POSTMODERNISM AND PERFORMANCE - Drama, Theatre, Performance

In 1977 Michel Benamou represented a gathering perspective when he wrote that performance was ‘the unifying mode of the postmodern’.

He identified three basic ways in which various senses of performance characterise postmodernity: the dramatisation of life by the media, the theatrical playfulness of art, and a focus on performance in the sense of technological efficiency. In post-industrial culture at large, where services and information rather than material products dominate, performance in the sense of process prevails. And while some modernist artists took refuge in ancient myth and symbol to compensate for the death of god, the postmodern artist instead follows Nietzsche to find affirmation in the free play of the will. Criticism, too, recognises itself as a performance, and so also plays (Benamou 1977: 3–4).

The poststructuralist understanding of ‘truth’ as an effect of perfor-mance, rather than an absolute given, was notably developed by Lyotard.

In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), he suggested that Western thought has grounded its truths in ‘grand narratives’ such as Marxism, Christianity and Freudianism. But these stories are without foundation and so have no intrinsic authority. He further suggested that this ‘condition’ of knowledge was now generally apparent, and that this

deﬁnes the ‘postmodern condition’. To live postmodernity is to live the performative nature of ‘truths’ (see chapter 6).

In Postmodernism and Performance (1994b), Nick Kaye takes a closer focus, and specifies the aeshetic genre Performance as a postmodern phenomenon. So ‘performance’ figures twice. It is first the generic term that defines the field of Performance, and especially here ‘art performance’

(see p. 183). And second, it is an operational term: the argument concerns live art’s postmodern performativity, its rhetorical strategies.

Kaye reviews attempts to define postmodern art. Jencks (1987), for instance, has identiﬁed ‘double coding’ and Hutcheon (1988) ‘parody’

as key tropes. But for Kaye these are paradoxical enterprises. For him, ‘the postmodern’ designates ‘a calling into question of the languages, styles and ﬁgures through which it is seen’. It is a way of doing art, rather than a sort of art. If modernism is characterised by ‘a projection towards foundation’, postmodernism ‘occurs as a disruption of this very claim to meaning’. The performativity of postmodern art is precisely this resistance. To be more deﬁnite about it would be to deny its actual nature. Postmodernism is an ephemeral effect; it cannot be abstracted from the texts and events which conduct it (Kaye 1994b: 4–23 passim).

Kaye maps the way in which frustrations with the modernist work of art led to challenges to the authority of the artwork within the work itself.

These performative strategies of deligitimation can, and were, said to be theatrical. And they ultimately also led to Performance as a new field of practice.

MINIMALISM, THEATRICALITY AND THE AUTHORITY OF ART

During the twentieth century, a major understanding of art turned in on itself. In the late 1960s minimalist art led various groups of sculptors, painters and other artists into theatre and performance. They shared a concern, which was exercised in much of the new work, about the nature and status of the work of art. At the same time, late 1960s minimalism provoked a ‘seminal’ defence of modernist art by critic Michael Fried.

Fried was provoked precisely by the ‘theatricality’ of the new minimalism.

It threatened the modernist ideal of the work of art as being ‘self-contained and self-determining’ (Kaye 1994b: 24).

From around 1965–6, minimalists had begun to make objects that seemed ‘to offer themselves as irreducible “facts”’. They were simply there,

‘a sheer physical presence’. They did not represent or symbolise anything;

and there was no suggestion of an interrelation between their constituent parts. In some ways this was a logical extension of the principle of modernist art as deﬁned by art theorist Clement Greenberg between 1939 and 1965. Greenberg argued that art had changed its function after the secularisation of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, whereby ratio-nalist thought radically challenged religious ‘truth’ and the transcendence of a godhead. After this, each art had no higher purpose than to become true to itself, to project itself towards its own ‘formal essence’. Paintings were not about subjects but about colour and form; or paint; or, ulti-mately, flatness and its delimitation. Modernist art simply made this

‘projection toward the absolute’ explicit rather than implicit. Greenberg conceives the modernist artwork as being legitimating, totally self-contained and timeless, independent of the circumstances of its being witnessed. It achieves ‘self-foundation’. Such works do not address the spectator, one enters into their presence; they are framed off from the rest of the world. But, as Kaye demonstrates, the new minimalist works presented themselves as if that ‘frame’ had gone missing. Paradoxically, the pursuit of an entirely self-contained work of art – pure ‘objecthood’ – had eventuated in works that begged the question about the status of those objects in the world. And that, according to Fried in a 1967 essay, was a species of theatricality: they were interacting with the onlooker, inviting them to reﬂect on their activity of looking. And while the modernist work is suspended from time, these pieces emphasised duration, as does theatre.

