

In writing about the gay disco scene of the 70’s, Douglas Crimp describes the slightly painful feeling after a full night of dancing, “as if the music had been absorbed by our muscles…” [3] The body seems to be an archive, storing records of what it has experienced. Dance seems to be an archive too: a collection of references and an embodied memory of the dances that came before. I tend to think that our bodies store the information of every dance we’ve ever seen. That collective movement I feel at the dance party actually transcends time and space. When I dance, it’s like I’m thumbing through a file of dance references, ranging from childhood friends to pop divas to the modern masters.

While we live online, I long for those full body affective gestures. Our telepresence from the chest or shoulders up has led to a surge in shirt sales and a drop in pants sales. But can we zoom out? As dance parties temporarily move online, especially among queer communities, and Club Quarantine dances every night of sheltering in place, I remember the power of dancing with each other, even if for now we dance as images.

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[1] Steyerl, Hito, “A Thing Like You and Me.” The Wretched of the Screen, Sternberg Press, 2012, pp. 51–52

[2] Griffin, Tim, and Yvonne Rainer, “Keep Moving: the Poems of Yvonne Rainer.” Yvonne Rainer: Poems, Badlands Unlimited, 2017.

[3] Crimp, Douglas, “Disss-Co (A Fragment).” Before Pictures, Dancing Foxes Press, 2016.

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ARTIST BIO

Adam Milner’s sprawling and idiosyncratic practice includes sculptures, drawings, videos, texts, and interventions which draw from deeply personal experiences to point toward a broader ethics around how we engage with the things around us. Milner has exhibited at the Mattress Factory, The Warhol, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Aspen Art Museum, Casa Maauad, Galería Mascota, and David B. Smith Gallery. Milner received an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2017), is a recent participant of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2018), and is currently a fellow with Black Cube Nomadic Museum. Milner lives and works in Brooklyn.