Output details

Minotaur

As part of its participation in the 3M Commission Project with the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago commissioned a new work by Daria Martin. Her 16mm film Minotaur pays tribute to the work of dancer Anna Halprin, one of the key pioneers of postmodern dance and movement.

Halprin's lifelong investigation of everyday movement and the body’s relationship to landscape has had a profound influence on Martin’s engagement with such relationships in her films. This film is centred on a Halprin dance based on the sculpture Minotaur by Auguste Rodin and Martin’s work traces labyrinthine transformations in which photographs, sculpture and dance succeed and replace one another, and in which bodies and objects appear part of a continuous tissue. Fluctuations between the disparate media are accompanied by shifts in gender dynamics. Martin's Minotaur extends Halprin’s interweaving of highly conceptualised and choreographed physical movement and her editing and cinematographic techniques evoke a history of experimental filmmaking.

Minotaur was presented in a solo exhibition at all three American museums and was accompanied by an 86-page publication, with an essay by Dominic Molon, and an interview between the artist and Anna Halprin (ISBN 9780933856882). Special talks accompanied two of the exhibits: with choreographer Anna Colllard (Remaking Anna Halprin) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and with Anna Halprin herself in the Billy Wilder Theatre, UCLA, Los Angeles. Martin also spoke publicly at UC Irvine about Halprin’s groundbreaking interdisciplinary workshops with her better-known protégé Yvonne Rainer.

As part of the 3M Consortium Project the film was acquired by all three museums for their permanent collections.