Shorter Notices Becoming Simone Forti: California, 1970–72

I am leaning over a slide at the light table. The familiar handwriting of artist and dancer Simone Forti (b. 1935) on the cardboard frame provides her name, a title—“Accompaniment to La Monte’s 2 Sounds and La Monte’s 2 Sounds”—and a date: 1968 (fig. 1). This is not the low, tight cursive of Forti’s in her twenties and thirties but the clear, spacious printing that she developed somewhat later, the same handwriting that appears in the inscriptions of her books now on my office shelf. I suspect the slide was labeled in the run-up to the acquisition of Forti’s archive in 2019 by the Getty Research Institute (GRI), or perhaps when the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York was considering Forti’s earliest works, those that Forti called “Dance Constructions” (1960–61), for its permanent collection between 2009 and 2015.¹ Now, seated in the Special Collections Reading Room at the GRI in November 2024, I’m consulting the Simone Forti papers and audiovisual materials, which have not yet been fully cataloged, in hopes of finding images of the Dance Constructions in the 1960s.² After spending years researching in the artist’s personal papers and in the collections of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, I know that extant material from Forti’s life and work in the 1960s, especially photographs, is scarce. And indeed, just a brief look at the slide at the GRI suggests it might instead depict a performance from 1971. The false lead of the mislabeled date isn’t even momentarily disappointing: I’m thrilled that what I’ve found could provide more insight into Forti’s time in Southern California between 1970 and 1972, which I’ve long hypothesized was a pivotal period for the artist.

Italian-born, Southern California–raised Forti was, until recently, primarily known in US American and European dance communities for her contributions to improvisational forms of movement. In the early 2000s, art historians and museum curators “discovered” that Forti’s artistic practice was implicated in and foundational for a number of canonical postwar movements—Happenings, Fluxus, and Minimalism, among others—and that the artist had been making drawings, videos, sculptures, music, and poetry in addition to performances for decades. As part of my scholarly inquiry into the art world’s fascination with dance, I’ve been tracking Forti’s transition from dance-world legend to visual-art star; following the artist and her works from her classroom in the dance department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to personal and institutional archives, in international galleries and museums and through publications.

Making sense of this trajectory requires weaving together several different kinds of knowledge. I’m drawing on my bodily experience from Forti’s classes and workshops, the data provided by files and photographs in the archive, and my evolving understanding of Forti’s creative and personal relationships as well as the growing body of secondary literature about Forti.³ This scholarly labor constitutes its own dance between the methods of the art historian (which some might say overvalues the archive) and the methods of the performance theorist (which, in privileging oral history and bodily knowledge, arguably undervalues the archive). My scholarship requires both methodological approaches. As theater scholar Rebecca Schneider has aptly pointed out, archival research on any topic is an embodied endeavor: you show up, take stock of the scene, pursue leads, dive in more deeply, get lost, begin again, forge new paths.⁴ Today at the Getty, I’m letting the archive pull me along. My query is strictly present tense and situated in the body, for the most part ignoring what others have said (and might think). If I’m paying close attention to what’s in front of me, yet open to surprises, just one little clue can open up whole new webs of relations and shed light on my own processes and preconceptions—even the entire historical enterprise.

I place the loupe over the slide and draw a sharp breath: Is that a child standing in the rope? With Forti beneath her? I seem to recall a document in which Forti expressed a desire to let children play with the plywood-and-rope equipment used in her Dance Constructions. In this work, Accompaniment for La Monte’s “2 Sounds” and La Monte’s “2 Sounds” (1961; hereafter Accompaniment), a performer steps into a long loop of rope hanging a few feet off the ground. An assistant moves in close and winds the first performer up tightly. As the assistant steps away, the rope uncoils, and the person in it whips out in a spin, twisting one way and then the other until the momentum runs out. It’s all conducted to a recording of composer La Monte Young’s screeching composition Two Sounds (1960) at an uncomfortably loud volume, which contains the sound of metal scraped on glass—and goes on for about twelve minutes.⁵ After a dramatic start, the majority of the piece consists of the performer swaying slightly in the rope and the audience members shifting subtly in their seats as they all endure Young’s music. In Accompaniment, Forti’s use of a singular gesture and limited movement to draw attention to the presence and mechanics of the human body and the relationship between audience and artwork is characteristic of all of the Dance Constructions, which are still performed today.

