Memory and Attribution
A slice of a pie of history
Today there is no image. I have been struggling with a tech meltdown for months. Somewhere in the world is a photograph taken by Fred Lonidier of me sitting in a tree during Pauline Oliveros’ wedding to Linda Montano in about 1970 but I can’t find it. It is symbolic that it is at least temporarily lost but may still be found.
Some of us at some times in some places get a bigger or smaller piece of the pie than others. The choreographer Simone Forti was a modest and humble artist and person who deserved a big piece of the pie whom I once knew well and is now gone.
She passed away at the age of 91. I added a comment to her eulogy in the NY Times obituary.
“Simone was a kind and gentle friend and generous colleague in the seventies in a group with Peter Van Riper, Alison Knowles and other refugees from NYC who came to Cal Arts, including Carolee Schneemann and Jim Tenney. We often discussed general ideas about what art should be and how art intersects with human relationships. We first met when she was teaching at Cal Arts and I was Allan Kaprow’s TA. I performed several times in her work and those experiences helped shape my own thinking. She had a good long life but I’m still sad to learn of her passing though grateful to see this lovely obituary.”
Some of the conversations I had with Simone were informed by my own experiments before we met. They continue to inform recent works in outdoor installations with trees and indoor installations with branches. I have called that spatial choreography.
When I was at Cal Arts, I had already been performing in California for several years with my own group, the American Ritual Theater. My thinking had grown up in New York City as a performer in other people’s work, particularly: Robert Rauschenberg and Peter Schumann. Besides Simone, in California, I had also worked in a Living Theater performance of the Plague and in workshops with Steve Paxton, Alex Hay and Barbara Smith. At the time, there was nothing special about all those people except that they were my friends in my formative years. Now, I look back in awe that I had the opportunity to know all those people so well in those times.
New York in the sixties and California in the early years of the seventies were times of immense optimism and hope. Those times could not be more different than what creative young people are experiencing today in the United States of America. What we are experiencing here rhymes too easily with events in other paces with other people, in some cases far more devastating than what we are going through in rhe USA.
What is happening in this country, in Israel, in too many places, requires anyone with conscience to function schizophrenically, which has it’s own consequences. There is a betrayal of humanity by people in power, apparently with absolute impunity. Maintaining sanity feels like walking a tightrope made of razor blades.
I can only hope that like the picture Fred took of me at Pauline & Linda’s event, pendulums will swing for us all and another world of generosity and kindness will develop out of the bath of pain most of us are enduring now.