Trisha Brown – Walking on the Wall 1971
Walking on the Wall (1971) premiered at the Whitney and was performed again in 2010 during the Off the Wall exhibition at the Whitney. Trisha Brown originally performed the indoor work herself with her troupe, involved mounted tracks, ropes, and harnesses.
Trisha Brown – Walking on the Wall 1971 – detail
Trisha Brown “It’s a Draw/Live Feed” 2008
Trisha Brown “It’s a Draw/ Live Feed” 2003
“In these large-scale drawings, realized through performance on a stage, in a gallery, or in the privacy of the studio, signs written on the body through dance training, memory and improvisation, take the form of pictorial signs motivated by gestures traced on the page. In the It’s a Draw series, the ground of drawing, paper, which is horizontal to the floor, becomes vertical when installed on a wall, a situation that recalls conditions Brown considered fundamental when shifting her work to the proscenium stage with its perpendicular and horizontal frames of floor and stage.5 The motivation of matter by physicality echoes in relation to artistic traditions encompassing Jackson Pollock’s “action painting,” Yves Klein’s anthropometries, 1950s–1960s performance, as well as sculpture and video concerned with the body’s phenomenological experience and with process.
Of course, Brown’s singular drawing language depends on unprecedented kinesthetic articulation and memory, as well as a visual ordering that takes into account improvisation and composition that is simultaneously physical and visual.”
“The It’s a Draw drawings deflect form by investigating process, although over time her repertoire of indexical marks have become a versatile, dependable and autonomous visual language, an evolution that reveals the gradual differentiation, repetition, combination and invention of mark-making systems. This is reflected in two recent drawings related to the series, although smaller in scale. The first, made primarily with the feet grasping charcoal and pastel is a constellation of twirls, smudges, dashes and dots made by the “jump” of charcoal across the page. An archive of signs for unrecoverable actions, arrayed like a series of words on a white page with the empty white spaces suggesting the beat of time between drawing incidents or events.
Process, the idea of drawing as a record of the physical act of its making, is moderated by Brown’s inimitable visual intelligence and penchant for structure. Comparing a group of drawings from the It’s a Draw group will underscore how decision-making moderates the random. One recent drawing incorporates a record of procedures and edits as a further layer of (choreographic and graphic) notation such as directional arrows, writing and color. Of course, only the choreographer can read the visual signs of dance that are a presence behind each drawing’s realization, now evaporated, absent.
Technically the It’s a Draw drawings are not “blind” drawing: the eyes are open, although constantly in motion in all directions.”
Credit: “Trisha Brown: The Signs of Gesture” by Susan Rosenberg in brochure for USF Contemporary Art Museum (Brown-Brochure)
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“This is the first walk that really became a filmic soundtrack and it created a format or style that I have been experimenting with ever since. The narrative uses the device of a man offsite watching a surveillance video of a woman walking in the garden. This woman, my voice, communicates with him through the image he sees. She also refers to his postcards of the museum grounds that he sent her years before. They are trying to locate a moment in time when things went wrong between them.”
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“Her piece guided spectators through the nearby landscape, starting from an exit door near the far end of the museum and near the sea itself. The soundtrack mentioned specific views and objects, but it also included intimate histories and the impression of planes overhead or a jogger from behind. The fictional and the factual alternated for the visitor who was ‘choreographed’ through the headphones.” — Bruce Ferguson
Like the mazes of office cubicles in so many of the buildings that surround Bryant Park, Walk the Walk comes to life over the course of a working day.
From Monday to Friday, Kate Gilmore’s performance-installation creates a spectacle of color, movement and sound from 8:30am to 6:30pm. Gilmore (b.1975, Washington, D.C.) presents a cubic structure, open on all sides, with a flat roof that functions as a podium. Working in shifts, groups of women take to the roof where they perform an improvisational choreography of everyday movement, such as walking, shuffling, and stomping. Neither professional dancers nor theatrical performers, Gilmore’s participants resemble a random sample of female office workers. They vary in age, race, and body type. Free to perform their artist-assigned task as they choose, they must nevertheless conform to a strict uniform of yellow dresses and beige shoes.
Members of the public are invited to observe the piece from the surrounding Fountain Terrace, but also to enter the open structure. The yellow theme of the women’s dresses continues on both the exterior and interior walls of the structure. Once inside, visitors may hear the reverberating sounds of the movement overhead. In this eccentric concerto of irregular footfalls, the physicality of Gilmore’s performance is experienced anew.
Kate Gilmore is best known for her physically demanding performance videos in which she is typically the sole protagonist. Walk the Walk is Gilmore’s first live public project and also her first to deploy other participants. Her interest in striking and often incongruous images continues in this piece, with its unexpected transformation of architecture, figures, actions, and location. In this way, the artist makes us aware of our assumptions about the codes of appropriate behavior and the limits of self expression. How do the attributes of gender, age, and appearance shape our perception of both social roles and personal desires? In Walk the Walk, Gilmore literally and metaphorically turns the inside out, inviting us into a world at once all too familiar and strangely provocative.
Walk (Square), 2011, Single Screen, HD, 20′40″
Walk (Square) forms part of an ongoing series of projects investigating collective gestures or situations enacted in public such as walking, dancing or celebrating. The work extends a practice based on an analysis of the construction of individual and collective identities and their performative representation through photography and moving image. Walking en masse—whether it be in processions, pilgrimages, in carnival or protest marches—forms the starting point for this video work made with 1000 Hamburg kids. Drawn into the centre of the city from all directions, with art as the ‘Pied Piper’, the work refers to current socio-political situations of protest as well as to recent research across different disciplines into the meanings of groups and crowds. The piece questions whether the act of walking may constitute a ‘form of speech’. On the square in front of Hamburg’s contemporary art museum a crowd of kids performs a simple walking choreography, based on Bruce Nauman’s video Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square, 1967– 1968, creating a shimmering form of movement that briefly produces a moment of collectivity and visual coherence before breaking apart.
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“At first glance, Melanie Manchot’s work shows us what might be a demonstration, a procession or a parade in the centre of Hamburg. The differences between the three, though seldom observed, are crucial. T h e historian David Cannadine has observed that when the French “put their social structures on public display they have parades (which are intrinsically egalitarian), whereas the British have processions (which are innately hierarchical)”. Demonstrations can be either hierarchical or not but, unlike the other two categories, are impossible to fully impose order on.
In ‘Walk (Square)’, a thousand children flock into Hamburg’s central square – with “art as the ‘pied piper”‘, as she puts it. Once inside the square, the children undertake what Manchot calls a “simple walking choreography” based on the Bruce Nauman work ‘Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square’, seen elsewhere in this show. Manchot’s recreation of the earlier work in new form asks us to imagine how occupying public space has changed its meaning between ‘then’ and ‘now’. At the time of Nauman’s work, the purpose of protest was not in doubt, even if its efficacy was not universally accepted. Walking is, here, the means of occupying public space by traversing it. As Manchot puts it, “the act of walking constitutes a ‘form of speech'”. To walk – together – is in certain contexts a political act in the purest sense of the term. It is to ensure that one cannot be simply ‘walked over’ by those in positions of authority. To walk is to create “a moment of collectivity”, in the artist’s words.”