The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme: Art and the Performative in Postwar France by Kaira M. Cabañas (review)

Kaira Cabañas’s book is an ambitious analysis of artists associated with the heterogeneous group Nouveau réalisme, formalized in 1960 and defined in relation to ‘new perceptual approaches of the real’ (p. 1). Known for ready-made appropriations addressing consumer and technological culture, critic Pierre Restany formulated Nouveau réalisme as a positive reversal of Dada negation, a position critiqued since as a ‘neo-avant-garde repetition’ (p. 9). Cabañas acknowledges that their use of the ready-made conveyed ambivalence towards post-war culture, but instead she argues that artists deployed ‘performative realism’ (p. 10), taking a different tack. Her rationale is based on J. L. Austin’s theory of performatives, or ‘speech acts’, which generate reality independent of fact and are enacted via assertion or repetition. Cabañas is not undertaking a comprehensive account of Nouveau réalisme; rather her argument is based on ‘a few representative test cases’ (p. 12) where links between performativity and power seem evident. Each chapter aims to ‘chart a tension’ (p. 12)between these discourses and how artists structured countering approaches to distort or undermine authority. Cabañas asserts that Yves Klein effectively ‘mobilized the performative efficacy of catalogue conventions’ (p. 32), citing Yves Peintures (1954), to affirm credentials retrospectively. While his exhibition of the immaterial presented in the 1958 Le Vide exhibition shifts his work towards social relations; and his post-exhibition speech demonstrates a ‘performative language’ (p. 61) that resonates within nationalist discourse and that of the Algerian War. This political context further informs her analysis of the affiches lacérées by Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé. In her assessment of the 1961 exhibition La France déchirée at Galerie J in Paris, Hains manifests a lack of forceful resolve over Algerian independence despite referential fragments evident in the torn posters. Cabañas identifies this as ‘improper’ performativity (p. 91), or speech-acts that have not been convincingly enunciated. Cabañas cites three examples of Daniel Spoerri’s work: the ‘rolling text’ ensemble performance at the ICA (London, 1960), constituting disrupted speech undermining conventional language by action; Snare Pictures, in which repasts stripped of sensual or social aspects are spatially shifted signifying insistent speech on the state of everyday things; and Anecdotal Typography of Chance (1962), evoking Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman with the artist’s transcription of ready-made things into the language of geometry. In the final chapter, Cabañas observes the rise of filmed news and artists performing work for televised news audiences, specifically Jean Tinguely’s End of the World No. 2 (1962), an explosion filmed in the Nevada Desert for David Brinkley’s Journal. Here, the failure of the planned detonation ‘addresses the limits of avant-garde paradigms in the face of emerging communication technology’ (p. 155) while the artist’s decision to allow the ‘flow’ of the event to continue produced a disrupted spectacle aligning this event with Guy Debord’s critique of televised spectacle. While key artists such as Arman, Martial Raysse, and Niki de Saint-Phalle are mentioned only in passing (despite the fact that all three, arguably, were addressing realism as an effect), Cabañas’s book lucidly examines select cases where artists’ social and political agency advances their methods well beyond ready-made appropriations.