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Notes
† A version of this essay will appear in the forthcoming MIT Press publication, Meredith Morse, Soft is Fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and After.
1. Simone Forti, The CNDO Transcripts: Simone Forti, interview by Anne Kilcoyne, 23 November 1991, Arts Archives (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1991), 5–6.
2. Simone Forti, curriculum vitae, and interview with the author, 18 May 2010, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Contexts include MoMA, New York, 1978; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1981; MOCA, Los Angeles, 2004; White Oak Dance Project's PASTForward event, 2000; and the Getty Research Institute's 2004 conference Structures and Systems: Minimal Art in the United States.
3. Simone Forti, untitled, in An Anthology of Chance Operations, Indeterminacy, Concept Art, Anti-Art, Meaningless Work, Natural Disasters, Stories, Poetry, Essays, Diagrams, Music, Dance Constructions, Plans of Action, Mathematics, Compositions, ed. La Monte Young (New York: La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, 1963), reprinted in 1970 by Heiner Friedrich.
4. For example, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 108, 110.
5. See Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey, 1830–1904 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and essayist Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003).
6. Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘LeWitt in Progress’, in Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 255.
7. Lucy Lippard with John Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art’, in Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, ed. Lucy R. Lippard (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971), 257, also Lucy Lippard, ‘Sol LeWitt: Nonvisual Structures’ in Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, 154–66.
8. Nicholas Baume, ‘The Music of Forgetting’, in Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes, ed. Baume (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2001), 23.
9. Carrie Lambert (Lambert-Beatty), ‘More or Less Minimalism: Six Notes on Performance and Visual Art in the 1960s’, in A Minimal Future?: Art as Object 1958–1968, exh. cat., ed. Ann Goldstein (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art/Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 105.
10. Lambert (Lambert-Beatty), ‘More or Less Minimalim’, 105, citing Forti's comments in a 2001 panel discussion, ‘BAMdialogue’ series, Brooklyn Academy of Music (Lambert's emphasis).
11. Lambert (Lambert-Beatty), ‘More or Less Minimalism’, 104. Barbara Rose, ‘ABC Art’ (1965), in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 274–97; Annette Michelson, ‘Yvonne Rainer, Part One: The Dancer and the Dance’, Artforum 12, no. 5 (January 1974): 57–63 (Part Two, published the next month, addresses Rainer's cinema); Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), e.g., ‘Mechanical Ballets: Light, Motion, Theater’, 201–42.
12. Yvonne Rainer, ‘A Quasi Survey of Some “Minimalist” Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A’, in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Battcock, 263–73.
13. Rainer, ‘A Quasi Survey’, 263.
14. James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 126.
15. Forti, CNDO Transcripts, 7.
16. Yvonne Rainer, ‘The Performer as a Persona: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer’, interview by Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp, Avalanche 5 (Summer 1972): 54 (my ellipsis).
17. Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, in Minimalism, ed. James Meyer (London: Phaidon, 2000), 209; first pub. Arts Yearbook 8 (1965).
18. ‘…[I]t is, quite simply in one way, without stress or interruption, a succession of things, a true temporal order of movements experienced as seen one after the other.’ Michelson, ‘Yvonne Rainer, Part One’, 58.
19. James Meyer, ‘The Minimal Unconscious’, October, no. 130 (Fall 2009): 152 and 152 n51. Meyer cites Rainer: Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 391; also Rainer, ‘Skirting and Aging: An Aging Artist's Memoir’, in Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002, exh. cat., ed. Sid Sachs (Philadelphia: University of the Arts, 2003), 90, 93.
20. Lambert, ‘More or Less Minimalism’, 108.
21. Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture’, Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 42–44, ‘Notes on Sculpture, Part 2’, Artforum 5, no. 2 (October 1966): 20–23. Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in ed. Battcock, Minimal Art, pp. 116–47; first pub. in Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967).
22. Michelson, ‘Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression’, in Robert Morris, exh. cat. (Washington D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1969), and Michelson, ‘Yvonne Rainer, Part One’.
23. Lambert, ‘More or Less Minimalism’, 107.
24. Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched, 143.
25. Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched, 145.
26. Rainer, ‘A Quasi Survey’, 266.
27. Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched, 133.
28. Krauss, ‘Mechanical Ballets’, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 239–40 (Krauss's emphasis).
29. Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched, 110.
30. Forti, CNDO Transcripts, 6.
31. Janice Ross, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 134–5.
32. Forti, Handbook in Motion (Charleston, VT: self-published, 1998, first pub. 1974 by Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design), 32 (my ellipsis).
33. Forti, CNDO Transcripts, 4.
34. Forti, CNDO Transcripts, 6. Forti refers to Robert Dunn's classroom approach, as well as Muybridge's locomotion studies.
35. Alexandra Munroe, ‘To Challenge the Mid-Summer Sun: The Gutai Group’, in Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, exh. cat., ed. Alexandra Munroe (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 83.
