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Overview
—-Theatre Journal
"A provocative exploration of relations between the historical avant-garde and Cold War vanguard art and theatre. Sell's compelling historical and cultural narrative shows how the connections between the two exist at a very deep level of radical politics and aesthetics—-an amazing concoction of rigorous scholarship, interdisciplinary learning, and progressive theorizing."
—-Michael Vanden Heuvel, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"An important study that will raise the bar not only on scholarship of the Black Arts Movement, but on U.S. avant-gardism generally."
—-James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts
Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism looks at the American avant-garde during the Cold War period, focusing on the interrelated questions of performance practices, cultural resistance, and the politics of criticism and scholarship in the U.S. counterculture. This groundbreaking book examines the role of the scholar and critic in the cultural struggles of radical artists and reveals how avant-garde performance identifies the very limits of critical consideration. It also explores the popularization of the avant-garde: how formerly subversive art is eventually discovered by the mass media, is gobbled up by the marketplace, and finds its way onto the syllabi of college and university courses. Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism is a timely and significant book that will appeal to those interested in avant-garde literary criticism, theater history, and performance studies.
Mike Sell is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and editor of Ed Bullins: Twelve Plays and Selected Writings.
Illustration: Poster design for the Living Theatre's production of Capital Changes (1998). © Luba Lukova.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472033072 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 06/12/2008 |
| Series: | Theater: Theory/Text/Performance |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
AVANT-GARDE PERFORMANCE AND THE LIMITS OF CRITICISM
Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement
By Mike Sell
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2005
University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11495-5
Chapter One Cruelty and the Cold War
The Migrations of the Avant-Garde
Cruelty landed on American shores in the spring of 1958 and premiered to mixed reviews the next summer. Like so many other immigrants, it relied on the sympathy and assistance of natives; in this case, the cosmopolitan bohemians of Greenwich Village. In April of '58, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, he a frustrated abstract expressionist painter but increasingly self-assured stage designer, she a poet, student of radical theater worker Erwin Piscator, and increasingly inventive director, both founders of the eleven-year-old, perpetually struggling Living Theatre, attended a soiree at Anaïs Nin's apartment. During the course of that evening, potter, poet, and Black Mountain College faculty member Mary Caroline Richards mentioned to Beck a translation project she was near completing. The book was Antonin Artaud's The Theater and Its Double and was to be published by Grove Press later that year. This kind of relatively banal occurrence-three artists discussing art and the avant-garde over drinks-would prove to have a profound impact on subsequent theater history. Beck has commented that, after receiving a prepublication copy of the translation, "The ghost of Artaud became our mentor." Their conversation would affect much more than just their own work; it would permanently alter the terrain of political strategy in the United States and abroad. Sally Banes writes, "Throughout the 60s, the Living Theatre would be a model for political theater groups internationally." She's right-and Artaud was a big part of their success as activists.
That said, it's likely that the techniques of cruelty would have influenced the counterculture regardless of Richards or the Becks having a drink together. After all, 1958 was the year an economic "hiccup" threw six million people out of work and severely trimmed the already lean audiences for off-Broadway theater. Artaud writes of the plague, "Beneath such a scourge, all social forms disintegrate." The economic downturn, complemented by increasingly authoritarian responses to left-wing critique, pressed artists like the Becks even farther "off" in search of an ideal spectator and farther off from the standards and conventions of mainstream art and criticism. The desire for a more authentic form of theater was growing among this disaffected community; the Becks moved toward Asian art and religion, renegade forms of American popular culture, and more deeply into their own community's piecemeal rituals of selfhood. The Theater and Its Double couldn't have found more receptive readers. And Richards's translation wasn't a lark; John Cage had been talking up the renegade surrealist for years, having brought back a copy of the book from France in 1948. Cage's interest in Artaud was part of a larger trend; the theatrical "cruelty" advocated by Artaud enjoyed a sudden rise in fortune during the 1950s as he and his work were rediscovered by a younger generation of artists and intellectuals eager to renew the intransigence of the prewar avant-garde but unwilling to accept the leadership of its surviving members. After all, Artaud had been kicked out of the surrealist group by no less than André Breton himself. He was a consummate left-tendency vanguardist, a rebel among rebels who also, conveniently, rejected the traditional languages and subjects of politics-a nice plus for those unwilling to accept any more the organizational mandates of the Old Left.
