An origin for Simone Forti’s Onion Walk can be located in a performance at Merce Cunningham Dance Studio in spring 1961: Forti read aloud what she called a “dance report” about an onion sprouting and falling from [its perch on the mouth of] a bottle. Shortly thereafter, the text was included in the influential scores compilation An Anthology of Chance Operations, along with four other brief texts about movement observed and/or performed. The sculptural assembly has only recently been formalized as an object-based artwork through Forti’s participation in museum exhibitions. Not quite an action and not quite an object, the onion’s movement will be witnessed by few (if any) visitors. In this form, its quiet simplicity comments on the interactivity of systems, the virtue of patience, and the tiny shifts that generate change and hope. It also points out how other artworks might really be onions—growing and changing—even if this is not immediately apparent to viewers. —Megan Metcalf
Forti’s “dance report” for Onion Walk can be found in the Getty Research Institute’s unique copy of An Anthology of Chance Operations (1962), published by Jackson Mac Low and George Maciunas and edited by La Monte Young.
© Simone Forti.
