The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor, and Leisure in 1960s New York by Giulia Palladini (review)

“The Sixties” names an era of New York artistic history that has been so thoroughly gentrified, in both the literal and metaphoric senses of the term, that its valorization now seems less a reaction to than an extension of the destruction of what we claim to value about it: the cheap rent, sexual freedom, and collective ethos that frames our memory of that era’s artistic production. Now that institutions and academic syllabi have transformed what was once subculture into canon, how ought scholars attend to the mythology that has become not just an inescapable part of studying that much-romanticized decade, but perhaps also its most telling feature?

A version of this uneasy query weaves through The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor, and Leisure in 1960s New York, Giulia Palladini’s theoretical reading of a strain of 1960s New York theatre and performance that offers insights into the relations among labor, pleasure, and value. In four chapters and two interludes that draw from interviews and oral history in addition to performance texts and documentation, Palladini brings together readings of the plays and productions of well-known figures such as Jack Smith, Ellen Stewart, and Andy Warhol with less familiar ones like Tom Eyen, John Vaccaro, and Jackie Curtis, all of whom made work about sexual and romantic pleasure and also worked to construct the creative conditions in which new forms of both were possible.

Palladini describes the art they created as “fore-play,” or “theater pleasure projecting itself towards a future” that constitutes “a counterforce within productive economy . . . a prelude where value is not yet conferred upon labor” (4, 21). Foreplay, in other words, is both a way of making theatre and thus a kind of labor (one that privileges erotic relations among artists and between them and their audiences, not defined by predetermined results), and an aesthetic orientation (toward the utopian future where different kinds of pleasure might be possible). The term, contextualized by Marx and Freud and in dialogue with queer theory, in particular José Muñoz, is usefully double-edged. It allows her to argue that the distinctive temporality of these performances, and the production of aesthetic, social, and erotic relations they call into being, constitute an alternative to capitalist values, while simultaneously underscoring their imbrication in the market and the values that have since accrued to them. The sexual connotations of the word evoke this contradiction: foreplay is a prelude to a main event (in this case, the professional success that many of these artists sought and some achieved), but it also suggests a different temporality of pleasure, one that tarries, delays, wanders, defers, and perhaps never arrives. These artists’ “love labor” was neither immune to the capitalist “dynamics of valorization” nor determined by them (12–13). This ambivalence is also captured in the problem of nomenclature: Palladini puts under erasure the concept of an artistic underground in the book’s first interlude, which offers an economic and regulatory history that makes it clear that the romantic vision of proud marginality that that term evokes is in large part a retrospective fantasy.

In her first, most densely theorized chapter, “There Is No Idleness Like Show-Idleness: On Preliminaries, Amateurism, and Work in the 1960s,” Palladini describes “an idle theater” (73), which she defines alongside Walter Benjamin’s readings of the flaneur and in relation to theorizations of the amateur by Stan Brakhage and Nicholas Ridout. She offers Smith’s loft performances alongside Eyen’s Why Hanna’s Skirt Won’t Stay Down, a play produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 1965 about a woman who goes to Coney Island in her off-hours and reenacts Marilyn Monroe’s skirt-blowing scene from The Seven Year Itch, as two examples of theatre that produce and celebrate idle pleasure, in contrast to the models of efficacious, laborious, and eventful performance put forward by Richard Schechner and Jerzy...