American Avant-Garde Research Articles

Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry by Christophe Wall-Romana (review)

Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry. Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. xv + 504 pp. is an ambiguous term. In past, it most often referred to a style of experimental filmmaking that followed a poetic or dream-like logic: early films of Man Ray (whose 1926 Emak Bakia, was subtitled cinepoeme); 1950s American avant-garde; and more recently, video-art. But a second sense of Cinepoetry inverts subject-predicate relation. Used this way, term refers not to poetic films but to film-like poems--to poetry modeled on or inspired by cinema. It is this second meaning that Christophe Wall-Romana theorizes and applies to an expansive study of twentieth-century French poetry in his book Cinepoetry. Almost every major modern French poet is discussed. There are chapters on Mallarme, Raymond Roussel, Cocteau, Epstein, Breton, and Cendrars, as well as post-World War II schools such as Lettrism, and more recent work of Max Jeanne, Maurice Roche, and Nelly Kaplan. The book persuasively argues that advent and evolution of cinema had a pronounced effect on these writers--principally as a conduit through which new aesthetic, perceptual, and technological concepts were experienced and integrated into their poetry. Broadly speaking, Wall-Romana's method consists first of establishing a biographical link between a given poet and cinema through extensive, and amply annotated, historical research (there are close to 1,500 footnotes); he then deploys concepts borrowed from film and media theory to analyze particular poems. The novelty of Mallarme's Un Coup de des (1897), for example, which Wall-Romana calls the first poem mediated by derived from emerging ideas of mechanical projection and automated movement; Roussell's La Vue (1902) reflected a nascent awareness of photo-cinematic difference; for Cocteau, whose later career in cinema is well known, key early influence lay in projectors ghostly, immersive embodiment; and for Blaise Cendrars as well as a generation of veterans returning home from WWI, films discontinuous editing presented a model for a post-traumatic temporality. Other writers--all way up to present--are understood in relation to decoupage, haptic, and apparatus theory. As such an overview suggests, theoretical movement of Cinepoetry runs exactly counter to that of adaptation studies, once privileged mode of trans-disciplinary thinking across film and literature. Instead of following antecedent literary achievements into newer medium of film, Wall-Romana projects concepts from film and media theory back to domain of a prior literature. In this basic gesture Cinepoetry belongs to a new wave of interdisciplinary studies that correlate rise of cinema in early twentieth century with parallel developments in literary arts--in particular, emergence of modernism. (1) For critics interested in relations across media, this is both exciting and validating. And yet it also reveals challenges inherent to various models yet available for cross-disciplinary work. Many of these challenges are variants of standard problematic around influence familiar to any literary critic or art historian. For instance, Wall-Romana dedicates much of his chapter on Mallarme to pursuit of an ultimately unverifiable hypothesis that poet was a cinephile. We are presented with a map that shows proximity of Mallarme's residence to a movie theater; a comic strip poet drew that resembles a storyboard; published mentions of cinema by his friends; and so on. Given foundational status that Un Coup de des occupies for concrete poetry, desire to subsume poem under cinepoetry banner is understandable. But more Wall-Romana speculates on a biographical link between Mallarme and cinema, more circumstantial case appears--and less relevant it feels to insights contained in his textual analysis. …

The avant-garde and the unAmerican: Experimental theatre and drama from Europe to the united states after world war II

ABSTRACTSince the inception of the absurd, avant-garde drama has continued to be written. Yet in the late 1960s we entered the era of postmodernism, in which two events inhibited the advance of the avant-garde. The first is the embrace by postmodern playwrights of a stylistic pluralism, an eclectic and often self-reflexive mixing of different styles from different periods. The second was, and is, the postmodern deification of ‘performance’ through the merging of author and director in a single ‘superstar’ and through the breaking down of boundaries between dramatic forms and performance styles, between styles and periods and between the arts themselves. Struggling within the confines of a self-reflexive, formal orientation and against an ill-defined social context of liberal and diffusive pluralism, the American avant-garde has attempted to display a creative and critical vitality, but has raised only minimal expectations. It countenances an active and often aggressive assertion of individual will, yet betrays an uneasy acquiescence and resignation. Its most significant efforts continue to involve the self-conscious exploration of the nature, limits and possibilities of drama and theatre in contemporary society, but the vision of the future provided by such work is tentative and unclear, as if the avant-garde dare not move beyond doubt and distrust towards an inspired vision.