It was as if the absolute had collapsed in on itself, turned inside out. We might call it a moment of immanent deconstruction. If these works were modernist, suggests Kaye, then the modernist work had now lost its meaning, ‘its possession of its own deﬁnition’ (Kaye 1994b: 33–4).

In the 1967 essay, ‘Art and objecthood’ Fried builds on Greenberg’s arguments to defend the self-foundation of modern art from being thus undermined. There was ‘a war going on between theatre and modernist painting’. Fried argued further that quality and value only had meaning within each individual art: ‘What lies between the arts is theatre’. Walter Pater (1839–94) had said that literature achieves the ideal of art at the moment when it approaches the condition of music – because then matter

and form cannot be distinguished from each other (Pater 1889). Fried scathingly turns this famous formulation around to declare, ‘Art degen-erates as it approaches the condition of theatre’ (Kaye 1994b: 25–8;

citations from Fried are Kaye’s). What Fried resisted here was to become a cornerstone for many artists in future decades. They experimented across formal boundaries. And the idea of ‘intermedia’ connotes not simply working across formal boundaries but working in the gaps between, dissolving the idea of a boundary itself.

PREMONITIONS OF POSTMODERN PERFORMANCE It is roughly from this point in the 1960s, in cross-over work by some minimalists and other artists, that art performance in Carroll’s sense emerges. But Kaye traces the roots back further. He uses Fried’s reaction to minimalism in 1967 as a lens through which to view earlier depar-tures from the self-contained artwork, the emergence of a postmodern performativity in art. For instance, Robert Rauschenberg’s simple White Paintings (1951–2) had been lit so that the shadow of the viewer fell on the painting. His subsequent ‘combines’, assemblages of disparate found materials, refused any sense of ‘formal closure’ and instead insisted on the activity of the spectator. And Jasper Johns began in the 1950s to make frontal paintings of ﬂags and numerals. They presented formal ironies:

were these representations in the sense of artistic interpretation? Or mere reproductions like a snapshot photograph? The endless and unsettling circulation between the senses of reproduction and representation insists on the sheer presence of the painting, and the activity of the viewer. The situation is both ‘theatrical’ and without closure (Kaye 1994b: 29).

The key works in Kaye’s narrative that bring us directly into the sphere of Performance are associated with Fluxus (1961–) (see chapter 6). In a 1966 book, Assemblages, Environments & Happenings, Allan Kaprow reﬂected on his own work and that of others, in which the drive is towards the dissolution of the artwork as a coherent whole. The fashioned envi-ronments are temporary and subject to decay. Happenings are distributed across time, space and persons; are for doing not seeing; and blur the line between art and the rest of life. Works such as Claus Oldenberg’s Store (1961) and George Brecht’s The Case (1959) confused the line between art object and use object. Brecht’s ﬁrst exhibition in 1959 was tilted toward

events: an arrangement. He presented ‘games and loose assemblages of often rearrangeable objects or even unsigned objects presented variously within and outside of the formal circumstances of the gallery’ (see Keyword:

Aleatory). The work is not within the artist’s control and there are no properties internal to the art object. Kaprow’s actions are, in his own words, ‘not-quite-art, not-quite-life’. Such art-making performs ‘moves toward a “work”, and yet, simultaneously, a set of strategies which serve to stave off a closure and so identification of what this work might be’

(Kaye 1994b: 30–40).

Kaye summarises: ‘the emergence of strategies which look specifically toward performance can be read as a final move towards an unravelling of the discrete or bounded “work of art”’ (Kaye 1994b: 32). The effect is to ‘make visible that which the work depends upon but which it cannot contain, to trip up and make apparent the move towards the “event” of its definition’ (Kaye 1994b: 44). As well as establishing a position on the borderline between art and the rest of life, such work also demands attention to the transactions and negotiations common to all arts experi-ence. It reveals the ways in which supposedly self-legitimating art itself depends on the spectator, for whom it indeed performs.

Reviewing the work of Foreman, Kirby and Wilson in the 1970s and 1980s, where the new strategies of Performance engage with the theatrical apparatus, Kaye identifies ‘a fundamental opposition to the desire for depth, for the discovery of a “centre” from whose vantage point the various elements . . . may be understood’. Closure is made a perpetual lure never to be grasped by a ‘play of prompts, of indications or traces which displace one another’. The idea that any meaning can ‘belong’ to the work is refused: the very process of its becoming is foregrounded as being the spectator’s work. The performances thus force attention to process, to the ‘event’ occurring between spectator and presentation (Kaye 1994b:

69–70).

