Matthew Causey

Department of Literature,

Communication and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
matthew.causey@lcc.gatech.edu

 

Kaye, Nick. Postmodernism and Performance. London: Macmillan, 1994.
In Postmodernism and Performance, a title in the New Directions in Theatre series from Macmillan, author Nick Kaye questions the possibility of attaining an adequate definition of the postmodern performance.

 

If the ‘postmodern event’ occurs as a breaking away, a disruption of what is ‘given’, then ‘its’ forms cannot usefully be pinned down in any final or categorical way . . . definitions cannot arrive at the postmodern, but can only set out a ground which might be challenged. (145)

 

Echoing Paul Mann’s position in The Theory-Death of the Avant-Gardethat theory facilitates the undoing of the avant-garde, that cultural criticism enacts a theory-death on the object of its discourse, Kaye notes criticism’s collusion in the construction of postmodern performance. He asserts that the organizing compulsion of criticism is antithetical to the strategies of postmodern aesthetic practices, which are designed to frustrate foundationalist thinking. Kaye’s refusal to reproduce the normal organizational categories leads him to draw together a wide range of contemporary American cultural events–performances of Kaprow, Brecht, and Finley; dance works of Cunningham and the Judson Dance Theater; music by Cage; theatre work by Foreman, Kirby, Wilson, and the Wooster Group–treating them all as more or less exemplary postmodern confrontations with, and disruptions of, the Modernist cultural project.

 

It seems that every book entitled Postmodernism and BLANK is required to begin with a rehearsal of the story of architectural postmodernism, and Kaye obligingly does so. Focusing on the architectural practices of Portoghesi, Klotz, and Jenc ks, he locates the key feature of postmodernism in a “falling away of the idea of a fundamental core or legitimating essence which might privilege one vocabulary over another” (9). He then offers a brief account of philosophical postmodernism, which is t o say of poststructuralist interrogations of history and meaning–interrogations which Kaye rightly claims are reproduced almost wholesale in much postmodern performance. Having thus sketched the rough contours of postmodernism as he understands it, Kaye proceeds to construct his more detailed argument about the relation between postmodernist and modernist art. He starts by glossing the modernist art theory of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Greenberg’s article “After Abstract Expressionism” (1962 ) and Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” (1967) are, according to Kaye, the signal texts of modernism’s institutionalization, the texts that provided a systematic theoretical basis for the various assumptions and attitudes that had long informed the American cu ltural scene. Greenberg argues in a para-Hegelian manner that the history and progress of modernist art is a march toward purification, a divesting of art of all extraneous material, culminating in the work of art realized as a wholly manifest, self-suff icient object. Kaye quotes Greenberg’s theory that the modernist project in art is to demonstrate that many of the “conventions of the art of painting” are “dispensable, unessential” (25). Greenberg’s model of art historicity champions the works of Nola nd, Morris, and Olitksi as representing the modernist ideal of a totally autonomous art: their color fields seeped into the fabric of a dematerialized canvas achieve a coalescence of literalism and illusionism. As Greenberg wrote in “Modernist Painting,”

 

The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself–not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. (qtd by Kaye, 101)

 

The transitional stage between Greenberg’s defense of Field Painting and Fried’s attack on Minimalism is only briefly mentioned by Kaye but constitutes a critical moment in the history he narrates. In answer to the call for an autonomous art and maintai ning that the canvas was inherently representational, artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris furthered the quest for an essential art form through minimalist sculpture. The artists created, through the absence of connecting parts, artificial color , or representation, Minimalist sculptures that were realized as pure objects of indivisible wholeness. The “literalness” of Minimalist sculpture was meant to supplant the illusionism of the canvas. The objecthood of the object (the thingness of the thi ng in Heideggerian terms) became the object of art. However, Michael Fried spotted a problem in the work of the Minimalists. He argued that the Minimalist objects surrendered their objecthood by foregrounding the space that they occupied and the duration of the spectator’s experience of observation. Fried asserted that the Minimalist object was time-dependent and hence spectator-dependent, and that it was therefore theatrical and therefore not art.

 

In Fried’s view, “art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre” (141). For Fried, the theatrical is severed from the modernist ideal of a wholly manifest thing-in-itself by virtue of its contingent unfolding in real time, its moment-by-moment dynamic with a receiving audience, its adherence to the paradigm of subjectivity. The experience of witnessing the modernist paintings of Olitski or Noland or the sculpture of Anthony Caro has, according to Fried, literally no duration, “because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest” (145). The properly Modernist goal is an instantaneousness and presentness characterized by the collapse of the subjectivity of the spectator into the objectivity of the work. Theater and performance, which work toward presence but not toward modernist presentness, are on this account effectively voided as non-art.

 

Having restaged the modernist arguments of Greenberg and Fried, Kaye proceeds to demonstrate the postmodernist–or more accurately anti-modernist–counter projects that have sought to disrupt any foundationalism or essentialism and have thrown into quest ion the concepts of authenticity, wholeness, meaning, and originality. If one accepts Greenberg and Fried’s model of modernism, then performance’s inherent disruption of the autonomous art work, its spatial and temporal specificity, its very “messiness,” or what Kaye calls its “evasion of stable parameters, meanings and identities” (35), make performance the perfect field on which to stage postmodernist rejections of modernist imperatives.

