The Body on the Page

The words surface in the pages of a mottled black-and-white composition book marked on the front with a tiny blue star sticker, the kind awarded in kindergarten for effort: “Open Gardenia.”

This was the kernel for the radical free-form dance workshop Simone Forti (born 1935), a singular presence in the history of American art, envisioned upon her return to Los Angeles from New York in the fall of 1970.

Though it lasted little more than a year and was witnessed by less than two dozen people, the Open Gardenia workshop marked a breakthrough in Forti’s creative evolution. Her career now encompasses seven decades, intersects with a variety of seminal movements, and incorporates everything from dance and choreography to writing, video, sculpture, music, and holograms. Her belief that small gestures and collaborations were seeds of a process that could eventually transform American culture is reflected in that black-and-white composition book, which now sits in the Simone Forti archive, housed at the Getty Research Institute.

The notebook sits alongside more than 50 others spanning the 1950s to the 2010s. For the first time, this formerly private body of work—a vivid collection of diary entries, sketches, and workshop notes with doodles and stream-of-consciousness jottings—can be viewed for what it is: an artwork in and of itself. In Handbook in Motion, Forti’s 1974 memoir, she describes her search for “an emotional posture of continual dilation.” The journals are the ground on which that process takes shape: an ever-widening openness, both to one’s inner self and the surrounding world.

A diary—and life—unlocked

In the notebooks, Forti retraces nightly dreams in detail. She invents words to silly songs. She sketches animal movements as part of her lifelong “zoo mantras.” She confesses embarrassments and unravels lengthy romantic obsessions. She plays with poetry, pages of awkward attempts giving way to lines of lucid beauty. The tallies of daily life—finances, phone numbers, drafts of important letters—tangle with the marginalia of the seeker. I Ching hexagrams. Vows and affirmations. Visions for new works.

The notebooks just before and after Open Gardenia portray a crucial period of transformation when Forti was fundamentally reshaping her identity and relationship to movement. At age 35, following her divorce in 1966 from her second husband, the performance artist Robert Whitman—an earlier marriage to sculptor Robert Morris had ended in 1962—Forti readopted her given surname for the first time in her professional career. In the pages of one log, she practices writing her name in a long column and then circles the signature she likes best.

In her 1974 memoir, she recounts dropping acid and experiencing an awakening while attending Woodstock in 1969. The sensation of slowly stepping through an endless expanse of bodies struck her as more profound than any conceptual dance piece. For a year, she lingered in upstate New York, nesting in various communes and dancing around fires, before returning to Los Angeles in 1970 to reunite with her parents, Milka and Mario, to whom she was devoted. When Forti was 3, the family had fled Italy to escape Fascism and eventually landed in West Los Angeles, where her parents remained for the duration of their lives.

Also in the time of the Open Gardenia workshops, Forti moved into a large house in the Los Feliz hills with Alison Knowles, Peter Van Riper, and Nam June Paik, all old friends from Fluxus (an experimental, international arts group in the 1960s and ’70s) who had been recruited to teach at the radically reconstituted California Institute of the Arts. “I was a CalArts groupie,” Forti later joked. Though she never joined the faculty, she substituted for the seminal artist and theorist Allan Kaprow’s class on Happenings (spontaneous, unrepeatable, performance art pieces) and became a devoted student of Marshall Ho’o, whose tai chi classes recharged her relationship to movement.

Pining for the communal dance forms she’d witnessed in Woodstock, Forti proposed Open Gardenia as a free-form workshop to dissolve all borders between dancers and musicians. The intention was to catalyze non-Western forms of collective improvisation. “I wanted to find my way again, to often being in a dance state,” she wrote. She described this as a pure experience of movement equivalent to “a state of sleeping, or of shivering.”

Open Gardenia convened on Friday evenings over the course of 1971 in various rooms at CalArts before finding a permanent home in the music hall on the new campus in Valencia. With its wood floor and high ceiling, Forti called it “The Temple.” No one led the sessions. In the spirit of a jam, participants were encouraged to enact ideas, inspirations, and actions. The others would react and build depending on present energies.

Forti freely plunged into her personal obsession with circles, using momentum to send the body into centrifugal patterns and figure eights, the physical equivalent of her automatic writing. “I felt that if I myself could just keep going,” she wrote, “if I could just get through two real tired Friday nights, then the next Friday night would start regaining life. And that’s exactly how it happened.”

Her notebook became a log of laboratory observation, as she recorded the evolution of the workshop through each successive meeting. Some sessions ended in discord and frustration. Others reached ecstasy. An entry dated November 17, 1971, shows the workshop hitting its peak: “Sometimes we were like flying…skipping…running…in circles concentric and in both directions…passing each other at a flying pace. We made music and danced till 10.” Beneath the words she sketched a picture of the burning logs of a little fire.

One of the few constants of Open Gardenia was Charlemagne Palestine, a 24-year-old acolyte of drone music pioneer La Monte Young and the Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath, who had been invited to teach at CalArts (he offered a course in “aura reading”). Upon meeting, Palestine and Forti immediately formed a sibling bond. At Open Gardenia, he started improvising on a Bosendorfer 290 Imperial, a behemoth 97-key grand piano with supernatural resonance. While Open Gardenia eventually dissipated, its spirit inhabits Illuminations, a singular improvisational duet for piano, voices, and movement. Forti and Palestine would intermittently perform the piece over the next five decades, each iteration a fresh manifestation of the original workshop’s mystic energies.

Notebook as form

In 1972, Forti left Los Angeles for Nova Scotia. The German curator Kasper König commissioned her to write a book for the Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design, known for its publications with minimalist and conceptual artists like Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, and Donald Judd. König wanted her to document the Dance Constructions, the canonical “movement sculptures” she had created in the early 1960s during her association with Fluxus. The manuscript she submitted largely focused on a different period entirely: the years between 1969 and 1972, which encompassed her time in Woodstock, the experiments of Open Gardenia, and her collaboration with Palestine. König was baffled. He couldn’t see how the internal changes documented by Forti had any bearing on what he considered to be her major work. Forti argued that art and life—internal and external, public and private, present and past—were inseparable elements within a single ongoing process.

Despite their creative clash (Forti called it “a beautiful struggle”), Handbook in Motion was eventually recognized as a seminal text. The book and its 2018 sequel, The Bear in the Mirror, both use handwritten pages photocopied directly from the pages of her notebooks, as if to assert: Here is my work. I am these pages. This is me.

It’s possible to extract compelling miscellanea from single pages, but the deeper significance of the journals is only revealed in the whole. With a fearless commitment to self-exposure sustained over decades, Forti returned to them as a physical space to be explored and activated. Her archive undermines the popular perception of the notebook as merely a staging ground for major works. The act of inscription against a blank page becomes a new means of stretching, limbering, coordination, balance, and reorientation. Through her, the notebook becomes a medium for movement.

Explore the Simone Forti papers at the Getty Research Institute.