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  • Radical Theatrics: Put-ons, Politics and the Sixties by Craig J. Peariso
  • Alan Filewod
Craig J. Peariso, Radical Theatrics: Put-ons, Politics and the Sixties (Seattle: University of Washington Press 2014)

At the time I write this review, Donald Trump is bellowing his way along the campaign trail and edging closer to the presidency. As his campaign gained momentum over the fall, media pundits who had courted him – and fed his craving for publicity – publicly wondered if he was in fact serious. Speculations that the campaign was a stunt, that he was using it to inflate his "brand," and that he would stage a last-minute exit, were fueled by the apparent delight he took in his extremist and reckless antics. But as the election nears, he shows no sign of anything except a lust for power. If he was a joke at first, he has manipulated the media brilliantly to put the joke back on them. Paradoxically, as his self-performance becomes more erratic and bellicose, the media falls in line to accept him as a legitimate and credible candidate. Is it because the media attention span is always fixed on the present moment and the latest soundbite, or is it because, even at its craziest, the performance of the radical self is functionally a legitimizing tactic? No matter what he does, Trump becomes more "real."

The mediatized performance of extremism in the cause of politics may be as old as mass media, and adaptive across its various forms, but as Craig Peariso argues persuasively, something changed in the 1960s when radical protest elevated the "put-on" (a phrase he borrows from [End Page 294] Jacob Brackman) into a political tactic. For Peariso, as an art historian, the radical theatrics of the Yippies, the Gay Liberation Front, and the Black Panthers (the three instantiations that form his case studies) can be understood as performances of the put-on through which we can read the limits and paradoxes of the political realities they disturb. The core problem, which he traces through the theories that work through the historical case studies (beginning with Herbert Marcuse and Susan Sontag), is that radical performance is necessarily subject to assimilation; performance becomes a commodity, and performances that strive to disrupt the system of signification and commodification ultimately falter; they appear to "fail" because they cannot disrupt their own representation.

Looking at Abbie Hoffman's self-performance as the trickster of the revolution, Peariso sees something more than the buffoonery that distressed the radical left. Hoffman, he suggests, embodied a sophisticated critique of the limits of radical action in the mediatized postmodern. Similarly, Peariso examines Eldridge Cleaver's hyper-sexualized self-staging as a put-on that replayed and reflected pervasive social anxiety about Black masculinity. In both cases, the "performers" were authors and captives of their performances. His other case study, dealing with the crisis in the New York queer community and the emergence of the Gay Activists Alliance (gaa), questions whether the confrontational tactics of camp and drag constituted a sophisticated political critique of the ways in which the dominant culture absorbs and constrains all forms of expression. Peariso's analyses are grounded in a richly detailed art-historical materiality; in each of these case studies he situates the social performance in the contexts of its contemporary theory, effectively plumbing the relationship between radical action and discourse to argue that theatricality can be both political resistance and critique.

Despite the title, this study is less about theatrics than it is about the historical moment of emergence of "new, more self-conscious and aesthetically complex forms of political resistance." (163) For Peariso, the put-on may mark the failure of signification, but he affirms the necessity of what he calls aestheticized resistance while pointing to the recurring dilemma of actions that attempt "to articulate dissent while brushing against the limits of historical possibility." (185)

The idea of failure provides the ground for his afterword, which addresses the contemporary dilemma of the put-on. Looking specifically at the Yes Men, who famously try to expose corporate crimes through provocative straight-faced but parodic interventions, he asks why their targets so often appear...

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