Spatial Envy Yvonne Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women

Abstract

Near the end of Yvonne Rainer’s recent film, The Man Who Envied Women, the frame is filled for the second time with Donald Judd’s large grey concrete sculptures luxuriating in an open Texas field.¹ The camera walks across these sculptures like fingers over a piano: they seem to hold a kind of tune half hidden, half audible. The sculptures are concrete outlines of squares the color of tombstones. The heaviness of their frame accentuates the hollowness of the air they embrace. Like a Wittgensteinian word game, or better still, like Mark Strand’s witty poem “Keeping Things Whole”, Judd’s sculptures suggest that “space” is that which negotiates between airy fields (infinite possibilities) and concrete architecture (finite facts), while not residing entirely in either the one or the other. As Strand puts it anthropomorphically: “When I walk/I part the air/and always the air moves in/to fill the spaces/where my body’s been”. Filling in the spaces created by departing persons, places, and things is the central concern of The Man Who Envied Women. Judd’s sculptures, with their refusal to locate or define a spatial point of origin or termination, are the objective correlative for the difficult idea of space that Rainer’s film alternatively vigilantly argues for, and whimsically hopes for. In this combination of argument and hope Rainer’s film resembles some of the best work of Jean-Luc Godard.