Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship, and: The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics, and Individuals (review)

While using different methodological approaches focused on disparate source material, both Martin Harries and Richard Butsch examine the ways in which a performance medium situates the audience, both politically and personally. Both texts are wellwritten and of interest to scholars and students of performance studies, cultural studies, media studies, and theatre history. Forgetting Lot’s Wife advances the field of performance studies by moving with fluency across the disciplinary borders of visual art, film, and theatre in ways that complicate understandings of works formally situated within one primary discipline. The Citizen Audience advances the field of media studies by pointing out the class-based assumptions and biases of many sociological studies focusing on the effects of media on audiences. Both authors discuss how audiences or spectators might disrupt or challenge their positioning as particular kinds of passive audiences, and it is for this reason that I look at these two books together as being complementary.

In Forgetting Lot’s Wife, Harries uses performancestudies methodologies, particularly intertextual analyses of disparate art forms, to illuminate twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance practices that engage the concept of spectatorial destruction. Harries focuses on artworks (visual, performative, and filmic) that reference the biblical story of Lot’s wife as a place from which to imagine, caution, or fantasize about the destructive potentiality of witnessing disturbing events. For instance, in his chapter “Artaud, Spectatorship, and Catastrophe,” Harries begins with Artaud’s reactions to the sixteenth- century painting Lot and His Daughters (attributed to Dutch painter Lucas van Leyden) as a means to articulate and define the theatre of cruelty. Harries then juxtaposes this analysis with Artaud’s performance in the 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. In both these works, the spectacle of destruction is based on religious narratives and is theorized as potentially purifying and liberating. Harries traces Artaud’s use of these works in service of creating a ritualized, sacred theatre in which both performer and spectator risk annihilation.

The other particularly cogent chapter in this book is “Anselm Kiefer’s Lot’s Wife: Perspective and the Place of the Spectator.” In this chapter, Harries explores the application and relevance of the salient theme from the biblical narrative of Lot’s wife— —witnessing the destruction of cities—to Kiefer’s work. Kiefer’s desolate “landscape” paintings Lilith (1987–89) and Lot’s Wife (1989) specifically reference biblical narratives. Harries suggests that the formal elements of these paintings place the spectator in the position of the destroyer in the case of Lilith, and the destroyed in the case of Lot’s Wife, while at the same time eliding differences between the landscape itself and the observer of it. Harries points to Kiefer’s witnessing the slums and urban decay of Rio de Janeiro from the air as the impetus/ inspiration for the creation of his painting Lilith, and his adoption of an aerial perspective for works referencing the fire-bombing of German cities during World War II as further support for his thesis that Kiefer’s use of perspective was potentially destructive. Interspersed with his analyses of Kiefer’s work, Harries includes poems, fiction, and personal narratives regarding witnessing the destruction of Dresden (Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and “After Nature” by W. G. Sebald, among others) as well as trauma theory from the field of psychology as counter-texts framing and informing his analysis of the unique place of Kiefer’s work among other works focusing on the same historical content.

In his epilogue, “Coda: Lot’s Wife on September 11, 2001,” Harries questions the social authority given to witnesses of destructive events as a kind of unethical standing in for the dead. Harries recounts his personal reaction to witnessing the destruction of the World Trade Center, and then details...