Parallels between The Stream and Performance Corridor are significant. Anti-illusion, Procedures/Materials indirectly ushered Brown’s work into the Whitney Museum six months after “ASTRO.” Her April 1970 calendar records a meeting with the Whitney, which was followed by an invitation to appear in its Composer’s Showcase series, a program newly energized by performances that were part of the Anti-illusion exhibition. Mounted in New York just months after Harald Szeemann’s exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form opened in Berne, Anti-illusion (1969) shared with Szeemann’s project the concern to showcase gesture and time through sculptures contingently materialized solely for the duration of a site-specific museum display. Szeemann’s inspiration to “do an exhibition that focuses on behaviors and gestures”98 ultimately explored ephemeral artistic ideas/behaviors, representing artistic processes through sculptures created in situ (not borrowed), that is, works whose “lives” were defined by an exhibition’s temporal limits.
The Whitney’s Anti-illusion exhibition included performances by Richard Serra (with Philip Glass), Bruce Nauman, Steve Reich, Michael Snow, and Keith Sonnier, for which the curator Marcia Tucker coined the name “extended time pieces,” distinguishing these art events from “entertainment.”99 Although sequestered in evening programs requiring a ticket, their inclusion reinforced the exhibition’s recognition of live performance as its touchstone: “Music, film, theater and dance have been considered separate from the plastic arts because they involve time as well as space. They are … impermanent, temporal manifestations whose duration is dependent on the artist, rather than the observer … the plastic arts have begun to share with the performing arts the mobile relational character of single notes to series … or single steps to a total configuration of movement.”100
In Anti-illusion, Procedures/Materials and When Attitudes Become Form (along with the Museum of Modern Art’s 1970 Spaces) curators partnering with artists commissioned ephemeral works of art, a precedent for the rise of performance in the visual art context that underpinned the introduction of Brown’s works to visual art settings. Exhibitions in which sculptures were devised and dismantled compare to “Dances in and around 80 Wooster Street” (1970), which shared curators’ foregrounding of gesture and time in process-based work that would be categorized as postminimal: sculpture reconceived as transient manifestations of artistic acts and gestures.101
This was the basis for 9 at Leo Castelli (1969) curated by the artist Robert Morris and presented in the remotely located warehouse at 103 West 108th Street, a space secured specifically for this occasion—a project that was influential for Szeemann’s and Tucker’s shows. An essay for Szeemann’s catalog by the artist Scott Burton discussed “the crucially important subject of time in the new art,” queried the status of art whose “installation is synonymous with its existence,” and worried about the “ontological instability” of some works, as compared with “fixed form sculpture [which] does not literally cease to exist when it is in storage.”102 Burton pointed out, “Categories are being eradicated, distinctions blurred to an enormous degree…. The tremendous critical intelligence demanded from the ambitious artist is bringing him closer and closer to the intellectual; art and ideas are becoming indistinguishable … words are looked at, pictures are read, poems are ‘events,’ plastic or visual art is ‘performed.’ In dance the difference between skilled and untrained body movement is dwindling. The only large esthetic distinction remaining is that between art and life; this exhibition reveals how that distinction is fading.”103
Taking as an example Bill Bollinger’s use of a rope to make sculpture, he asks what happens “when it is disassembled? Does it still exist? If so, does it exist as a rope, as potential art, or as art?”104 Robert Morris’s work, subject to alteration in each installation, inspired the comment “Change … may be noticeable only to someone who has seen the work in an earlier state [and so] memory is essential to comprehension.”105 In Artnews’s Summer issue, Burton, reviewing the Anti-illusion exhibition in the wittily titled “Time on Their Hands,” wrote, “As anyone who follows any of the performing arts more than briefly understands, the artist’s own body is not an enduring material.” He noted a “blurr[ing] of traditional distinctions between performing and producing artists; that is, between art as service and art as object. If a work of plastic art can exist as a gesture (and not just the result of a gesture) then critics of the most recent art are right to feel that threatened by the theatricality of temporalized work. The chief characteristic of live performance is that after it is completed, there is nothing left to quantify. The witness is forced to examine his own impressions and thus his own psyche instead of being able to pretend to a formal objectivity…. On the one side of gesture is intention and idea and, on the other, temporal physical action or permanent mark, separate from its motivating idea.”106
James Monte, associate curator of the Anti-illusion exhibition, emphasized, “The radical nature of many works in this exhibition depends … on the fact that the acts of conceiving and placing the pieces takes precedence over the object quality of the works…. The artist must rely on his act, outside of his studio, in a strange environment within a short period of time, to carry the weight of his aesthetic position…. The piece may be determined by its location in a particular place in a particular museum … an integral, inextricable armature necessary for the existence of the work.”107 Brown’s “Dances in and around 80 Wooster Street” made site her theater, an “inextricable armature.”
To advertise the Whitney Museum’s “Another Fearless Dance Concert” (1971) Brown selected Carol Goodden’s now iconic photograph of Man Walking for a poster (figure 3.20). A hand-drawn program, backdating Man Walking Down the Side of a Building to 1969, signaled the piece as the model for Walking on the Wall, the main event at the Whitney (figure 3.21). Joined by Leaning Duets II (1971) plus Falling Duets I and II (1968 and 1971) and Skymap (1969), the program, like “Dances in and around 80 Wooster Street,” reflects Brown’s curating of her work in relation to the totality of a context. Presented on the museum’s second floor (denuded of art objects), she located dance on every available wall space: the floor, three adjacent walls, and the ceiling.
Walking on the Wall (1971) reconfigured her vertical walk as a horizontal dance for seven performers, following experiments on the roof of 80 Wooster Street and at the artist Jared Bark’s 155 West Broadway loft, rigged just 2 feet off the floor.108 In anticipation of the track’s installation at the museum, Brown asked architect Bernie Kirschenbaum to contact the offices of Marcel Breuer, the Whitney’s architect, to inquire about the load-bearing capacities of the museum’s gridded ceiling; Brown reported that “Breuer said if a fly landed on it I would get out of the room.”109 Concerned about safety, Rauschenberg contributed to the purchase of seven tracks and harnesses, and even assisted in their installation.110 At the Whitney, Walking on the Wall was performed as a group exercise, requiring the navigation of traffic created by seven dancers (Trisha Brown, Carmen Beuchat, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, Mark Gabor, Sylvia Palacios, and Steve Paxton) traversing three walls of an open cube.
Figure 3.20 Poster for “Another Fearless Dance Concert,” 1971. Trisha Brown