Not the Other Avant-garde - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0472099310 ISBN 13: 9780472099313

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2006

Synopsis

Almost without exception, studies of the avant-garde take for granted the premise that the influential experimental practices associated with the avant-garde began primarily as a European phenomenon that in turn spread around the world. These ten original essays, especially commissioned for Not the Other Avant-Garde, forge a radically new conception of the avant-garde by demonstrating the many ways in which the first- and second-wave avant-gardes were always already a transnational phenomenon, an amalgam of often contradictory performance traditions and practices developed in various cultural locations around the world, including Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Argentina, India, and Japan. Essays from leading scholars and critics-including Marvin Carlson, Sudipto Chatterjee, John Conteh-Morgan, Peter Eckersall, Harry J. Elam Jr., Joachim Fiebach, David G. Goodman, Jean Graham-Jones, Hannah Higgins, and Adam Versényi-suggest collectively that the very concept of the avant-garde is possible only if conceptualized beyond the limitations of Eurocentric paradigms. Not the Other Avant-Garde is groundbreaking in both avant-garde studies and performance studies and will be a valuable contribution to the fields of theater studies, modernist studies, art history, literature, and music history. "Joins the growing field of critical and transnational theories on the arts. . . its grounding in live performance and its foregrounding of the performative human body presents a new theoretical paradigm that is pathbreaking." --Haiping Yan, University of California, Los Angeles James M. Harding is Associate Professor of English at Mary Washington University. He is author of Adorno and "A Writing of the Ruins": Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture and editor of Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality. John Rouse is Associate Professor of Theater at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of Brecht and the West German Theatre.

About this title

About the Author

James M. Harding is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Performance, Transparency and the Cultures of Surveillance; The Ghosts of the Avant- Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance; and Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde, among other books.

John Rouse is Associate Professor of Theater at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of Brecht and the West German Theatre.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

NOT THE OTHER AVANT-GARDE

The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2006University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-09931-3

Contents

James M. Harding and John Rouse Introduction.......................................................................................................................1James M. Harding From Cutting Edge to Rough Edges: On the Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance.....................................................18Harry J. Elam, Jr. The TDR Black Theatre Issue: Refiguring the Avant-Garde.........................................................................................41Joachim Fiebach Avant-Garde and Performance Cultures in Africa.....................................................................................................67John Conteh-Morgan The Other Avant-Garde: The Theater of Radical Aesthetics and the Poetics and Politics of Performance in Contemporary Africa.....................92Marvin Carlson Avant-Garde Drama in the Middle East................................................................................................................125Adam Versnyi Made in Mexico: The Theatrical Avant-Garde and the Formation of a Nation.............................................................................145Jean Graham-Jones Aesthetics, Politics, and Vanguardias in Twentieth-Century Argentinean Theater...................................................................168Sudipto Chatterjee From "Vanguard" to "Avant-Garde"? Questioning the Progressive Bengali Theater of Kolkata........................................................192Peter Eckersall From Liminality to Ideology: The Politics of Embodiment in Prewar Avant-garde Theater in Japan.....................................................225David G. Goodman Angura: Japan's Nostalgic Avant-Garde.............................................................................................................250Hannah Higgins Border Crossings: Three Transnationalisms of Fluxus.................................................................................................265Contributors........................................................................................................................................................286Index...............................................................................................................................................................289

Chapter One

From Cutting Edge to Rough Edges On the Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance

James M. Harding

Assume therefore that, as a result of specific historical circumstances, a theory or idea pertaining to those circumstances arises. What happens to it when, in different circumstances and for new reasons, it is used again and, in still more different circumstances again? What can this tell us about theory itself, its limits, its possibilities, its inherent problems and what can it suggest to us about the relationship between theory and criticism, on the one hand, and society and culture on the other? -Edward Said, "Traveling Theory"

