Arriving at the Same Moment

Yesterday, I had been trying to describe the wholeness of a favorite painter’s work, and the attempt reminded me of something I’d read a long time ago.

So tonight I re-read a 1986 interview by Marianne Goldberg with the choreographer Trisha Brown. I was looking for a couple of sentences in which Brown describes dancing in view of an audience. "What makes performing rewarding,” she says, “is when all of the person's person has arrived at the same moment. Feeling is present, physical skill, luck."

I’ve known that moment myself, and it’s what I look for in art and artists.

Here’s what I loved about Trisha Brown’s dances: their intelligence, their sensuousness, their grounding in the reality of the present, their surprises. When I saw her 1983 masterwork Set and Reset, I had been a choreographer for a long time. By then, and to my regret, watching dance had become a chore. I could almost always predict in any dance what would happen next. But that night, I was literally slapping my knee in surprise.

Brown wasn’t just messing with the compositional structures of modern dance. She was messing with her audiences’ perceptual apparatus too. She was setting up situations in which viewers witnessed their own brains struggling to figure out not only how dancers could walk horizontally around and down structural columns with apparent ease, but also how perceptions could shift from moment to moment: the dancers were freefalling, no they were climbing; they were small, no they were large. It was the best kind of liveliness and it’s one of the things that only great art can create.

Trisha Brown: All of the Person's Person Arriving
An Interview by Marianne Goldberg
The Drama Review: TDR
Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), pp. 149-170

What Scale Is, and Why It Matters

Of the many distractions that have kept me from writing here, one was an unsuccessful attempt to land a job running exhibitions for a museum that draws about 150,000 visitors a year. It wasn’t a good fit for them or for me—our ideas about what might be said to those 150,000 people were just too far apart. But I had relished the possibility of communicating so directly with so many people.

For wanting to satisfy that urge, I can blame my own personality. (When a college friend asked me if I’d rather be rich or famous, I chose fame. But then I learned in young adulthood that with fame came death threats. So, no thank you, I don’t really want to be famous. I just want to be influential in a field that I care about deeply.)

But, for caring about scale, I can also blame Otto Piene.

I heard Otto speak on numerous occasions about his Olympic Rainbow, a helium-filled sculpture 2400 feet in length that was deployed at the closing ceremony of the 1972 Munich Olympics—the same Olympics in which eleven Israeli team members were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. Otto always talked about the struggle toward a decision made by Olympics officials to continue the Games after the attack and, therefore, to continue with the closing ceremony.

The Olympic Rainbow had been tested with the help of the German army, no less, and it flew flawlessly at the ceremony. As you’ll see in Vin Grabill’s video*, the project was huge. Its scale was important to Otto.

Until very recently, though, I had thought that by “scale,” Otto had meant simply the massive physical size of the thing. It took me until just a few months ago to realize** that he had also meant something more. Otto had noticed, and was proud of, the audience of millions who saw the Olympic Rainbow in person and on TV. He believed that each of them might have been affected by the simple (or maybe not so simple) ideas of peace and togetherness that the work carried.

That’s scale.

As my home city hems and haws over whether we really want an Olympics here in 2024, I am learning—again—that reaching many, many, many people with art really does matter. The great choreographer Pina Bausch said, "Dance, dance, or we are lost." Likewise: make art, show art, to as many people as possible.

* Grabill’s video documents several of Otto’s Sky Art events, including fabulous footage of the testing of the Olympic Rainbow and, in another event, of the incomparable, flying Charlotte Moorman. Northwestern University’s Block Museum will open an exhibition of Charlotte’s work in 2016.

** This realization came on seeing a recorded interview of Piene with Ute Meta Bauer, now the Founding Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore. MIT’s link to the interview is inactive. I’ll add it if it comes back.

A Personal Note

When I was about nine years old, one of my uncles had a serious heart attack and wasn’t expected to survive. My parents took me to the hospital to visit him and I was amazed at how terribly sick he looked. We had never really been close – I had a lot of uncles, and this one had a reputation for being volatile – but for some reason he looked slowly toward me and extracted a promise. “If I get out of this hospital,” he whispered, “will you get back on a horse?”

I had been thrown from a pony, and then stepped on by it, when I was four. I hadn’t been in a saddle since. Mind you, this was Mississippi-style riding: we got on and hung on. I had loved it. But that big bruise on my little leg had thrown me, too. It kept me from doing something I wanted to do.

My uncle survived. So I had to start riding again, nervously at first. I spent many hours at my grandmother’s farm with one cousin or another, riding as far as the horses would let us go, until they got hungry and headed for the barn.

My Uncle Bobby came to mind this morning as I was arguing with myself about getting back to writing here. Nothing dramatic, like being thrown from a pony, has happened. But I’ve been wondering for far too long if Cultureburg is the right thing – if it can ever have the impact I envision, or reach the people that I want it to reach. Time has clarified direction.

So, as of today: Tighten the cinch. Let’s ride.