After moving to a new loft at 80 Wooster Street, one of George Maciunas’s first Fluxhouse cooperatives,35 she heightened the illusion of weightlessness: “We built the grid … It had holes cut out of a very large surface … evenly spaced … [so that] three dancers appear to be free-falling … travel-[ing] the area in slow, end over end motion.”36 The effect of the dancers’ suspension in space was enhanced, its mechanism less obvious. The new surface also “alleviated the pain of standing on metal hook-holds,” which Brown said were “so horrible for my feet,”37 a detail signaling her commitment to noninjurious movement, one of her works’ constant leitmotifs.38 Brown recognized that she was “making a bold step … doing something very large and out of the ordinary. So much of women’s work was in her lap. This was a monumental structure—the scale, the steepness and the difficulty of it.”39
Planes did not reveal physical struggle; the New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff saw in it a “startling and beautiful effect of weightlessness.”40 When Brown visited the Walker Art Center to see Planes’ first reprisal since 1968 as part of the 2008 exhibition Trisha Brown: So the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing, curated by Peter Eleey, she recognized, with fascination, the artifice of her representation of “truths” about the body and gravity: “When you walk on a wall,” she said, “if you actually were to just relax, everything would hang down. You don’t have all the signals you get when you are upright, about where your arm or head should be, so you have to invent that.”41 In the years since Planes’ premiere, popular climbing walls in sporting goods stores have replicated its format. Brown’s attunement to the effects of changing contexts on her work inspired stylization of what was initially unadorned movement: in 2008 she introduced a new element, with dancers climbing over one another to traverse the wall.42
Yalkut said Brown’s vision of locating movement on a physical object in Planes—a wall hosting her dance and his film’s projection, set on a darkened stage—attracted him as an innovative contribution to expanded cinema.43 This brought a formal rigor to the combination of live performance with projected film. The wall circumscribed their multimedia work to reassert art’s boundaries, even as Planes’ cinematic projection encompasses dance in layered, collaged images, a shifting scenographic surround in which performers, costumed in two-sided jumpsuits—white on one side and black on the other—appear/disappear as their facings shift.
This coordination of theater and object has few reference points. The June 2, 1967, “Manifestation 3,” staged in the theater of the Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris, by Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni (known collectively as BMPT), joined visual art and theater without a bodily component. On the stage each artist presented an abstract painting. Expecting a performance, the audience instead saw two-dimensional art, a collision devised to query an institutional context’s impact on abstract art’s meaning/reception.44
Figure 3.3 Daniel Buren, BMPT Manifestation, 1967. © 2015 DB-ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery, London
Cued by Brown’s concern with space and perception Yalkut conceived the film in terms of “several different levels for the eye or surface of the eye, elevating it into outer space in series of levels, or planes.”45 His visionary imagery extended earlier multimedia, “psychedelic” collaborations with Marshall McLuhan and Timothy Leary,46 incorporating macro-and micro-perspectives; natural, scientific, human, and technological subject matter; and footage both found and made—techniques and subject matter that consciously looked back to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s “New Vision” of the 1920s.
Opening with fast zooms into an elevator airshaft at 80 Wooster Street, the film layers black-and-white over color footage, and negative over positive. It contains aerial shots of Manhattan’s skyline, taken from a helicopter flying over the Hudson River, juxtaposed with street-level urban images filmed from a moving car or from atop the Empire State Building.47 Found footage—Earth shot from space, a solar eclipse, rocket blasts, floating dirigibles, aerial images of crowd scenes and Muslims prostrated in prayer—coexists with scientific images of microbes. Rhythmic cutting produces a narrative of rebirth, reentry, and expanding consciousness. The film ends with color shots of an infant suspended over a cityscape, images of the aurora borealis, and parachutists descending through space to Earth. Interested in Eastern mysticism,48 he featured “corollaries between psychic space and the physical escape of consciousness beyond the earth’s biosphere … culminating in the brief and rapid deceleration of re-entry.”49
Yalkut introduced color images of Simone Forti, improvising inside a plastic bubble “star form” sculpture by the artist Les Levine, suspended on saw horses at 80 Wooster Street.50 With a fish-eye lens on his 16 mm Bolex camera, he recorded her motions inside the acrylic structure, producing novel, distorting perspectives on her body, which appear intermittently, superimposed on the black-and-white “A” reel (discussed earlier). The structure was a damaged version of his vacuum form Plexi sculptures, made at 80 Wooster Street and then for Yalkut’s film mocked up on sawhorses on the building’s roof where Yalkut filmed Forti.51 It dates to Levine’s 1967 exhibition, Star Garden (A Place), shown on an outdoor terrace at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.52 An April 1, 1967, press release described it as “an architectural device … made of acrylic plastic sheets … heated and then shaped by jets of air into rounded forms” with transparent seven-foot-high bubbles: overall dimension of 40 square feet. An early example of “interactive” art, “the work,” MoMA’s release said, “is not complete until an individual walks through it.”53 Forti supplied vocalizations to fulfill Yalkut’s idea of joining human chanting with a mechanical hum (of a vacuum cleaner).54
Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, and Michelle Friedman performed Planes in the “Intermedia ’68” programs, which traveled to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, New Paltz, Albany, and Buffalo; Nassau Community College; Rockland Community College; Nazareth and St. John Fisher Colleges in Rochester; and Buffalo’s Albright Knox Gallery. Performances concluded at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the first of many programs by Brown there beginning in the late 1970s, with Planes praised as a “gem,” and for showing “media [that] were still mixed but [with an] emphasis … on dance.”55
Figure 3.4 Robert Smithson, Asphalt Run-Down, outside Rome, October 1969. Photographer: Robert Smithson. Photo and Art © Holt Smithson Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai
Together with two of Brown’s performed improvisations, Skunk Cabbage, Salt Grass and Waders (1967) and Yellowbelly (1968), Planes was included in the 1969 Festival of Music and Dance organized by Fabio Sargentini at his L’Attico Gallery in Rome,56 for which the Italian-born dancer/choreographer, Simone Forti was the conduit; she facilitated Sargentini’s New York visit to identify participants in his June 1969 program: Terry Riley, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Simone Forti. Held in the parking garage that Sargentini acquired to showcase contemporary art, the performance was bracketed by Jannis Kounellis’s exhibition Untitled (12 Horses) (1969; including live horses) and by Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Run-Down (1969).57 Sharing Brown’s concern with gravity and entropy, Smithson’s work involved a dump truck unloading a mass of asphalt down a deserted hill outside of Rome, recorded in a photograph.
In