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The New Humanism Dick Higgins The moment that one tries to treat those ideas which are associated with the term "postmodern" concretely, and apply them specifically to the performance arts, issues and questions are raised which were not anticipated. Even at best "postmodern" is a curious near-oxymoron, covering some forty years of cultural history in which the performance arts, I think it could be argued, have changed even more than the others, so that while the senior citizens speak of Samuel Beckett as "postmodern" their grandchildren think of him as a neo-romantic. During the "postmodern" period, myths have become objectivized and are usually treated very eclectically, simultaneity has become characteristic of communications, and forms have become more interpenetrative with their subjects than they had been. Many themes have ceased to be presented with logic (either emotional or rational) and are instead presented intuitively as allusions, and narrative, if any, has lost its primacy and become either simply scenario or disappeared altogether except for the purpose of ornament. In the first part of the postmodern period we have the works which begin this evolution-those of Beckett and Genet (anticipated by the Stein of The Geographical Historyof America or the Joyce of Finnegans Wake or the texts of Arno Schmidt in Germany), of the theatre of the absurd, of Abstract Expressionist and tachiste painting. The early work of The Living Theatre or more recent work by Claus Bremer would be examples of the principles of these being applied to theatre. Further instances of such trends in American poetry were the Black Mountain School of Charles Olson and his followers, and the New York intuitive styles of John Ashbery or Kenneth Koch. 23 But sometime around 1958 a second major shift began to crystallize which I have elsewhere called "postcognitivism"-which actually means "postSELFcognitivism." Here the overt message follows the narrative into the near-limbo of being mere ornament, the artist ceases to create his own myth (as he had been doing, typically, since the mid-nineteenth century) and the areas of sensual experience or discipline came to be less discrete than they had been. At times these tended to fuse into the intermedia-concrete poetry, for example, which fuses text and visual art, sound poetry which fuses text and music conceptually and does not simply mix them, or the Happening, which is a three-way intermedium or fusion of text/ drama, visual art and music, or the "event" which is the minimalist analog of the Happening-as in Fluxus works. All the arts were affected by this shift. The novel, for instance, became almost out-of-sequence from its immediate ancestry once visual elements and non-syntactic prose became quite common in the works of, say, Federman in America, Kutter in Switzerland, Roche in France, etc. The principles of chance or aleatoric structures ceased to be the property of a single school and became the stock in trade for poets of many groups, for composers such as Pousseur or Kagel, artists like George Brecht of Fluxus, and so on. The ferment which all this fusion produced made the 1960s even more innovative than the 1920s had been-the most innovative decade in our history, in fact. The critics lagged behind. They saw each fusion of sensibility not as a process but as a separate and definitive trend or movement, thus creating the Illusion of a Concrete Poetry movement, a Pop Art movement, a Happenings movement, a Fluxus movement, and so on. The resulting conceptual confusion drove many of them into a formalistic Marxism which, in its own terms at least, explained a lot but dealt with the issues raised by these new art fusions only obliquely and inadequately. There was little or no connection between the formal Marxism of the Art and Language group of critics, for instance, and the more intuitive Marxism of many of the artists whose impetus in doing these new arts came from an attempt to do art work which was more appropriate to the real needs, real people, and real Intellectual currents of the time. In many cases the critics retreated Into theory that had little or no relevance to practice; at least no...

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