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  • Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement
  • Kimberly Jannarone
Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement. Mike Sell . Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. Pp. vi + 327. $60.00 (cloth).

An effective theory of the avant-garde would have to be a kind of critical pataphysics: a "science of exceptions" that allows for the avant-garde's exceptionality within its own critical system. Mike Sell's new book proposes such a critical pathway by arguing that the avant-garde represents an "intertwining of technology, subjectivity, and cultural production" (2) that can best be understood in the specific materiality of avant-garde performance and discourse. This important contribution to avant-garde scholarship has potentially broad interest because, in both its theoretical introduction and in its detailed case studies, it draws equally from theories of radical performance, visual art, and culture. Whereas other recent studies of avant-garde performance (by Günter Berghaus and Arnold Aronson) delve into primary sources in order to provide thorough histories of avant-garde movements, the value of Sell's work lies in his examination of the interdependence of scholarship, material culture, and the avant-garde. While most scholars would agree that the avant-garde cannot be understood by form and aesthetics alone, Sell truly delivers a thoroughly interdisciplinary investigation, setting the bar for future studies. The book has four major sections: a theoretical introduction and three case studies of cold war era performance experiments, including The Living Theater's production of Jack Gelber's "The Connection," Happenings and Fluxus events, and, finally, the Black Arts Movement.

In the introduction, which alone will make indispensable reading for students and scholars, Sell self-reflectively engages with all the major (and most of the minor) scholarly debates and theories of the avant-garde. Pursuing how the avant-garde is both enabled by and resistant to institutional analysis, Sell questions "the persistently utopian flavor" of avant-garde criticism and [End Page 412] asks why scholars have so often used the avant-garde "as a vehicle for their own social, political, and cultural ideals" (38). He dissects what he calls "the Eulogist School" of avant-garde studies (represented by, among others, Hilton Kramer, Matei Cˇalinescu, and Daniel Bell), a school that repeatedly proclaims the death of the avant-garde not because it has actually died, but because, as Sell convincingly argues, one critical ideal of truth, unity, and/or art has died that found its justification in a particular (now defunct) avant-garde.

Sell also engages with more current critical debates, notably with Paul Mann's The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (1991), which critiqued the internal systems of avant-garde criticism while declaring these systems self-defeating. Sell challenges Mann's "theory-death" by proposing that we abandon the narrow focus traditionally trained on the avant-garde by scholars such as Bürger, Poggioli, Greenberg, and Fried, a discourse centered on Western visual art of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries—a position also put forward in James M. Harding's recent work. Both Harding and Sell insist on performance as essential to the avant-garde project. But where Harding seeks to correct the "eulogist" bias by expanding the scope of avant-garde studies to non-Western performance, Sell reaches toward non-artistic forms altogether, drawing provocative parallels between political and aesthetic radicalism that reach from the nineteenth century to the present.

The chapters on the Living Theater's production of Jack Gelber's "The Connection" are a highlight of the book, breathing new life into familiar material. They present detailed analysis of spectators' responses to the production in the contexts of bebop and jazz sessions, drug culture and the war on drugs, and historical artistic precedents (such as Artaud and the symbolist movement). Sell demonstrates that "The Connection" arose, in part, from the Living's "increasing affection for the lateral associative qualities of marijuana, and their enthusiastic move into jazz epistemology" (78) by exploring how the production's "closed-circuit feel" drew both from what bebop had established as...

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