Landscape for Fire: Score for Eternal Condition

This drawing was one of a small group of 'performance scores' that were made in 1973 and 1974. Each score contained the spatial and the temporal structure of one specific fire-performance. The performances varied in length from twenty minutes to all day.

Some of the scores were drawn as part of the process of thinking through the structure of the performance before it was performed, others completed after the realisation as a final record of the completed work. The scores could be used as an instruction blueprint for a performance, much like architectural sections function for a building, or musical scores for a musical composition.

Most of the scores refer to a performance that was realised in public. Five of these were mounted in the UK, one in Sweden and one in the USA. This particular drawing if one of two "eternal condition" scores from 1973, each of which imagines a fire performance that never ends. Naturally enough neither has ever been performed. Still, though impractical, they are, technically speaking, realisable.

The offset-lithographed photograph attached to the drawing was taken at the performance of ‘Landscape for Fire II’ on North Weald on August 27,1973 by Carolee Schneemann. It is this particular performance that was the basis for the film ‘Landscape for Fire’.