Claudia La Rocco on Simone Forti

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

From endless passing of the bars his gaze
has wearied—there is no more it can hold.
There seem to be a thousand bars always,
and past those thousand bars there is no world.

The soft pad of his brawny, rippling pace
turns itself in a tightening circle till,
like a mighty dance around a tiny space,
it centers a numb but still enormous will.

But at times the shades of his pupils rise,
grasping an image he cannot resist;
through his tense, unmoving limbs it flies,
and within his heart it ceases to exist.*

I was staring not at a panther but at grainy black-and-white video of other zoo animals, juxtaposed with the animated faces of human children and isolated in horridly small, horridly naked cement cells. Most terrible was the polar bear, ceaseless in its driven, impotent pacing. So weary that it cannot hold.

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 shifting how we think about form in traditions spanning dance, music, and visual art. If you’re at all conversant with art history, you know this narrative of postmodern dance meets Minimalist sculpture—I offer this gross reduction not to dismiss that era (Lord knows I’ve written plenty about it), but because enough already. And because the narrative inevitably reduces Forti, an Italian-born, Los Angeles–raised artist whose varied output is so often boiled down to her “Dance Constructions,” nine task-based pedestrian-movement works she made in her mid-twenties. Not that these works aren’t seminal! Not that they aren’t worth seeing (sculptural elements from two were on view, and performances of several occurred throughout the show). Not that 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 them ink and graphite sketches in which fast drawings and handwritten scrawls float delicately on white paper. In Polar Bear Reaching Nose in Wind (Animal Study), 1982, Forti catches the apex predator at a less harried moment, as it plays with a piece of bark: “Some thing to ‘manipulate’?” she writes alongside the drawing. “Something to do.”

In 2010, maybe the first time I interviewed Forti, she relayed the story of her then husband, Robert Morris, chiding her on her lack of drive and focus: You can’t, he told her, just stand around all day, staring out the window and eating peanut butter. (You need, in other words, something to do.) I’ve seen her relate this elsewhere, and it strikes me now as the sort of witty shorthand one develops to encapsulate (reduce) a larger, messier evolution. It also strikes me that, of course, you can just stand around staring out the window—particularly if you are a writer, as Forti also is. Observation, constrained by time: The right window is a great teacher.

Daily life and sweeping geopolitical events exist easily and uneasily in Forti’s observations, often joined by a disarmingly simple specificity.

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

            katsup
katsup katsup

How soft
How shy the blouse
            beneath the iron

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

There’s something about the gentle collision of observation and something-to-do-ness at the heart of Forti’s art, which, whether a dance, a drawing, or a poem, operates at a deeply consoling and satisfying human level. No matter the form, she offers the true improviser’s gift to the audience: presence. It might not always be interesting, but it’s what’s happening now—the view out the window.

“Why is this compelling?” I wrote in my notebook, transfixed by A Free Consultation, a 2016 video in which, over the course of 17 minutes and 35 seconds, Forti slowly, painstakingly, tremblingly crawls over rocks, snow, tree limbs, and brambles on the shore of Lake Michigan, studying what she encounters and holding a hand-crank radio all the while. “It’s that she’s absolutely doing it, I think,” came my answer. 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 “News Animations,” a series begun in the mid-’80s in which, as she writes in “On News Animations” (Oh, Tongue), “I’ve been dancing the news, talking and dancing, being all the parts of the news.” Typically, this involves newspapers, the increasingly crinkled, ripped, sodden pages becoming form as much as content. In Zuma News, 2013, we find her ensconced on the shoreline on Malibu’s Zuma Beach, awkwardly corralling seaweed-festooned masses of all that’s fit to print. Contorted images spin by, of Angela Merkel triumphantly lifting a hand, no doubt pleased at having ruined someone else’s life that day; of perfect dancer bodies doing perfect dancer things across the Arts section.

Both Merkel and the dancers make me think of one of Forti’s phrases from Mad Brook News Animation, on view, delivered as she stamps her feet and forms her body into a tight beam: “Talking about power, power, power beyond hands and feet.” And this in turn returns me to “Der Panther,” which I only had in mind to begin with because I’d recently read Teju Cole’s essay “On the Blackness of the Panther,” which gives us that beautiful Rilke poem and also the abhorrent “Die Aschanti,” in which the German-language poet muses on a group of West African people who have been exhibited as if in a zoo. Rilke is disappointed, Cole writes, that “the Ashanti are just there, self-possessed, with a ‘bizarre’ vanity, acting almost as though they were equal to Europeans.”

Forti began working with the news in tribute to her 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 to the Jews in Italy and got us out of there in time.”

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

And so back to staring out that window. Like any survey, “Simone Forti” toggled between giving its audience little tastes, contextualizing these tidbits, and letting them communicate what they would on their own. I was glad of the curators’ decision to place the animal studies at the beginning. On a humorous note, it was difficult to resist the tragic similarities between zoo cellblock and museum white cube; more importantly, it set the tone for Forti as observer par excellence. (During a tour of the show, the choreographer Milka Djordjevich, one of the dancers performing Forti’s “Dance Constructions,” laughingly noted that when she was a student of Forti’s at the University of California, Los Angeles, “We went outside. And observed things.”) I also loved the ending they chose: a lone photograph occupying the last wall. Window Shadow, 2022, depicts the almost subterranean play of light on a window, bars and latches backlit. The photograph looks like the result of contemplation, and indeed it is: The window is in Forti’s current apartment, and time spent watching time pass via light is one of the ways in which Forti, who has advanced Parkinson’s disease, now conceptualizes her movement practice. This is upsetting, certainly; one thinks of animals pacing, of more insidious cages.

But no, the will isn’t numb at all. This is the wrong lesson. Because Window Shadow also evinces the beautiful ongoingness that typifies Forti’s art. Spoon in hand, peanut butter and mind at the ready. Taking in whatever is there—because in truth, that’s all there is.

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

Claudia La Rocco is the author, most recently, of the novella Drive By (Smooth Friend). She edits The Back Room at Small Press Traffic.