In one of many summations, Kaye writes that ‘one might speak . . . of a moment which is both “theatrical” or “performative” and properly postmodern’; that ‘the condition of “performance” may be read, in itself, as tending to foster . . . postmodern contingencies and instabilities’ (Kaye 1994b: 23).

UNDECIDABILITY, AVANT GARDES AND THE RECUPERATION OF MODERNISM

In Staging Femininities, Geraldine Harris remarks that the only full-length accounts of postmodern feminist performance available at her time of writing were by art historians and theorists (Harris 1999: 6). While this marks a previous negligence by even feminist Theatre Studies, it also confirms a lineage: Performance/live art emerges principally from fine art practice. Accordingly, we shall spend some time here with fine art theory and criticism that has explicated Performance.

In The Object of Performance (1989) art theorist Henry M. Sayre divides 1980s paintings that declared themselves ‘postmodern’ into two sorts:

those actually based in ‘pluralism’ and those generating an active ‘undecid-ability’. He cites Hal Foster’s opposition, in The Anti-Aesthetic (1983), to the regular conflation of ‘pluralism’ and ‘postmodernism’. ‘Pluralism’

implies that ‘all positions in culture are now open and equal’. This may suggest a productive openness. But Foster insists this is ‘simply the inverse of the fatalistic belief that . . . we live under a “total system” without hope of redress’ (Foster in Sayre 1989: xii). In contrast, Derrida’s notion of ‘undecidability’ designates the impossibility of resolution, an active tension between different positions of possible closure. This ‘condition of contingency, multiplicity, and polyvocality’ is what ‘properly’ pertains to postmodernism. ‘Pluralism’ or ‘indeterminacy’ implies equivalence between various aesthetic choices: ‘anything goes’ as Foster nicely puts it, or what we might call closure through negligence. Pluralism is intrinsic to the work and is just another species of formalism, whereas undecidability foregrounds the ethics of perception: the socially meaningful relationships between people, the art they make, and what it implies (Sayre 1989:

xii–xiv).

On this basis, Sayre posits ‘a distinct and definable avant-garde’ in American art and literature since 1970 that might be called ‘postmodern’.

He argues that while it opposes the modernist formalism associated with Greenberg, it derives from a different modernism, one grounded in Dada and Futurism. The postmodern avant garde strips the idea of ‘modernism’

itself of its assumed univocality, its consistency as a period style. And performance, ‘styleless, diverse, and conspicuously unprogrammatic’, has been one of the chief means to make this challenge (Sayre 1989: xi–xii).

Sayre argues that if Performance had been integral to the New York art scene from the moment of Kaprow’s Happenings in 1959, it was the counter-cultural, protest and feminist actions in California and New York of the late 1960s that made performance ‘a recognisable art form’. In this context, not only was performance a potent means of making political art, especially against the Vietnam War; it also militated against the art estab-lishment as part of the ofﬁcial culture. Sayre thus identiﬁes Performance as being ‘intensely political in orientation’ from what he maps as its true point of inception (Sayre 1989: 13–14). Relative to Kaye’s ultimately rather formalist treatment (in that he foregrounds undecidability as an abstracted operational principle), Sayre’s attention to historical conditions is welcome. But there is something of a sleight of hand here: Sayre is indulging in proof of essence by origin, and a selective origin at that.

FORMALISM, FEMINISM AND PERFORMANCE

One sculptor who made his way into performance in the 1960s was Robert Morris. He made a celebrated piece called Site in 1964 with Carolee Schneeman. The title is an evident pun. The work proceeds as a con-struction site, where ideas about the ways in which painting organises sight are mobilised. Site is a refunctioning of the realist oil painting Olympia (1863) by Edouard Manet (1832–83). Now, the subject matter of Olympia is a courtesan, lying naked on a couch, looking out from the canvas to engage the spectator’s eyes. Sayre cites art historian T.J. Clark’s demonstration in 1985 that the painting sets up a critical undecidability.

In French bourgeois culture, the courtesan ‘was what could be represented of prostitution’ in art, and, for this to happen, she had to be divorced from ordinary prostitutes. Oil paintings represented female sexuality within the confines of idealised classical beauty; while common prostitutes represented themselves as sexual commodities in the streets; and courtesans plied their trade in private, beyond patent representation. The classically named Olympia gazes out from the painting to implicate the (presumed male) viewer in this set of contradictions.