"In Advance Of": An Introduction

From its very inception the Western theatrical avant-garde has found itself entangled in the cultural politics of colonialism. Examples of this entanglement are not difficult to find since they are often scantly masked beneath aesthetic categories like primitivism or negritude, to name only the most obvious, or even beneath a patronizing embrace of Asian performance traditions, as occurred in Russia, Germany, and France. In Ubu Roi, for example, Alfred Jarry provocatively embraced a fashioned savage primitivism that not only shocked William Butler Yeats but that theater historians have also consistently cited as "the beginning of the performative avant-garde." In Zurich, the Dadaists displayed similar proclivities. Hugo Ball costumed himself in a facsimile of a witch doctor's headdress before reciting his Lautegedichte at the Cabaret Voltaire. His friend and cofounder of the cabaret, Richard Huelsenbeck, followed the reading of his own fabricated "Negro poems" with a debate on their authenticity, and when Jan Ephriam, the owner of the cabaret, gave Huelsenbeck examples of genuine African poems that he had collected as a sailor, Huelsenbeck recited them at the cabaret but decided that they would be better (perhaps even more authentic) if, as in his fabricated poems, he added the sound "Umba" to the end of each line. Even Antonin Artaud's intense fascination with Balinese dance theater was mediated, as is well known, by the colonial fair where he first encountered Balinese dancers. While these and similar moments in the history of avant-garde performance indicate the extent to which experimental artists were anxious to find alternatives to bourgeois cultural expression, they also remind us that the Western avant-garde sustained European cultural prerogatives even amid its most vociferous assaults on bourgeois culture. The legacies of such entanglement have left historians of the avant-garde confronting a grossly underplayed dilemma. Either we argue that the whole of the avant-garde is not contained within the particulars of its colonialist attitudes and thus circumvent the entanglement, or we cite it as an example of the pervasive ideological corruption wrought by Western imperialism and begin the hard search for models of artistic expression uncontaminated by colonialist presumptions.

Granted, my construction of this dilemma is polemical, but the stakes are higher than they might first appear. For the choice one makes here has a major impact on how we understand the legacies of the avant-garde, especially with regard to its influence (beyond the borders of Europe and) on the world stage. A profoundly neglected uncertainty looms over the question of whether the expanding influence of the avant-garde indicates an escape from its colonialist birthing or is another example of imported Western cultural hegemony. With this latter concern in mind, the limits of our current theories of the avant-garde and the need to revisit the colonialist underpinnings of avant-garde performance become evident. Indeed, there is a special appropriateness to this return now. At a time when we hear calls for a radical reassessment of the very concept "avant-garde" and its concomitant histories, a return to the avant-garde's subtle entanglement in the politics of colonialism offers the possibility not only of fundamentally retheorizing the avant-garde but of shifting its basic terrain. The argument here is very simple: if we turn a blind apologetic eye to that entanglement or if we see only it and dismiss the idea of the avant-garde as another ideological conduit for European cultural hegemony, then we have failed to recognize that the colonialist underpinnings of avant-garde performance mark it not as a European but as a fundamentally global cultural phenomenon.

The arguments that follow do not downplay the contested intercultural exchanges and vexed negotiations that have shaped this phenomenon. Indeed, the shortest summary of this essay's main assertion is that nothing more aptly characterizes the avant-garde than the moments of contested intercultural exchange at its colonialist birthing. Those exchanges mark not only the avant-garde, but culture itself, and in an effort to maintain the critical integrity of those contested moments, I have chosen to characterize the avant-garde as a transnational phenomenon, first because the term highlights the global dimensions of the avant-garde, and second because the term transnationalism is itself contested, signifying both the processes of global hegemony and the practice of counterhegemonic resistance.

Center to Edge/Edge to Center

Important opportunities for rethinking the history, indeed the very concept, of the avant-garde can be found by considering whether the notion of an edge (in this case, the cutting edge) presupposes a center or, at the very least, a point of origin from which one might plot a rectilinear course to the edge itself. With respect to the avant-garde, the question of whether we can have an edge without a center is another way of asking whether we can have an advanced guard without some anchored sense of what is at its rear. Historically, scholars have presumed that the former necessitates the latter and have characterized this edge-to-center relationship dialectically, positioning the avant-garde at margins hostile to the bourgeois center of society. While this critical paradigm is evident at least as far back as Renato Poggioli's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1962), some of the most important theoretical work along this line emerged in the early 1990s when Paul Mann rejected the notion that the avant-garde occupies a stable site of resistance vis--vis society at large. Moving from a static to a more dynamic understanding of avant-garde gestures, Mann places the trajectory of the avant-garde within an enduring continuum of negation and affirmation, or what he calls the "anti and its recuperation." Recuperation, he argues, "is not simply the defeat of negation; rather both are functions of the same dialectal apparatus." The avant-garde, following Mann, is thus propelled forward in an ever expanding process of innovation that is dogged by an inescapable and equally expanding process of appropriation. Indeed, according to this argument, the two processes are one. Hostile though it may be to bourgeois culture, the avant-garde thus not only reaffirms the social mainstream in the authority its rebelliousness tacitly acknowledges; it also revitalizes the center of that exceptionally resilient mainstream by feeding it with fresh cultural expression.

