Wesselmann, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Watts, John Wesley, and George Brecht—to the city, home of the Washington School of Color Field painters.
Figure 2.8 Peter Moore, performance view of Robert Rauschenberg’s Pelican, 1963 (1965 performance by Robert Rauschenberg, Carolyn Brown, and Alex Hay). Photograph © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NY
Robert Dunn organized the dance program (considered to be Judson Concert #5) as a series of simultaneous performances arrayed around the National Skating Rink—as is recorded on the “America on Wheels” printed, diagrammatic program. Brown performed Trillium (1962) at the rink’s center, dramatically lit by an overhead spotlight; in addition, she presented her second work, a duet with Steve Paxton, Lightfall (1963)—recently premiered at Judson Church Concert #4 on January 30, 1963, Brown’s first presentation of her work in the church.
These Washington performances by Judson members were overshadowed by Rauschenberg’s Pelican, today known through iconic photographs, including one showing Rauschenberg in roller skates, sporting a cumbersome parachute on his back, with Per Olof Ultvedt supporting the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s star dancer, Carolyn Brown, outfitted in a casual gray sweat suit and performing en pointe.
As Steve Paxton recalled, Pelican included other forms of motion: Rauschenberg and Ultvedt “enter[ed] the rink, dressed in gray sweat suits and balanced on their knees on axles attached to bicycle wheels … which they turned by hand, rolling into the space” in fits and starts.43 Discarding the wheels, they suited up in “backpacks to which were attached large pieces of fabric, like parachutes”44 and in roller skates; they engaged Carolyn Brown by circling and supporting her dancing, before exiting, again, by kneeling on their hand-driven bicycle axles. A poetic, visual, and kinesthetic presentation of different movement possibilities,45 Pelican was in Rauschenberg words inspired by conditions of the site: “I favor a physical encounter of materials and ideas on a very literal, almost simpleminded plane.”46
Asked if the roller skating was Pelican’s syntax or unifying image, Rauschenberg emphasized the concrete, pragmatic aspects of his artistic decision making, telling Richard Kostelanetz, “No, it was just a form of locomotion. There were other wheels in the dance too. It was just that once I established the fact that I was going to call the dance a piece and didn’t want it to be a skating act … then somehow the other ingredients had to adjust to that; so that Carolyn Brown … was dancing on points, which is just as arbitrary a way of moving.”47
Motor, created for a parking garage, employed a car and, like Pelican, contrasts different methods of motion and locomotion. Revealing a penchant for reductive simplification similar to her choice of Trillium’s task movements, Motor charts movement’s trajectory from the human body to the earliest, locomotive apparatus—the wheel (of the skateboard)—to the industrial and mechanized motion represented by the car. The car’s utilitarian, nonillusionistic, nontheatrical light source—intrinsic to the object (car) and the performance—made for a context within the context of the garage. As in Pelican, where bicycle wheels, roller skates, and pointe shoes altered (and impaired) movement, the skateboard—with its formulaic opportunities for movement—provided resistance in Brown’s improvisation, as did the car’s unforeseeable, “unchoreographed” behavior and illumination.
Figure 2.9 Peter Moore, performance view of Trisha Brown’s Motor, 1965. Photograph © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NY
Motor participates in a potent 1960s iconography, that of the automobile, the basis for George Brecht’s composition Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event) to John Cage (1960) and a major element of Robert Whitman’s Two Holes of Water—3 (1966), presented at “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” (1966).48 Brecht said that Rauschenberg’s comments on a public panel at New York University inspired his work, whose score was published in An Anthology.49 Brown’s activation of the wheels of the skateboard, car, and headlights in relation to (undocumented) time structures echoes Brecht’s work, created for “any number of vehicles arranged outdoors” in which “there are at least as many sets of instruction cards as vehicles.” His score includes a list of possibilities for activating cars’ mechanisms—including headlights, parking lights, footlights, directional signal, inside light, glove compartment light, spot lamp, special lights, horns, sirens, bells, motor, windshield wipers, radio, seats, and doors—according to precise time structures.
As part of A string (1966), presented in the contained indoor setting of Judson Church, Brown replaced the car with a motor scooter. Jill Johnston compared it to a happening, implicitly relating it to Rauschenberg’s dance. Johnston wrote of Motor: “The use of objects in the second section achieved a dramatic impact much closer to the metaphorical license of the painter-happenings than the phenomenological approach to objects of many dancer happenings. In a blacked out space Miss Brown used a child’s skateboard to scoot on, run with, fall over, etc., as she was followed closely by a man on a motor scooter.”50
The final component of A string—Outside (1966)—defines its concept and movement source in relation to the architectural site of its making. Its premise connects to Brown’s exploration of frames and contexts in Motor and Homemade—albeit in a far more literal fashion. Its realization followed from Brown’s adoption of a loft-studio’s walls as the basis for a movement score, a situation she re-created when she presented the work at Judson Church.
She explained the importance of Outside’s geometric framework, how movements’ invention followed from cues delivered by a loft-studio’s wall surfaces. As Sally Banes reported (while renaming Outside “Inside,” as Brown did for a 1978 text published by Anne Livet), Brown “read the hardware, fixtures, woodwork, and various objects stored around the edges as instructions for movement,” explaining “Outside organizational methods force new patterns of construction.”51 Brown said she faced her studio wall “at a distance of twelve feet and beginning at the extreme left … read the wall as a score. While moving across the room to the far right,” she gleaned information about “speed, shape, duration or quality of a move [from] visual information on the wall … the architectural collection of alcove, door, peeling paint and pipes,” correlating these incidents with physical actions.52 “After finishing the first wall,” she said, “I repositioned myself in the same way for the second wall and repeated the procedure, [then] for the third and fourth.”53
This use of “structured improvisation”—a phrase coined by Simone Forti, whom Brown considered a most important mentor—had begun after Brown’s arrival in New York in the winter of 1961. Steve Paxton recalled watching Trisha and Simone demonstrating ‘improvisation’ in weekly workshops in James Waring’s space on Eighth Street and Third Avenue.54 Together with Paxton—in an illicit artistic behavior—they commandeered an unauthorized space on Great Jones Street as a studio.55
Brown recalls, “Simone would point blindly into the space and then follow out the end of her finger. From whatever there was, she would derive a set of rules about time and space that were complete enough to proceed with an improvisation.”56 Forti’s and Brown’s method of sourcing improvised movement dates to their participation in Ann Halprin’s 1960 workshop. Don McDonagh reported in Artforum in 1972 that Ann Halprin “began to work toward a type of dance activity that would draw upon its environment…. It was improvisation in which the resistance of materials … dictated the activity that
