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

In the second act of Gertrude Stein’s libretto for The Mother of Us All, Susan B. Anthony responds to three men who have just pronounced themselves “very important persons”: “Yes, so they are,” she says. “I am important but not that way, not that way” (84). Here, in Stein’s concise terms, lies the project of James Harding’s latest contribution to re-thinking the legacy of experimental performance. Cutting Performances aims to begin a re-historiography of the avant-garde along gender lines by articulating the particular and under-theorized ways in which innovative women performers have been “important.” It’s not enough to note interesting female figures in the margins of the historically established avant-garde, Harding argues. We must stretch our thinking about vanguardism to recognize these women apart from the established parameters of “the avant-garde.” In doing this, a differently-constituted vanguard will emerge whose contours have in fact been shaped by these women, a vanguard not subsidiary, but parallel, to the white, male, Eurocentric avant-garde of our current historiography.

Harding launches his re-historiography through an incendiary introduction and five case studies of significant twentieth-century performances by women: the avant-garde practices of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven; Gertrude Stein’s Susan B. Anthony bio-play, The Mother of Us All; Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece; Carolee Schneeman’s Round House; and Valerie Solanas’s shooting of Andy Warhol. Each is read through what Harding calls a “collage” historiography, an elegant conceptual frame that at first seems to hearken to familiar high-modernist aesthetics, but, in Harding’s readings, in fact expands horizons of thinking about subversive performance. Not merely (or even significantly) concerned with literature and graphic arts, collage, in Harding’s study, includes found behaviours, live performance, history itself, and a household (Freytag’s) brimming with the domestic detritus of Manhattan.

Why collage? It provides, Harding argues, a “dynamic, decentered tension” (162) the “unveiled heterogeneity” of which can “interrogate the patriarchal foundations of historiography” (86). It can destabilize established aesthetic values, producing “new associations and meanings” (23). Collage in Stein is easily enough recognized (although the way Harding incorporates history into her version of collage is eye-opening). It appears in more subtle, yet equally persuasive and even more interesting ways in the other studies.

The case studies advance Harding’s conceptualization of a female collage aesthetic and provide provocative readings of fascinating figures in and out of canonical avant-garde boundaries. The chapter on the spoon-wearing, junk-collecting, umbrella-stealing Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven—who challenged William Carlos Williams to contract syphilis from her in order to “free [his] mind for serious art” (46)—pulls all her poetic fragments and streaking through the streets together into one life-long act of disruptive performance that rivals that of Jarry, Nerval, and others more lauded for their eccentricities. In fact, Harding suggests that the Baroness’s activities have been read as merely eccentric—the probably untheorized actions of an untidy foreigner—when they actually represent a complete and deliberate subversion of social, aesthetic, and gender norms.

The chapters on Schneeman and Yoko Ono’s performances continue the theorization of collage as a vanguard performative: a powerful means to expose the historical avant-garde’s reactionary behavioural assumptions. The chapters also tackle the anti-theatrical prejudice, arguing that many male critics and modernists connected performance with femininity, relegating both to a secondary realm of action. This argument is well made during Harding’s reading of the hilariously reactionary Dialectics of Liberation Congress (1967), in which dozens of male Marxists met in London to theorize revolutionary activity and individual freedom. In a kind of men’s club of academic theory, they relegated Schneeman (one of the only women there) and her critical performance event to the sidelines and refused her legal protection from police censors. Similarly, Harding argues that Yoko Ono’s famous “Cut Piece...