 

Certainly Kaye is not the first to make this claim for performance’s special stature in postmodernity. In The Object of Performance (a book to which Kaye is indebted), Henry M. Sayre quotes from a catalogue for an exhibition of contemporary sculpture at the Hirshhorn Museum (1982) written by Howard Fox, which states that

 

Theatricality may be considered that propensity in the visual arts for a work to reveal itself within the mind of the beholder as something other than what it is known empirically to be. This is precisely antithetical to the Modern ideal of the wholly manifest, self-sufficient object; and theatricality may be the single most pervasive property of post-Modernism. (9)

 

Quite apart from the modernist desire to create the thing-in-itself, the desire for the de-materialization of the art object has run concurrently and in some cases has prefigured the modernist projects, reflecting Lyotard’s suggestion that the postmodern is, in fact, premodern. It is no mere anomaly that the history of the Euro-American Avant-Garde carries with it a series of performative experiments: Symbolist and Expressionists theatre, the Futurist serate and Dadaist soiree, Surrealist drama, Happenings and Performance Art. My point is that performance’s qualifications as postmodern or anti-modern have been well established. Greenberg and Fried’s derriere-garde notions of authenticity, purity, essence, reside in a historical, foundationalist, and essentialist discourse that has been thoroughly discounted from a postmodern position, voided of relevance in a contemporary model of art. I would question the validity of a continued rehearsing of their arguments to sustain performance’s val ue. Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” not unlike Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (whose assertion that an original is degraded through its mechanical repetition is problematized, not to say invalidated, in a digital age) is by now a tediously familiar argument with far too little contemporary resonance to function as the point of emergence for a “new vision” of postmodern art.

 

Aside from this over-reliance on polemic against already discredited theoretical positions, there is a problem, too, in Kaye’s reliance on theoretical discourse as such. Kaye is keenly aware of theory’s collusion in manufacturing, narrativizing, and con cretizing abstract “trends” in art. Yet his own procedure reproduces, perhaps inevitably, that very tendency. By positioning postmodern performance as essentially a philosophico-aesthetic response to Modernist art, Kaye simply disregards the concrete hi story–the cultural, political, and technological realities–of postmodern society, and the significance of this social field for the emergence of postmodern artistic practices. The point here is rudimentary: what engenders an art work is not only the theory and practice of previous schools, but a complex set of relations among contemporary social and cultural phenomena. The seductive labyrinth of “pure” art theory is finally of little use unless the theorist attempts, as Edward Said has suggested, to address its “worldliness.” This is a move that Kaye never makes, and as a result his theoretical discussion seems to take place in too isolated an arena of philosophical conceits. However, he astutely challenges some traditional theories, in particular, Sally Banes’s positioning of postmodern dance as modernist in the Greenbergian sense.

 

A large portion of the book deals with the theories and practices of modern and postmodern dance and this section is greatly indebted to the writings of Sally Banes for both its historical perspective and its theoretical model. Countering Banes, Kaye ch allenges “the very possibility of a properly ‘modernist’ performance and in turn . . . the move from a modern . . . to a postmodern dance” (71). Like Banes, Kaye traces American modern dance through the work of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, among others, and their rejection of conventional languages of classical dance and the formlessness of Isodora Duncan’s “free dance.” Modern dance relied instead on a formalistic expressionism aimed at representing the “inner life.” The Judson Dance Theatre (196 2-64), which included the choreographer/dancers Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and David Gordon, defined itself as postmodern, on the grounds that their work abandoned modern dance’s representational strategy of expression. Sal ly Banes has disputed this claim, defining their work as more correctly modernist, in the Greenbergian sense, in that their minimalist strategies sought to reduce dance to pure movement, severing its connection to expression and representation. Kaye counters Banes’s view by arguing that,

 

far from rehearsing Greenberg’s program through dance, the historical postmodern dance’s reduction of dance to simply ‘movement’, or even the presence of the dancer alone, attacks the very notion of the autonomous work of art, revealing a contingency, and so an instability, in place of the center the modernist project would seek to realize. (89)

 

Kaye is here maintaining Fried’s argument that a modernist project in performance is impossible. Banes might counter with her position that each art form has its own distinct positioning of the postmodern, or in other words, rather than constructing a me tanarrative of Modernism perhaps a local narrative of particular works would uncover more useful critiques.

 

The value of Postmodernism and Performance lies not in Kaye’s attempt to theorize postmodern performance as the perfect counter-project to high Modernism, but in his discussion of individual performance and dance works. Aside from offering stimulating analyses of well-known works, he brings to light some more obscure but important pieces, such as “First Signs of Decadence” from Michael Kirby’s Structuralist Workshop.

