Attention Economy - June 11, 2023

Josef Vascovitz: “As a commissioned work, Catherine Cabeen’s Into the Void is a smart choice for OtB, especially as the theatre season winds down. First it’s a beautiful blend of music and stagecraft, with exquisite (ly performed) dance gracefully stepping through a narrative about art. When art speaks well about art , it finds a way to reexamine even your most steadfast assumptions. Coupled with Catherine and her troop’s remarkable dance movement- at times she seemed to float through the air like Klein’s famous leap- held motionless against gravity.”

Sound can be a trance. Colors can be an embrace. Air can be a shape. Those might seem like vague impressions to take away from “Into the Void,” Seattle choreographer Catherine Cabeen’s first evening-length piece, especially when you’re aware of the research that went into “Void.” […] Yves Klein, the French artist who inspired “Void,” had his eye on the ineffable — and that, in large part, is what has drawn Cabeen to him. Klein created work that sometimes left no trace but a memory. At other times, he suggested that his artistic process was as integral to the appreciation of a piece as any innate qualities in the work itself — for instance, in his “Anthropométries,” created by covering nude models in paint, then having them roll across white paper. Cabeen’s 70-minute work alludes to certain specifics of Klein’s life. But if you want to catch the references she’s making, you’ll have to do some homework first. Far from being a literal illustration of Klein’s life and career, “Void” is a d

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Catherine Cabeen: “Klein once said that, “A painter should only paint a single masterpiece, himself, constantly.” His admiration for the daily practice of art making, and the lack of separation between art and life, which that creates, is one aspect of his work that continues to draw me to him. I wonder how this connection between art and life played out for Klein in relation to his gender expression. He was a small man, not physically imposing, but a black belt in judo who was always full of energy. His work is often seen as misogynistic, though his wife and many of the female models he worked with claim that he was full of spiritual integrity, enthusiasm and joy when he created the work in question. While I aim to dismantle the problematic gendered hierarchy in Klein’s performance art through how I reference the 1960 Anthropometries in Into the Void, I hope to do so by complicating the issue and posing new questions, not by solving or underlining the binary nature of male/female…”

Evelyn Nesbit was just 16 years old when she used to kick high into the air from the red velvet swing, aiming her toes at the great Japanese fan that hung from the ceiling of the hideaway built for seduction. The year was 1901, and Nesbit, a model and chorus girl with long black hair, full lips and dark eyes, was there to charm her seducer, Stanford White, one of the most celebrated architects of the Gilded Age. White had designed the swing for his adulterous loft in a four-story brick row house at 22 West 24th Street so that Nesbit and other young women in varying degrees of undress could entertain him. When the building partly collapsed last weekend, after complaints about its precarious state of disrepair, it took down with it the setting of a rich and bizarre turn-of-the-century Manhattan narrative, one that involved beauty, opulence, fame, sex and eventually murder.