Farewell to Simone Forti, who loved art and hated all disciplines

When Simone Forti described herself as a ‘movement artist’, she was not seeking an original definition. She was simply distancing herself from all existing ones. She was not merely a choreographer, nor a performer, nor a visual artist. She was one of the rare figures of the late 20th century capable of demonstrating that movement, sculpture, language and thought belong to the same field of experience. She died in Los Angeles at the age of ninety-one, leaving a legacy that spans postmodern dance, Minimalism, Fluxus and much of contemporary performance art.

Born in Florence in 1935 into a Jewish family, her family was forced to leave Italy following the racial laws. Her exile to the United States was not merely a biographical event; it became the condition from which to observe the world without ever quite belonging to it. After studying with Anna Halprin in California, her move to New York in the late 1950s with her then-husband, the artist Robert Morris, placed Forti at the very heart of where new forms of expression were emerging. Surrounding her were Morris himself, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, La Monte Young, Yoko Ono and John Cage. But whilst many were seeking to redefine dance, she already seemed intent on moving beyond it. Her "Dance Constructions" of 1960–61 forever altered the relationship between body and object, described by Forti as ‘a pilot concert for the works I would create in the years to come’. Inclined planes, ropes, platforms, boxes, swings – simple elements not used to construct a set but to define a form of behaviour. The performer does not interpret a choreography; they enter a system of rules, allowing gravity, balance, weight, chance and the body’s own intelligence to produce the work. Movement does not represent something; it is something.

It is hardly surprising that Richard Serra recognises Simone Forti as one of the key figures in his own artistic development. Their relationship – both romantic and intellectual – spanned the second half of the 1960s, at a time when Serra was developing his own sculptural vocabulary. In the early Verb Lists or in the films they made together, a common ground is evident: the idea that the gesture does not describe a form but generates it. Whilst Serra applies that principle to steel and space, Forti continues to explore it through the living body, teaching it to think.

There is also a profoundly Italian chapter in his story, one that is often overlooked. Between 1968 and 1969, he lived in Rome, where he visited the Villa Borghese zoo daily – an experience that gave rise to ‘Animal Studies’, patient observations of animal movements that evolved into improvisations, drawings and performances. ‘I simply regarded the animals as fellow dancers,’ recalls Forti. It was Fabio Sargentini, above all, who understood the radical nature of her work. At L’Attico, she found one of the few places in Europe where dance, Arte Povera, performance and sculpture were not separate disciplines but parts of the same experiment. Claudio Abate’s photographs of her in the Roman space have since become defining images of that period. She returned to the United States, lived in a commune in Woodstock and then taught at the California Institute of the Arts in the 1970s. In her workshop-style classes, the students were partners and collaborators. She returned to Los Angeles in 1998.

In recent years, institutional recognition has finally come in the form of a retrospective at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, another at MOCA in Los Angeles, the acquisition of "Dance Constructions" by MoMA, and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Dance Biennale in 2023. These are significant accolades, even if his legacy certainly does not amount to merely a series of works held in museums.

Forti has transformed the very way we think about movement. She has taught us that the body can be a place of knowledge even before it is a place of expression, and that observing an animal, reading a newspaper, speaking words or walking across a room can all form part of the same artistic practice. In an era that has constantly demanded artists choose a discipline, Simone Forti has demonstrated that the most radical form of freedom lies precisely in rejecting them all.