''I think of art as an ongoing exploration rather than a search for a conclusion, an ongoing set of questions, finding new ways to ask the questions, and visual answers.''-Yvonne Rainer Yvonne Rainer's work as a filmmaker, feminist artist, choreographer, and performer has won international acclaim. She began her career in New York in the 1960s as a founder of the pioneering Judson Dance Theater. When she started making films in the mid-1970s, works such as Lives of Performers and Film About a Woman Who . quickly established her at the forefront of independent cinema. Her work has been the subject of more than a dozen retrospectives, most recently at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and has earned her numerous honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. The latest volume in PAJ's Art + Performance series, A Woman Who . is a wide-ranging collection of Rainer's interviews, essays, talks, and other writings.

The book reflects the remarkable scope of her thinking over three decades, moving from dance pieces such as the well-known ''The Mind is a Muscle'' to more recent provocative films on feminist issues. Rainer's works have unblinkingly explored such issues as menopause, breast cancer, lesbianism, sexual dissatisfaction, and political violence. Increasingly, her films are seen beyond the festival circuit and attract audiences in art theaters throughout the United States and abroad. The scripts of her two most recent feature-length films, Privilege and MURDER and murder, are included in this collection. ''Taken as a whole, Rainer's work represents both a disciplined and liberatory practice of writing-a practice of graphing that encompasses choreography, filmography, and autobiography. From the breathless call of her 1965 NO manifesto, to the close-up of newspaper text pasted across her own face in Film About a Woman Who . , to the scrolling statistics that march across the bottom of the frames of MURDER and Murder, Rainer has consistently insisted that there is no seeing that is not always the result of a specific form of literacy, a mode of reading that both reveals and conceals.''-from the introductory essay by Peggy Phelan.