Yet for all the significance of Mann's problematizing of the avant-garde's anticultural or negating gestures, his argument still falls well within the established paradigm of conceptualizing the avant-garde as an edge undulating outward from a center taken for granted. Indeed, Mann's argument meshes quite well with Michael Kirby's classic definition of the avant-garde in The Art of Time (1969): "'avant-garde' refers specifically to a concern with the historical directionality of art. An advanced guard implies a rear guard or at least the main body of troops following behind." There is a lot to be learned from the reaffirmation of this paradigm in Mann's argument, especially since the dialectic of "the anti and its recuperation," like the militaristic origins of the term avant-garde itself, bears a striking resemblance to the structures of Western bourgeois expansionism. This resemblance, while overlooked in Mann's arguments, touches upon what is perhaps the most disturbingly familiar and resoundingly conservative note within the seemingly dissonant and radical cords of avant-garde expression. Indeed the very notion of a front guard feeding the vital center presents us with a discomforting reminder that the term avant-garde first emerged as a characterization of artistic practice in the heyday of nineteenth-century European colonial enterprise, when edge-to-center/center-to-edge relationships structured the hegemonic mechanisms of empire. The subtle affirmation of empire in Artaud's interest in Balinese dance theater (which he encountered at the Paris Colonial Exhibition in 1931) is but one example of the myriad ways that colonialist attitudes and European avant-garde proclivities could circulate with relative ease within the same conceptual economy. Indeed, they often converged. Certainly this was the case with Western modernism's fascination with what it appropriated from other cultures under the conceptual rubric of primitivism, an appropriation that provided what subsequently became staple contours of European avant-garde expression.

The European construction of primitivism has far-reaching implications not merely for modernism in general but for the avant-garde in particular. Any serious rethinking of the avant-garde thus must grapple with this latter example from the contested edges of empire, where an assumption of European cultural superiority and its ability to civilize "savage" cultures after its own Western image provided ideological cover for the appropriation, on physical, intellectual, and aesthetic levels, of non-Western cultural artifacts. Significant steps toward precisely such a reassessment of the avant-garde play an important role in the latter chapters of Rebecca Schneider's book The Explicit Body in Performance, where, in the preface to an eloquent exploration of the blurred notions of the primitive and the feminine in the Western modernist imaginary, she argues that the European avant-garde positioned itself within racist and contradictory constructions of the primitive. While assuming, on the one hand, that the " 'primitive' practices and artifacts of 'other' cultures ... [were] less evolutionarily developed" than European culture, the avant-garde simultaneously embraced, on the other hand, "the savage primitive" as a mode of "confrontation [with] the tenets of high modernism." The context for these disparate inclinations, Schneider argues, was a nostalgia for the prelapsarian, which the Western avant-garde first projected onto African and Oceanic cultures and then embraced in a gesture of reestablishing "connectedness to all that modernity had 'lost.'" Whatever opposition such gestures mounted against the modern institutions of Western bourgeois society, the characterizations of non-Western cultures as prelapsarian or as less developed were but two sides of a single coin purchasing European cultural prerogatives at the expense of a richer and more dynamic intercultural exchange between different peoples. Predictably, it was an expense paid for by non-Western cultures.

While nostalgia for the prelapsarian is a signature trope of modernist aesthetics, the flip side of this nostalgia has played a far more enduring role in the history and historiography of the avant-garde. Indeed, there is a pressing need for scholars to rethink their understanding of the avant-garde in such a way as to disentangle the idea of an art that is "in advance of" from a simultaneous reaffirmation of the hierarchical assumption that non-Western cultures were less sophisticated or less developed than their European counterparts. This is no easy task, especially since the idea of an art that is "cutting edge" or that is "in advance of" tends to imply, by its very definition, a hierarchy of evolution. So if we are to break from the Western cultural chauvinism of movements like primitivism, we need to disabuse ourselves of Eurocentric truisms about the cutting edge of art that have found their way into works as important as Richard Schechner's The Future of Ritual. When in the early pages of that work Schechner mentions in passing that the "historical avant-garde took shape in Europe during the last decades of the nineteenth century.... [and] soon spread to many places around the world," the chronology he endorses reminds us that the center-to-edge/ edge-to-center framing of the avant-garde in scholarship is as much a model for constructing an ideologically loaded and biased history of European artistic influence as it is a model for characterizing the forward and most advanced positions of artistic expression. Ironically, it is a model that places Europe simultaneously at both center and edge: privileging it as the center of innovation while positioning it at the cultural frontiers as the harbinger of the new. Yet this truism propagates a myth, placing European expression at the cutting edge because European artists supposedly understood what non-Western artists were presumably incapable of comprehending about their own work. It is to erase the moments of exchange between European and non-European (e.g., African, Asian, Oceanic) cultures and to perpetuate the injustices that historically marked those exchanges by positing their consequence as a point of origin rather than as a product of an earlier moment of appropriation, subordination, and conquest. In short, the model assumed by Schechner (and he is certainly not alone in this assumption) tacitly elides the contested exchange between cultures and privileges a representation that posits the repackaged return of looted intellectual and aesthetic property "to many places around the world" as European originality, innovation, and enlightenment. The center-to-edge model underlying Schechner's chronology assumes a uniform, rectilinear historiography of aesthetic innovation that provides ideological cover for erasing a dubious and circular path of return.

