The adoption of dance studies by a widening pool of interdisciplinary scholars is an exciting contemporary trend in our field. Horizontal Together: Art, Dance, and Queer Embodiment in 1960s New York by Dr. Paisid Aramphongphan brings together theories of dance, queer studies, and fine art to lay a glittering tapestry of connection and conversation across the practitioners of the period. Rather than attempt to offer a historical contextualization of postmodern dance and the postmodern dance pioneers of the Judson Church (beautifully achieved by Sally Banes's Reference Banes1993 book Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theatre, 1962–1964,) Aramphongphan brings to light smaller moments of the Judson oeuvre, placing them in dialogue with queer horizontalism in the practices of Andy Warhol and his artistic contemporaries. These include Jack Smith and other collaborators at the Factory, Fred Herko, and the A-Men. Aramphongphan argues that because it is bodies that create social categories of sexuality, dance is an important analytical tool for establishing a language of queer community.

The thesis of Horizontal Together is that queer artists in 1960s New York rejected masculinist verticality in favor of a queer, embodied horizontality, exploring flaccidity, passivity, the blurring of social and artistic boundaries, and an expansive approach to artistic practice. The most pervasive image in the book is that of the couch, of casual conversations and intimate enmeshments of reclining on velvet surfaces in a community very much like ones’ own queer, artistic self. This is not to say that Aramphongphan's work, and that of the artists studied, is not challenging or serious; in fact, the soft sensuality and casual pedestrianism of queer subculture acts historically as a direct challenge to vertical power. Theoretically, Aramphongphan's text calls into question scholarly frameworks for the time period, imposed both through contemporary criticism and retrospectively by historians, which act as forms of queer erasure.

In chapter 1, Aramphongphan productively explores theories of technique and gesture, calling on theorists Amelia Jones and Carrie Noland, alongside Iris Marion Young, to differentiate the elegant intellectualism and covered queerness of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg, from the effeminate, ill-socialized inefficiencies of Warhol and Jack Smith. Even the embodiment of Jackson Pollock, so often characterized as vigorously active, is reclaimed here as a light dance of small movements, translated toward the canvas and the horizontal plane. In chapter 2, this embodied approach is expanded to the consideration of horizontal languishing, expressed in queer art pieces such as Warhol's Couch series (1964), Harold Stevenson's The New Adam (1962), José Rodríguez-Soltero's Jerovi (1965), and others. Many of these works are lushly reproduced in the text, which features a five-page gallery in full color, as well as numerous black and white reference images. As Aramphongphan explains, these artworks “bring to the fore the performative dimension that, at the same time, can also have affective effects on the embodied self … intersubjectively constituting the sense of self in turn” (58). He continues, “[The images] show us the lived experiences and everyday embodiment of those depicted. As artists, in other words, they were making their queer world, and as queer people, they were making art” (58).

It is at the end of chapter 2 that two major absences in Horizontal Together come to light. The first is an absence that Aramphongphan highlights himself—the absence of queer bodies of color from the text's horizontal repertoire. Aramphongphan's explanation for this is the lack of materials available for research, in spite of his best efforts toward diligent research and discovery. He notes that cultural expectations around queerness mean that horizontal gestures would not necessarily be available, or even desirable, for artists of color, both because of systemic barriers to entry in the postmodern New York art scene, and because of cultural expectations that associated homosexuality and whiteness (83). He also notes that because of the Orientalism of the white gaze, which tended to feminize Asian men regardless of their sexual orientation, the adoption of languid horizontality, as in Yasumasa Morimura's Olympia and Une modern Olympia (both 1988), ran the risk of being misperceived as feminine mimicry, rather than an assertion of queer identity.

The second absence is the book's lack of engagement with broader theories of horizontality. This could have been done through dance studies, perhaps by taking up André Lepecki's assertion that Trisha Brown uses horizontality to create a space of potentiality (Reference Lepecki2005, 68), or Liz Lerman's ethos of horizontalist practice as a form of artistic ethics (Reference Lerman2011, xv–xvi). It could also have been drawn from political theory, such as Marina Sitrin's vital work tying horizontality to Argentinian protest movements (Reference Sitrin2012). I personally was hungry for a conversation between Aramphongphan's explanation of queer, horizontalist languishing, and Rodrigo Nunes's analysis of how horizontality's political potential is so often reduced to immobility in practice (Reference Nunes, Harvey, Milburn, Trott and Watts2005). Whereas horizontalist theory is diffused across many different fields and is thus sometimes difficult to find, reading the text in conversation with these other sources adds rich layers of additional meaning. I certainly look forward to seeing Aramphongphan's work brought into that wider conversation.