Then, and especially now, Olympia of course also raises questions about the simultaneous exploitation and idealisation of women by men. Sayre demonstrates that while Site disrupts the authority of the artwork as a ﬁnished expression beyond process, it also cancels the critical work that

Manet’s painting does. In his formalist challenge to Manet, Morris appro-priates Schneeman into his own work as a passive object – as Schneeman herself later reﬂected, as ‘Cunt Mascot’. Schneeman’s own trajectory from expressionist painting into Performance was driven as much by resistance to male artists’ objectiﬁcation of women as to formalism. She called the gallery and academic art system ‘the Art Stud Club’. Nothing much seemed to have changed.

In chapter 6, we refer to a perceived split between the more directly political Performance tradition that issued out of Fluxus in Europe and what grew after the mid-1960s in America. Here, we witness a radical split in the same period between formalist art made by some men and a more directly political performance-based art made by feminists. In one of the introductory essays to Framing Feminism (1987), art historian Griselda Pollock provides us with a political deﬁnition of Performance.

Pollock summarises arguments made by Mary Kelly in 1977 for the development of a ‘feminist problematic in art’: feminism needs to think in terms of ‘feminist art practices’ rather than ‘feminist art’. The latter is a product of the bourgeois problematic, by which she means the underpinning ideological ﬁeld, where ‘art’ and ‘artist’ carry assumptions about the separation of art from work and craft, male artists from female subjects, and the unique vision of the artist. Rather than attempt a feminist

‘content’ in ‘art’, women artists needed to develop ‘tactical activities’ and

‘strategically developed practices of representation’ geared to ‘a radically different order of knowledge’. The theoretical grounding for this was a feminist problematic. Performance was one of the new areas of art practice with the ﬂexibility and power to dislocate the dominant and build ‘a new multiplicity of powers and knowledges for the diverse communities of the oppressed’. Pollock is adamant that the goal of feminism is not to be incorporated into ‘the pluralism popularly labelled Post-modernism’

(Pollock 1987: 80–1; see also above and chapter 5).

THREE SYSTEMS OF UNDECIDABILITY

In Staging Femininities (1999), Geraldine Harris develops an extended theorisation of the work of three British women performance artists, Rose English, Annie Sprinkle and Bobby Baker. Her necessarily complex argument is neatly summed up in the simple assertion that a piece by Rose

English is not only ‘worth taking as seriously as Derrida’ but is also funny.

Appropriating the principle of ‘undecidability’ from Sayre (1989), Harris suggests that contemporary Performance, feminism and postmodernism all operate in this way: all resist deﬁnition (Harris 1999: 6).

She accords with Auslander’s observation in 1997 that ‘female perfor-mance art always potentially carries some sense of “political” message because, in being “authored” by “women”, it inevitably imputes a critique of the politics of representation’ (p. 22; Auslander 1987: 21). There is an implicit circulation between woman as subject and woman as object.

Harris, however, further identiﬁes a strategic circulation. She suggests that at the heart of this work is a ‘double gesture’. The term derives from Irigaray, and it relates to both the ‘positionality’ and ‘strategic essen-tialism’ discussed in chapter 5. The enactment of the double gesture simultaneously invokes essentialist categories and deconstructs them, in a manner which refuses either gesture ﬁnal authority. While ‘positionality’

and ‘strategic essentialism’ suggest a diachronic situation (one articulated across time), Irigaray’s formulation is synchronic, and hence of immense rhetorical power. Carried over from feminist praxis at large into these performances, it is ‘the main means of negotiating the tricky terrain between theory and practice’ (Harris 1999: 19).

An important underpinning for Harris’s explication is her consideration of the complex relationships between feminism and postmodernism.

Again, ‘undecidability’ emerges as the key term. Both ‘offer critiques of humanist rationalism, scientific objectivity, historical truth and the transparency of language’. But while championing multiplicity, both paradoxically nevertheless tend to be regarded as ‘easily identifiable, singular, transcultural phenomena’; and each has an equally paradoxical tendency towards metanarrative. A ‘play between multiplicity and singu-larity’ applies to both feminism and postmodernism.

Meanwhile, a possible ‘aporia’ between the two discursive practices is opened by the pressure exerted by postmodernism on the category of ‘sex’.

In document Drama, Theatre, Performance (Page 143-160)