True to the spirit of Artaud, his rescue by a younger generation did not result in any specifiable "school of Artaud," no "masterpieces" of the kind he despised. As Susan Sontag points out, the work of those most influenced by Artaud "shows there is no way to use Artaud that stays true to him." As a consequence of relying on specific theater spaces, specific performers' bodies, and specific audiences to manifest the harrowing experience of what he believed to be true, essential theater, Artaudian cruelty is inevitably a highly situational mode of performance, one that is difficult to define and describe with any certainty of not being contradicted by a future "cruel" performance taking place in its own singular context. Artaud is often cited for his distaste for repetition: "Let us leave textual criticism to graduate students, formal criticism to esthetes, and recognize that what has been said is not still to be said; that an expression does not have the same value twice, does not live two lives; that all words, once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are uttered, that a form, once it has served, cannot be used again ... [T]he theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice." Artaud's claim has proven notoriously difficult to sustain in practice. This may be due to the peculiarly fragmented nature of Artaudian theater. David Graver has convincingly asserted that Artaud's work "cultivates multiple sources of authority as much as possible without disrupting the powers of the theatrical event," that "we need to understand what Artaud wants done with three distinct and in some ways inimical centers of authority in the theatrical performance": specifically, text, spectacle, and somatic effect. This affinity for singular contexts and intrasymbolic conflict is, perhaps, one of the reasons why his star was on the rise a decade into the Cold War, influencing not only the Living Theatre, but also the Black Arts (see Amiri Baraka's "The Revolutionary Theatre") and guerrilla theater movements.
The reasons for the differences among "cruel theaters" are as various as there are performance contexts and specific constellations of text, spectacle, and somatic effect, but there are some specific, generally underdiscussed, culture-centered concerns that I wish to pause over in preparation for this chapter's exploration of the Living Theatre's use of cruelty in their groundbreaking 1959 production of The Connection. The first of these concerns is drug use and its relationship to aesthetic radicalism, social control, and national autonomy. Artaud is a linchpin of this relationship, though hardly the only one. John D. Lyon notes that Artaud's "vehement and repeated calls for a new theatre, a 'theatre of cruelty,' and his fascination with the culture of peyote and opium are often considered two separate facets of his existence, one creative, the other anecdotal. Yet the particular urgency of his appeals for a reconsideration of the communicative process in Western culture is closely linked to his frequent description of the effects of various intoxicants."
In the 1950s, the intersection of criminal drug use with various kinds of purposefully scandalous cultural expression was becoming an increasingly important presence on the American scene. By the late 1960s, drug use and the refusal of the mainstream would be virtually synonymous. Though the counterculture was not only about drugs, drug experience and drug culture were basic factors in the development and destruction of many countercultural communities. Taking a moment to map the intersection between drug use and cultural resistance will help to prepare the ground for a more localized exploration of the Living Theatre's production of a play about drug use and a deeper analysis of how drugs and drug experience were politicized by various kinds of performance practices during the 1960s. Cruelty, in this case, was a question of body freedom and body expression.