In June 1968, Accompaniment was performed by visual artist and musician Walter De Maria in an unfinished loft studio space in New York City associated with Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. I had hoped to find more photographs of De Maria, who appeared in a number of dances by Forti and her Judson Dance Theater peers in the 1960s, at the GRI. Forti used a black-and-white photograph by Peter Moore of the 1968 performance to illustrate Accompaniment in her autobiographical book Handbook in Motion (1974).⁶ Written and compiled during a residency in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1972–73, Handbook in Motion consists of journal entries, drawings, ephemera, and photographs detailing Forti’s artistic activities and influences up to that point. A nonchronological narrative juxtaposes the artist’s early dance training and performances in San Francisco and New York City (1950s and ’60s) with her subsequent creative experiments in Rome, upstate New York, and California (late 1960s to the early 1970s). Since its publication in 1974, Forti’s account of finding herself as an artist has been enormously influential for dance practitioners.

The photograph by Moore from 1968 reproduced in Handbook in Motion shows a blurry De Maria elevated over checkered linoleum, but the color slide that I’m looking at now in the GRI’s Reading Room is dominated by a dark carpet (see fig. 1). A row of old-school track lights dots the ceiling, while an attentive seated audience lines the edges of the space. Just off-center, the two female-presenting performers of Accompaniment are brightly illuminated, seemingly at the moment when the assistant winds up the person suspended in the rope. A bulky speaker—likely from which Young’s recording blasted—is in the corner where the rear walls meet. This is clearly not the same occasion as the one that appears in Handbook in Motion. Based on the color quality of the slide and the outfits and haircuts of the people in it, I think this is a concert of Forti’s Dance Constructions (in which Accompaniment appeared) at the Pasadena Art Museum in February 1971, almost ten years after the works’ first appearance in 1961.

Forti had returned to Southern California sometime in the late summer or fall of 1970 and stayed until the spring of 1972, a brief but productive period that is difficult to detect within the archival record. I’m especially interested in a series of informal jam sessions that Forti called “Open Gardenia,” which Forti initiated at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) soon after she arrived in California. I think these sessions served as an engine for her modes of working and creative output in the decades that followed. However, not only was Forti’s artistic practice newly in formation in those years but so too were the institutions with which she was associated: CalArts and the Pasadena Art Museum (today the Norton Simon Museum). Along with the usual problem of limited (or no) photographs or film/video of performances and other live events in the 1960s and 70s, the repositories where this documentation might end up were not yet securely in place. The processing and accessibility of Forti’s papers and audiovisual materials at the GRI promises clues for finally constructing a coherent narrative and stable timeline for the events and artworks of 1970–72, enabling my art history to perform certain certainties.

But dance in the archive—and Forti’s dance between 1970 and 1972—insists that some things will stubbornly refuse to reveal themselves fully. Forti’s dances disrupt any final narrative, and my experience pursuing their remnants attests above all to the gaps, failures, fantasies, and desires that drive my project—and may drive the writing of every history. Art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty has noted how many of the performative works of the 1960s and 70s were “designed to be lost,” leaving behind material testifying primarily to lack, which compels the pursuit across contexts and time.⁷ Indeed, in the archive, the absence of live movement and the performer’s enlivened body generates only more longing for experiences forever out of reach or always slipping away. The slide’s image of the 1971 performance illuminates so much about the performers, the museum space, and even the photographer—while provoking so many additional speculations. I’m suspended between wanting to pin everything down and wanting to let mystery remain.

Back at home, I hunt for a research photograph of a typewritten text marked with the rusty residue of an old paper clip. It’s an undated, untitled proposal about a workshop that Forti wanted to teach at CalArts containing a lengthy description of the concerts she had held at the Pasadena Art Museum; I found it in Forti’s papers at her home in Los Angeles around 2013, before they were acquired by the GRI.⁸ Writing at the conclusion of her museum performances, circa spring 1971, Forti described how she and her collaborators planned to install the wooden ramp with ropes required for Slant Board (1961; fig. 2), another Dance Construction, on the CalArts campus in Valencia, then still under construction, “so that anyone who is interested will be able to play on it.”⁹ The proposal doesn’t mention children at all.