From the "Cutting Edge" to "Rough Edges"

The one redeeming quality of this selective chronology of the avant-garde is that it is merely a matter of scholarly convention to locate the foundations of avant-garde expression subsequent to the moments of intercultural exchange rather than in the exchanges themselves. Since colonial history reminds us that these exchanges were far from equitable, one can speculate that this historiographic convention is another example supporting Walter Benjamin's contention that history is seldom written by the vanquished. But there is much more to be gained by breaking with convention and shifting our focus back to this earlier contested and largely erased moment. The issue here is not merely to offer some record of that moment, as does Christopher Innes's chapter "The Politics of Primitivism" in Avant-Garde Theatre, 1892-1992. It is rather to finally see the aporia beneath the apology in Innes's recognition, on the one hand, that "the whole artistic enterprise of interculturalism remains inherently problematic" because of its links to "nineteenth-century imperialism" while, on the other, he glosses over the implications of that recognition with the claim that "the attempt to reproduce the effects of 'primitive' or ritual theatre helps to explain avant-garde elements that might otherwise seem puzzling." For not only does that moment of problematic intercultural exchange belong to the history of the avant-garde, which, as Innes recognizes, is reason in itself for including it, but highlighting that moment of contested exchange provides us with a vantage point from which we might begin to retheorize the avant-garde as a whole-something that Innes does not do. To some extent, that vantage point sets three distinct theoretical areas into critical relief. Roughly speaking, those areas can be characterized as contested edges, simultaneous articulations, and apostate adaptations. But the individual titular categories are less important than the theorizing they facilitate.

Above all, a return to the site of cultural exchange and contestation between cultures gives us a very different vision of the center-to-edge/ edge-to-center relationship than that which heretofore has served as a paradigm for conceptualizing the avant-garde. The most crucial revision of that paradigm, gained in the step back to the site of cultural contestations, is the recognition of a plurality of edges devoid of an identifiable center, a plurality that the rectilinear center-to-edge/edge-to-center convention in scholarship on the avant-garde has obscured. Here, a rethinking of the avant-garde can fruitfully begin with a move from a singular to plural notion of the edge. In simplest terms, that move necessitates that we reconceptualize our notion of the vanguard within a theory of borders, and that we supplant the cutting edge with the rough edges of contestation, "struggle," and "negotiation," which as Michal Kobialka has noted, are implied in the "palimpsest quality" of borders "and the multifocal aspect of representational systems or practices used to narrate" them. Some justification for this turn to border theory as a segue into a reconceptualized vision of the avant-garde can be found in the fact that, while two-sided, the border is, like the cutting edge, "a site of resistance or compliance." It is, to echo once again Paul Mann's theory of the avant-garde, a site of "the anti and its recuperation." But more important still is the multisided nature of the border that moves us beyond the universalized notions of history and aesthetics implicit in the linear undercurrents of terms like cutting edge. For if nothing else, border theory reminds us that in culture(s) there is no such thing as a jagged edge protruding into an empty space. The cutting edge always cuts into its other, one edge not only going against another but also assuming the authority to define or erase the other in the act of expansion. How little is this sense of expansion to be found in the existing theories of the avant-garde! As of yet, scholarship has provided us with a notion of the avant-garde that is conceptualized in relation to its "rear guard" (Kirby) and characterized as "forward looking" (Schechner). Yet, conveniently, scholars have neglected to consider what the conventional conception of the avant-garde displaces in its forward march and what those displacements say about the paucity of our existing theories of the avant-garde.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472099310
• ISBN 13: 9780472099313
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312
• Editor: Harding James M., Rouse John