An Interview with Ben Lerner

An Interview with Ben Lerner Gayle Rogers (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution BEN LERNER Courtesy of Coffee House Press [End Page 218] One of the most important and prodigious young writers in America today, Ben Lerner is an omnivorous reader whose work situates itself in relation to a host of antecedents, many of them notably opposed to theories of writing as the expression or revelation of a singular, coherent interiority. Perhaps the clearest line extends, as Marjorie Perloff might trace it, from the early modernism of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams to Objectivism, through the Black Mountain poets and Language poetry, and to current figures such as John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, and those whom Stephen Burt has termed "elliptical" poets. If there is or was a tradition of the American avant-garde, Lerner would seem to belong to it, and the theories of referentiality and unoriginality posited by Ron Silliman or Allen Grossman that he cites in this interview seem explicatory. But this genealogy is partial. One is likely to find, in Lerner's poetry and prose alike, traces of or allusions to Leo Tolstoy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Walt Whitman; or quotations from Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, or Jacques Derrida colliding with cliche's from TV melodrama; or oblique citations of theories of images and simulacra, not as explanatory or exegetical concepts, but as figures for the acts of poesis and consumption. His writing continually changes shape, employing masks, borrowing and recycling language with both innovative and self-alienating flair, and emphasizing process over product, composing over composition, and limits over ideals of transcendence. Lerner is a multiform [End Page 219] talent who crosses genres, modes, and media to represent a leading edge of contemporary writing, and he has already found success in both academic and literary "prize cultures." All of this—the intra- and extratextual—is complexly woven together in Lerner's debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). Called by Lorin Stein "one of the funniest (and truest) novels I know of by a writer of his generation" and praised ubiquitously en route to winning multiple awards, the book takes its title from one of Ashbery's opaque poems in The Tennis Court Oath (1962). Ashbery himself sees Atocha as "[a]n extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life"; indeed, its fusion of poetic and novelistic materials reveals much about the relationship between these and other genres in our day. Leaving the Atocha Station is the first-person narrative of Adam Gordon, a sort of untrustworthy alter ego of Lerner. He is a habitual liar, a drug-addled poet who thinks of himself as a fraud, a vain and fragile womanizer, and perhaps most importantly for the novel itself, a character who steals others' experiences and language and relates them as if they were his own. Adam spends a year in Madrid on a prestigious fellowship, working on his "project," which is to be (we are told) an epic poem about Franco, fascism, and the Spanish Civil War. He frequently claims to have progressed from one "phase" of his project to the next, but little evidence supports that assertion. He can't keep track of which lies about himself—that his mother died, that his father is a fascist—he has told to which of his two girlfriends. But the external plot—Adam's time in Madrid—is more a setting for the bigger concerns that the novel takes up, which are the relationships among language, experience, art, mediation, authorship, and the spectacle of violence. The novel culminates with Adam's witnessing the bombing of the Atocha Station in Madrid, on March 11, 2004, an event that he wants to "feel," to experience as presence, but only absorbs secondhand through newspapers, others' responses, and afterimages. The major event of Leaving the Atocha Station becomes a nonevent; most of the novel takes place when nothing happens, when Adam drifts or escapes into gaps between conventional communications and [End Page 220] exchanges. In a compelling and darkly comic style, Lerner also builds on the recombinatory, unsettled nature of his own poetry. Adam, whose Spanish is dubious (he claims), relates...

“How Do You Imagine Latin America?” Questioning Latin American Art and Identity in Print

In this essay I examine two questionnaires issued in Latin American magazines that offer different models for constituting Latin American art and its place in the transatlantic imagination in the early twentieth century. In 1928 the Cuban magazine Revista de Avance asked contributors from throughout Latin America, “What should Latin American art be? What should the attitude of Latin American artists towards European art be?” Three years later the Latin American magazine Iman , based in Paris, asked European Surrealists, “How do you imagine Latin America?” These two questionnaires, issued a few years apart, exemplify the tension between the autochthonous and cosmopolitan strains of the Latin American avant-garde, a struggle between autonomy from the international and integration with it. My essay first asserts the importance of the magazine form to the development and circulation of the Latin American avant-garde and then spotlights the overlooked genre of the questionnaire to centralize its role in defining a local and international artistic identity in print. Next, I examine each magazine’s questionnaire in depth to explicate the collective formation of an imagined “Latin American art” that emerged from the questions and responses, along with the modes of translation that they proposed. Lastly, I assess the implications of these versions of Latin American art to determine Latin America’s place within the field of global modernism, as articulated by the artists, writers, and editors who shaped it.

Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde. By James M. Harding. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; 244 pp. $60.00 cloth, $32.50 paper, e-book available. Artaud and His Doubles. By Kimberly Jannarone. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; 272 pp. $55.00 cloth, $30.00 paper, e-book available

<i>Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde.</i> By James M. Harding. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; 244 pp. $60.00 cloth, $32.50 paper, e-book available. <i>Artaud and His Doubles.</i> By Kimberly Jannarone. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; 272 pp. $55.00 cloth, $30.00 paper, e-book available

Dada in Paris. Revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet. Translated by Sharmila Ganguly (review)

Reviewed by: Dada in Paris. Revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet. Translated by Sharmila Ganguly Luca Somigli (bio) Michel Sanouillet. Dada in Paris. Revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet. Translated by Sharmila Ganguly. The MIT Press. 2009. xii, 705. US $39.95 Few texts have played as seminal a role in reconstructing the history of the avant-garde as Michel Sanouillet’s Dada à Paris, first published in 1965, revised and expanded by Anne Sanouillet in 1993 and 2005,and now finally translated into English. Writing at a time when Dada was seen as little more than a phase in the prehistory of surrealism, Sanouillet conducted extensive archival research and interviewed many of the protagonists of that brief but groundbreaking cultural moment to provide a detailed account of the complex network of relations that, over a period of less than four years, from 1920 to 1923, brought together many of the protagonists of the European and North American avant-garde in the Dada adventure. A concise but comprehensive introduction sketches the genesis of the movement in Zurich and its rapid dissemination throughout Europe and in New York. The book then shifts its focus to the French capital, where a group of young writers – the ‘three musketeers’ André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault – formed in the poetic environment of Apollinaire’s ‘new spirit,’ found a new direction for their literary research in the works of Dada co-founder Tristan [End Page 774] Tzara and in particular in his ‘Dada Manifesto 1918.’ By January 1920, Tzara was himself in Paris, where he had been preceded by Francis Picabia, and soon they, Breton and his friends, and several other artists (mostly writers) joined forces. Sanouillet chronicles in minute detail, sometimes literally day by day, the public initiatives of the group – art exhibits, publications, and most especially public ‘performances’ – meant to challenge and undercut the cultural values of their mainstream audiences. He also describes the rivalries that opposed Dada to other avant-garde factions (Cocteau was especially detested) and the internal divisions that eventually and perhaps predictably tore the movement apart. The narrative is well-known. By mid-1921, two antagonistic conceptions of Dada emerged: one, embodied by Tzara, identified its spirit in the pure undermining of all positive values and in the immediacy of the gratuitous gesture. The other, with Breton as its main proponent, sought to channel that destructive impulse toward the articulation of ‘a line of direction, if not a goal,’ and would eventually result in the emergence of a full-fledged avant-garde formation, namely surrealism. As the author rightly notes, in Paris, a city that by the early 1920shad seen and heckled and finally accepted every possible artistic avant-garde, Dada found itself confined to the sphere of literature (visual artists such as Picabia or Max Ernst had been formed outside France) and for the most part did not push its revolution into the wider artistic field, as in New York, or into the domain of politics, as in Germany. In its struggle with Dada, the institution of literature proved its remarkable resilience. I said that the narrative is well-known, but it is so precisely because Sanuillet’s book has played a crucial role in shaping it. Indeed, one of the reasons why Dada in Paris remains of such interest almost half a century after its initial publication is that, even in this updated edition with its references to the international consecration of Dada in the last twenty years, one can perceive behind the impeccable historical reconstruction the passions and antagonisms that in 1965 still divided the protagonists of this cultural season and of which the historian himself was by no means a neutral witness. (In one of his most scathing but also revealing comments, Sanouillet describes Breton and his faction as ‘champions of a respectful avant-garde, apprentice mandarins committed to playing out the futile game that would lead them from a juvenile revolution to the sanction of the Nouvelle Revue Française.’) Dada in Paris is a book that deftly balances critical rigour and militant passion, the detachment of the historian and the proximity of the witness. With its immense apparatus, including some 250 letters and...

Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde (review)

Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde (review)

“Baseball over Tea-Cakes”: Major League Baseball in American Avant-Garde Poetry from Imagism to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

