The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art and Poetry by Jon Erickson (review)

Book Reviews 169 tion of the final section of reviews dating from 1979 to 1993 to the essays preceding it. The subtitle of this section, "Reports from an Emerging Culture," summarizes the tone of these writings, in which Fuchs strives to describe, often to defend, the theatrical manifestations of what she sees as an important new development in the history of western culture. As a journalistic critic, Fuchs is clearly a partisan of the postmodern but she also seeks to develop evaluative criteria that will make it possible to distinguish good postmodern performance from bad. Overall, these reviews leave no doubt that postmodernism is a major cultural watershed that must be reckoned with. Yet it is significant that the word "postmodernism" does not appear in the title of the book and is used only sparingly in the first two sections. The certainty of the reality and significance of postmodemism that animates the reviews is much more muted in the academic writings, where postmodemism and its manifestations appear more as problematics than as sure things. This juxtaposition provides a compelling glimpse into Fuchs's mind and the strong sense that criticism is a self-contesting struggle toward conclusions that mayor may not prove to be definitive. PHILIP AUSLANDER. GEORGlA JNSTlTUTB OF TECHNOLOGY JON ERICKSON. The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art and Poetry. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995· Pp. 245, illustrated. $39·50. The Fate ofthe Object is an ambitious book, impressive in its scope and able in its range of theory. Author Jon Erickson notes that his work concentrates "on the value of objectification for the artist in the production of works" and at the same time "analyze[s] the reception of works of art in relation to their objecthood" (29); this, indeed, is what the book carefully and often provocalively charts. Most impressive is the sheer range of malerials that Erickson explores in order to illustrate his thesis. Chapter 2 looks at modern theater (including Craig, Artaud, Genet, and Beckett - wilh especial attention to The Balcony and Krapp's Last Tape "as progenitors of a postmodern theatrical consciousness " even at the same time as they are resolutely modernist [85]). Chapter 3 considers the visual arts (abstract painters Malevich, Kandinsky, and Mondrian ; and conceptual artists, particularly Ducharnp) for a will towards "selffashioning " concomitantly with "self-deconstruction" (135). Chapter 4 takes as its focus the material word (concrete poetry, the Language poets, with an interesting account of some of Stein's writing). Some of the resonances produced by such a wide range of reference - between, say, Barnett Newman and Samuel Beckett - are both tantalizing and thought-provoking. 170 Book Reviews Erickson spends a significant portion of the book wrestling with his own unease with "theory." He certainly has a confident facility with many different strands of philosophical/critical thought, and his accounts of various positions are scrupulously fair. At the end of chapter 3 he takes this on quite specifically : I am not antitheory, certainly, as what I am writing here is a theory of sorts. But I am affirming that theory, just like human beings in general, needs to know where it stands in the larger material scheme of things. It has to operate in a dialectical relationship with mute materiality (which can be apprehended in other than linguistic ways) and have respect for that other term (133). The savior, according to Erickson, is art: The great advantage of art or literature over theory is that this dual aspect of reality is at their very core. The truest poet is one who knows that language isn't everything. The truest artist knows that while he or she is painting a "picture ," or constructing an object, the colors and textures, shapes and lines have an integrity and being to themselves that surpasses simple signification (1331. While there is definitely something to be said for this argument (if only to remind theorists of what it is they generally do), Erickson'S tone in the book tends towards a reification of the anist and an abjection of the academic. In the Preface he claims that "if I could imagine an ideal reader for...