Steve Benson's "Views of Communist China": Experimental Form and the Orientalist Trace

Part of a political desire to dissent from mainstream cultural discourse in the US, "Views of Communist China," a 1977 performance orchestrated by Steve Benson as part of the Talks Series, displays the intimacy between the Language poetry avant-garde movement and orientalism. Participating in both Language poetry and a poetic tradition of US orientalism, "Views of Communist China" represents a crisis for such a tradition as it recognizes its own process of projection. As a moment of crisis, the performance ultimately became formally productive for Benson, for whom it inaugurated a practice of performance and documentation that has gone on to characterize his artistic work in subsequent decades.