Black Flags is a large installation William Forsythe created in 2014 for one of his projects called Choreographic Objects. Forsythe has been revolutionising the language of dance since the late 1980s, with his radical deconstructive approach to ballet, and, in 2005 he pushed his creative drive further by asking himself questions like, “is it possible for choreography to generate autonomous expressions of its principles, a choreographic object, without the body?” (Forsythe, no date). The result were the Choreographic Objects, a series of challenging installations which could differ in size, material and structure.
Black Flags is one of them, is huge and it consists of two robotic arms holding and moving two black flags. The big dark fabric of each flag moves sometimes in unison with the other, sometimes according to a different direction or angle, “there is a distribution of forces which is really unique” says Forsythe, praising the “beauty and precision” (Forsythe, 2017) of these objects. The noise of the robots in action is the only ‘music’ in the piece.
I have not seen it live, but I felt a deep sense of uncanny bewilderment watching the video of this performance and I begun to think about the reasons why. The first thing that has come to my mind is the Italian ‘sbandieratori’, flag twirlers, artists who move flags in various directions and even throw them in the air in acrobatic compositions. It is not clear what their origin was, but nowadays, there are numerous Medieval-inspired spectacles which include the exhibition of the flag twirlers whose work can certainly be seen as a type of choreography. Here are a couple of examples, the first is a live recording of the sbandieratori from Lanciano, a town in the South of Italy, the second is a video portray of the sbandieratori from Acquapendente, a smaller town in the Centre of Italy:
Watching Forsythe’s flags and the flag twirlers one can notice the creepy (Forsythe used the term ‘creep’ himself, see Forsythe, 2017) calmness of the formers with respect to the upbeat of the latters, there is a connection in the dexterous flags manipulation, but a sharp difference in dynamics.
The bewilderment continues, there is something out of place in this installation, but I still do not know what it is. Then , the second association emerges, it is is with the Anarchists’ flag, which was black towards the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. First made popular by Louise Michel in France in the 1880s, it then recurred in other countries like the United States (afaq, 2008). According to Howard Ehrlich, the colour black was chosen for its association with various elements:
"Black is the shade of negation. The black flag is the negation of all flags. It is a negation of nationhood which puts the human race against itself and denies the unity of all humankind. Black is a mood of anger and outrage (…). Balck is also a colour of mourning. (…) Balck is also beautiful. It is a colour of determination, of resolve, of strength, a colour by which all others are clarified and defined. Black is the mysterious surrounding of germination, of fertility, the breeding ground of new life which always evolves, renews, refreshes, and reproduces itself in darkness" (Ehrlich, quoted in afaq, 2008).
I am getting there. This sense of bewilderment is connected with the idea of nation/group the flag incorporates. And I think of the United States flags planted on the moon in 1969 or, moving backwards, of the flag in Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the people (1830), where the allegory of the female form (Warner, 1985) representing the ideal of Liberty, guides a group of people through war (more specifically, the 1830 July Revolution). That same three-coloured flag would later became the French national flag.
Forsythe, talking about Black Flags, has affirmed that they worked hard “to de-anthropomorphise these robots in their actions and we’ve done everything we can to take away the idea of dominance or submission or purpose although it does creep in” (Forsythe, 2017). I am not sure I agree with this idea. Flags are highly overloaded symbols connected with human history, politics, culture and various other fields (there is also a field dedicated to them, it is called Vexillology, from the Latin word ‘vexillum’, flag) and they bear within themselves patterns of dominance and submission. Choosing flags for an installation without engaging with these patterns means to perpetrate them in some way. George Balanchine, for example, has choreographed two ballets devoted to flags, Stars and Stripes (1958) and Union Jack (1976), choosing a celebratory tone and “patriotic touches” (Balanchine Trust, no date).
Wlliam Pope.L’s Trinket, a 2008 installation, where a huge flag is being moved by large industrial fans and illuminated by several lights, is quite different in this sense. It looks like a United States flag but it is not as Pope.L has added a star, which is a small detail that disrupts the pattern. In a similar way, the title poses a sharp contrast to the majesty of the symbol the flag has, “when speaking of big things use small words” he says (Pope. L, 2015).
Christopher Knight summarises the work as follows:
"The egalitarian promise of the flag's symbolism is easily acknowledged, but what makes the sculpture great is its layered depth. More difficult to represent is the symbol's power, whose source is counterintuitive: The symbol is dynamic because its egalitarian promise has not been fulfilled" (Knight, 2015).
According to Pope.L the flag “is a space of disagreement and agreement” and this condenses the layered discourse on flag symbolism, especially for the use of the term ‘space’, as it recalls the geopolitical root of many conflicts.