Another false lead—and I realize I have fallen into the trap of Forti’s first historians, who linked the artist and her early choreography to children’s games in order to explain their radical simplicity, which had the effect of infantilizing the artist herself.¹⁰ Sitting at my desk, now a little ashamed, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to find out whether the “rope board” made it to the CalArts campus, and who might have experimented with it? I also wonder whether Forti was eventually hired to teach the Gardenia Workshop that she outlined for the brand-new art school, or if she even submitted the proposal at all? A copy had remained in her files for me to discover more than four decades later, after all.

Forti’s friend and colleague Allan Kaprow, who is credited with inventing the Happenings in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s, enlisted Forti to cover his classes at CalArts while he traveled to Cologne for an exhibition in November 1970. At the school, Forti sought collaborators for the kind of music and dance practice she had begun to develop during her time living on communes in upstate New York in 1969–1970.¹¹ She explains in her proposal for Gardenia Workshop how she had organized the Open Gardenia jam sessions: “The more I talked to people [at CalArts], the more I realized that there was a common need for an open ended yet stable situation” in which collaborations between artistic mediums and between people could take hold.¹² What resulted was “a kind of weekly festival in which everyone who showed up was a welcome performer.”¹³ Forti found a regular time and place for these sessions on Friday nights from seven to nine in the multimedia trailer (a location suggested by faculty member and composer Serge Tcherepnin) and arrived at the name Open Gardenia. She describes participants in the jam sessions “dancing and making sounds, working lights, or projecting live or recorded images” and names some members of the ad hoc group, the most famous among them Tcherepnin, Fluxus artist Shigeko Kubota, and composer Charlemagne Palestine.¹⁴ Forti’s bid was simple: She wanted to formalize the Open Gardenia activities in a class or workshop that, under her direction, “would uniquely complement the studies which are already offered at Cal Arts.”¹⁵

The overall image that Forti paints of the Open Gardenia sessions in her proposal, in Handbook in Motion, and in her contemporaneous notebooks is so evocative, yet certain details remain maddeningly obscure.¹⁶ I’ve never found any photographs or film documentation of the Friday night sessions at CalArts in 1970–71, and the organizer herself admitted at the time: “I have no idea of all the people who came and went.”¹⁷ Even if I had a recording, I still would never know what it was like to be there on the interim campus in that “first, famously chaotic year” of CalArts, when the previous Chouinard Art Institute and Los Angeles Conservatory of Music converged on the former Villa Cabrini Academy campus in Burbank in 1970.¹⁸ All of the documentation (and first-person recollections) in the world could never convey the full range of the movement and sounds, lights, and music in a dimly lit space filled with incense and cigarette smoke. More to the point, I’d never be able to smell the perspiration of the moving bodies in the room, feel the creative, social, and libidinal energy flowing between Open Gardenia’s participants, or join in their spontaneous side conversations.

I know this is a fantasy. But I’m nonetheless convinced that Open Gardenia’s powerful currents precipitated many of Forti’s discoveries in dance, sound, and the visual arts since 1970. With Palestine, Forti developed a collaborative, improvisational movement and music practice, later called “Illuminations,” which consisted of Forti drawing numbers and spirals on paper and then following the patterns with her entire body on a walk or run while Palestine sounded out tones and extended drones on the piano and other instruments.¹⁹ The duo eventually performed all over the world. Likewise, with CalArts printmaking professor and artist Peter Van Riper, Forti developed Big Room (sometimes also called “Home Base”), which paired her movement improvisations with Van Riper’s musical improvisations, most often on the sopranino saxophone.²⁰ They married and appeared together in major art venues nationally and internationally in the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond.²¹ Forti’s extended, iterative collaborations with Palestine and later with Van Riper combined spontaneous decision-making with the shared knowledge acquired through working together intimately over time: breathing, sounding, and moving together in the spaces of rehearsal, performance, pedagogy, and domestic life.

I can’t claim such an intimate association with the artist, but I experience something similar with the fragments in the archive, which I’ve been circling for almost fifteen years. And I’m beginning to think that there are parallels between my scholarly process and those in Illuminations and Big Room, which developed slowly out of the artists’ personal relationships, embodied knowledge, and happy accidents. The names Illuminations and Big Room never marked an arrival or enclosure but rather the continuity in the connections between the performers and their respective mediums; each “work” folded into the next, which folded into the next, which folded into the next.²² Likewise, I’ve been constructing and reconstructing my (hi)stories with ever-expanding knowledge about the events and people with whom Forti was associated, against a backdrop of a bodily understanding of some of Forti’s work and specters of conversations and collaborations from the past that will never be recovered. I’ve pursued the material traces of the artist’s practice from her home to her gallery, The Box, in Los Angeles, and now to the GRI, generating a continually evolving picture of Forti’s body of work as well as its internal connections. But whereas the notes, letters, sketches, and other archival documentation that surround a painting or sculpture point toward a securely tangible thing, the dance configured by physical artifacts from the archive never takes a final form. This makes my pursuit seem futile while keeping me going—and keeping me humble in the knowledge that every history is an approximation.