36. Forti, CNDO Transcripts, 5. Forti has consistently indicated a fascination with Gutai works in interviews, for example with Liz Kotz (unpub.; Simone Forti's archives, 2000), with Dorit Cypis (‘Between the Conceptual and the Vibrational: Dorit Cypis Speaks with Simone Forti’, X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly 6, no. 4 (Summer 2004) at X-Tra Online, www.x-traonline.org/past_articles.php?articleID=355, accessed 23 October 2011; in my interview with her (unpub., 2010); and in her interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist (‘Simone Forti’, in Hans-Ulrich Obrist: Interviews: Volume 2, ed. Charles Arsène-Henry et al. (Milan: Charta, 2010), 370–83). See also Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-modern Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 24.
37. See Forti, ‘Simone Forti: Drunk with Movement’, interview with Jenny Schlenzka, Flash Art, no. 269 (November–December 2009), as Flash Art Online, http://www.flashartonline.com/interno.php?pagina=articolo_det&id_art=478&det=ok&title=SIMONE-FORTI, accessed 24 May 2011. Forti has confirmed that Shiraga's Dozo Ohairi Kudasai was the work she had seen in a photo years before. Simone Forti, e-mail message to author, 15 July, 2010.
38. See Charles Merewether, ‘Disjunctive Modernity: The Practice of Artistic Experimentation in Postwar Japan’, in Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950–1970, ed. Merewether, Rika Iezumi Hiro and Reiko Tomii (Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2007), 9; also Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 86. While it is unclear which image Forti saw at Halprin's, she recognised Shiraga's work in several images we discussed in which Shiraga was either holding or swinging the axe. Forti confirmed that she believed the axe swing would take down the structure. Simone Forti, e-mail message to author, 15 July, 2010.
39. Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings (New York: N. H. Abrams, 1966), 219. Forti has kept Kaprow's book in her library (meeting with author, 18 May, 2010).
40. Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 17.
41. Julia Robinson, ‘From Abstraction to Model: George Brecht's Events and the Conceptual Turn in Art of the 1960s’, October, no. 127 (Winter 2009), 95–6.
42. Julia Robinson, ‘From Abstraction to Model’, 96.
43. Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Part 1’, in Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 205–6.
44. Forti, ‘Between the Conceptual and the Vibrational’, 3–4. While Forti's early work participated in American modern dance's concern to create cultural, individual, and social meaning in embodied terms, I suggest her work is not readily explicated through the framework developing within dance scholarship from the 1980s to the 1990s that sought to theorise ballet, modern dance, and the ‘new dance’ in terms of power relations, gender, performativity (after Judith Butler), and the objectifying gaze. Forti envisioned the relation of dancer to audience through kinesthetics, and her exposure to new forms of body and space emerging in New York's art after Cage.
45. Julia Robinson, ‘Prime Media’, in +-1961: Founding the Expanded Arts, exh. cat., ed. Julia Robinson and Christian Xatrec (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2013), 26.
46. Baume, ‘The Music of Forgetting’, 23.
47. Forti, Handbook in Motion, 31 (my ellipses).
48. Ross, Anna Halprin, 51.
49. Ross, Anna Halprin, 58–9.
50. Ross, Anna Halprin, 59–60.
51. See-Saw and Rollers, the Reuben Gallery, New York, December, 1960. The program included performances by Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine.
52. Ross, Anna Halprin, 140, 379 n82. Halprin discusses the poles in Halprin, ‘Yvonne Rainer interviews Ann Halprin’, Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965), 142–68.
53. Melissa Trimingham, ‘Oskar Schlemmer's Research Practice at the Dessau Bauhaus’, Theatre Research International 29, no. 2 (2004): 136. Ross has also observed that Halprin's Birds resembled Stäbetanz (Ross, Anna Halprin, 379 n83).
54. There is a small H’Doubler literature detailing her innovative, highly influential dance pedagogy. See Janice Ross, Moving Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). A central text of H’Doubler's is Dance: A Creative Art Experience (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957); first pub. 1940.
55. Ross, Anna Halprin, 59. Ross quotes Halprin's notebook entries dated 1943.
56. Anna Gibbs, ‘After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication’, in The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 195.
57. Gibbs, ‘After Affect’, 187. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 42.
58. Simone Forti, ‘Animate Dancing: A Practice in Dance Improvisation’, in Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, eds., Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, 2003), 54 (my ellipses).
59. Simone Forti, ‘Full Moves: Thoughts on Dance Behavior’, Contact Quarterly 9, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 14. Forti's work has consistently attended to ‘movement’ in the non-human world: an early 1960s text work describes an onion sprouting, and her work during the 1970s was notably concerned with animal locomotion.
60. Comments by performers of Huddle (my ellipsis) in Simone Forti: From Dance Construction to Logomotion, prod., dir. Charles Dennis (Los Angeles: UCLA National Dance/Media Project with Loisaida Arts Inc., 1999), duration: 26 min.
61. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Theories of Art After Minimalism and Pop’, Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Number One, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 63–4.
62. Susan Best, ‘Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics: Rethinking the Anti-Aesthetic Tradition in Late-Modern Art’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, no. 3 (2006), 140.