“Baseball over Tea-Cakes”Major League Baseball in American Avant-Garde Poetry from Imagism to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Richard Parker (bio) Harold Seymour and Dorothy Seymour Mills begin their history of baseball by observing that “Baseball in America is many things. But, contrary to widespread belief, professional baseball is not a sport. It is a commercialized amusement business.”1 They go on to demonstrate that baseball “is not only a business but a monopoly as well,” detailing Major League Baseball’s already immense scale at the time of the 1959 season. My history of Major League Baseball considers this specific corporate incarnation in American poetry, beginning with Ezra Pound and Imagism in the 1910s and concluding with the Language poets in 1970s and 1980s, passing through the intermediate stages of Objectivist verse, the Black Mountain poets, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats and the New York Schools. This genealogy makes for a somewhat perverse history of American writing on baseball; with the exception of Jack Spicer, baseball is not a significant subject for any of the poets I will address here, and none of them can reasonably be considered “baseball poets.”2 My history will, in fact, be one of writers pointedly not writing about baseball, and the nuances in their approach to this avoidance. Underlying this non-history is a century of growth in Major League Baseball that often matches changes within the avant-garde, with the many ambiguities and controversies of westward expansion and a rampantly postmodern, late-capitalist consumerism providing snug analogies to developments in American poetry. My history of Major League Baseball in avant-garde American poetry begins with the young Ezra Pound, a writer with very little to say about baseball, a poet who wrote no poetry on baseball and who would only come to approach baseball late in his career. His early example is, however, germane to the manner in which the other writers I will approach deal with baseball in their poetry, chiefly through his early mentoring of the Imagist movement. Imagism’s inability to address an amassed urban proletariat, as displayed in Pound’s early work as those undifferentiated “faces in the crowd” of “In a [End Page 87] Station of the Metro,” or the “the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor” in “The Garden,” was endemic.3 Through his Imagist phase and later Pound was unable to convincingly depict a differentiated, modern, urban working-class. Rather than the urban poor, Pound’s sympathy would be for the rural peasants of an exoticised China (a sympathy most clearly displayed by the early Pound in the adaptive translations of Cathay [1915]). As far back as 1874, Mark Twain had already warned of baseball’s dangerous proximity to the big business interests of the Gilded Age, accusing baseball of becoming “the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century!”4 With the arrival of the Imagists in the years immediately preceding the Great War, this connection between baseball, mass entertainment, and big business would have been even clearer, and this movement’s refusal of such subjects, along with its transatlantic ambivalence towards Americana in general, make it unsurprising that they did not deal directly with the sport. Their example would, however, provide a model for the approach towards baseball employed by the poets I will discuss here. Imagism originated in London, and the poems quoted above describe London and Paris, neither of which cities held Major League Baseball franchises in the 1915 and 1916 seasons. Across the Atlantic, however, America’s stay-at-home poets would make a more direct approach to the national pastime, and in some cases would choose to adapt the techniques of Imagism to this project. William Carlos Williams’s much anthologized poem, “At the Ball Game,” originally an untitled section of Spring and All (1923), while going further to approach both the baseball crowd and their game, would transfer some of the Imagist ambivalence to the spectacle of the sports crowd. Like Pound’s crowds these spectators are quite homogenous: The crowd at the ball game is moved uniformly by a spirit...

&lt;i&gt;Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs Erika Balsom (bio) Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs; EDITED BY Paul Arthur, David E. James, and Michele Pierson Oxford University Press, 2011 Ken Jacobs has been a key figure of the American avant-garde cinema for over half a century, but his films, videos, and performances have never been more relevant. As 3-D makes its return to suburban multiplexes everywhere, raising questions of the precise nature of cinematic illusionism and the allure of its spectacular attraction, Jacobs's extensive work with stereoscopy and visual astonishment provides a more thorough investigation into these matters than can be found in any critical literature to date. When the obsolescence of photochemical film poses serious questions for avant-garde cinema, a sphere of practice long invested in the specific qualities of that medium, Jacobs's unequivocal transition to digital video offers a rich case study in what changes and what remains the same after celluloid. Scores of young filmmakers and video makers are ransacking the audiovisual archive in the production of found-footage work, but Jacobs was there first. And as standard theatrical exhibition is no longer the default situation in which moving images are consumed, the need to think through an existing history of paracinematic forms—such as Jacobs's Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern performances— becomes imperative. In short, despite belonging to the foundational generation of the American avant-garde, there is a sense that Jacobs's moment is now. All of these phenomena suggest that the appearance of Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs is rather timely, but as the first book dedicated solely to the filmmaker, its arrival is terribly belated. Following in the wake of single-filmmaker anthologies such as To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground (1992) and Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker (2005), both edited by David E. James, Optic Antics assembles a diverse group of contributors, each bringing a distinct method and style to the project. In a prospectus written for Oxford University Press, the late Paul Arthur wrote that this anthology would not function "as a resolution or systematic untangling of the many contrasting, sometimes dissonant, chords in Jacobs's work" but instead would be "conceived as a discursive analogue to its underlying spirit of raucous contention" (19). These essays very [End Page 136] much fulfill Arthur's hope, combining personal tribute, artists' projects, scholarly analysis, and historical narrative to produce a compelling and multifaceted account of Jacobs's practice. An Art Spiegelman cartoon detailing how a screening in Jacobs's class spawned the idea for Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986) sits easily next to David E. James's parsing of the literary-historical background of The Sky Socialist (1964-68); Amy Taubin's fascinating interview with Flo Jacobs, "Flo Talks!," leads into Nicole Brenez's highly theoretical account of the figural economy of the various projects Jacobs derived from Billy Bitzer's 1905 film Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son. However, despite the clear investment Optic Antics demonstrates in combining a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory approaches to Jacobs's life and work, across the book's twenty-three contributions, key concerns—and key omissions—emerge. Central to the book is an effort to understand Jacobs's use of found footage from the preclassical cinema as something other than a materialist inquiry into the nature of the film medium. The notion that Jacobs might be engaged in a variety of ontological investigations proper to structural film has been perhaps the dominant way of thinking about the filmmaker's work since the publication of P. Adams Sitney's seminal Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde. While this dimension of Jacobs's filmmaking garnered a positive evaluation from Sitney, as the intellectual and artistic climates shifted in the 1980s, others would brandish the label of formalist as an epithet. The fascinating time capsule of experimental film culture offered in Scott MacDonald's "Ken Jacobs and the Robert Flaherty Seminar" describes the uproar that resulted when Jacobs showed XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX (1980)—a Nervous System performance using a short pornographic film from the early 1920s—at the 1992 seminar. Audience members accused Jacobs...