Forti was invited to share her work at the newly opened Pasadena Art Museum in early 1971. She has written that she “naturally turned to [her] Open Gardenia family” for collaborators and performers.²³ Forti divided the material she had into two separate occasions and locations, which reflected the transition between the work she had done to date and the work she would soon pursue with Palestine and Van Riper, and others (fig. 3). On 26 February, in a downstairs gallery with a spiral staircase and dark carpet, Forti and her collaborators performed three of the five Dance Constructions that had debuted in downtown New York City in 1961 as well as a few other works Forti developed later in the 1960s (fig. 4). The evening closed with all of the performers improvising on “a folk dance,” an exercise that Forti has also called “Droning,” “Buzzing,” or “Scramble” in other contexts.²⁴ A week later, in early March, some of these performers—Forti, Palestine, Tcherepnin, and musician Lolly Bienenfeld—presented a collaboration of sound, movement, and lights in the museum’s auditorium, likely along the lines of what they had been doing together in Open Gardenia.²⁵ Forti’s separation of her past work from present at the Pasadena museum prefigured the retrospective look she would soon take while preparing Handbook in Motion in Nova Scotia. Made at a creative crossroads, Handbook in Motion, the Pasadena concerts—and almost certainly Open Gardenia—all signaled reckoning, rebirth, and re-formation.

Like Forti, the Pasadena Art Museum was also at a critical juncture: Still developing its contemporary art collection (and with limited funds), the museum featured music and other live events as well as temporary, site-specific installations to fill the galleries of a brand-new and largely reviled building, which opened to great fanfare in January 1970.²⁶ The institution itself was ultimately temporary, becoming enfolded in what is today the Norton Simon Museum around 1974.²⁷ Now fully processed and accessible to researchers, Forti’s archive at the GRI will enable scholars to reconstruct historic connections between institutions, artists, and disciplines. Museums are composed of people, after all, and performance research enables an understanding of the social dimension of institutions, correcting old narratives and long-held assumptions. Even still, I suspect that Forti and her collaborators—and maybe all historical figures—will continue to resist being captured definitively. And certain episodes, like Open Gardenia, may in the end remain not fully knowable, which is what makes them so appealing.

As I compare the color slide at the GRI (see fig. 1) with a set of scans from Forti’s gallery, it appears that the long-haired figure in the rope at the Pasadena Art Museum might not have been a child after all. Maybe it was just a person of small stature photographed from above? And the short-haired person winding her up was definitely not Forti, whose hair was longer and lighter at the time (fig. 5). I wonder if I’ll ever be able to find out who these performers were, or if I’ll ever get a view of the second Pasadena performance? The images I have from The Box only depict the first concert on 26 February, with its spectators and special lighting, as well as a rehearsal of the Dance Constructions. One of the rehearsal photographs of Slant Board found its way into Handbook in Motion, with a credit to Tcherepnin (see fig. 2).²⁸ My best guess is that if he took these photographs—there are no images of “a folk dance,” in which he would have participated—then he wouldn’t have been able to take photos of the multimedia performance in the auditorium on 5 March, in which he was performing. Who knows if anyone from the now-defunct museum hired a contract photographer for the evening, and if that person or their heirs would have any idea today what the negatives depicted? (Related research in other institutional archives tells me the answer is usually no, and the remaining files at the Norton Simon are slim.)

Such a window onto the second Pasadena Art Museum performance might finally provide my longed-for peek into Open Gardenia, which exemplifies a heady moment in art and Southern California history. But my singular focus may be clouding my ability to see Open Gardenia elsewhere. Looking at the images from The Box, I linger on those of the rehearsal, which had full work lights, ladders for hanging the ropes from the staircase, and a zone on the floor for cups with water or coffee (fig. 6). The dancers—like those I’ve been with in Forti’s classes, and like those I’ve seen training for her performances around the world—lounge on the floor and listen intently to the artist’s instructions. They also laugh and goof around with each other and with the artist (figs. 7, 8).

