{"product_id":"soft-is-fast-isbn-9780262548939","title":"Soft Is Fast","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn innovative analysis of Simone Forti's interdisciplinary art, viewing her influential 1960s “dance constructions” as negotiating the aesthetic strategies of John Cage and Anna Halprin.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSimone Forti's art developed within the overlapping circles of New York City's 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eForti seems to have kept one foot inside visual art's frames of meaning and the other outside them. In \u003ci\u003eSoft Is Fast\u003c\/i\u003e, Meredith Morse adopts a new way to understand Forti's 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMorse shows that Forti's work negotiated John Cage's 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 Whitman's and La Monte Young's responses to Cage, Forti reshaped Cage's concepts into models that could accommodate Halprin's charged spaces and imagined, interpenetrative understanding of other bodies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMorse considers Forti's use of sound and her affective use of materials as central to her work; examines Forti's text pieces, little discussed in art historical literature; analyzes \u003ci\u003eHuddle\u003c\/i\u003e, considered one of Forti's signature works; and explicates Forti's later improvisational practice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eForti has been relatively overlooked by art historians, perhaps because of her work's central concern with modes of feeling and embodiment, unlike other art of the 1960s, which was characterized by strategies of depersonalization and affectlessness. \u003ci\u003eSoft Is Fast\u003c\/i\u003e corrects this critical oversight. | Acknowledgments ix\u003cbr\u003eIntroduction 1\u003cbr\u003ePart I The 1960s \u003cbr\u003e1 The Natural and the Neutral: Simone Forti, Ann Halprin, and Margaret H'Doubler 15\u003cbr\u003e2 Simone Forti in New York: John Cage and Robert Whitman 37\u003cbr\u003e3 Scale: Simone Forti's Text Works in \u003ci\u003eAn Anthology of Chance Operations \u003c\/i\u003e63\u003cbr\u003e4 The Dance Constructions, La Monte Young's Performance, and Slow Time 81\u003cbr\u003e5 The Problem of the Personal 103\u003cbr\u003ePart II The 1960s and After\u003cbr\u003e6 \u003ci\u003eHuddle: \u003c\/i\u003eInhabitation and Sociality 125\u003cbr\u003e7 Disoriented Perception: Simone Forti in the 1970s and Process Art 149\u003cbr\u003e8 News Animations and Improvisations: Movement-Feeling-Forms 171\u003cbr\u003eEpilogue: Performing then as Now 191\u003cbr\u003eNotes 199\u003cbr\u003eIndex 243 | Meredith Morse is Assistant Professor of Humanities (Art History) at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.","brand":"The MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303871041765,"sku":"NP9780262548939","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780262548939.jpg?v=1767736878","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/soft-is-fast-isbn-9780262548939","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}