it from a spigot every day.13 Schlichter grew marijuana and tomatoes on the roof and used the water tower as a swimming pool for children—to the dismay of other parents.14
Sculptor Charles Ross, the mastermind behind the collaborative Concert #13 at Judson, moved into the fourth floor.15 Conceptual artist Robert Watts, who was involved in happenings along with Allan Kaprow, moved into the fifth floor.
Brown found the raw space to be fertile ground for her choreographic—and architectural—imagination. In a way, she was collaborating with the space around her rather than with other artists. In workshops, she gave students the instruction to “read the wall.” The idea was simply to let one’s body respond to the markings on the well-worn wall. In 1967 she drove foot holes into her wall “in order to reach the ceiling but also to move on a vertical plane.”16 This was undoubtedly in preparation for her 1968 equipment piece Planes. She started off her 1970 concert “Dances In and Around 80 Wooster Street,” with her iconic daredevil work Man Walking Down the Side of a Building. A tiny audience clustered below in the courtyard, looking up in awe. The film of this event17 shows a man at the top of 80 Wooster, facing downward, body horizontal, walking so slowly and deliberately that he could just as well be taking the first steps on the moon. (This was only a year after the Apollo moon landing was seen on television.) SoHo artists Richard Nonas, Jared Bark, and David Bradshaw stood on the roof and let the cord out safely.18 Then the audience went inside the building to see Floor of the Forest, in which Brown and Carmen Beuchat crawled on an eye-level grid of horizontal ropes that were strung with garments. The two slithered into and out of the shirts, pants, and dresses. With this work, Brown brought the domestic mess of family life to the pristine grid of minimalism. At the same time, the piece referred to the uneven terrain of the forest, which Brown had called her “first art lesson.”19 Audience members had to create their own uneven terrain, squatting down or rising up to get a glimpse of the performers.
Last, the audience went outside onto Wooster Street to see Brown’s Leaning Duets I. This was a partnering task dance related to what she had been exposed to on Anna Halprin’s deck as well as to Forti’s Slant Board (1961) and her own Planes. Five pairs of people had to keep their feet in contact with their partner’s feet while leaning away from each other and trying to take steps without falling. The two would talk to each other (“Give me more of your weight” or “I need to twist to my left”) to keep in balance and go forward. This kind of discuss-what-you-are-doing banter became rife in Grand Union.
Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), by Trisha Brown. Joseph Schlichter, 80 Wooster Street. Photo: Carol Goodden.
When Brown moved into SoHo, huge trucks were moving through the streets to deliver rags or other cargo to manufacturers. She picked up the lingo of the driver teams and brought those commands into Grand Union. In the last performance at LoGiudice Gallery,20 during an ultra-slow, ultra-gentle duet between Gordon and Paxton, she carried on with a gruff, street voice: “Easy now, easy now, easy now. C’mon now. Move it along, move it along. Over we go, now. C’mon, easy does it. Let’s go, move it, keep it going. Keep it movin’, keep it movin’. Up and over, watch out now. Move it along. [Th]at’s it, easy does it.”
Brown wasn’t dreaming of dancing in a theater. Learning her Bauhaus lessons well, she made her art in the place where she lived. “All of the pieces I performed at 80 Wooster had rambled in my head for a long time. My rule was, if an idea doesn’t disappear by natural cause, then it has to be done. I wanted to work with the wall but not by building one. I looked at walls in warehouses and as I moved around the streets … I chose this exterior wall and then thought—why not use mountain climbing equipment?”21
Brown also made short works at other sites in SoHo. Her Roof Piece premiered with audiences viewing from 53 Wooster Street in 1971; Woman Walking Down a Ladder (1973) took place on the rooftop of 130 Greene Street; Group Primary Accumulation premiered at Sonnabend Gallery the same year (later to be performed in Central Park and other outdoor areas); and Spiral (1974) was inspired by the columns at 383 West Broadway (later Ivan Karp’s OK Harris Gallery), where she also premiered Pamplona Stones.22 When she reprised Roof Piece in 1973, retitling it Roof and Fire Piece, the number of rooftops stretched to fifteen.23 The photograph of this piece, taken in 1973 by Babette Mangolte, later came to represent the revolutionary SoHo arts scene to Europe.24
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Roof Piece (1971), by Trisha Brown. Foreground: Sylvia Palacios Whitman; at upper left, Douglas Dunn. Photo: Babette Mangolte, 1973.
Although Maciunas was creating a cooperative artist colony with what he considered a “selfless spirit of collectivism,”25 he was an autocrat. With an architect’s training, he was very sure of what he wanted. As Richard Foreman recalled, “He saw things in his own way and if you didn’t accept the way he saw things happening, he would get very mad.”26 Foreman described working with Maciunas as “a kind of a perverse spiritual test.”27
Maciunas, however, cared about the artists he knew and alerted them if a good deal came up. When he discovered 541 Broadway, with its good proportions (wider than the usual twenty-five feet), no interior columns, and floors made of wood—not just wood over concrete—he knew it would be perfect for dancing. He contacted Trisha Brown, who relocated there in 1974 or 1975, soon to be followed by David Gordon and Valda Setterfield.28 Douglas Dunn moved there, from a block away, in 1982.29 Lucinda Childs of the Judson days also lived in the building, and on the Mercer Street side lived—and still live—hybrid artists Joan Jonas and Jackie Winsor. Simone Forti, along with dance artist Frances Alenikoff, musician Yoshi Wada, and artist Emily Harvey, lived in the next building at 537 Broadway.
Maciunas felt that his artists’ colony, which grew to sixteen buildings over ten years, was in line with the ideals of Bauhaus and Black Mountain.30 In the Cagean and Fluxus spirit of making art out of everyday life, he was creating spaces where artists lived, made work, and gathered. Trisha Brown, with her uncanny ability to nestle the human body into, or use the body to extend, existing architecture, was in line with Maciunas’s vision. Brown helped shape the values of SoHo and vice versa. During this period, she was working with Grand Union as well as making her equipment pieces and accumulation pieces.
Like Brown, both Marilyn Wood and Mary Overlie devised ways to embed the moving body into the SoHo landscape. A former Cunningham dancer, Wood devoted herself to site-specific dance, performing internationally with her Celebration Group as well as on the fire escapes on Prince Street. In 1976 and 1977 Overlie, who had performed a speaking role in Rainer’s piece at Oberlin in 1972 and had been a guest of Grand Union at 112 Greene Street in 1972, performed with her dancers in the windows of Holly Solomon Gallery, creating a stir of enchantment on West Broadway.31
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Another hotspot in SoHo made possible by low cost was 112 Greene Street. A cluster of artists, including married couple Jeffrey Lew, a self-styled anarchist, and Rachel Wood, a dancer, inhabited the building. They had bought the building—Wood had family money—directly from a rag factory in 1970.32 The pioneering site artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who briefly lived in the basement, was constantly altering the space with his outrageously deconstructionist actions. In an episode of “guerrilla gardening,” he piled soil into a small hill in the basement and planted a cherry tree in it. In order to give the tree space to grow, he cut a big hole in the ground floor of the building, which became his signature mode—literally deconstructing buildings. Though he died in 1978, he is known as one of the great instigators of large-scale, space-altering work, addressing the deterioration of New York City buildings with his manic imagination. Matta-Clark, whose godfather was Marcel Duchamp,33 was a forbear of later huge projects by the likes of site artists James Turrell, Michael Heizer, and Christo.34