In the last chapter of her brilliant book Each One Another: The Self in Contemporary Art, Rachel Haidu quotes at length Yvonne Rainer’s description of her desire to “render the shards of her own life” and incorporate “the new content” of personal feelings, which the choreographer saw as no less than markers of the uniqueness of a human being, into her work beginning in the early 1970s. Rainer elaborates, “On the one hand, this mindset can be characterized as a refusal of narrative and fixed meanings and a distrust of the “telling” and shaping strategies of fiction and history. On another, it can be seen as a refusal to differentiate events, thus running the risk of trapping the spectator in a chain of unlimited interchangeability” (156).

To any discerning observer of Rainer’s work, this refusal of the “interchangeability” of people and the suggested (re)turn to the uniqueness of the self might seem counterintuitive, if not scandalous. A pioneer of contemporary dance, Rainer is known for initiating dance that “valorizes the objective world of the everyday” (154), announcing a clear break from emotional flourishes and hyper-subjective personality in traditional dance. Yet Rainer’s clear violation of postmodern art’s spareness of emotion and claim to anonymity is not a simple defection to the cause of traditional art and its bourgeois-humanist project, which was systematically eschewed first by the radical experimentations of the interwar avant-garde, and later—more vehemently—by the discourse of postmodernism and its conception of subject-formation.

Rather, as Haidu argues, it marks a moment when the artist began to plumb—as a valid aesthetic category to be reckoned with—the potential of selfhood, individuality, and our right to live, talk, and feel within our own interior worlds, liberated from the constraints of linguistic and structural rules. Not just another quotation, Rainer’s passage can be understood to crystallize the analytical heart of Haidu’s book.   

Moving across a range of media, from painting and dance to video and film, Each One Another frames its investigation into post-1970s art around ideas of interiority, totality, and holisms, with their own clear edges that negotiate with, brush off, or even repel the constraints of external structures and laws. Haidu opines from the beginning that the desire that so interests her, and to which she believes both many artists and theorists have lovingly and often secretly responded, is a desire for the unity of a self.

Taking a stand against the dominant traditions of postmodern philosophy and art history, which tend to subsume the individual and the particular into the systematic and structural, Haidu recasts the desire for selfhood in ways she knows may cause unease in the ambient light of the postmodern critiques of identity and language that, notably, formed the theoretical core of Haidu’s first book on Marcel Broodthaers’s art. However, Haidu does not resort to a facile opposition between a plural-discursive-collective subject and a singular-bourgeois-independent selfhood, a paradigm that has seduced many of us (myself included) at one point or another, particularly when dealing with post-1970s art.

The central ambition of Each One Another is to rethink the limits of subject-centered ideas and simultaneously to invite investigation of the self into our discussions of (self-)identity and knowledge-formation, and to explore how art relates to all of these concepts in a conflicted yet productive manner. As Haidu states in the introduction, the term “self” can “open up all kinds of questions about both the subject and the self” (2). 

Haidu’s book demonstrates with brio how the privileged position of subject as a category of judgment in art history and critical theory has declined in recent years. Yet dislodging and even abolishing the portmanteau position of the subject would not be enough. Whether we argue for or against a subject-centered understanding of art and identity, as long as we deal with theories of the subject, Haidu implies, we are in its permanent grip: “we are perpetually inside reproductive structures: social and economic classes; racialized, colonial, and imperial fictions; constructs of gender and sexuality” (2).

Chapter one, “Shape,” explores how shapes in the work of Philip Guston and Amy Sillman present themselves as a totality and shows how this totality operates as the emotive and experiential realization of historical reality. The case of Guston is an instructive one, in no small measure because of the perennial controversy surrounding the painter’s evocation of the imagery of American racial atrocities. Focusing on Guston’s later oeuvre of “common objects,” and reading, through the lens of Gestalt psychology, the painter’s rendering of the objects as an independent wholeness, Haidu displaces the referential function of Guston’s images (or at least our belief in it). This reading takes us beyond the conventional understanding of Guston’s shapes through linguistic (signifying) structure and moves us toward the individual(ized) feeling of the burden of history and its totalitarian impulse.

Yet Haidu does not allow us to believe in the unlimited liberatory potential of the shape as an independent self, freed from the intervention of structural conditions. By highlighting how Amy Sillman subjects her shapes to the repeated process of cutout, printing, and painting, which leads to a systematic network of fragmented, reattributed, and circulated shapes, Haidu demonstrates that the gestural and formless expressivity of Sillman’s work, often regarded as the quintessential marker of the self, is in fact activated by its enmeshment within the mapping and inscription of the structure of the work.

The conflictual yet dialectical relation between the self and structure comes into focus with more nuance in chapter two, “Character.” Looking at James Coleman’s 2007 Retake with Evidence, a video reenactment of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Kolonnus, and Steve McQueen’s 2011 film Shame, Haidu shows how both artists depend on formal techniques (such as soliloquy and artificial color and sound) and accentuate their marked plasticity to detach not only the characters but also the viewers from the natural representation that would support the structures of the works’ given narratives and characters.

For example, Coleman’s presentation of Oedipus, through the acting of the character actor Harvey Keitel, involves not a return to or confirmation of premodern tropes of the Western myth, but a parody of them. This parody undermines from within the manifest claims to Western dominance and patriarchal authority. And the use of artificial color and studio sound in Shame, which is intentionally out of sync with the diegetic narrative unfolding in the film, pierces the viewer’s sensorial self and begs us, Haidu suggests, to feel individually the edges of “our bodily and sensorial experience, that is, the surface of our embodiment” (134). 

The push-and-pull between the self and structure that Haidu sets up from the beginning of the book reaches its apex in the last chapter and de facto conclusion, titled “Role.” By examining the 2015 staging of Work/Travail/Arbeid by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, as well as Yvonne Rainer’s The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there is nothing left to move? enacted at MoMA in 2015, Haidu points out how roles operate in dance as an abstract formalized marker for selves. That is, the role’s formal rigidity and superficial quality grant us the right to be separated from each other and to remain independent selves, with our own clear boundaries.  Yet, through movement, which is a technique specific to dance, we can constantly slide in and out of set roles and positions. Roles are shared and exchanged not only among people on stage but also across temporalities, among previous and subsequent generations. And throughout this infinite repetition of interchanges and clashes among roles and people, we can feel not only the contours of our selves but the traces and vestiges of other selves that open us to the field of the de-individualized collective—that is, to borrow Jean-Luc Nancy’s famed phrase, our “being singular plural” as a mode of existence.

It is possible that some will regard the book’s focus on the “turning inward of the self” as a misguided academic musing, far removed from the urgent concerns of contemporary political crisis. Indeed, it does seem to contradict the intensifying rhetoric in favor of collectivity and solidarity against the ongoing and pervasive atrocities in our world. But Haidu does not try to provide a clear path out of our current crisis. Instead, she gently urges us to consider what it means to live in the aftermath or the middle of the failure of collectivity and collective politics.

Just as Virginia Woolf retreated into a room of her own and thought in darkness, with the unconscious as a counterpoint to the noise of the aerial attacks of the fascist regime, Haidu’s book shows us that in our time, in an era still filled with totalitarian violence, letting one’s boundaries stay intact and acknowledging each other’s existence as “totality”  might be the way to take responsibility and imagine a new mode of collectivity. And, as this remarkable book powerfully argues, art—possibly the only field that bypasses the noise of rhetoric and language—has some lessons to teach.