Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde, and: Artaud and His Doubles (review)

The avantgarde is avantgarde again, it seems. The last decade has witnessed journal articles, conferences, books, and academic courses in numbers unmatched since the 1960s, when avantgarde studies first emerged as a field. Why such growth? Why such interest? While those aren't questions to be answered here, meaningful, if not paradigm-shifting efforts to shape this new wave can be found in two books from the University of Michigan Press's Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series: James Harding's Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde and Kimberly Jannarone's Artaud and His Doubles.

These texts are emblematic of an emerging scholarly framework, what I would call "Critical Vanguard Studies." Harding and Jannarone limit their thinking neither to the Marxist and poststructuralist models nor the untheoretical, descriptive narratives that dominate the field. Though not dismissive of such approaches, they consider the relationship among aesthetics, power, ideology, institutions, and the power of critical-creative expression from a more diverse range of critical perspectives and with a keen eye toward the ideologies of history writing.

But what makes these two books emblematic of this trend is that they study the studying itself, to paraphrase Jannarone (27). Paul Mann's The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (1991) hit shelves over 20 years ago, but few have absorbed his lesson that, if we are to make comprehensive sense of the avantgarde, then we must address both the vanguards and the discourses surrounding them. In this spirit, readers will find in Harding and Jannarone's books thoroughgoing assessments of both subject matter and discourse. They address, respectively, the gender bias of avantgarde studies and the weirdly hagiographical, ahistorical way that scholars and artists have treated Artaud. More importantly, both writers extend their critiques to how scholars have written the history of the avantgarde and how they have conceptualized and historicized avantgarde performance.

Harding's Cutting Performances examines five American artists: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gertrude Stein, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, and Valerie Solanas. Great choices, not only because these are remarkable figures in and of themselves, but also because their diverse critical-creative praxes enable Harding to describe a theory of the avantgarde that, while embedded in the rich tradition of feminist performance theory, is path-breaking. Harding writes, "I am less interested in feminist theory more generally than I am in experimental feminist artists whose feminism is manifested in the particulars of their performative praxis and whose praxis has the potential to change the course of current theories of the avant-garde" (7).

This is where collage comes into play. Because he wishes not just to argue for "a more prominent position for women experimental artists within the existing, accepted histories of American avant-garde performance" (70), he frames the varied collage techniques and epistemologies of these artists as a "recurrent metacritical strategy of feminist expression" that can be effectively deployed within avantgarde historiography itself—within, if you will, the "studying." This method's fullest exposition is in the chapter on Stein. Harding reads The Mother of Us All as a paradigmatic "staging of a crisis in representation that, seen through a variety of paratactical juxtapositions, illuminates the inability of the written word to provide a reliable sense of objective referentiality" (71). Ultimately, he argues for a critical strategy that, "drawing upon the radical juxtapositions of collage, accommodates a diversity of seemingly irreconcilable aesthetic tendencies while simultaneously calling attention to the constructed nature of the history" we tell about the avantgarde (73). Harding properly situates gender and sexuality as central to avantgarde theory—and provides a robust model for considering other biases that have shaped the avantgarde and its discourses.

Which leads me to a couple...