[ … ] Beginning in the latter part of [the 1970s), a major shift occurred in the ways Trisha Brown made dances, which in turn affected her drawings. With Son of Gone Fishin’ (1981 ), she started to use video to compose her choreographies, recording the company’s rehearsals and editing together phrases of improvisation that could be studied and replicated by her dancers. Video provided a much more powerful combination of documentary and generative properties than drawing ever had been able to offer her. Drawing, thereby freed from the yoke of composition, was liberated to function differently.
Instead of thinking about her body from the inside or in the abstract, Brown could now look at it as an object, much as video allowed her to do. It does not seem accidental that a subtle but significant breakthrough that the artist made in 1980, when she drew each of her hands with the other, coincided with the commencement of her use of video. Overlapping on the page in a graphic duet reminiscent of the opening ‘thumb dance’ of her classic Accumulation ( 1971 ), Left hand drawn by right hand #1 (1980) … was the first time she depicted herself through observation, and so specifically on the page. ‘I looked down the front of my body, and it was all that I could see’, Brown says.1 A seal had been cracked, yet she continued to draw abstractly throughout the decade. She mapped paragraphs of texts into their elemental parts according to various rule sets and structures, as if trying to establish or break some code. As such, these drawings feel related to Alighiero Boetti’s Biro pictures (1970-88), for which the artist deconstructed words and phrases along a letter-based alphabet register to one side, with the words spelled out in space like a musical score, demarcated by commas in their given alphabetic register. But it was fifteen years after that first hand drawing before Brown took the logical next step that it implied.
Sitting beside a piece of paper on the floor and holding a pen between her toes, she used each foot to draw the other.2 The difficulty of the method was exactly its allure. ‘I purposely take [the drawing) one step out of my control by using something other than my hand to draw it’, she explained, but the iconography of the feet remained somewhat too logical or expected, ‘too beautiful’ for an artist who had always worked away from the recognizable, toward the abstract.3 ln moving the paper from the notebook or desk down to the level of the dance floor, these foot drawings put the picture plane at the mercy of Brown’s entire body. With the paper on the floor, it was only a short skip and hop for her to realize the full gestural possibility of line, what the critic Harold Rosenberg meant when he described it as ‘the primary agency of physical motion … conceived not as the thinnest of planes, nor as edge, contour or connective but as stroke or figure (in the sense of”figure skating”)’.4 The ‘action’, he deadpanned, ‘became its own representation’; extrapolating from the foot drawings, Brown realized that she could use her whole body to depict itself.5
Beginning in 1999, Brown allowed her movements to speak for themselves on paper, in the process creating a kind of full-body self-portrait. She once noted admiringly that Robert Rauschenberg ‘arrives fresh at the scene of the accident he’s about to create’ – the forensic attitude again rears its head – and the attendant metaphors of messes, collisions, mishaps and skid marks are exactly right for describing the results of Brown’s entrance onto the paper.6 Using a sheet large enough to encompass her whole body, she began to treat the frame of the paper as a stage.7 Moving across it with pastels or graphite in her toes, rolling over, pivoting, sitting back, pushing, skidding, pulling, swooping, breaking her materials, skipping and stuttering them over the surface (or across the gap between sheets), thrusting, rubbing up the texture of the floor beneath, sweating, scooting, fidgeting, smearing, X-marking-the-spot, lying in wait: Brown creates a mystery novel in two dimensions. In places we can discern actual footprints and handprints rendered painterly, like those ofjasper Johns and David Hammons, in the mingling of charcoal dust, oil and sweat. But these drawings are mostly composed of the residual markings of movement, not static prints. Brown thereby recalls a whole range of artists, from Yves Klein to Tom Marioni, in whose surfaces the moving figure is present at full scale. Carolee Schneemann, who was part of the Judson circle, produced a work in the early 1970s that most directly anticipated Brown’s large drawings ( despite its marked differences – its relationship to gravity being among the most significant).
Using a rope attached to the ceiling of a train car, Schneemann ‘held a chalk in one hand extended, so that changes in weight, position, motion were charted by the free motion of the hand on the perimeter of the walls and floor it touched’.8 This performance, which Schneemann called Tracking (1973), itself recalls the earlier works of Kazuo Shiraga, who, similarly suspended, paints with his feet on floor-based canvases, and once wrestled mud as a public performance. Calling her series It’s a Draw, Brown evokes the futility ofShiraga’s early action work, punning on the state of exhaustion that marks the conclusion of these pieces, the detente she achieves against the imposing emptiness of the . paper-cum-stage.9 I … I
The It’s a Draw pieces perfectly and precariously balance the ‘concrete’ and ‘elusive’ qualities that Rauschenberg found, albeit in opposite proportions, in dance and art.10 In this tenuous concordance, Brown ironically holds out the possibility of breaking it all back apart: expanding the ‘history’ in history painting (and putting the lie to Walter Benjamin, who saw history as a compressed stratum piled upon itself); ungluing the simultaneity of the Futurist legacy; and excavating the gestural layers of Action Painting. In short, Brown proposes restoring the primacy of the moving body that is the absent or
obscured subject of all of these things, working back towards Eadweard Muybridge and against the vacuously instantaneous image we’ve ended up with. What Brown’s drawings represent, then, is a chance to repatriate a piece of what dance – not music or theatre, nor performance more generally _ bequeathed to the modern image, and in particular to the fated gesture that came to loom over the past half-century. The terms of Action Painting, naturally, are the terms of dance, and Brown has no need to borrow them back. [ … ]