In her 1974 memoir Handbook in Motion, Simone Forti describes how, when she moved from San Francisco to New York in 1959, the city seemed a “maze of concrete mirrors.” New York didn’t just disorient: it “shocked” her. She took solace from the city’s alienating architecture by rooting herself in her body, paying close attention to the effects of gravity on her anatomy. “I tuned into my own weight and bulk as a kind of prayer,” she writes. Forti’s 1960s works, structured by game-like sets of rules, were highly influential for Yvonne Rainer, the Judson Dance Theater, and others. In the early pieces, performers interact with simple props, such as gym rope or plywood boxes. These “dance constructions”—Forti’s own usefully ambiguous term—blur the distinctions between choreography, performance, and minimalist sculpture. That Forti’s work resonates in 2017 speaks both of the lasting relevance of her themes—the friction between individual actions and collective rules, for example—and of the dynamism and flexibility of the works themselves, interpreted afresh with each performance. Forti’s See Saw (1960) is an integral art-historical, thematic, and aesthetic reference point in “When my eyes saw and when my ears heard,” a group show at Hollybush Gardens that explores how bodies …

Andrea Büttner’s second show at Hollybush Gardens is a study in humility, painted in a shade of don’t-look-at-me grey. The dominant color in the exhibition is that particular commonplace grey of worker’s uniforms—the cheap, mass-produced pencil skirts of hotel workers and public servants, or school uniform blazers. It’s the fabric used to make such clothing that Büttner has stretched over canvas to create several large “fabric paintings.” One immediately thinks of Gerhard Richter’s Grey painting series (1967–1986), yet the varyingly placed stitched seams running vertically down each of Büttner’s panels nod quietly to the “zips” of Barnett Newman’s paintings. Nowhere does this dull fabric look more like a uniform than down this line, which immediately brings to mind the long seam on a pair of trousers. Unlike Newman’s zips, however, these fabric paintings could, theoretically, be physically ripped apart—split down those long seams, as though one might be able to liberate a gloriously fleshy expanse of hips or thighs beneath. But, for now, everything is covered over, modestly. Though the seams create an unlikely point of tension, such interpretational inflections are accentuated if one is made aware of Büttner’s interest in humility and shame. For her previous exhibition here she painted …