Anticipated by Trillium—in which she held the work up to critical scrutiny by presenting it in two different contexts (New York and New London)—Outside reinscribes, within the presentation context itself, architectural constraints that had informed the work’s inception. Her approach reflects a strategy common to mid-1960s visual art. In Sol LeWitt’s Wall/Floor Piece (Three Squares) (1966), three identical square structures (with their centers’ empty) are placed in a corner—one on the floor and the others side-by-side, on two perpendicular walls to map the room’s architecture—reiterating the gallery’s interior architecture, with the viewer inhabiting the same real-space, real-time dimensions of the artwork (see figure 2.10).
In Bruce Nauman’s Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance) (1967–1968)—which postdates Outside—a square’s perimeter is marked on the floor. The artist, facing inward to its center, steps at the halfway point of each of the square’s sides, circulating around the perimeter to the sound of a metronome (see figure 2.11).
Describing this (and other movement-based works made for recording on film), he told Willoughby Sharp, “I thought of them as dance-problems without being a dancer.”73 Also relevant to Brown’s piece, is Mel Bochner’s Measurement: Room (1969; figure 2.12), which transforms a gallery into a surface for a drawn line that demarcates each surface’s dimensions while implicating the viewer in the contrast between “abstract systems of knowledge and real, embodied perception.”74
Figure 2.10 Sol LeWitt, Wall/Floor Piece (Three Squares), 1966. Private collection. © 2015 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of The LeWitt Estate
Figure 2.11 Bruce Nauman, Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance), 1967–1968. Still from 16 mm film, black and white, sound, 400 feet, approx. 10 min. © 2015 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix, New York
In 1978 Brown notated Outside’s simple diagrammatic score for publication in Anne Livet’s Contemporary Dance; she drew a rectangle with arrows pointing counterclockwise around its perimeter. Her decision to record the architectural, site-related dimension of her work—its geometric shape—with no information about Outside’s improvised movement—which is lost to time—retroactively recognizes the importance of structures, planes, surfaces, and physical sites for her later works. The image reveals Brown’s conviction that it is through tangible structures, and/or their inscription, that choreography lasts beyond the instance of any single example of a work’s evanescent movement or performance.
Outside looks forward to Brown’s next body of work, the “Equipment Dances,” in which she adopted architecture and sculptural constructions—found and made—to define her choreographic scores and task-based movements, further marrying her approach to John Cage’s ideas. Self-generating and self-contained, the objective logic of the “Equipment Dances” ensured the authenticity of each work’s performance. The severity of Brown’s structured situations—intrinsic to her visualization of choreography—also creates an effect of authenticity, since imitation is neutralized as an element of their performance. Paradoxically Brown’s increasingly reductive definition of choreography as structure and duration brought her work to an intimate conversation with visual art.
Figure 2.12 Mel Bochner, Measurement: Room, 1969. Tape and Letraset on wall, size determined by installation. Collection Museum of Modern Art, New York. Installation view: Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, 1969. © 2015 Mel Bochner. Photograph © Erik Mosel, Munich, Germany
In a Crack between Dance and Art
“Equipment Dances” (1968–1971)
3
There were so few choices; the structure, the set up, made the choices. Now that comes out of my view on making and choreographing movement.— Trisha Brown1
Planes (1968) inaugurated a new body of works—all orchestrated in relation to architecture and sculpture, and all radically reorienting dancers’ relationship to gravity. In retrospect, it established Brown’s model of serial production, here as the basis for a group of choreographies produced in relation to the architecture of downtown SoHo, a relatively desolate part of New York that was home to a vanishing manufacturing industry, whose empty loft spaces were colonized by an influx of artists-inhabitants in the 1960s. The dances that followed from Planes—Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Walking on the Wall, Rummage Sale and Floor of the Forest, and Leaning Duets—emerged at a culturally revolutionary moment beginning in 1968, when disruptions to the fabric of everyday life turned hierarchies of power and authority upside down and when the United States’ NASA space program showed gravity to be contingent, not natural, but a condition of life on Earth. As contemporary art and art criticism became impregnated by the writings of the French philosopher of phenomenology Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Brown’s works were named “Equipment Dances” in the first critical essay ever published on Brown’s work, written by Sally Sommer.2
Sommer’s title resonates with psychologist James R. Gibson’s writing in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966). Focusing on the body’s phenomenological experience of space, he argues, “The equipment of feeling is automatically the same equipment as for doing.”3 His ideas about how the body “extract[s] information from the environment … to provide orientation to the ground as a relatively reliable surface of support”4 seemingly informed Sommer’s analysis of Brown’s works’ effects: the way her use of “equipment” positions dancers in extraordinary, antigravity situations to affect audience perception of everyday movement.5
In the “Equipment Dances,” pedestrian movement—a lexicon common to participants in Robert Dunn’s class—is stressed by architectural structures and by gravity’s inevitable motor. Rather than just question whether an everyday action could be considered dance, Brown made these actions subject to movement scores produced by material sites—walls or objects. In the process she challenged expectations about where dance is presented and seen, and brought visual scrutiny to the choreographed nature of quotidian movement forms.
Building facades compelled her imagination as a young mother wheeling her son’s stroller through SoHo: “I was excluded from traditional theaters … because of the economics of dance, so the streets became one of the few places I could do my works.”6 Defining choreography’s parameters in terms of objective structures, Brown externalized, visualized, and displaced the intentionality governing movements’ initiating impulses. The “Equipment Dances” cancel any concerns but for the structuring of choreography, eliminating the appearance that arbitrary choice making is her work’s source. Devoted to Cage’s emphasis