Avant-garde Strategies Research Articles

Digital Transformations

Digital Transformations

Resisting Convention: The Films of Joe Comerford

RESISTING CONVENTION: THE FILMS OF JOE COMERFORD JERRY WHITE Throughout his career, filmmaker Joe Comerford has fiercely challenged mainstream ideas about Irish selfhood. Juxtaposed with the images of Ireland that have filled film screens until the 1960s, Comerford’s work is assertively anti-romantic and offers a rigorously anti-colonial critique of the “New Ireland.” In his treatment of landscape, for example, Comerford eschews traditional preoccupation with the picturesque—with the conventional iconographic project of making Ireland look beautiful, or, alternately, harsh and rugged. His unstable landscapes connote danger and anxiety rather than beauty or grandeur. Further, his work explicitly concerns itself with those on the margins: drug addicts, the desperately poor of Dublin, traveling people, gay men, and criminals on the run. This concern with the periphery breaks down essentialist ideas such as fíor ghael or the “Celtic Tiger,” and interrogates Ireland’s confrontation of its postcolonial future. Drawing on a wide variety of visual and narrative strategies , Comerford intentionally offers “imperfect” solutions to the problem of representation raised by modern Irish culture. In fact, the notion of imperfection itself figures prominently in the debates into which Comerford hurls himself. CONTEXT Although Comerford participates in a blossoming indigenous motion picture community that seeks to correct conventional visualizations of Ireland , his work stands apart from much of the recent Irish cinema receiving international attention. Comerford’s densely constructed films, which should be viewed in both a national and international context, offer contradictory mixtures of narrative, political, and avant-garde strategies. Echoing both the French New Wave and the Third Cinema movement, they combine traditional narrative with techniques that undermine illusionistic realism. THE FILMS OF JOE COMERFORD 134 Comerford aggressively avoids Hollywood’s1 choice to subsume both formal innovation and explicit ideology to the demands of realism. His work is unusual not only because it is confrontational or anti-authoritarian , both formally and politically, but because it clearly chooses to be so. These films distinguish themselves from popular cinema by asserting themselves as ideological representations. Whereas most of Comerford’s films have a narrative drive,2 complete with a beginning, a middle, and an end, he never bypasses formal and political concerns in favor of an obsessive focus on narrative linearity and closure. Neither entirely avant-garde nor entirely conventional, his work has an ambiguous relationship with dominant models of cinema. To some extent, Comerford’s films evoke French New Wave productions of the 1950s and 1960s; his 1988 Reefer and the Model, especially, recalls the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. Innovative French filmmakers were deeply, albeit self-consciously, influenced by Hollywood, and Comerford ’s derivative relationship with Hollywood is similarly complex. His first feature, Traveler, draws on elements of the Hollywood road movie; Reefer and the Model on the heist film; and High Boot Benny, on the boarding school melodrama. In each case, though, like his French colleagues of the fifties and sixties, Comerford radically transforms the conventions he exploits in ways quite specific to his own national and historic condition. The concept of “Third Cinema” is equally important in understanding Comerford’s films. First appearing in a fiery and idealistic manifesto (“Hacia un Tercer Cine,” or “Towards a Third Cinema”) by Argentine Fernando Solanas and Spaniard Octavio Gettino,3 the term stresses skepticism toward illusionistic/realist narrative. Solanas and Gettino assert THE FILMS OF JOE COMERFORD 135 1 The term “Hollywood” should not be taken to mean films made only in Hollywood, California, but films made in a realist style, produced in an explicitly commercial framework, and generally fulfilling a schema outlined in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s seminal text, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 2 Exceptions to this would be his short experimental films Withdrawal (1974), a nonnarrative portrayal of the tormented psyche of a drug addict, or Waterbag (1984), which deals with a woman who has just had an abortion. These films are not discussed in this article, which is restricted to Comerford’s features, or in the case of the fifty-one-minute Down the Corner, his featurette. 3 Published in the Cuban journal Tricontinental in 1969, the essay first appeared in English in Cineaste 4:3...