Nothing & Everything: The Influence of Buddhism on the American Avant-Garde 1942 - 1962, by Ellen Pearlman.

Nothing & Everything: The Influence of Buddhism on the American Avant-Garde 1942 - 1962. By Ellen Pearlman. Berkeley: Evolver Editions, 2012, 264 pages, ISBN 978-1583943632 (paperback), $21.95.Reviewed by Marc OlmstedEllen Pearlman does a pretty bang-up job in a too slim volume on the subject of Buddhism's effect on the American avant-garde from 1942 to 1962. Because of the specificity of the time line, this is mostly the influence of Zen Buddhism as popularized by the writings of premier Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki.The early chapter on D.T. Suzuki himself may be the gem of the entire book. We have an intimate portrait of a man often seen as basically an academic more than a practitioner of Zen. Here the whole person emerges, and we see how special (and brilliant) he was, and the depth of his actual practice, which includes a description of his kensho or flash of enlightenment.The chapter on John Cage that follows this one is also exceptional, with a similar portrait to Suzuki's of both the man and his music. For those unfamiliar with Cage, his concerts were playful and maddening, using randomness, instruments that could include household items, and even the shifts of the uncomfortable audience in their seats to suggest an almost enforced Zen sitting confrontation with boredom and inattentiveness.The book ends very nicely with a dovetailing account of Beats Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky meeting D.T. Suzuki in 1957. It is a story that has been told elsewhere, but here we also get the memories of Suzuki's then-secretary Mihoko Okamura and her own account of Suzuki's positive summation of the Beats, even as he understood the discipline that was still absent.As Pearlman gets into considerably denser material with Suzuki's influence beyond and through Cage, it is hard not to sense a need to hurry things up in the limited time she has left. Descriptions of the Fluxus group that came out of Cage, and the influence of Zen on Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock becomes increasingly a laundry list and brief catalog sketch. There is still room to discuss the pre-surrealist movement Dada and the strangely Western karma of Zen-influenced art on a newly secular postwar Japanese avant-garde. There is the intuited if unintentional Zen of presenting a urinal as art (with Marcel Duchamp signing it R. Mutt) as a natural progression that would eventually yield Andy Warhol's soup cans, both artists likely without awareness of Zen theory of the ordinary and the boring. Besides a secondary influence of Buddhists such as Cage on an artist like Warhol, one might also consider artists naturally arriving (as perhaps Duchamp did) at some of the same empiric conclusions about mind itself in efforts to deconstruct concept and perception.By the time we reach the New York collaboration between Saburo Hasegawa, the first Japanese abstract painter, the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and Franz Kline the European-American painter, the absence of good photographs becomes somewhat like listening to a restaurant menu. It is fascinating, important, but very hard to grasp without previous knowledge.The tidy thesis of Suzuki as prime source works well for the most part, except with its lack of influence on Kerouac, who found his Buddhism elsewhere in the public library and was drawn to different elements closer to Theravada and (at least in spirit) Pure Land Schools of China and Japan, the latter mostly because of his Catholic background and propensity for religious devotion. Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen were clearly influenced by D.T. Suzuki, but Ginsberg's Buddhism is owed primarily to Kerouac, and doesn't really even begin to blossom until his trip to India in 1962, even if he had read D.T. Suzuki prior even to hearing about Buddhism from Kerouac. Kerouac in his book Dharma Bums shows he is not all that interested in Zen specifically, even after meeting Snyder and Whalen. …

Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde (review)

Reviewed by: Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde Tara Rodman Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde. By James M. Harding. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; pp. 244. Cutting Performances demonstrates that feminist performances can, and should, play a crucial role in our understanding of the American avant-garde. James Harding's aims here are twofold. First, to the extent that he endeavors to rescue the feminist artists in his case studies from historical disregard, he does so not merely to reinsert their works into the canon, but to prove that there is, in fact, a lineage of feminist avant-garde performance of which more recent female artists remain ignorant. And second, and perhaps more important, is the prescriptive aspect of the book: Harding proposes a feminist historiography of the avant-garde, in which the avant-garde itself is redefined in relation to feminist performances. [End Page 672] Harding's project focuses primarily on collage. Seen as an aesthetic, rather than strictly a graphic-art medium, collage is a juxtaposition of texts, bodies, voices, and objects that asserts a multiplicity of meaning. For Harding, these juxtapositions call "attention to that which remains unaccounted for in conventional representation and logic" (25), and thus offer a model for feminist historiography, where feminist performance neither replaces male innovation nor constitutes a separate artistic sphere, but is instead inherent to a history of the avant-garde that this book aims to tell. Harding's five case studies feature artists from throughout the twentieth century whose iconoclasm resisted the patriarchal assumptions of the mainstream and went further than their supposedly more challenging male peers. One of the strengths of the book is the way in which Harding not only positions these performances as historically important, but grounds his feminist historiography in concrete details that show that these women were explicitly responding to both the work and the behavior of the male artists surrounding them, in addition to broader patriarchal social institutions. In the first chapter, Harding analyzes Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's skin-baring costumes of detritus as a rejoinder to the timid gender blurring of her contemporaries, such as Marcel Duchamp's female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy. While Duchamp dressed up within the safety of Man Ray's studio (and, Harding speculates, only from the waist up), the baroness paraded through New York City streets, inviting and enduring repeated instances of police repression. Harding argues for von Freytag-Loringhoven's status as the "mother" of American Dada, as both her body and apartment—two "female" realms—became canvasses for a living collage of sexual and artistic transgression. The second chapter, which lays out much of Harding's theory of collage, examines Gertrude Stein's 1946 The Mother of Us All as an example of how performance undermines the authority of texts. According to Harding, the opera's layering of history and fiction destabilizes both forms of narrative, thereby escaping constrictive, unified meaning in favor of nonlinear, heterogeneous representations of experience. Harding next analyzes Yoko Ono's Cut Piece as a violent "unmaking of collage" that challenged the rhetoric of immediacy and authenticity of contemporaneous happenings artists like Allan Kaprow and Claus Oldenburg. Cut Piece (performed five times between 1964 and 1966) makes clear that such immediacy was still governed by patriarchal practices, because the activities audience members chose to carry out reiterated norms of sexual and racial dominance. Further, Harding's analysis of Cut Piece highlights the fact that collage is part of an artistic tradition that is implicated in the institutions of patriarchy, but it also foregrounds the historicity of collage, opening up the possibility for its recovery as a feminist aesthetic. In his fourth chapter, Harding again takes up performance's challenge to textual authority through Carolee Schneemann's participation in the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London. Her physical performance of "found behaviors" and fragments read aloud from the keynote addresses, paired with a screening of her erotic film Fuses, contested the conference organizers' plan for decorous academic papers on the topic of liberation. Harding argues that, while the emerging academic practice of...

Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde. By James M. Harding. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pp. ix + 222. £53.50/$60 Hb.

Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde. By James M. Harding. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pp. ix + 222. £53.50/$60 Hb.

Total performance

Emerging in the 1960s, ethnopoetics sought to bridge the gap between ethnography and poetry in presenting indigenous oral literatures from around the world to contemporary US audiences. Jerome Rothenberg, a leading figure of the movement, developed a set of innovative translation techniques based on a perceived affinity between oral literature and the formal experiments of European and American avant-gardes. This paper discusses Rothenberg's search for universal forms and themes across widely divergent cultures and times, arguing that his translations of oral literature subvert the universalizing tendencies of his critical work and assert the irreducible difference of the source texts. They do so by emphasizing the moment of performance unique to each text. Rather than providing a transcript of a hypothetical performance, Rothenberg's translations enact a performance of their own with the use of avant-garde techniques adopted from concrete, visual and sound poetry.

Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists and the American Avant-Garde (review)

Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists and the American Avant-Garde (review)

Cutting performances: collage events, feminist artists, and the American avant-garde

Cutting performances: collage events, feminist artists, and the American avant-garde

The Poet’s Place: William Carlos Williams and the Production of an American Avant-Garde

Poets in Exile MODERNITY'S grand narratives institute their own radical dismantling (510). Susan Stanford Friedman's conception of in the previous sentence captures in miniature what many other critics noted: is overreaching, unstable, and, above all, contradictory.1 Friedman's conception of also leads to understanding modernism as a form of critical which suggests rather than being the sanctioned aesthetic of modernity, as we might assume from its name, that modernism is modernity's active, and radical, antagonist (Somigli 5). As Astradur Eysteinsson says in Concept of Modernism, modernism is attempt to interrupt the that we live and understand as a social, if not 'normal,' way of life and is thus a concept [ . . . ] signifying a paradigmatic shift, a major revolt, beginning in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, against the prevalent literary and aesthetic traditions of the Western world (6, 2). Luca Somigli narrows Eysteinsson's definition by arguing that modernism developed as a response to the fallen condition of the poet in modernity (9). In making this argument he refers to the example of Charles Baudelaire, and in particular Baudelaire's prose poem Lost Halo - a text Somigli argues provides an allegory for the cultural crisis that poets faced in the latter half of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries.2 With the triumph of capital ist and positivist science and the entrenchment and institutionalization of their attendant grand narratives, individuals who found themselves outside of those narratives were made to wonder who, what, and where they were (Somigli 7). Modernity, after all, if it is understood as a grand narrative (or multiple grand narratives), would seem to be offering solutions to the problems of history. Modernity's solutions, however, are necessarily exclusive. Baudelaire brings to the surface what these Utopian projects suppressed in their rise to ideological dominance, and what has ultimately been left out of their final solutions. exclusion most significant for Baudelaire, of course, is that the poet, or at least the poet as he had been historically understood, seems to no place in the projects of modernity.3 Baudelaire allegorizes the predicament of the modern poet with a story of a poet who loses his halo while crossing a busy boulevard. Another man, recognizing the halo-less poet in a house of ill fame, drinking quintessences and eating ambrosia, addresses the poet, and eventually asks whether or not the poet, in an attempt to get his halo back, will put out a notice or have the police advertise for it. poet replies, Good God no! I'm fine here. You're the only one who recognized me. Besides, dignity irks me. And I'm glad to think that some bad poet will pick it up and insolently stick it on his head. Make someone happy, what a delight! And especially a happy someone I can laugh at! What about X, or Z! Right! Wouldn't that be funny! (Baudelaire 113) Somigli argues that what Baudelaire lays bare in this text is that the loss of the halo, the symbolic insignia of the poet's social status and function, is the result of a transformation that pushes him to the margins of capitalist economy (9). In Walter Benjamin's terms, the poet, a remnant of precapitalist society, is evacuated of his aura. This has real benefits according to Baudelaire, in that the poet is now able to come into contact with cultural realms from which his halo had previously kept him apart; however, these contacts come at the price of his public voice. No longer do poets an exalted place from which to speak; lacking their haloes, nothing now sanctions their voices other than that which sanctions everything in modernity: money. Baudelaire's prose poem thus enacts in miniature, as Marshall Berman points out, the historical development that Marx and Engels describe in Communist Manifesto: The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked to with reverent awe. …

Mapping the avant-gardes

Starting from the premise that, as a Western cultural concept/construct, ‘avantgarde’ is a twentieth-century phenomenon involving a programmatic break with the dominant norms of a given art or medium or of transmedial cultural practices, mapping the avant-gardes involves dealing primarily with three kinds of relations: (1) those of the post-Second World War avant-gardes to the earlier avant-gardes; (2) those of the peripheral European cultures to those of the centre(s); and (3) those of the avant-gardes in post-colonial cultures to those of the European and, after the Second World War, the European and U.S.-American centres. The article will pay special attention to the third type of relations, and in particular to the conditions governing the transformative reception of models by Latin American avant-gardes after the First World War and the partially changed conditions after the Second World War. In very general terms, one can claim that the earlier Latin American avant-gardes were concerned with achievi...

