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
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,