Illinois Central Transposed, 1979
On Illinois Central Transposed, 1968
I think of this work as an exploded canvas, units of rapidly changing clusters. A flow of energy which makes an active audience inevitable and necessary—not to mimic the performance but to absorb relations within the space and between one another—to be correspondent to the materials and imagery, grasping a conscious and realizable wish to replace the performers with themselves.
The central imagery of this work is The Tree; the absence of the tree as characteristic of Midwest landscape and the transformation of the tree into paper. Our paper environment is in material contrast to the photographic landscape environment (landscape as dream territory [skin] meanders into view, holds still; we measure distances; what is seen: a scene wrapped around the body).
From the prairies Native Americans had been driven west; the high buffalo grass gradually cleared for roads, homesteads, farming. Tree planting became a measure of domestic and agricultural order: shelterbelts, wind barriers, water retention, erosion protection. Decades later the agribusiness expanded acres of corn, soybeans, and wheat; the trees once marking the boundaries of small farms were cut down as if an effluvium, inviting soil erosion, floods, destroying natural cover, the ecology of wildlife. The destruction of the intensive, traditional farming in Vietnam meant the ruin of a coherent agricultural system, defoliation, the diabolical intention of “paving over the jungle with concrete.”
The intimate and at times violent imagery is anchored in a tension of contrasting focal planes linking the exposed Illinois landscape to the devastation of Vietnam. If there was a mythic association between human body and tree, there was as well a tactile and sensory extension of flesh into paper—malleable, expressive, sculptural. The scrap paper we used in Chicago was bales of canceled bank checks—Illinois trade representing millions of dollars—completely shredded. The absence of a dominant foreground, a landscape of frontal physical expanse (which is where I decided in 1960 that “painting is dead”), the openness an implication of visual paradox.
Because of the metaphoric political content—overriding language, polemic, propaganda, abstraction—I could never determine whether the difficulties in producing this work, and its reception, were random or somehow inevitable, coming at a time when even the length of people’s hair was taken as evidence of their politics. The difficulties were extraordinary, though Illinois Central was the most extensively performed of my theater pieces. In the course of five months it was adapted to six different spaces and realized with six different groups of performers and technicians: originally for the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, then for John Brockman's Intermedia 1968 tour.
published in More than Meat Joy (Documentext, 1979)