&lt;i&gt;Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre Jim Fitzmorris Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre. Sarah Bay-Cheng. New York: Routledge, 2005. xii+207 pp. $26.95 (paper). Sarah Bay-Cheng’s Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre begins again the ongoing debate about the simultaneously praised and derided American writer/theorist’s place in the dramatic canon. The success of Bay-Cheng’s project of reclaiming Gertrude Stein’s dramatic work rises and falls on the writer’s conclusion that Stein’s plays are not only innovative with dramatic form but ultimately worthy of the stage, rather than simply chamber pieces that are better read than seen. In other words, Bay-Cheng asks and attempts to answer the question, “Do the plays play?” This “stageability” (20) then serves to forcibly allow the plays to address the relevant political, social, and aesthetic questions of the avant-garde not only for Stein’s own time but also in the contemporary stage work of theatre artists such as Susan Lori-Parks, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson. Mama Dada is a necessary and engaging view into Stein’s always-emerging, forever-receding shadow on the landscape of contemporary nontraditional playwriting; however, Bay-Cheng’s study can also be an occasionally infuriating series of absences for the reader more interested in the stagecraft or actual performance reconstruction surrounding Stein’s work. After beginning with Stein’s fixture within and emergence from the early movements of the avant-garde, experimental cinema, and the germination of what would become queer theory, Bay-Cheng spends the majority of Mama Dada in the critical analysis of and the engagement with Stein’s dramatic texts and theatrical productions as they were realized and received in her lifetime. These analyses include two of Stein’s most celebrated works, “Four Saints in Three Acts” and “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights,” along with her monumental dramatic coda “The Mother of Us All.” Mama Dada concludes with an overview of Stein’s widespread but still underappreciated influence on the American avant-garde of the present day. The book’s structure fixes Stein in a continuum; Bay-Cheng playfully refers to it as a “continuous present” throughout the text, where Stein is always a presence but not always seen, even in her own lifetime. Chapter 5, “Atom and Eve: Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights,” illuminates what is both rewarding and lacking in Mama Dada. Bay-Cheng traces Stein’s modern retelling of the Faust legend from its incubation within the novel that would become Ida, A Novel (1941) into a fully realized stage production. Using both the photos from the program and Stein’s journal notes from her viewing of Mozart’s [End Page 172] Don Giovanni in 1938, Bay-Cheng shows Stein’s inspiration for bringing the Faustus story to the stage: “Thus, it is not difficult, based on the conclusion of Don Giovanni—in which the title character descends into hell—and the program’s references to previous productions of Faustian operas, to see how Stein began combining the elements that would eventually become Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights” (76). The ingenious use of the primary documents shows a clear demonstration of Stein’s understanding of the necessity for theatrically realizing her rumination on the classic tale of a soul sold for enlightenment. Bay-Cheng’s analysis of Stein’s journal notes and Don Giovanni’s program then sets the stage for her in-depth examination of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights as a text with no past or future but only a present contained in a technological nightmare that is debilitating in its blinding brilliance. However, the insight of the analysis of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights ends before arriving into its actual production. For all the time Mama Dada spends deconstructing theatrical texts, it does not give anywhere near equal weight to the reconstruction of the plays as actual theatrical events. Stein’s work, as Bay-Cheng rightfully asserts, calls attention to the “continuous present” of existence where nothing is as it previously was or will be. Of all the arts, theatre, with its inherent ephemerality, makes more visible the impossibility of actual...

Strategic Canonization and the Audio-Vision-ary Pragmatics of Stan VanDerBeek’s Culture: Intercom

Revisioning the significance of Stan VanDerBeek is beset with a number of historiographical problems that tell us a great deal about history-making in technological times. Why, and more importantly, how, does a key experimental filmmaker breaking radical ground in animation and a technoart innovator of the American avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s fall into complete obscurity? The author argues that a very similar process is taking place around the reductive term ‘digital media’, the shift in technocultural production and consumption that rendered all filmic consciousness as animation.

Anagram, Gestalt, Game in Maya Deren: Reconfiguring the Image in Post-war Cinema

This article examines the relationship between the film work of American Avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and Cold-war science, particularly the sciences of Gestalt psychology, cybernetics, game theory, and anthropology. The central concern is to link Deren's investment in time and in transforming the cinematic image with contemporaneous developments in science, technology, and politics. Using her engagement with the cybernetician and anthropologist Gregory Bateson as a frame, the essay demonstrates that Deren's attitude to temporality and representation is both similar to and radically different from that emerging in psychology, anthropology, communication science and game theory after the war. This cinema excavates the probabilistic and reflexive nature of time, as understood in both art and science during this period, to create new associations between subjects, screens, and life. However, Deren's work produces associations and potentials that the game theories and technologies with which she is concerned do not. Her work utilizes the discourse of temporality and representation taken from these sciences, while refusing to repeat without difference, and so blocking a return to older discourses of objectivity, authority, and knowledge.