Chapter 3 is where dance starts to become a central focus within Horizontal Together. “Plastiques” connects Ruth St. Denis with the photography of Jack Smith, drawing on aesthetic and gestural similarities, referential imagery, and techniques of tableau vivant. As a champion of feminine expression, Aramphongphan suggest that Smith saw St. Denis as icon, a blueprint for his own queer emulation of femininity (104). Whereas some of the images in this chapter, drawn from Smith's The Beautiful Book (1962), are explicit enough to give pause to an undergraduate instructor, there is much that is useful here about St. Denis's own intermedia work across the worlds of dance and film. Of particular interest is the suggestion that by mining “low” and “high” art for inspiration, Smith practiced a queer horizontality of reference that created relationships across accepted artistic frameworks (104). Aramphongphan also grapples in this chapter with Smith's reliance on the “economy of normative orientalism” circulating in visual culture at this time (107). Aramphongphan is careful to ground his evaluation in material reality, acknowledging that Smith had no access to the premises put forward in Said's Orientalism (1978) and that, given his admiration of her, it is unlikely Smith's work should be read as a critique of St. Denis's own Orientalist practices. Nevertheless, Aramphongphan provides several ways of approaching Smith's work with an eye toward critique and redemption, in a model that is both nuanced and fair-minded.

The final two chapters of the work dive into the relationship between the fine art world of queer New York, particularly Warhol's A-men, and the Judson Church. In the chapter “Dancing Queers: Andy Warhol, Fred Herko, and the A-Men,” Aramphongphan examines the “how” of this relationship, drawing attention to Fred Herko's performances in both spaces, and the interplay between efficiency and inefficiency that underpins some of the aesthetics of the time. In the last chapter, however, Aramphongphan turns toward historiography, asking why the austere and reductive elements of Judson—the “No Manifesto” Judson—have eclipsed acknowledgements of the balletic, vaudevillian, and queer sides of the group's work.

One of the reasons, Aramphongphan claims, was the presence of Robert Rauschenberg, whose ascendence in the art world afforded him greater status than other Judson artists. In addition to his iconic status, Rauschenberg and the elite circle around him—a circle that included Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris—were more ready than other Judson Church artists to write about their work, thus consolidating a minimalist narrative from a pluralistic whole. Homophobia also played a role in shaping this art history. While Rauschenberg and Steve Paxton openly lived together, they maintained a public façade of asexuality or heterosexuality. Jill Johnston, who collaborated with the balletic Fred Herko and who also documented Judson concerts in her bold, experimental writing, found herself the subject of hostility for her relationship with Lucinda Childs: “To find a favored party of their group in bed with the critic, who was moreover of the wrong sex, was a territorial affront” (144). Historically, Childs has been described as a Rauschenbergian disciple, a partial truth that does not encompass her other work with James Waring's company of ballet, vaudeville, Warhol, and camp.

These and other “straightening devices” (153), which, as evidenced in this book, include censorship, miscategorization, erasure, dismissal, and outright bigotry, combined with the flattening of historical discourse as a whole as it is streamlined for scholarly audiences, has resulted in losses from our understanding of dance and art. Placing queerness back into the narrative, Aramphongphan also connects the Ballets Russes into this canon, allowing for a discussion of Orientalism, effeminacy, and excess in the work's closing pages. This in turn leads to a discussion of “imaginative possibilities,” or how today's artists might reclaim postmodern art spaces for artists of color, and others who have been excluded from the history of fine art and dance.

Overall, Horizontal Together is a hopeful work that offers new insight and critique in the service of a more inclusive historical practice. I recommend it to students and scholars interested in reclaiming dance/art history, and for those working with queerness and interdisciplinary scholarship. Aramphongphan makes a persuasive case for a “semiotics of kinesthetics” (8) illustrating throughout the text that bodies and the way they move can create a significant impact on how a community expresses itself. Through dance, and art, bodies in the 1960s used the semiotics of horizontality to create, and state their place, in a network of queer artistry.