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Simone Forti (American, born Italy, 1935)
Holography by Lloyd Cross
Striding Crawling, 1977
Simone Forti was a key figure in the new dance movement of the 1960s and 1970s, creating iconic works that defined a new language of movement. In 1976 and 1977, she made a number of holographic works in which she appeared standing, striding, and crawling in a shimmering ghostly sequence activated by the viewer's movement. Harnessing the most advanced visual technology of the day (holography) to ancient elements (clay, fire), Striding Crawling creates a pre-cinematic moving image whose structure evokes 19th-century optical structures such as the zoetrope and magic lantern peep shows.
Forti's image in the hologram is composed of individual still film frames condensed into a sequence of vertical lines, which has been transferred to the Plexiglas cylinder. The eye reads each element separately but fuses them together stereoscopically, not unlike the way individual stills of film being run through a projector read as a seamless unit. Forti's body, animated by the viewer's movement around the cylinder, oscillates between the still and moving image, brought to life one moment and frozen the next. Striding Crawling creates a mysterious hybrid form which operates somewhere between film, performance, and sculpture.
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About Simone Forti
Born 1935, Florence, Italy
Lives in Los Angeles, California
Simone Forti is an internationally recognized performance innovator. Together with the artist Robert Morris, Forti founded an improvisational theater and dance group in San Francisco in 1957. The group attempted to create experiences that were liberated from the stylized choreography of ballet or the rigid formalism they saw in some modern dance. Forti created pieces that recreated every day movements like eating or dressing. She also explored the tensions of natural processes such as falling, rolling or climbing. At the forefront of the revolutionary blurring between art, life and performance that characterized contemporary art in the 1960s, Forti has continued to teach and create innovative performances that challenge both dancers and viewers to experience the movement of their own bodies.
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Robert Whitman (American, born 1935)
Shower, 1964
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