Psychedelic drugs are the most noted of those used within countercultural communities; Roszak writes, "At the bohemian fringe of our disaffected youth culture, all roads lead to psychedelia." However, there was much more than psychedelia involved with the counterculture; just as strong a presence could be claimed for nicotine, alcohol, and marijuana, as well as harder drugs like amphetamines, barbiturates, and heroin. Intoxication and aesthetic antagonism were one and the same for many countercultures. Roszak quotes from a fairly sympathetic series on the Haight-Ashbury drug economy published in the Washington Post in 1967 that declared the hippies "the biggest crime story since prohibition" (163). Drug experience was often the first step a young person took toward becoming that fearful "other" of American Cold War culture: the "hippie radical." However, drug use was not just a characteristic of the counterculture; in fact, drug use within the affiliated subcultures of the Left was symptomatic of the culture as a whole. Roszak reports that during the same year, 1967, Americans of all political stripes consumed over eight hundred thousand pounds of barbiturates. One out of four adult Americans used tranquilizers at some time (170). The World Psychiatric Association reported that in Great Britain from 1964 to 1967 over forty-three million prescriptions were given for psychotropic drugs (170). As had been the case since the middle nineteenth century (with the exception of the period immediately following World War I), the majority of Western drug users, whether casual or addicted, were white, middle-class, middle-aged women-a community not often associated with avant-garde antagonism, rarely mentioned by War on Drugs hawks, and strangely absent from the Living Theatre's production of The Connection.
The War on Drugs, officially initiated by the U.S. government in the 1920s following the repeal of alcohol prohibition, but unofficially pursued for almost a half century prior, was, in the 1950s and 1960s, a complex sociopolitical dynamic comprised of odd alliances, absurd antipathies, quixotic strategies, inglorious defeats, systematic falsehoods, and blatant hypocrisy. Always about much more than the illegal sale and use of intoxicants, it was, and remains, a war over the form and significance of community and communication, both within and outside the United States. Little wonder, then, that one of the first avant-garde counteroffensives in the War on Drugs occurred in a theatrical production that utilized performance techniques that emphasized the crossing of borders: media borders, bodily borders, the borders separating avant-garde movements, the borders between textual sign, theatrical image, and somatic effect. Cruelty, as it functions in The Connection, was about how the body can signal through the flames of experiential, cultural, and legal extremis.
Though drug use is a major concern of this chapter-it's hard to imagine either cruelty or the Living Theatre without drugs-I also need to bring into play another issue. Any consideration of the avant-garde's ability to resist or subvert bourgeois capitalist culture, as Mann has convincingly argued, is bound up with institutions and the languages, analytical methods, and concepts that help such institutions function; other words, discourse. As discussed in the introduction, Mann has convincingly demonstrated that these languages, methods, and concepts are of special importance when we're thinking about the history of the avant-garde and judging its successes or failures. Mann shows us that the avant-garde is about more than art; it is about the creation of critical discourses that help to situate and justify the avant-garde's challenge, often in explicit opposition to academic scholarship, criticism, and pedagogy.
To recall another point from my introduction, the death-of-the-avant-garde debate hinged on the idea that the avant-garde had been fully absorbed and negated by innovative sectors of bourgeois culture such as advertising, pop culture, and legal reformations-become, in sum, an organ of the bourgeois body politic. However, such co-optation did not take a single form throughout the West, a point not considered by Mann. In France, for example, the tradition of avant-garde outrage and experimental writing (Artaud playing a significant role in both) enjoyed a relative hardiness at the highest levels of society, due in part to the prestige enjoyed among the intelligentsia by writers like James Joyce, Louis Aragon, and Samuel Beckett and in part due to the entrenchment of the Left within the institutions of French civil society. The broad distrust of authority that was the legacy of the Vichy regime, the Resistance, and periodicals such as Combat helped keep the root system robust for the avant-garde as both an aesthetic and political tendency. The legitimacy of the avant-garde meant that broad and influential segments of the post-World War II French technical and educational classes were fully informed about and largely sympathetic with the avant-garde, especially the long-lived vanguard belief that social progress was best advanced through acts of public cultural criticism. "Cooptation" in France occurred most significantly in the late 1960s at the top levels of culture among leading leftist public intellectuals, intellectuals who played a key role in public policy, cultural production, and fashion.