Louise Bourgeois Sculptural Confrontations

1. M.-L. Bernadac and H.-U. Olbrist (eds.), Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father, Writings and Interviews 1923-1997 (Violette Editions: London, 1998) p. 86. (References to the book are cited throughout in abbreviated form as: 'Bourgeois, Writings'.) The comment comes from an intriguing interchange with William Rubin published in 1969. That there is much of the canny modernist in Bourgeois' artistry is argued particularly persuasively by Adrian Rifcin in 'Reading the Sexual for Something Else', in I. Cole (ed.), Louise Bourgeois (Museum of Modern Art: Oxford, 1996), pp. 31-6. Rosalind Krauss' 1989 article 'Louise Bourgeois: Portrait of the Artist as Fillette', in Bachelors (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999), pp. 5174, also makes a strong case against easy autobiographical readings of Bourgeois' work and for ones that recognize the extent to which her project is embedded in a sharp awareness of avant-garde strategies. That the foregrounding of the psychic in Bourgeois' work itself emerges from a complex structural understanding of the nature of affects and drives is brought out very convincingly in Mignon Nixon's writing on the artist (see for example 'Bad Enough Mother', October 71, Winter 1995, pp. 71-92).

The "Intercultural" Work of Lee Breuer

The “Intercultural” Work of Lee Breuer 1 Iris L. Smith (bio) The American theater has never found a way to integrate its avant-garde artists into the larger world of theater the way Europe did, by giving them a place in their major institutions after they’ve proved their worth, nor even the way that the film, literary, and art establishments/industries have done here. In theater, the avant-garde spirit is made perpetual outcast. — Bonnie Marranca French cultural theorists and American theatre critics may rarely agree, but on the cultural position of the avant-garde, editor and critic Bonnie Marranca might be paraphrasing Pierre Bourdieu. Marranca sees contemporary American avant-garde theatre as economically dominated (“made perpetual outcast”) but symbolically dominant (“they’ve proved their worth”), a distinction Bourdieu draws for the nineteenth-century avant-garde in his essay “The Field of Cultural Production.” In the United States, the contemporary “avant-garde” includes artists who came to maturity in the 1960s and 1970s, often working in theatre collectives or in collaboration with artists from diverse media; familiar names include Richard Foreman, Maria Irene Fornes, Philip Glass, Megan Terry, Meredith Monk, Jean-Claude van Itallie, The Wooster Group, Elizabeth Swados, Yvonne Rainer, and Mabou Mines. This avant-garde is largely white, often but not always straight, female as often as male, and mature, both in age and artistic experience. Now part of an established avant-garde, if such an oxymoron can be entertained, the group continues to struggle financially, despite recognition as artists who have long since arrived. Had they come to maturity in Europe rather than the US, as Marranca notes, they might have been running major theatres, as Heiner Müller did the Berliner Ensemble. Some of these artists, not comfortable being considered avant-garde, have tried to dispense with the ghettoizing label. Others would argue that the term has not applied since the 1950s, when accommodation with mass culture began to mark the work of avant-garde artists, and public response to the work shifted from anger to acceptance. In other words, the artist cannot be avant-garde when the public refuses to be shocked by what s/he produces. While artists like Sam Shepard, Spalding Gray, and Philip Glass have embraced (not without irony) their acceptance in the mainstream—on Broadway, at Lincoln Center, or in Hollywood—for most of them a confrontational stance toward the status quo in theatre, dance, and music remains characteristic of their work. [End Page 37] A number of artists, among them playwright and director Lee Breuer, have turned to interculturalism to redefine “American theatre,” modifying avant-garde strategies of confrontation to address their own continuing marginality in the United States. Despite widespread recognition for productions with Mabou Mines, of which he is a founding member, and for independent work as varied as Lulu and Gospel at Colonus, Lee Breuer remains unaffiliated with any regional or commercial theatre. His outsider position, added to his knowledge of the theatre and funding worlds, makes him a useful commentator on the current status of the so-called “established” avant-garde. While theorists of intercultural performance have written off these artists as cultural imperialists, Breuer uses his position to stage genealogies of cultural stereotype. Unable to reverse or erase these stereotypes, Breuer plays them to the hilt. As his work has evolved, its tendency to allow stereotype to stifle the experience of cultural difference has been replaced with a reading of social and ethnic difference through discourses that have informed interculturalism, most prominently discourses of gender. In his 1991 article “The Two-Handed Gun: Reflections on Power, Culture, Lambs, Hyenas, and Government Support for the Arts,” Breuer outlines the situation of the contemporary American artist. As a young writer, Breuer felt that the artist was solely defined by his aesthetics—“Give me a metaphor or give me death” (89)—but he now sees the cultural context shaping that attitude as American, Calvinist, capitalist. While art was removed to an elitist, privileged realm, the artist was situated as capitalist. If not as useful a commodity as a toaster, the product could at least be assigned to “high” culture, a safe realm in the doxology of bourgeois...