James M. Harding. The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance.

Buckley, Jennifer

James M. Harding. The Ghosts of the 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 the intention of casting out one particularly persistent specter from the field of avant-garde studies: Peter Burger's 1974 Theory of the Avant-Garde, which has exerted an outsized influence since its 1984 publication in English. Burger's central claim, as many will recall, is that the avant-garde is distinguished by its critique of art as an institution--not only the museums, academies, publishers, etc., in or through which people usually encounter art, but also prevailing ideas of what counts as art. For Burger, the avant-garde emerged in the early twentieth century to dismantle the barriers between art and life supposedly erected, or at least reinforced, by the aesthetic movement. With the avant-garde, art ceased to function as a social safety valve for the mildly disaffected bourgeoisie and became instead a "life praxis." In Burger's Theory, the ferocious mockery of Dada is the essential avant-garde stance, and once that mockery became a predictable source of pleasure for a large enough late-capitalist public, the avant-garde was effectively dead. Cage? Warhol? Merely "neo-avant-garde" to Burger.

Harding wants to expel the ghost of Theory so that other, more performance-friendly theories of the 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 the 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 avant-garde 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 the s in the "avant-gardes." Indeed, Harding's fundamental problem with Theory of the Avant-Garde is that it's the theory of "the avant-garde" (9): singular, homogenizing, and totalizing. To characterize the non-linear historiographical method with which he wants to replace Burger's theory, Harding adopts Deleuze and Guattari's botanical metaphor, the rhizome. The book's strong general claim is that the concepts of origin and originality that enable critics to speak of an historical avant-garde mistake the manner in which avant-gardes coalesce, develop, and disperse. While Rosalind Krauss and Martin Puchner, among others, have made similar arguments about the misapplication of such concepts in histories of vanguard art and performance, the point bears repeating. Harding repeats it convincingly, taking scholars to task for confusing the demise of any one avant-garde with the 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 "against the grain" (23) not only of artists' stated intentions but also against the conventional critical wisdom. He is not the first critic to note that Hugo Ball's "verse without words," performed at the 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 the ideological terrain is within any particular avant-garde, he recounts the squabble within Paris Dada that produced both the sober, Breton-helmed 1921 mock trial 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. By stressing the autocratic tendencies apparent in Bretons attempt to administer the Barres trial, Harding disputes accounts of Dada and Surrealism premised on a succession model, in which one avant-garde swiftly and irrevocably gives way to another. It is unlikely that most scholars actually accept, as Harding claims they do, such "highly mystified baton-passing" (33) critical narratives, but he is right to excavate the "reactionary undercurrents" (37) in certain manifestations of Dada.

Dada is not the only avant-garde in which Harding detects illiberal, or at least non-progressive, impulses. In a chapter on two 1970s adaptations of Frankenstein, Harding accuses Andy Warhol and the Living Theatre's Julian Beck of failing to consider the gender implications of rejecting the concept of individual artistic production: denying their works an Author also leads them to deny that title to Mary Shelley. Conversely, Harding endeavors to rehabilitate two well-known artists often reproached for not being politically progressive enough--John Cage and Peter Brook. From a leftist perspective, Cage's are sins of omission. Harding acknowledges that, as Yvonne Rainer has said, Cages Zen-inflected optimism can seem like "'goofy naivete'" (60). Brook's are, notoriously, sins of commission performed before, during, and after his 1985 production, The Mahabharata. The chapter on Cage considers the 1952 untitled piece primarily as an occasion to define a "distinctly American" and "affirmative" (69) vanguardism which, unlike the mostly anti-academic and anti-institutional European avant-gardes, thrived in John Dewey-influenced, counter-cultural academic institutions like Black Mountain College and the New School. The move Harding makes to historicize the untitled piece and (briefly) 4'33" is a productive one, but he becomes so engaged in doing so at the expense of Cages critics that Cages work disappears from the reader's view for long stretches. Harding argues that Cages famous insistence that "there is no such thing as silence"--a sentence which, spoken during Cages 1958 lecture series "Composition as Process" indicates but one aspect of a career that spanned five decades--is a political statement, one that prompts us to listen more intently to marginalized groups who only seem inexpressive. This argument is intriguing, and it is not without precedent, but Harding's case might have been stronger if he had examined Cages art, especially his post-1950s work, in greater detail.

Likewise, the chapter on Brook is less about the director or The Mahabharata than it is about the politics of intercultural performance. Here Harding's main target is Schechner, whom he provocatively reproaches for dismissing as "neo" any post- 1970s avant-garde with which he is not personally involved. After a lengthy examination of Schechner's debate with Rustom Bharucha on the asymmetries of intercultural performance and exchange, Harding offers a too-brief study of The Mahabharata. Taking up an argument first made by Una Chaudhuri, here he claims that the multilingual cast's spoken English created a Brechtian effect which, though unintended by Brook, produced a critique of exactly the kind of Western cultural appropriation of which Brook is often accused. While it makes excellent sense to separate any work from its creator's always divided and ultimately unknowable intentions, the evidence here seems a bit thin, and Harding's method shows signs of strain. Less persuasive still is Harding's suggestion that cross-casting functions in similar ways in Brook's Mahabharata and in Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, a play which is clearly about colonialism and its effects in ways that Brook's production was not.

The book's final chapters take up the larger question of whether contemporary avant-gardes exist at all. Harding briefly looks where readers might expect him to--to the "phoenix-like" (167) Living Theatre, and to works like Richard Montoya and Culture Clash's Anthems: Culture Clash in the District (2002) and the Riot Group's Pugilist Specialist (2003-2007)--but he also ventures into the more politically contested territory in which critics including Schechner, Sell, and Frederic Jameson have debated whether terrorism should be considered a form of avant-garde action. It is here that the political import of Harding's argument about avant-garde pluralities becomes most apparent, as he insists that Western aesthetics and linear historiographical methods cannot adequately register, much less fully consider, the models of vanguardism to which (for example) the murderous actions of Al Qaeda correspond. Here Harding effectively allies himself not only with Sell, but also with Masao Miyoshi, arguing that the "idea of post-coloniality" (180) is not helpful, and may even be counterproductive, in attempts to conceptualize globalization and to discover the presence and potential of the avant-gardes under current conditions. In the book's conclusion, Harding steps back into the theater--specifically, into the Living Theatres recently closed Clinton Street space, where he numbers the ghosts summoned during the company's 2007 revival of their production of The Brig in a compelling demonstration of how the method he proposes might open up new critical perspectives on avant-gardes whose significance even their advocates might locate in previous eras.

Unfortunately, the book suffers from a dispiriting number of copy-editing errors. Most are inconsequential but irritating; foreign words lack their proper accents, while names (including Artaud's, David Tudor's, and Clement Greenberg's) are repeatedly misspelled. But some faults are substantial; Harding's overuse of the verb "pivot" actually impedes his argument at several points. That argument, however, emerges from the text largely intact. The past may indeed be haunting the present, but it is not where all possible avant-gardes reside. As Harding persuasively argues, history is where scholars should consign rigid theoretical models of "the historical avant-garde"--not vanguardism itself.

JENNIFER BUCKLEY

University of Iowa