Trisha Brown

Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark

Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s

3 March 2011 - 22 May 2011

Barbican Art Gallery

Performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson, choreographer Trisha Brown and artist Gordon Matta-Clark were friends and active participants in the New York art community, working fluidly between visual art and performance.

Featuring sculptures, drawings, photographs, documentation of performances and mixed media works, the exhibition focuses on the intersections between their practices and explores their shared concerns – performance, the body, the urban environment and found spaces.

I was particularly interested in Trisha Brown's work. It was great to see original film footage Man Walking Down The Side Of A Building.

The live performances held at the gallery throughout the day gave us the chance to witness Brown's architecturally challenging dance-actions, such as walking horizontally around the gallery walls.

The cross over and sublimation of dance into art and vice-versa are looked at in great depth in Andre Lepecki's book: Exhausting Dance 2006. He he investigates performance and the politics of movement by looking at the work of key choreographers, performance and visual artists as well as theorists from the last 30 years.

In chapter 4 (Toppling dance) Lepeki's looks at Trisha Brown's piece called 'It's A Draw/Live Feed', which was carried out as a live drawing performance in a Museum in Philadelphia. The drawing/movements were viewed by the audience via a video link in another room.

"During the performance of It's A Draw/Live Feed the space of Brown's dancing drawing explodes in a series of dizzying explorations between genres, between focal points, between confounding positions and certainties about spectatorship, authorship, artistic disciplines, documentation, original, copy, presence, liveness, dance and art."

Andre Lepecki