Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement Lisa Wolford Wylam Mike Sell . Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. 336, illustrated. $60 (Hb). Recognized with an honourable mention for the Joe A. Callaway Prize for best book on theatre and drama, Mike Sell's Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism examines three distinct American experimental art practices. Written from a critical perspective informed by new historicism and performance studies and structured as a series of case studies, Sell's book historicizes the early performances of the Living Theatre, Allan Kaprow's Happenings, and the Black Arts Movement. Each, Sell demonstrates, emblematizes particular cultural needs and strategies of social change, while being generally imbricated in the politics of the Cold War period. Departing from the insight that radical avant-garde movements are nourished and sustained by the academy, Sell interrogates the normalizing and potentially compromising force of such critical labour; simultaneously, he highlights the challenges [End Page 467] that avant-garde performance practices pose for formalist, objectivizing modes of critique. Writing in the wake of the catastrophic attack of 11 September 2001, Sell reflects on various premature articulations of the avant-garde's demise, eulogies that ring false among the global struggles of the current historical moment. "By examining the efforts of cultural radicals during the sixties to open up or tear down oppressive symbolic, discursive, and institutional systems," he writes, "we can learn much about the possibilities and limitations of similar efforts in our own times" (4). Sell surveys key texts that theorize avant-garde production, highlighting the need for greater attention to materialist concerns, along with an increased self-reflexivity regarding the conservative tendencies implicit in criticism itself: norms of critical practice, he emphasizes, discourage and invalidate the emotional, sensorial, and somatic elements of the critic's response. Defining the avant-garde as "a radical, revolutionary cultural movement that works outside of parliamentary process and not merely an urge toward formal or conceptual experiment" (20), Sell argues that such forms of cultural production force the critic to acknowledge the limitations of both formalist analysis and utopian rhapsody, with their attendant dangers of mystification, a-historicism, and depoliticization. The book's first case study examines Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theatre, through which Artaud's influence was viscerally interjected into American political theatre and countercultural performance. Sell details the activist impulses that informed the Living Theatre's early work: their landmark production of Jack Gelber's The Connection, for example, limned the link between avant-garde production and drug prohibition by foregrounding jazz subculture and heroin addiction. Sell's analysis examines the extent to which even a movement with such anarchic goals as the Living Theatre remains caught within the very systems of authority and global capital it seeks to destabilize. He evocatively traces the ways in which The Connection's "translation of heroin from mere prop into dramaturgy" facilitated a mercurial form of countercultural bonding (130). Ably combining thick description and materialist analysis, Sell demonstrates how criticism can enrich understanding of both aesthetic and cultural dynamics in performance. Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism approaches the Fluxus movement and the emergence of "Happenings" in the United States by way of Allan Kaprow's Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, which Sell positions as emblematic for two reasons: first, its quasi-canonical status in academic constructions of the movement and, second, the challenges it poses to normative critical practices, which are implicitly rooted in panoptic knowledge and illusions of objectivity. [End Page 468] Sell complicates such totalizing perspectives by mapping the porous boundaries and transnational impulses behind Fluxus, Happenings, and related forms of cultural work that sought to resist commodification in the global marketplace. Dematerializing the art object, such work reveals as ludicrous the notion of the object's economic "value" as well as the investment of conventional modes of critique in quantifying such value. "The moment that value is undermined," Sell argues, "history shivers apart" (141). Drawing on the literary...