Abstract
James M. Harding. The Ghosts of Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 234 pages. $50.00. Ghosts materialize with some regularity in theater and performance studies, both as subject and as theory-enabling metaphor. Herbert Blau, Joseph Roach, and Marvin Carlson have all powerfully used haunting or ghosting as tropes to explain how theater and performance work. But only James M. Harding proposes to conduct an exorcism, with intention of casting out one particularly persistent specter from field of studies: Peter Burger's 1974 Theory of Avant-Garde, which has exerted an outsized influence since its 1984 publication in English. Burger's central claim, as many will recall, is that is distinguished by its critique of art as an institution--not only museums, academies, publishers, etc., in or through which people usually encounter art, but also prevailing ideas of what counts as art. For Burger, emerged in early twentieth century to dismantle barriers between art and supposedly erected, or at least reinforced, by aesthetic movement. With avant-garde, art ceased to function as a social safety valve for mildly disaffected bourgeoisie and became instead a life praxis. In Burger's Theory, ferocious mockery of Dada is essential stance, and once that mockery became a predictable source of pleasure for a large enough late-capitalist public, was effectively dead. Cage? Warhol? Merely neo-avant-garde to Burger. Harding wants to expel ghost of Theory so that other, more performance-friendly theories of avant-gardes might thrive. To do so he critiques at length not only Burger, in whom he rightly detects an anti-theatrical streak, but also entire Eulogist School of Avant-Garde Studies (51), among whose members he counts Richard Schechner and David Savran. Harding borrows that pithy phrase from Mike Sell, whose critical work serves as a major source for his own argument. Like Sell, Harding insists that all movements are internally pluralistic, always moving in multiple directions from multiple points of origin. Likewise, he resists any account of vanguard activity that explicitly or implicitly leaves off s in Indeed, Harding's fundamental problem with Theory of Avant-Garde is that it's theory of the avant-garde (9): singular, homogenizing, and totalizing. To characterize non-linear historiographical method with which he wants to replace Burger's theory, Harding adopts Deleuze and Guattari's botanical metaphor, rhizome. The book's strong general claim is that concepts of origin and originality that enable critics to speak of an historical mistake manner in which avant-gardes coalesce, develop, and disperse. While Rosalind Krauss and Martin Puchner, among others, have made similar arguments about misapplication of such concepts in histories of vanguard art and performance, point bears repeating. Harding repeats it convincingly, taking scholars to task for confusing demise of any one with death of all past, current, and future avant-gardes. To demonstrate what an attention to vanguard multiplicities can reveal, Harding revisits several performances well known to scholars, reading them grain (23) not only of artists' stated intentions but also against conventional critical wisdom. He is not first critic to note that Hugo Ball's verse without words, performed at Cabaret Voltaire in magical bishop (1) regalia, existed in tension with Ball's expressed desire for a unified, stable discourse (8). Harding does well, though, to celebrate that tension as a condition of plurality (9) that demands a flexible theoretical model. To emphasize how contested ideological terrain is within any particular avant-garde, he recounts squabble within Paris Dada that produced both sober, Breton-helmed 1921 mock of Maurice Barres, through which Breton and Aragon attempted to expulse Tristan Tzara, and Tzara's retaliatory trial of Breton, which degenerated into a Tzara-approved melee. …
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