Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (review)

Shannon Jackson’s third book, Social Works, provocatively questions the limits of Modern Drama. Jackson’s case studies, derived predominantly from the post-1970s art world, seem at first to have little to do with either “drama” or the “modern.” Yet, Jackson’s study of aesthetically arresting social performances and their support systems, at the intersection of theatrical and performance art, illuminates the very grounds on which we perceive modern drama. Jackson concretizes this disciplinary situatedness in her prologue, via two performances of Beckett’s Rockaby. The first, attended to within a theatrical frame grounded in expectations of action, seemed, according to Jackson, to render the play’s iconic rocking and scripted pauses with painful slowness. Twenty years later, in a gallery context calling for more measured contemplation, the rocking seemed to Jackson “scandalizingly fast” (3).

Jackson’s anecdotal reflection also instantiates a rhetorical ploy, threaded throughout the book, of animating the socially and historically situated self. She appears variously as Mother, Daughter, and spectator, as well as public university citizen and scholarly interlocutor. Though the single-authored monograph remains a mark of academic productivity, Jackson carefully iterates the support system of students, colleagues, artists, family, funding, and time that allows such productivity to materialize. Jackson’s generosity extends to her scholarly style. While unflinching in pointing up critical contradictions, she takes care to reflect on the conditions that produce such contradictions, to cite other perspectives generously (including those of the artists investigated), and to situate herself within a network of disciplinary practices and theories steeped in understandings of materialist feminism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, critical race theory, neo-liberalism, and labour and performance studies (among others).

Jackson locates her explorations of work in the United States and Europe within the “social turn” of “post-studio” arts and “postdramatic theater” (a phrase credited to Hans-Thies Lehmann, 2). Rather than accepting these terms at face value, however, she traces their respective genealogies. Jackson turns to the Frankfurt School, for example, to ground seminal arguments about theatrical modernity as well as to remind us of differing critical perspectives on Brecht from Benjamin, Adorno, and Lukács. Brecht then becomes a theatrical touchstone for reconsidering defamiliarizing aesthetic tactics and resonant political theories of antagonism and rupture. Duchamp and his “ready-mades” serve a similar function as an art world touchstone of institutional critique.

Jackson’s main scholarly intervention, however, is to provide a critical framework for performance practices in which trajectories of postdramatic theatre and post-studio art coincide, particularly those that bring together aesthetic and social provocations. She encourages a rethinking of such provocations as necessarily opposed to civic support, deploying a vocabulary of interdependence to counter easy assumptions about artistic and social autonomy or simplistic renderings of power hierarchies. These arguments unfold over seven chapters, a prologue, and epilogue through vividly rendered case studies. Chapter organization models the book’s trope of interdependence, with chapters building upon and referencing each other, while each retains enough of the book’s core arguments to function semi-autonomously.

“Performance, Aesthetics, and Support” introduces key terms and arguments with a focus on “social practices,” theatricality, and the art world’s scepticism toward both. Particular attention is paid to the genealogy of “support,” as the discussion ranges from the function of the wall in museums, to backstage theatrical technicians, to Marxist base/superstructure models of economic analysis. “Quality Time” indexes arts-based social practices through debates around relational aesthetics and radicality in, respectively, the arts and community-based theatre worlds. Thus, Claire Bishop’s and Sarah Brady’s controversial articles about arts and theatre, respectively, are placed in relation to each other and to two contrasting social artists – Shannon Flattery and Santiago Sierra – who differently deploy community-based storytelling and embodiment in their artwork.

The next two chapters take up art works that precede the historiographically marked “social turn” in the arts. “High Maintenance” elegantly brings together feminist and materialist analysis to recount Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s performance of cleaning...