School,2 invited her to contribute to an evening at the Reuben Gallery. This was a short-lived, unheated space that Kaprow had helped establish as a place for performances and happenings.3 “At that time there weren’t any firm boundaries between different artistic practices,” said Forti in an interview, echoing Halprin’s sense of the ferment on the West Coast. “We were all more or less concerned with an art of process rather than with producing stable, marketable aesthetic objects.”4
In the Cage-influenced tradition of happenings by Kaprow and theater pieces by her then husband, Robert Whitman, Forti did not feel the need to classify her pieces. In 1961, when La Monte Young invited her to create an evening at Yoko Ono’s studio on Chambers Street, she came up with several events she called “dance constructions.” Both Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton performed on this evening—Rainer in See-Saw (1960)5 and Paxton in Huddle, Slant Board, and Herding.6 In each of these pieces the object and movement are essential to each other. Many years later, in 2015, the dance constructions were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art as part of its recognition of performance as art.
In 1969, after Forti’s marriage to Whitman broke up, she attended the Woodstock Festival. When the festival was over, she roamed from one commune to another for about a year. Here she speaks about what one might call the dreamy side of communality:
It was an extraordinary moment in my life. Like everyone else I took a lot of drugs—hash, marijuana, acid, mescaline. But the most important thing had something to do with a way of being together—which was not at all theoretical, on the contrary. There was at one and the same time an incredible freedom and a mutual respect that was unheard of until then. It took me a year to come down. I lived communally—in a situation where the only tacit rule was to value silence. You could develop a practice of listening, of attention: to others, to space, to time, and to action. In this way I never stopped dancing—in a thousand different ways. I remember one morning I got up at dawn and while two friends prepared breakfast I was outside in the landscape, perched on a large rock, another small rock balanced on my head. I was experimenting with the degree of flexibility of my dorsal spine that such an arrangement permitted. You see, these were often very simple experiments and experiences. And there was an intensely pleasurable but unspoken connection and understanding between this activity and that of my friends who were cooking their porridge.7
Freedom. Respect. Silence. Listening. Dancing. Experimenting. Connection. Was it absolutely necessary to ingest drugs to attain these states of mind? Forti has speculated that “drugs had a lot to do with it, everybody tripping together so much.”8 Perhaps so. As Richard Foreman recently reminded me, Timothy Leary’s advice to “turn on, tune in, drop out” was useful when it came to breaking habits and opening one’s eyes to other ways of living.9
But qualities like silence and listening are aspects of creativity that both Cage and Halprin valued—with or without substances. And they fed into Forti’s improvisational abilities, which she passed on to Rainer, Paxton, and Brown. She listened to her own impulses when she danced; she could stick with something for a long time, and she could just as easily spring away from it. If she was banking in circles, she could get so caught up in the momentum that she would keep it up for a long time. But if another image or thought suddenly occurred to her, she would go for it. There was no conflict between mind and body—like a cat that is tired of scratching the sofa and suddenly pounces on a ball. Forti’s close observations of animal behavior contributed to that kind of impulsive break.
Simone Forti in her Fan Dance (1975). Photo: Babette Mangolte. Courtesy of the artist and The Box, LA.
In Forti’s world, even objects—or perhaps especially objects, considering her dance constructions—were part of it. As she has written, again about living on a commune, “Objects, though moved by people, seemed to follow their own paths, to be part of the flow.”10 This sense that both living and inanimate things were part of one big process was bedrock to Grand Union.
CHAPTER 2
ONLY IN SOHO
The scattered community of artists in Lower Manhattan continued to experiment into the seventies across disciplines, fervor undimmed. But finding affordable living and working space was an uphill battle. A solution was masterminded by Lithuanian immigrant and madcap visionary George Maciunas. Informed by ideas from Bauhaus and European agriculture collectives, he jumpstarted an artists’ colony in SoHo (the area from Houston Street to Canal Street, and from Sixth Avenue to Crosby or Lafayette Street, aka the cast-iron district) by setting up 80 Wooster Street as a cooperative “Fluxhouse.”
At the same time, the interdisciplinary hub of 112 Greene Street was fertile soil for SoHo’s budding art colony. Pioneering visual artists and performance artists like Gordon Matta-Clark, Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, Laurie Anderson, Alan Saret, and Richard Nonas added to the rich cross-disciplinary ferment, as did composers Philip Glass, Richard Landry, and Ornette Coleman. Venues in SoHo that presented dance and performance included The Kitchen, founded by video artists, and galleries run by Paula Cooper and Holly Solomon. It wasn’t much of a stretch for Laurie Anderson to call SoHo of that period the center of the art world.1
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In 1967 the artists who had been involved with Judson started hearing that George Maciunas was buying loft buildings in SoHo and selling them cheap to artists. Small manufacturers of clothing, corrugated boxes, candy, or dolls were fleeing New York, leaving behind a landscape of empty warehouses. Maciunas, later known as the “father of SoHo,” had a vision of cooperative loft living for artists. In exchange for taking on the risks of illegal occupancy, artists paid a low price for gobs of space. Maciunas was charging only two dollars a square foot, and word spread like wildfire.2 According to performer and movement therapist Joseph Schlichter, Trisha Brown’s husband at the time, “Everyone in Judson Theater was rumbling about it. There were 150 or 160 people who were interested. We had to roll dice to determine who got in.”3
Maciunas, who came to these shores in 1948, had studied architecture at Cooper Union and Carnegie Institute of Technology. He had also studied with Richard Maxfield, a student in John Cage’s famous course in experimental composition at the New School, instilling in him an interest in artists who were mixing genres. As the leading member of Fluxus, he gave the group its name and organized events in both Europe and New York.
Maciunas fought for what he believed—in eccentric ways. Charles Ross recalled him chasing away a city building inspector with a samurai sword. Maciunas once bought two huge batter mixers from a baker and installed one as his bathtub.4 He aligned himself with the Soviet ideal of workers sharing in ownership. According to Sally Banes, he even called his cooperatives kolkhoz, the Russian word for collective farm.5 He not only organized housing for artists but also got them work. He hired musicians as plumbers, including Philip Glass, Rhys Chatham, and Yoshi Wada, who used giant plumbing pipes to make new sounds.6
The first artist to go in with Maciunas, in 1967, was filmmaker Jonas Mekas, a fellow Lithuanian immigrant. Mekas and Maciunas transformed the ground floor of 80 Wooster Street into Fluxhouse Cooperative II. (Fluxhouse I, on Greene Street, was eventually repurposed.)7 It became the new home for the roving Filmmaker’s Cinematheque, which showed films by avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, and Andy Warhol, as well as Mekas.8 Others who performed there included poet Allen Ginsberg and video pioneer Nam June Paik.9 Because Yoko Ono was an active Fluxus artist, sometimes she would drop by with John Lennon.10 It was there that Philip Glass presented the first concert of his own work in 1968.11 But because of lack of proper licensing, the Fluxhouse only lasted until July 1968. Budding theater director Richard Foreman, who had helped to build the theater, then produced four of his early plays there.12
Trisha Brown and Joseph Schlichter moved into the top floor of 80 Wooster with their two-year-old son, Adam. In the beginning, the building’s only bathroom was in the