The semiofficial presence of the avant-garde in French intellectual discourse was not unknown in the United States during the 1950s, thanks to the stalwarts at Partisan Review, the geriatric avant-gardists in the social circles surrounding Peggy Guggenheim, the faculty of experimental educational institutions such as Black Mountain College and the New School for Social Research, less radical institutions such as Rutgers, and the rapidly expanding gallery and museum system. However, unlike France, where the avant-garde played a significant role in the revitalization of the Left, producing such significant journals as Tel Quel and Socialisme ou Barbarie, in the United States the avant-garde met a rather different fate due to the less substantial presence of the avant-garde at the top levels of labor and policy organizations and the less rooted tradition of radical public intellectualism. It's certainly true that during the Cold War, the avant-garde, in Serge Guilbaut's words, had been accorded by top-level American officials a "position of paramount importance," particularly in cultural exchanges with ideologically opposed nations. However, this position was occupied, as I've demonstrated and Guilbaut admits, by only a very few avant-garde trends.
This is where things get interesting-and the situated nature of cruelty more clear. The embrace of the avant-garde by some sectors of the U.S. system of higher education and by a handful of public intellectuals occurred simultaneously with the development of rebellious, truly popular cultural trends that were, for at least a time, beyond the possibility of absorption. A kind of native tradition of cruelty sprouted among rock 'n' rollers like Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis; actors like Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean; stand-up comedians such as Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl; and jazz musicians like Charlie Parker and Oscar Peterson. Though none of these artists was familiar with Artaud, each of them explored aspects of expression that should strike us now as distinctly "Artaudian": the use of the irrational, the refusal of complete fidelity to text, the belief in the overwhelming necessity of full and honest expression, the seeking of intense somatic responses from the audience as a consequence of intense feeling on the part of the performer and the liberal use of drugs, and a rethinking of the body as both a medium and subject of art.
Not simply the cultural creations, but the social settings that surrounded these popular trends linked them to Artaud and his intransigent vanguard attitude in a way not unlike what evolutionary scientists call "parallel development." In the case of rock 'n' roll, method acting, sick comedy, and jazz, the social settings themselves were seedbeds for native cruelty, many of them reminiscent of the kind of "total" or "environmental" theater advocated by the Frenchman. As a consequence of the extremity of gesture developed in these kinds of performance situations, these subcultures were under continual attack by authorities. Artistic content and drug use were coincident targets of harassment. Lenny Bruce, for example, was prosecuted not only for the sinister perfection of his satire but also for his use of drugs. The coincidence of censorship and antidrug prosecution wasn't new in the 1950s. Radical aesthetics in the capitalist West have often coincided with the illegal marketing or excessive use of drugs. Likewise, conservative attacks on radical aesthetic positions have often coincided with attacks on the cultural forms surrounding aesthetic production, cultural forms that often celebrated the use of drugs. Opium, opiates, and nicotine in the later periods of French and British romanticism; nicotine, cocaine, alcohol, and peyote for the one-man vanguard movement Stanislaw Witkiewicz; alcohol in the Lost Generation; nicotine and caffeine in the existentialist movement; alcohol, Benzedrine, and marijuana among the Beats; ecstasy in Rave culture-the socioeconomic history of substance abuse is entangled with the history of subversive aesthetics, and both are intertwined with the history of the law. The discourses of aesthetics, social control, and drugs have long been tangled in a tight, unruly knot. We're still untangling that knot today-and, from all appearances, we appear to be getting all the more tangled in it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from AVANT-GARDE PERFORMANCE AND THE LIMITS OF CRITICISM by Mike Sell
Copyright © 2005 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Revolution Will Not Be Theorized 1
Case 1 The Connection: Cruelty, Jazz, and Drug War, 1959-1963 57
1 Cruelty and the Cold War 59
2 Jazz and Drug War 91
Case 2 Happenings, Fluxus, and the Production of Memory 133
3 Bad Memory 135
4 The Avant-Garde Disappears 165
5 Performance and the Mode of Production 205
Case 3 The Black Arts Movement: Text, Performance, Blackness 215
6 Blackness as Critical Practice 217
7 Blackness and Text 243
8 Was the Black Arts Movement an Avant-Garde? 276
Notes 291
Index 315