Claudia La Rocco on Simone Forti

STANDING IN THE VENTILATED GALLERIES from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, on a Thursday morning in March, I thought of Rilke’s famous poem “The Panther”:

Of the interminable passage of the bars his gaze
got tired – there is nothing more it can hold.
There always seems to be a thousand bars,
and past these thousand bars there are no more people.

The soft cushion of its muscular, undulating rhythm
turns in a tight circle until,
like a mighty dance around a tiny space,
it centers a numb but still enormous will.

But sometimes the shadows of his pupils rise,
capture an image he cannot resist;
through its tense and motionless limbs it flies,
and in his heart he ceases to exist.*

I wasn’t watching a panther but a grainy black-and-white video of other zoo animals, juxtaposed with the animated faces of human children and isolated in horribly small, horribly bare cement cells. The most terrible was the polar bear, incessant in its impulsive and helpless steps. So tired he can’t hold on.

The 1974 video was part of “Simone Forti” – curated by Rebecca Lowery and Alex Sloane with Jason Underhill – a survey of the artist’s work dating back to the 1960s, when she belonged to a generation – or better, a community – long celebrated for changing the way we think about form in traditions spanning dance, music and the visual arts. If you know anything about art history, you know that this narrative of postmodern dance meets minimalist sculpture – I offer this rough reduction not to dismiss that era (God knows I’ve written a lot about it), but because already enough. And because the narrative inevitably narrows Forti, an Italian-born, Los Angeles-raised artist whose varied output so often boils down to her “Dancing Constructions,” nine works of pedestrian movement based on tasks she made in his mid-twenties. Not that these works are not precursors! Not that they’re not worth seeing (sculptural elements of two were on display and performances of several took place throughout the show). Not that the debates over whether the Museum of Modern Art in New York saved or destroyed them by acquiring them in 2015 aren’t. . .

Blah blah blah. Back to the zoo. The video is part of a series of animal studies, many of which are ink and graphite sketches in which sweeping drawings and handwritten scribbles float delicately on white paper. In Polar bear reaching nose in wind (animal study), 1982, Forti catches the apex predator in a less harassed moment, while playing with a piece of bark: “Something to ‘handle’?” she writes next to the drawing. “Something to do.”

In 2010, perhaps the first time I interviewed Forti, she told the story of her then-husband, Robert Morris, chiding her for her lack of drive and focus: You can notHe told him, stay up all day, look out the window and eat peanut butter. (You need, in other words, something to do.) I’ve seen her recount this elsewhere, and it strikes me now as the kind of witty shorthand one develops to encapsulate (reduce) larger, messier evolution. It also strikes me that, of course, you can just stand there staring out the window, especially if you’re a writer, as Forti is too. Observation, constrained by time: The window on the right is an excellent teacher.

Everyday life and major geopolitical events exist easily and uncomfortably in Forti’s observations, often joined by disarmingly simple specificity.

THE FIRST MORNING I went to MOCA, woke up early to the sound of a rough, high-pitched din: a red-crowned parrot on the telephone line outside my friends’ house in Altadena. The parrots were back the second day I visited the museum, and I had the sentimental and embarrassing thought that the birds were some sort of Simone Forti omen. Then I opened oh tongueForti’s 2003 book, a revised edition of which has just been published by NERO, and here they are on the first page, the “Morning Birds”:

Katsup
Katsup Katsup

How sweet
How shy the blouse
under iron

vi vi vi vi vi
vi vi vi
vi vi vi vi vi
vi vi vi

There is something in the gentle collision of observation and doing at the heart of Forti’s art, which, whether it is a dance, a drawing or a poem , operates on a deeply comforting and satisfying human level. Regardless of the form, it offers the audience the true gift of the improviser: presence. It may not always be interesting, but it does NOW— the view through the window.

“Why is this compelling? I wrote in my notebook, transfixed by A free consultation, a 2016 video in which, in 17 minutes and 35 seconds, Forti crawls slowly, laboriously and shivering over rocks, snow, tree limbs and brambles on the shore of Lake Michigan, studying what she meeting and holding a hand- turn on the radio all the time. “She absolutely does, I think,” came my response. Because she is so fully in it, we can be too.

In the moment, yes, but also in the world. A free consultation is one of Forti’s “New Animations”, a series started in the mid-80s in which, as she writes in “On News Animations” (oh tongue), “I danced the news, talked and danced, being all parts of the news.” Typically, this involves newspapers, with the increasingly crumpled, torn and soggy pages becoming as much form as content. In Zuma News, 2013, we find her set up on the shore of Zuma Beach in Malibu, awkwardly gathering scalloped seaweed masses of anything printable. Distorted images flash by, of Angela Merkel raising her hand triumphantly, no doubt delighted to have ruined someone else’s life that day; of perfect dancer bodies doing perfect dancer things in the Arts section.

Merkel and the dancers remind me of one of Forti’s phrases from Mad Brook News Animationon the bill, uttered as she stamps her foot and forms her body into a tight bundle: “Talking about power, power, power beyond hands and feet.” And that in turn brings me back to “The Panther“, which I only had in mind to begin with because I had recently read Teju Cole’s essay “On the Blackness of the Panther”, which gives us this beautiful poem by Rilke and also the odious “Die Aschantiin which the German-language poet meditates on a group of West Africans who have been exhibited as if in a zoo. Rilke is disappointed, writes Cole, that “the Ashanti are just there, self-possessed, with a ‘weird’ conceit, acting almost as if they were equal to the Europeans”.

Forti started working with the short stories as a tribute to his father. From oh tongue“My father was an avid reader of the news, and I always felt protected by that. In 1938, he was among the first to sense the degree of danger for Jews in Italy and got us out of there on time.

Power beyond hands and feet. Everyday life and major geopolitical events exist easily and uncomfortably in Forti’s observations, often joined by disarmingly simple specificity. Cole again: “The general is where solidarity begins, but the specific is where our lives come into play.”

And let’s go back to looking out that window. Like any investigation, “Simone Forti” swung between giving its audience little tastes, contextualizing those treats, and letting them communicate what they would do on their own. I was happy with the Conservatives’ decision to put animal studies first. On a humorous note, it was hard to resist the tragic similarities between the zoo’s cellblock and the museum’s white cube; more importantly, he set the tone for Forti as the quintessential observer. (During a tour of the show, choreographer Milka Djordjevich, one of the dancers performing Forti’s “Dance Constructions,” noted with a laugh that when she was a Forti student at the University of California, Los Angeles, ” We went out. And observed things. I also loved the ending they chose: a solitary photograph occupying the last wall. window shade, 2022, stages the almost underground play of light on a backlit window, bars and latches. The photograph looks like the result of contemplation, and indeed it is: the window is in Forti’s current apartment, and the time spent watching time pass by the light is one of the ways in which Forti, who has reached an advanced stage of Parkinson’s disease, now conceptualizes his practice of movement. . It is heartbreaking, certainly; one thinks of animals pacing, of more insidious cages.

But no, the will is not numb at all. This is the wrong lesson. Because window shade also bears witness to the beautiful continuity that characterizes Forti’s art. Spoon in hand, peanut butter and spirit at hand. Absorb all that is there, because in truth, that is all there is.

* From Rainer Maria Rilke: new poems, trans. Joseph Cadora (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2014).

Claudia LaRocco is the author, more recently, of the short story Driven by (Smooth friend). She edits The back room at Small Press Traffic.