Hopscotch is a game that combines rhythmic and free movement with rudimentary arithmetic. Counting becomes music and music becomes movement, rhythm. As an artist, you are often aware of a similar amalgamation of freedom and formalization. For, without formalization, there is no structure in what you want to say. And so, painters, however figuratively they may work, must treat the formal qualities (colour, form, composition) adequately in order to produce a powerful image. Many solutions that artist have considered in that fight became in themselves an individual language, an individual vocabulary that was sometimes more powerful than what they said with it. Just like rap musiciansans, where the style is sometimes more powerful than the purpose of the rap. In Line, Donegan plays a sort of hopscotch with the formal qualities of the tape. She improvises in this performance like a jazz musiciansan with 'the line'. In her ironic investigation of form, she paraphrases Barnett Newman's 'zip' paintings, (his works with vertical lines that divide the canvas) or she quotes the primary use of colour of Godard's Le Mépris. With her heel covered in paint, she slides across a canvas placed on the ground, staring vacantly into the camera, while repeating a sentence derived from Godard: "Je ne vais pas". Other references to that film from the sixties are Piccoli's trilby hat and her blonde wigged imitation of the graceful Bardot bound up in vivid red towels. But all her paraphrases and line exercises do not show what she really thinks. You remain on the surface of an ironic parade (Satie) around a frontier, a boundary between different worlds where there appears to be no transgression, except those that you make yourself while seeing her in action and asking yourself what the line could mean. In any case, take the final slogan from Yoko Ono to heart: "Don't worry!" Hopscotch is something you do for pleasure.
– Willem van Weelden
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Editing Robert Beck, Music Erik satie, LaMonte Young, The Plastic Ono Band
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