Another artist, Roberto Longo, has created in 2014 a big sculpture of wood, steel and wax which recalls a partial United States flag, except for the fact that it is black and built as if it were a “sinking ship” (Longo, 2016). The erect (almost phallic) position of a flag hanging from its pole is deconstructed and reshaped according to a disturbing diagonal. Titled Untitled (Pequod) it recalls Ahab’s ship in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), a ship which in the end sank as did Ahab’s obsession with the white whale. “Moby Dick is like the genetic code of America” says Longo, in that the ship crew members came from different cultures but were led by white guys. And Ahab “has this incredible hubris which is very much like American hubris right now” (Longo, 2016).
"The egalitarian promise of the flag's symbolism is easily acknowledged, but what makes the sculpture great is its layered depth. More difficult to represent is the symbol's power, whose source is counterintuitive: The symbol is dynamic because its egalitarian promise has not been fulfilled" (Knight, 2015).
According to Pope.L the flag “is a space of disagreement and agreement” and this condenses the layered discourse on flag symbolism, especially for the use of the term ‘space’, as it recalls the geopolitical root of many conflicts.
Another artist, Roberto Longo, has created in 2014 a big sculpture of wood, steel and wax which recalls a partial United States flag, except for the fact that it is black and built as if it were a “sinking ship” (Longo, 2016). The erect (almost phallic) position of a flag hanging from its pole is deconstructed and reshaped according to a disturbing diagonal. Titled Untitled (Pequod) it recalls Ahab’s ship in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), a ship which in the end sank as did Ahab’s obsession with the white whale. “Moby Dick is like the genetic code of America” says Longo, in that the ship crew members came from different cultures but were led by white guys. And Ahab “has this incredible hubris which is very much like American hubris right now” (Longo, 2016).
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| Robert Longo, Untitled (Pequod). |
Both Pope.L and Longo engage with the symbolism connected to flags, Fosythe does not. That is probably the cause of my bewilderment, I feel something important is missing. I appreciate Forsythe’s choice of two flags so that movement does not have a central focus, but two. However, this recalls the anthropomorphic image of two arms, even though the robots are placed on the floor and not attached to a unifying object. I also found the fabric moving through the air particularly interesting, with the three elements in this installation, interacting with each other: one is the robots, the second is the flags and “air is the third invisible player, you have to basically choreograph the air and the flags” (Forsythe, 2017). This aspect reminded me of two performances: Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance (1891) and Martha Graham’s solo "Specter 1914" from Chronicle (1936). Fuller used metres of costume sewed together with two wands which were used to extend the length of her arms and amplify the volume of the moving fabric. Her body disappeared and was replaced by curves and spirals shaped by the costume. Here is an example danced not by Fuller but by one of her rivals and filmed by the Lumière brothers:
Graham’s solo is less high paced in fabric manipulation. The costume is made of a tight long-sleeved black top and a very long black skirt open at the back. At one point, the dancer begins to move the skirt from its laying down position upward, revealing its red inside colour (another version of the Anarchist flag was red and black). She repeats this gesture several times and, as in Fuller’s case, her figure seems to be reshaped by the moving fabric. Here is the solo danced by former Martha Graham Dance Company principal dancer, Katherine Crockett:
Flags, huge flags, moving flags, flags performing a choreography, flags as controversial symbols. Black Flags is a thought provoking work, a fascinating display of choreographic elements, with one missing point, a statement (of any kind) about flag symbolism, which I consider as the elephant in the room. As poet John Agard has written in his poem “Flag”:
What’s that fluttering in the breeze?
It’s just a piece of cloth
that brings a nation to its knees (Agard, 2004).
REFERENCES
afag, "Appendix - The Symbols of Anarchy", in Anarchist Writers, 11 October 2008, http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/append2.html (accessed 16 March 2019).
John Agard, “Flag”, in Half-Caste and Other Poems (London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2004), consulted in The Poetry Archive, https://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/flag (accessed 16 March 2019).
The George Balanchine Trust, “Stars and Stripes”, balanchine.com, no date, http://balanchine.com/stars-and-stripes/ (accessed 16 March 2019).
William Forsythe, “Choreographic Objects – Essay”, no date, williamforsythe.com, https://www.williamforsythe.com/essay.html (accessed 15 March 2019).
William Forsythe, “William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects”, Gagosian, 23 October 2017, youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgQYc5xJc5w (accessed 16 March 2019).
Christopher Knight, “William Pope.L sets the U.S. flag waving at the MOCA/Geffen”, Los Angeles Times, 24 March 2015, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-pope-l-moca-review-20150324-column.html (accessed 15 March 2019).
Robert Longo, “I Will Strike the Sun”, Out of Sync – Art in Focus, 18 May 2016, youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-jZFOAw46I (accessed 15 March 2019).
William Pope.L, “William Pope.L: Trinket”, MOCA, 15 April 2015, youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5wdIAtO4pU (accessed 15 March 2019).
Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens – The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Picador, 1985).
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