“Since I feel movement seen in different contexts takes on a different expressive quality, this flexibility was enlivening and useful rather than forbidding. It can spur the imagination rather than leave it in its own fixed grooves.”
—Merce Cunningham, on Frank Stella’s set for ‘Scramble’
As one of seven prints in the Merce Cunningham Portfolio, benefiting the dancer and choreographer’s innovative studio, the screenprint and offset lithograph Furg commemorates Stella’s collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Following his appointment as artistic director of the company, the 1967 dance Scramble was the first piece for which Jasper Johns selected an artist to conceptualize the sets and costumes– Johns tapped none other than Frank Stella, beginning a robust history of the dance company’s collaboration with contemporary artists of the time.
Stella specified the colors of the costumes the dancers should wear for Scramble: the men wore single-colored jumpsuits, while the women dawned monochrome leotards and tights. These brightly hued dancers moved against the backdrop of Stella’s flexible set. Six vertical frames of different lengths and heights each held a single strip of colored canvas: purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Each was mounted on wheels to be moveable, allowing dancers to shift the formation of the space, allowing the horizontal bands of color to change the spectator’s perception of the dance action. As the name implies, Scramble was all about rearrangements, and as such, Stella’s set permitted the shifting of the set each time the dance was performed. Cunningham was thrilled by this set’s adaptability: “Since I feel movement seen in different contexts takes on a different expressive quality, this flexibility was enlivening and useful rather than forbidding. It can spur the imagination rather than leave it in its own fixed grooves,” he said. The form of Furg recalls this ever-changing set and performance, horizontal bars of the rainbow stacked upon one another in rearranged, often overlapping orders.
Other artists who contributed to the Merce Cunningham Portfolio include John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, all of whom collaborated with Cunningham on various pieces and performances. Such participation reflects Cunningham’s respectability among his contemporaries in the New York art scene and his continued influence on the avant-garde
