"The eye finds no fixed point on which to rest..."

"The eye finds no fixed point on which to rest ... HI CHANTAL PONTBRIAND Translated by C.R. Parsons At this point I want to make a claim that I cannot hope to prove or substantiate but that I believe nevertheless to be true: viz.• that theatre and theatricality are at war today, not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as such - and to the extent that the different arts can be described as modernist, with modernist sensibility as such. This claim can be broken down into three propositions or theses: I) The success, even the survival, ofthe arts has come increasingly /0 depend on their ability to defeat theatre. 2) Art degenerates as it approaches the condition ojtheatre. 3) The concepts ojqualityand value - and/0 the extentthat these arecentralto art, lhe concept ofart itself - are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts, What lies between the arts is theatre.2 I have quoted at length this statement by the American critic Michael Fried explicitly in order to underline its ambiguity. On the one hand, he states "that theatre and theatricality are at war ... with art as such"; on the other, that "What lies between the arts is theatre."In the first case, he says that theatre as an artform is an impossibility; in the second, he opposes to the unacceptable notion of theatricality that of specificity. Despite what Fried thinks, what has given impetus to - what bas even shaken - the arts scene during the sixties and seventies is indeed a kind oftheatricality, brought about by a re-examination of the codes categorizing the arts; painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, music, dance, etc.; by a shifting of fields between these codes; and also by emphasis given to a device which is akin to the theatre, that of spectator/stage/spectacle, seen as process. This whole phenomenon is called performance. For Fried, the failure of theatre is synonymous with the survival of the arts '''The eye finds no fixed point ... " 155 and even with their success. Quality or value exists only within a discipline, not between disciplines. A work such as an audio-visual set-up, let us say, or a performance which brings together film, text, and sound elements, could not possibly meet the criteria ofquality and value advanced by Greenbergian critics like Fried, who consider that performance, like theatre, is a failure. It should be pointed out first of all that for these critics there is no distinction between theatre and performance. In their eyes, performance corresponds to a regressive manifestation of no interest, since it does not seek exclusively the specificity of form conveyed by modernism. Performance, they say, represents the ultimate decadence of theatre, which modernism, in its discomfort, has tried to conjure away by making it a theatre of absence, emptiness, void. What would draw performance closer to theatre and theatricality is indeed the idea of presence, which modem philosophy, to a degree, aims to criticize. To speak ofpresence again today, in a theoretical framework, can indeed seem retrograde. But exactly what presence is involved? Is it the presence evinced by contemporary art when there is a meeting between the performer and his public, when there is a performance situation (let us leave it at that for now) - is that presence similar to the one which concerns classical philosophy? Is the relationship continuous or discontinuous? If it is continuous (space-time a priori), one must of course concede decadence. But would it not be more interesting and plausible to think that this nco-presence has broken ties with the old one, or that it is simply different, even without having broken its ties? Ifwe seek in performance something to help us understand the meaning of a reactualized presence, what first comes to mind is the here and now of performance already mentioned, its incidental or situational chara:ter. Presence is temporality, and essentially what interests us in contemporary art is this criterion of temporality, this coming into being: the characteristic presence of performance could be called presentness - that is to say, performance unfolds essentially in the present time. But this definition is not enough, since our aim is to draw...