Figure 3.13 Trisha Brown, Floor of the Forest, 1970. Trisha Brown Archive, New York
Figure 3.14 Trisha Brown, Floor of the Forest, 1970. Photograph by Carol Goodden
Figure 3.15 Bas Jan Ader, All My Clothes, 1970. Gelatin silver print, 11 × 14 in. (28 × 35.5 cm), edition of three. © 2016 The Estate of Bas Jan Ader / Mary Sue Ader-Andersen / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Meliksetian | Briggs, Los Angeles
Reprised in an October 22, 1971, program that included Accumulation’s premiere at New York University—where Brown was an adjunct assistant professor of dance—she retitled the piece Rummage Sale and Floor of the Forest. A chaotic happening-like clothing sale occurred below the suspended object, where bargaining for clothes with “salespeople tending their tables”91 became a structured improvisation, and viewers became performers.
Reprised at the international exhibition Documenta XII in 2007, in Kassel, Germany—where the piece was prominently located in the Museum Fredericianum—Floor of the Forest was given a curatorial makeover: the choice of new, brightly colored clothing, as threaded through the grid structure, transformed what had originally been a makeshift construction of casual wardrobe discards into a striking, visually dynamic, and aesthetically elegant sculptural object that has been used in subsequent presentations. By contrast, the original, as seen in period photographs, bears the marks of impoverished SoHo living, with the selection of clothing merely functional, holding no appeal to the eye.
Following the 1971 presentation, Brown reflected with Cage-like wonder that imaginatively reframed her art’s perpetuation in everyday life: “The piece is still continuing…. For them it’s a piece of clothing they liked … for me those clothes are artifacts of history.”92 Brown perceived the audience’s actions as dancelike: “Looking at some stranger trying on a kimono that my dear friend Suzushi [Hanayagi] had given me before she was to leave this country, watching the women preen in it, using that gesture of feeling yourself in your new-bought clothes … it was just an incredible experience for me.”93
Occurring within months of Richard Serra’s first site-specific urban sculpture, To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram Right Angles Reversed (1970; figure 3.16), located at 183rd Street and Webster Avenue in the Bronx, “Dances in and around 80 Wooster Street” and in particular Man Walking—through a logic of indeterminacy—redefined choreography as site-specific, self-contained, and sculptural, delivering choreography to the threshold of conceptual art.
Brown’s location of her work in a “crack” between the sculptural and choreographic expanded in The Stream (1970; figures 3.17 and 3.18), presented October 3, 1970, six months after “Dances in and around 80 Wooster Street.” At the daylong event, “ASTRO: An Astrological Celebration,” in New York’s Union Square Park (sponsored by the Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts), Brown edged closer to visual art, experimenting with performance-in-the-absence-of dancers and with choreography as public sculpture.94
Reconstructed for the first time in 2011, on the roof of the Hayward Gallery, London, as part of the 2011 exhibition Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, The Stream consists of a bare bones, 34-foot-long troughlike plywood structure with two slanting sides joined by a flat floor on which Brown placed approximately forty pots and pans of different sizes and shapes, each filled with water.95 The Stream invites anyone to “wad[e] through the water or step around pans as if from stone to stone in an actual stream, avoiding water, or racing up and down, climbing on the [construction’s] sides,” a dangerous activity, given the tilting walls, precariously placed pans of water, and gravity.96
Figure 3.16 Richard Serra, To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram Right Angles Reversed, 1970. © 2015 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Peter Moore. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York
Figure 3.17 Trisha Brown, The Stream, 1970. Trisha Brown Archive, New York
Figure 3.18 Trisha Brown, The Stream, 1970. Trisha Brown Archive, New York
Figure 3.19 Bruce Nauman, Performance Corridor, 1969. Wallboard, wood, 96 × 240 × 20 in. (243.8 × 609.6 × 50.8 cm). © 2015 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York
Uncharacteristically literal, The Stream re-creates Brown’s childhood memories: the subtle weight shifting and balance required to play amid streams and rocks, an image she has used to conjure sources for her natural movement language. Inserted into public space, it was a makeshift playground inviting participation. Her incitement of performance by an object compares to Bruce Nauman’s Performance Corridor, created for the 1969 Whitney Museum exhibition Anti-illusion, Procedures/Materials. A plywood construction, 20 feet long by 20 inches wide, it was a sculptural situation directing the audience to assume the role of performer. Nauman said, “The first corridor pieces were about someone else doing the performance … the problem … was to find a way to restrict the situation so that the performance [was] the one I had in mind.”97
Parallels between The Stream and Performance Corridor are significant. Anti-illusion, Procedures/Materials indirectly ushered Brown’s work into the Whitney Museum six months after “ASTRO.” Her April 1970 calendar records a meeting with the Whitney, which was followed by an invitation to appear in its Composer’s Showcase series, a program newly energized by performances that were part of the Anti-illusion exhibition. Mounted in New York just months after Harald Szeemann’s exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form opened in Berne, Anti-illusion (1969) shared with Szeemann’s project the concern to showcase gesture and time through sculptures contingently materialized solely for the duration of a site-specific museum display. Szeemann’s inspiration to “do an exhibition that focuses on behaviors and gestures”98 ultimately explored ephemeral artistic ideas/behaviors, representing artistic processes through sculptures created in situ (not borrowed), that is, works whose “lives” were defined by an exhibition’s temporal limits.
The Whitney’s Anti-illusion exhibition included performances by Richard Serra (with Philip Glass), Bruce Nauman, Steve Reich, Michael Snow, and Keith Sonnier, for which the curator Marcia Tucker coined the name “extended time pieces,” distinguishing these art events from “entertainment.”99 Although sequestered in evening programs requiring a ticket, their inclusion reinforced
