Soft Is Fast

Simone Fortis art developed within the overlapping circles of New York Citys advanced visual art, dance, and music of the early 1960s. Her “dance constructions” and related works of the 1960s were important for both visual art and dance of the era. Artists Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer have both acknowledged her influence.

Forti seems to have kept one foot inside visual arts frames of meaning and the other outside them. In Soft Is Fast, Meredith Morse adopts a new way to understand Fortis work, based in art historical analysis but drawing upon dance history and cultural studies and the history of American social thought. Morse argues that Forti introduced a form of direct encounter that departed radically from the spectatorship proposed by Minimalism, and prefigured the participatory art of recent decades.

Morse shows that Fortis work negotiated John Cages ideas of sound, score, and theater through the unique approach to movement, essentially improvisational and grounded in anatomical exploration, that she learned from performer and teacher Ann (later Anna) Halprin. Attentive to Robert Whitmans and La Monte Youngs responses to Cage, Forti reshaped Cages concepts into models that could accommodate Halprins charged spaces and imagined, interpenetrative understanding of other bodies.

Morse considers Fortis use of sound and her affective use of materials as central to her work; examines Fortis text pieces, little discussed in art historical literature; analyzes Huddle, considered one of Fortis signature works; and explicates Fortis later improvisational practice.

Forti has been relatively overlooked by art historians, perhaps because of her works central concern with modes of feeling and embodiment, unlike other art of the 1960s, which was characterized by strategies of depersonalization and affectlessness. Soft Is Fast corrects this critical oversight.