Forti, as both a collaborator and a director, not quite a student and not quite a teacher, contributed to and benefited from the energetic, interdisciplinary atmosphere that she, CalArts, and the Pasadena Art Museum fostered in that moment in the early 1970s. The chaotic, in-between, and only partly knowable are what myths are made of. And these are likely the qualities that made that period so productive for Forti and her peers—and will keep it from full legibility in the present and future. Of course I want to join them: It looks like they’re having so much fun.

Notes

Special thanks to Mara McCarthy and The Box, Los Angeles, for help with locating and reproducing the extraordinary slides that illustrate this essay. Feedback from Claudia La Rocco, three anonymous readers, and the editors of the Getty Research Journal made this short text achieve much more than I expected when I set out; thank you.

This essay treats the titles of works, series, and events in a manner following the artist, as much as it can be known. Italics indicate an artwork or piece of choreography formalized into a discrete entity, often through the publication of writing about that work. Titles capitalized headline style and set in roman indicate a movement practice, exercise, or ongoing series of events for which Forti arrived at an identifying name. The boundaries between a practice and a distinct work are especially unclear in improvisational movement practices, which are driven by collaborative prompts or scores rather than a desired outcome. Whether the naming conventions Forti established for her works were intentional or not, the precise handling of her titling appears not to have mattered much to the artist and her collaborators; my essay aims to honor the artist’s fluidity in this regard.

1. Calling the suite of works “Dance Constructions” follows Forti’s example and preserves a sense of a category of artworks; MoMA often italicizes the words, treating them like a title for the suite. See Megan Metcalf, “Making the Museum Dance: Simone Forti’s Huddle (1961) and Its Acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art,” Dance Chronicle 45, no. 1 (February 2022): 30–56; and Nancy Lim, “MoMA Collects: Simone Forti’s Dance Constructions,” Inside/Out (blog), Museum of Modern Art, 27 January 2016, http:​/​/​www​.moma​.org​/explore​/inside​_out​/2016​/01​/27​/moma​-collects​-simone​-fortis​-dance​-constructions. The museum’s conceptual and practical transformations of Forti’s early works are the subject of Megan Metcalf, Collecting Choreography: Simone Forti and Performance in the Contemporary Art Museum (University of California Press, forthcoming). ↩︎

2. Simone Forti papers, 1914–2019, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (GRI), 2019.M.23, https:​/​/​primo​.getty​.edu​/permalink​/f​/mlc5om​/GETTY​_ALMA21199699560001551. ↩︎

3. I began taking Forti’s classes in improvisation at UCLA in 2010, continuing until she retired in 2014; from 2009 until the present, I have attended Forti’s workshops, performances, and talks all over the country. In 2011, I performed in the Dance Constructions in Los Angeles, and, in 2014, assisted Forti as she taught them to new performers in Salzburg, Austria. Dancer Ann Cooper Albright’s biographical book Simone Forti: Improvising a Life (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) is among the most recent accounts of Forti’s practice, building on major exhibitions of Forti’s work: Simone Forti (2023) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body, A Retrospective in Motion (2014) at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria. See also Meredith Morse, Soft Is Fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and After (MIT Press, 2016). ↩︎

4. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge, 2010), 104. ↩︎

5. “La Monte Young-Two Sounds,” YouTube video, 14:38, posted by mishima, 1 January 2012, https:​/​/​youtu​.be​/t1ZF7jMK00w​?si​=Le​_YVSJAfPuGRuTo. In general, only unofficial recordings of Young’s work are available online. The harsh sounds—identified variously as a mallet scraped on a gong, ashtrays against a window, and tin cans on glass—were also used in Merce Cunningham’s choreography Winterbranch (1964). An analog recording is available in the Simone Forti papers at the GRI: “La Monte Young: Two Sounds, 1960 April,” audiotape reel, 13 min., Simone Forti papers, box 27, item D19, https:​/​/​primo​.getty​.edu​/permalink​/f​/19q6gmb​/GETTY​_ROSETTAIE11313741. ↩︎

6. Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 65. ↩︎

7. Carrie Lambert, “Documentary Dialectics: Performance Lost and Found,” Visual Resources 16, no. 3 (2000): 276. ↩︎

8. Simone Forti, untitled typewritten proposal for a workshop at CalArts, circa spring 1971, with a photocopy of the first page of Robert Morris’s published essay “Notes on Dance,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (1965) embedded in it, Simone Forti papers, GRI, box 139, folder 30. ↩︎

