Simone Forti among Friends

Simone Forti, exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA, January 15–April 2, 2023.In February 2020, the then director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles asked Simone Forti how she felt about the increasing interest of art museums in her work. Forti took a breath and responded, "There's a dynamic where one person gets singled out—it's a social dynamic. I say to myself, 'Simone, play that role with grace because you've been given that role.'"1 Forti's careful comment conveyed her consciousness of community as well as her enduring modesty, values foregrounded in the exhibition that eventually opened three years later in MOCA's Grand Avenue building.Titled simply Simone Forti, the show occupied just three rooms, stretching across Forti's varied practice without trying to cover everything. Its scope and presentation made room for her achievements in dance while also showcasing other delight­fully curious items. This presentation emphasized the collaborative nature of her work, which is often difficult to do in a museum setting. With an orientation toward the monograph, physical objects, and linear time, the very nature of visual art institutions frustrates efforts to represent the careers and output of major figures in dance. With a lighter touch and some unexpected twists, however, MOCA produced an endearing, idiosyncratic vision of Forti's production from circa 1960 to the present. The most powerful effect might have been how the occasion—Forti's first major museum exhibition in her hometown—brought together generations of Los Angeles artists and dancers.The opening gallery, which was dominated by the plywood and rope equipment used for Forti's most exhibited works, the Dance Constructions of 1960-61, set the collaborative tone.2 At the entrance, a sequence of photographs captured Forti in performance in Vienna alongside students in 1978, which concluded with them making a Huddle. The epitome of collaboration, Huddle was first tested with classmates in a studio setting in late 1960 or early 1961: it consisted of a small mountain of people constantly rearranging themselves to support a climber who would ascend to the top of the mound and then come back down. At MOCA, Huddle was performed live on a regular schedule, represented in a looped video of performances from 1974 to 2011. (I appeared in the last performance.) The work was imaged in a grainy red hologram in the exhibition's last room.As it flickered in and out of view at MOCA, Huddle signaled the process-based and iterative nature of Forti's entire output—a central feature of many dance practices and one which has flummoxed other curators of Forti's body of work. Forti's first major museum retrospective, Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg in 2014 (for which I served as a research assistant) was notable for its attempt at offering a comprehensive portrait of the artist, surfacing large amounts of history and material in the catalogue and the museum's large galleries. That exhibition's solution to the ephemerality of much of Forti's work was to re-cast the artist as a painter and sculptor. Drawings were separated from the sketchbooks that had helped Forti generate dozens if not hundreds of dances and poems over fifty years; watercolor studies Forti painted in college were framed and positioned as major works of art; in addition, props such as the gorgeous wood-and-metal "thunder makers," which produced sound in a live performance, were presented as sculptural objects in their own right. Thinking with the Body also created a tidy chronology via a seemingly developmental sequence of rooms that began with Forti's earliest works and ended with her then current "News Animation" improvisation practice.MOCA's Simone Forti let ideas recur and materials intermingle, as they frequently did over the course of Forti's long career. It had a generous roominess, its pacing like eddies pulling the spectator along only to let her linger in little pools. The mixed materiality and temporality felt true to the artist's process and the way a movement practice expands over time to contain all of its previous incarnations. For example, a projection of Solo No. 1 (1974), a black-and-white video of Forti crawling, walking, and running in circles in a dance studio in New York, provided critical context for a number of other works throughout the show, especially the series Large Illumination Drawings (1972) now owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Posters and postcard announcements with similar arced and looping shapes created a constellation with a journal entry (ca. 1970) on display in one of two vitrines at the show's end. Under the header "devotion," it read, "I always felt that insight would set me free and I always turned to dance for insight." This was illustrated with a drawing of a circle, traced over a few times so that the repetitions were visible. Devotion, intuition, recursion: these kept Forti moving, sustaining her ideas across decades.Solo No. 1 also related to the animal studies Forti began at the zoo in the late 1960s that provided a foundation for the improvisations she developed with musician Peter Van Riper in the 1970s, mostly titled Big Room. This practice was represented at MOCA by a video of a performance and a poster of the pair in front of an antique stove dressed as their parents or grandparents might have been in the 1940s. This bit of ephemera showcased Forti's and Van Riper's humor and a narrative undercurrent of their mostly abstract performances of music and movement. Under other circumstances, the poster might have been dismissed or demoted as inferior to the other "artworks" in the exhibition. But its inclusion at MOCA reflected intimacy with the artist and her archive as well as a deep understanding of the shapeshifting nature of Forti's practice. (Surely this was due, at least in part, to the inclusion of Jason Underhill, Forti's longtime studio manager, as one of the three exhibition curators.) Overall, the checklist and its organization proposed that distinctions between artwork and archive, "major" and "minor" artworks—even major and minor artists—are neither straightforward nor stable.Catherine Wagley's preview of Simone Forti in the art publication Momus likewise underscored the "relational" nature of Forti's practice.3 Almost everything Forti did, she did with others. This included, for example, other artists such as Van Riper and the composer Charlemagne Palestine; students in Vienna, the Netherlands, and Los Angeles; dancers in studios and galleries around the world; documenters such as photographer Peter Moore, videographer Andy Mann, and holographer Lloyd Cross. In addition to her friends, Forti collaborated with bears, turtles, and flamingos; with tree branches, ocean waves, rivers, and ice; a flashlight, a radio, and an American flag—the list goes on. Forti's works simply wouldn't exist without their contributions, physicality, and associations. The 2018–2019 exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done at MoMA, in which Forti featured prominently, also emphasized contingency and collaboration. However, rather than a series of proper names already recognized in art and other histories, a rich interdisciplinary "environment" produced by venues and organizations in New York City, or even theoretical political possibilities, the MOCA show emphasized the actual people, bodies, and materialities out of which Forti built her creative practice and lasting relationships.For the most part, what and whom the exhibition emphasized enabled it to remain—like Forti's 2020 comment—on the right side of the line between acknowledging Forti's achievements and positioning the artist as an isolated genius. A few aspects of Simone Forti did, however, slip over. Overly large projections (also a problem in MoMA's Judson show) inflated Forti's human-scaled choreography into a spectacle that flashed like a sign in case you forgot whom the exhibition was about. Similarly, the exhibition's inclusion of the live performances Slant Board, Huddle, and Hangers (all 1961) necessitated stage-like spaces and a quality of attention that interrupted the flow of the exhibition and the easy camaraderie among the other artworks. The hushed reverence and respectful distance that descended when the performers entered the gallery rendered the museum dances a little unreal and removed from the "pedestrian" behavior that made them so innovative for dance in the 1960s.The increasing presence of the Dance Constructions in museums has increased their visibility as well as Forti's, but this comes at some cost. Could there still be a way to see these performances "among friends," how I imagined them (and Forti described them) in their first appearances in Yoko Ono's loft in May 1961?4 They'd just be taking place quietly in a corner, minding their own business, yet deeply in dialogue with the sculpture, music, painting, and performance of the same period. Could Huddle become porous again so that the audience could join in (as it did on a number of historical occasions)?The audience had no difficulty gathering to support Forti at the MOCA opening in January 2023. Since her return to Los Angeles in 1998, Forti has gone to shows of all kinds, often in venues as fleeting as her own performances, touching artists across the Southland (even though she doesn't drive the freeways). In a torrential downpour, these practitioners—a notoriously disparate group of dancers, musicians, and visual artists—flooded MOCA, stretching the museum's capacity in order to show up for Forti as she had for them. They (we) crowded into the galleries and strained to see the performances, taking endless photographs and waiting for a chance to greet the artist. Singled out yet very much in contact with community, Forti radiated with grace.