Arnie
Zane's photographs of Pearl Pease mark the midpoint in his photographic
trajectory from the pictorial to the realistic during the short
six year period, 1971 to 1977. Before Pearl, with a few important
exceptions, Arnie was constructing a sensual, silent world of gossamer
dream -- pictorial explorations of elegance, youthful languor, and
the ambiguities of sexual desire and sexual identity. After Pearl
he would turn almost exclusively to a topographic exploration of
the torso as the site of gesture, personality, and the shifting
interplay of masculinity and femininity.
Arnie's
growing involvement in Bill's early dance efforts, his own related
activity as a fledgling performer and choreographer, and probably
most importantly, his experience with the newly developed phenomena
of contact improvisation under Lois Welk's tutelage, widened his
sense of the body and made possible a new perspective in photography.
Pearl
was an extraordinary street presence in Binghamton in 1974. Bill
remembers:
We
were driving across the bridge in Binghamton when we happened
upon the astonishing sight of this ancient woman (who we later
learned was only fifty or so) wearing a lace fontage around her
head and a girl's Marie Antoinette-style pink party dress. Pink
angel wings were strapped to her back. Her hair was almost white.
Arnie stopped and asked her if she wanted to be in a show and
she said that, well, she had to think about it. She ultimately
accepted, and in The Track Dance sat in the parking lot installation
fiendishly smoking cigarettes and knitting for hours.
More
on Zane's images of Pearl.
(From
Continuous Replay, published
by MIT
Press.)
More
on the exhibition:
Amsterdam,
Binghamton, San Francisco
Torsos