9. Forti, typewritten proposal, GRI, 3. ↩︎

10. See, in particular, Don McDonagh, The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance (Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1970), 190–92; and Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers (Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 24–29. ↩︎

11. Forti describes this period at length in Forti, Handbook in Motion, 15–27. ↩︎

12. Forti, typewritten proposal, GRI, 1. ↩︎

13. Forti, typewritten proposal, GRI, 1. ↩︎

14. Forti, typewritten proposal, GRI, 1. ↩︎

15. Forti, typewritten proposal, GRI, 5. ↩︎

16. Forti describes some of the motivations behind Open Gardenia as well as its practicalities in Forti, Handbook in Motion, 108–13; a notebook entry that includes a drawing is reproduced on pp. 110–12. Forti’s notebooks, which include additional recollections of Open Gardenia, can be found in the Forti papers, GRI, box 1, folders 2–3, 6; and box 2, folders 1–6. ↩︎

17. Forti, typewritten proposal, GRI, 1. ↩︎

18. “Timeline,” CalArts, https:​/​/​calarts​.edu​/history​/timeline. ↩︎

19. “Charlemagne Palestine—Piano Piece for Simone (1971),” recorded between October and December 1971, CalArts, from Illuminations with Simone Forti, Youtube video, 11:57, posted by fascia lata, 1 August 2021, https:​/​/​youtu​.be​/v3yFC​-nR7qw​?si​=SbPMS2MPWlQeWNVQ. Copies of this rare recording exist online, but not as official recordings. Forti and Palestine issued a vinyl record with these recordings in 2010 (Alga Marghen), and various recordings of their sessions together are now at the Getty. For example, “Illuminations, Simone Forti and Charlemagne Palestine, 1971,” computer disc, Forti papers, GRI, box 26, item CM177, https:​/​/​www​.getty​.edu​/research​/collections​/component​/26QTQC. Forti describes her work sessions and performances with Palestine and includes some of her preparatory drawings as well as photographs in Forti, Handbook in Motion, 129–39. Forti’s text from Handbook in Motion is reproduced in Sabine Breitwieser, ed., Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body (Museum der Moderne Salzburg, 2014), 199–203. ↩︎

20. Forti describes Home Base in the article Simone Forti, “Home Base,” Contact Quarterly 5, nos. 3/4 (1980): 6–10, which was included in the second edition of Handbook in Motion (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1980), 143–51. ↩︎

21. “Seeing Hearing Peter Van Riper/Simone Forti, c. 1992,” Youtube video, 28:59, posted by Peter Van Riper (username), 18 February 2013, https:​/​/​youtu​.be​/P3YVsYZGfkY​?si​=jxrWrWXUOkI8​-Kzs. This would have been a very late collaboration between Forti and Van Riper that took place not long before his death. ↩︎

22. Forti’s Crawling (1972) consists of movement evolving in part out of the Illuminations practice. See “Simone Crawl, 1970s,” YouTube video, 3:20, posted by Peter Van Riper (username), 3 June 2013, https:​/​/​youtu​.be​/h8oeyOeurCk​?si​=ZDVDCcVPBHmgAKoY. ↩︎

23. Forti, typewritten proposal, GRI, 2. ↩︎

24. “a folk dance” is how Forti listed the final event in the graphic program for the 26 February performances of “Two Evenings at the Pasadena Art Museum,” 1971. “Droning” and “droneing” is how she described it in her preparatory drawings and notebooks (Los Angeles, The Box, and Forti papers, GRI, box 1, folders 2–3, 6; and box 2, folders 1–6). Forti provided a score for Buzzing in the magazine Women’s Work edited by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood in 1975. The Getty has a copy of the facsimile edition of the two issues of the original magazine: Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood, eds., Women’s Work (Primary Information, 2019). ↩︎

25. Forti, typewritten proposal, GRI, 2. ↩︎

26. See Karen Jacobson, ed., Radical Past: Contemporary Art and Music in Pasadena, 1960–1974 (Pasadena, CA: Armory Center for the Arts; Art Center College of Design, 1999). ↩︎

27. See John Coplans, “Pasadena’s Collapse and the Simon Takeover,” Artforum (February 1975): 28–45. ↩︎

28. Forti, Handbook in Motion, 57. ↩︎