 

Kaye isolates three unifying elements in many of the postmodern works he approaches (an unavoidable but decidedly non-postmodernist tactic). The first is the deflation or dematerialization of the art object as an autonomous whole, in favor of an emphasis on the spectator’s construction of that object as an image in the mind. George Brecht in speaking of his Fluxus inspired “event-scores,” such as Water Yam (1962), said that “for me, an object does not exist outside people’s contact with it” (43). Brecht may very well be the most radical artist in Kaye’s collection, insofar as his performance works were “less concerned with the disruption or breaking down of a ‘work’ than with a catching of attention at a point at which the promise of a work, and the move toward closure, is first encountered” (40). Brecht’s Water Yam is presented as a boxed collection of white cards with black text that states various instructions or actions. One card reads, “THREE AQUEOUS EVENTS.” Under t he “title” are placed the words “ice, water, steam.” As Kaye notes, the “event scores” of Brecht can be read as a poem or procedural notation.

 

Considered as a score, the card seems to be even more open and unclear, as it becomes an ambiguous stimulus to something or other that is yet to be made or occur. In doing so, it places its own self-sufficiency into question and explicitly looks towards a decision yet to be made. (40)

 

From Kaye’s standpoint, one of the foremost postmodern theater companies is Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, which carries out the shift from art as object to art as receptive event and also fulfills Kaye’s second criterion of postmode rn performance in its disruption of the meaningful. The Ontological-Hysteric Theatre has developed a performance-wrighting that stages the production of image, its immediate demise through discourse, and the persistence of a (re)appearing ideology . Kaye quotes Foreman who wrote,

 

as Stella, Judd, et al. realized several years ago . . . one must reject composition in favor of shape (or something else). . . . Why? Because the resonance must be between the head and the object. The resonance between the elements of the object is now a DEAD THING. (49)

 

Foreman’s performance works generally use a deceptively traditional style with a strict proscenium configuration and the trappings of the conventional stage. What Foreman does with that tradition is to turn the image-manufacturing into a “reverberation m achine” constantly undoing the image, colliding it against expectation, asking the spectator to think, to put the pieces back together in a new manner.

 

Kaye writes clearly about Michael Kirby’s Structuralist Workshop, an important but often overlooked moment in American avant-garde theatre. The Workshop, a loosely aligned group of NYC theatre artists, whose most productive work was done in the mid to l ate seventies, is likewise concerned with the structuring of performance in the mind of the spectator, “a recognition of relation and contingency” (48). In an interview with Kaye, Kirby said that

 

‘structure’ is being used to refer to the way the parts of a work relate to each other, how they ‘fit together’ in the mind to form a particular configuration. This fitting together does not happen ‘out there’ in the objective work; it happens in the mind of the spectator. (48)

 

Not unlike Foreman, Kirby employs the effects of the realistic stage only to complicate the reception of that aesthetic gesture through antithetical staging structures. In First Signs of Decadence, a work analyzed by Kaye, Kirby structures t he staging through a “complex array of rules to which the interaction of characters as well as entrances, exits, lighting, music, and even patterns of emotional response, are subject” (57). Kirby is attempting, in his words, to set up a “tension between the representational and non-representational aspects through which the performance is always being torn apart” (57); torn apart to disrupt meaning, content and closure and to open contingencies that in turn activate the spectator’s thinking.

 

The third feature or tactic of postmodern performance, according to Kaye, is its “upsetting [of] the hierarchies and assumptions that would define and stabilize the formal and thematic parameters of [the performance] work” (142). The performance work of the Wooster Group, in existence for nearly twenty years and a spin-off company from Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, ideally fits Kaye’s depiction of the anti-modernist move in postmodern performance. The Wooster Group, under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, has created a radical form of performance-wrighting that includes a collision of appropriated texts from such diverse categories as traditional modern drama (Our Town, The Crucible), popular culture (cable- TV, Japanese sci-fi films), personal narratives (family suicide), and the taboo texts of pornography and blackface caricature. The fragmented texts are cut-up, reworked and edited into a larger mediatized performance work that consistently undoes its own authority. Both Philip Auslander and David Savran have written about the Wooster Group’s political postmodernism, which effects a disempowering of the performance’s status as a “charismatic other.” An image played out in a Wooster Group performance is allowed to present itself without a moralistic posturing from the performer. When the company used black-face on white actors they made no effort to let the audience off the hook by pointing to the gesture and condemning it. Instead, the spectator was f orced to articulate a response, to take responsibility for how he or she would respond. The effect is powerful and has led to acrimonious debates and funding rejections for the company.

 

One difficulty in theorizing postmodern performance is the sheer size of the territory that the term “performance” maps out. It extends far beyond the theatre and galleries to include the total flow of the televisual, the indigenous performance, the int ertextuality of the postmodern cityscape within which we perform daily, the postorganic domain of virtual environments and cyberspace. A drawback of Postmodernism and Performance is that Kaye’s examination focuses on too narrow a series of p erformances from downtown NYC, and neglects this larger field. Though Kaye notes that postmodern performance has forgone the genres and the spatiality of modernism, he doesn’t seem to recognize that our performance theory needs to follow that lead. None theless, Kaye’s analyses of the specific performances are insightful and provocative. Whatever my specific reservations, Postmodernism and Performance is an important and thought-provoking addition to a troubled field.

 

Works Cited

 

• Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Gregory Battcock, ed. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968.
• Sayre, Henry M. The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.