Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right ed. by Kimberly Jannarone (review)

History is full of examples of political hostility toward experimental arts — from the Nazi sanction of “degenerate art,” to the inveterate US tradition of Republican members of congress attacking modern art as variously communist plot, obscenity, and budgetary extravagance. It would be easy, therefore, to assume artistic innovation is inherently incompatible with reactionary or authoritarian agendas. But performance can be politically promiscuous. Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right, edited by Kimberly Jannarone, drives this point home, offering a spirited and thorough corrective to “any easy linkages between avant-garde performance and the progressive politics” commonly associated with it (1).

To trace surprising affinities between theatrical challenges to the status quo and illiberal politics, the 16 essays gathered in this volume embrace diverse critical approaches, from meticulous historiography to probing metacritical reflection. They survey a gamut of vanguardism, onstage and off — some revisiting mainstays of the historical avant-garde (from Expressionist allegory to Artaudian cruelty); others dissecting politically regressive acts that bleed into the category of performance (from abortive plans for fascist rallies to terrorist spectacles). Collectively, the writers make a compelling case for paying subtler attention to the shifting affiliations between ideology and radical aesthetic form — particularly in theatrical performance, which all too frequently furnishes models for mingling deceptive appearances and inflamed public passions.

Vanguard Performance joins a growing discourse rethinking longstanding suppositions about the conceptual category of “avant-garde” and its role in confronting oppressive power structures. Critics of the avant-garde once assuredly concluded that radical artistic gestures reflected countercultural bona fides — at least since Peter Bürger’s influential Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) — but more recently, critical debates have become reflexively attuned to the avant-garde’s susceptibility to appropriation in service of the establishment. More recent studies have begun to look at not only inadvertent complicities of cutting-edge artists, but also active espousals of right-wing attitudes that cannot be separated from their art. Rebecca Schneider has described a “nostalgic drive backward” inherent in the avant-garde’s primitivist fetishes and preoccupations with ritual (1997:129). James Harding and John Rouse have further emphasized that such reversions to archaic forms, meant paradoxically to revitalize modern aesthetics, have left the avant-garde “haunted by a conservative shadow” (2006:22). Erika Fischer-Lichte has demonstrated the debts that totalitarian states have owed to avant-garde mass spectacles (2005). Meanwhile, where scholars like Günter Berghaus have detailed theatre under Mussolini and Hitler (1996), recent studies by Mark Antliff (2007) and Kimberly Jannarone (2010) have unearthed analogous sympathies for fascism among French artists. Mike Sell’s work has perhaps gone furthest, exploring avant-garde entanglements with racist power, religious bigotry, and extremist violence (2011).

For its part, Vanguard Performance yearns to shake off “the historical and political critical baggage” of the term “avant-garde” in favor of “vanguardism” to “restore ideological flexibility” to our understanding of performance innovations (6). Despite the unwieldy breadth at risk in this fuzzy rubric, Jannarone has smartly organized the book into three parts that reveal valuable ways of discerning the ideological hazards of (1) radical performances that idealize heroic — often violent — shows of strength or supremacy; (2) stagings that exalt the coercion of masses; and (3) institutional contexts, technologies, and discourses that give rise to illiberal political effects of experimental aesthetics and performance practices.

Part I, “Heroic Vanguards and Radical Reactionaries,” opens with a contribution by Richard Schechner reflecting on the 9/11 terrorist attack as an orchestrated aesthetic act meant to topple an established order. As such, he argues, it represents an “actualization of key ideas and impulses driving the avant-garde,” despite its horrific service to fundamentalist ends (31). He conceptually links the sublime in performance, mass reception, and politics of intimidation and submission. This elegantly sets the stage for analyses that follow, establishing expansive terms for what constitutes “vanguard performance,” while remaining precise about how performance conspires with changing media for real-world political effect. Schechner’s...