legacy of postwar art, not only redefining dance, but also asserting choreography’s place in visual art tradition. In its transparent analysis of choreography’s elemental components, the work opens to cross-comparisons with visual artists’ works. Brown’s shift of walking from horizontality to verticality echoes Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955): a readymade object transformed by a 90-degree shift (plus the addition of paint) into an art object. Literally presented “off the wall,” Man Walking bears connection to Rauschenberg’s combines such as Canyon (1959), where an object suspended from the canvas’s frame enters real space, and Elgin Tie (1964), presented at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (see figure 3.8).
Rauschenberg’s descent from ceiling to floor anticipated Brown’s vertical walk, just as it built on Simone Forti’s Slant Board (1961; figure 3.9), in which a wooden platform mounted at a 45-degree angle against a wall is attached with ropes that provide a movement score, inciting performers’ actual energy expenditure to perform the repeated tasks of climbing and descending this surface plane, negotiating gravity. Whereas the duration and number of repetitions in Forti’s dance are a matter of choice, Brown adopted the framing device of architecture to establish the parameters for her choreographic act.
Brown’s work resonates with La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #1 to Bob Morris: Draw a Straight Line and Follow It (1960) and with Richard Long’s performative photograph, A Line Made by Walking (1967; figure 3.10).77 Her rigging of the body and intervention into urban space anticipate Gordon Matta-Clark’s site-specific, sculptural interventions into architecture and his 1973 Vassar College Tree Dance—and also coincide with Richard Serra’s rigging of his large-scale sculptural works.78
Carol Goodden, Matta-Clark’s companion, performed in Brown’s Leaning Duets [I] (1970) in the “Dances in and around 80 Wooster Street” program, presented on the street by five pairs of dancers: one version without “equipment” and the other using “rope devices with handles … to achieve a greater angle.”79 (See figure 3.11.) An elemental statement about gravity’s role in movement’s production, Leaning Duets pairs two dancers side to side, with feet planted adjacent to one another. Using their bodies as ballast, they cantilever away from one another and from gravity’s center. This precarious balance gives way, propelling their bodies’ forward momentum to repeat the task. Physical negotiation was accompanied by verbal communication: “Give me some weight” or “Give me a lot” or “Take a little.”80
Figure 3.8 Robert Rauschenberg, Elgin Tie, 1964. Image © Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Photograph by Stig T. Karlsson. Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York
Figure 3.9 Simone Forti, Slant Board, 1961. Photograph 1982, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Richard Serra’s One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969; figure 3.12) mobilizes gravity through the contingent, choreographed act of setting up four self-supporting lead slabs, unfastened and leaning against one another, to create a precariously balanced cube.81 Each lead square’s great weight implies falling’s potential danger, while exemplifying Serra’s idea of “choreography in relation to material.”82 Serra acknowledged dance’s influence as prompting him to consider the idea of “the body passing through space, and [its] movement not being predicated totally on image or sight or optical awareness, but on physical awareness in relation to space, place, time, movement.”83 Brown had written the dance critic Edward Denby hoping he would attend her performance84 whose gender-crossing dangerous act challenged a 1970s situation described by painter Susan Rothenberg: “The women were all dancers; the men were sculptors”85—a statement that captures period-specific thinking but not the fact that there were men who danced and women who sculpted. Brown later said that Yvonne Rainer, who missed the performance but had heard about it, remarked to Trisha, “That sounds tough.”86
Figure 3.10 Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967. Photograph and pencil on board, 375 × 324 mm. Tate Gallery, London, purchased 1976. © 2015 Richard Long. All Rights Reserved, DACS, London / ARS, NY. Photo: Tate, London / Art Resource, NY
Figure 3.11 Peter Moore, performance view of Trisha Brown’s Leaning Duets, 1970. Photograph © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NY
Presented in the second-floor space of Jonas Mekas’s Cinémathèque, Brown’s Floor of the Forest (1970; figures 3.13 and 3.14) structured the performance, as well as the audience’s relationship to it, through a three-dimensional metal structure, 12 by 14 feet, suspended from the ceiling at viewers’ eye level and made from pipe that was strung with a grid of rope through which clothing was threaded.
Brown explained, “The organization of the clothing … form[ed] a solid rectangular surface.”87 The dancers were tasked with dressing and undressing, moving in and out of the garments attached to the ropes, fleeting settlements for their bodies. Audiences studied the activity head-on or ducked down to see the performers hanging below: “Old clothes make new hammocks,” Anna Kisselgoff remarked.88
As in Man Walking, travel in space was task-based. Horizontality impelled a struggle with gravity: “one action impinging on another.”89 This work also relates to Robert Whitman’s Flower (1963), in which Brown and her husband performed an aggressive undressing of each other’s heavily layered clothes. Floor of the Forest circumscribes these actions in relation to a gridded structure, organizing a temporal performance in relation to an object. In the SoHo Weekly News Rob Baker discussed an American Dance Festival performance of the work, emphasizing the work’s “self-containment” as “process, as concept and as a series of specific movements in space.”90 The grid’s first, but not last, appearance in Brown’s work coincided with its ascendance in minimalism as an abstract readymade format. In Floor of the Forest the grid engendered actions with structure and as interactive sculpture. Brown’s repurposing of clothing echoes, among other works of the time, the artist Bas Jan Ader’s photograph All My Clothes (1970).
Figure 3.12 Richard Serra, One Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969. Lead antimony, four plates, each 48 × 48 × 1 in. (121.92 × 191.92 × 2.54 cm). Collection The Museum of Modern Art, gift of the Grinstein Family. © 2015 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Peter Moore. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
