Origins of The Avant-Garde

1. Origins of The Avant-Garde

2. Origins of The Avant-Garde • To some observers, the postwar era in American theatre was a period of steady and ineluctable decline: • The number of new productions decreased with each season • The range of theatre produced narrowed alarmingly • The financial burdens grew more overwhelming • Audiences stayed home to watch television

3. Origins of The Avant-Garde • But in fact, evolutionary process was occurring, the American theatre was transforming into something different from what it had ever been, something that reflected the changing needs of artists and audiences alike and that could adapt more readily to a new world.

4. Origins of The Avant-Garde • In the roughly thirty-year period from the mid-1950s to the mid 1980s, there was an eruption of theatrical activity in the United States that would ultimately reshape every aspect of performance and have significant influences both at home and abroad.

5. Origins of The Avant-Garde • The myth of declining theatrical activity was easily belied by looking at the weekly theatre listings of the time, especially in a newspaper such as the then counterculture Village Voice.

6. Origins of The Avant-Garde • Never before in American history had the foundations of the art been examined so minutely, been so challenged, and been so radically altered. The driving force at the center of this activity was the avant-garde.

7. Origins of The Avant-Garde • The concept of an avant-garde was something new in American theatre. The European theatre had experienced waves of avant-garde activity since the emergence of symbolism in the 1880s, but there was no equivalent in the United States.

8. Origins of The Avant-Garde • The general thrust and tenor of pre-World War II experimental theatre was summed up by Lee Strasberg, one of the founders of the Group Theatre and later head of the Actors Studio.

9. Origins of The Avant-Garde • What began to emerge in the 1950s, however, was something quite different from previous experience. There was a bold spirit of experimentation – a rebellion against the mainstream commercial system and the utter rejection of the status quo.

10. Origins of The Avant-Garde • Historically, the function of the avant-garde, as art historian Thomas Crow has suggested, has been to serve ‘as a research and development arm of the culture industry’.

11. Origins of The Avant-Garde • In a 1944 essay, artist Robert Motherwell noted that painting “has always been a species of abstraction: the painter has selected from the world he knows, a world which is not entirely the same in each epoch, the forms and relations which interested him, and then employed them as he pleased… The art of Picasso has differed in the degree of abstraction, but not the kind of abstraction, from the art of the Renaissance tradition of which he is the bitter finale.”

12. Origins of The Avant-Garde • Historically, the theatre artist, like a painter, had selected elements – that is, abstracted – from the known surrounding world in order to create a play. Conventional forms and structures were used to evoke the physical and emotional properties of the experiential world.

13. Origins of The Avant-Garde • As Jean-François Lyotard said in discussing the aesthetic developments engendered by Denis Diderot, “Art would no longer imitate nature but would create a whole other world, eine Zwischenwelt [a between world] as Paul Klee would later say.” • To borrow from Michael Kirby’s definition of Happenings, avant-garde theatre, by and large, created a structure and experience that was neither logical nor illogical but, rather, “alogical.”

14. Origins of The Avant-Garde • In stating that this new theatre did not evolve from neoclassical and Renaissance models – that it did not create a world – this theatre was not fundamentally linear, illusionistic, thematic, or psychological, certainly not in any conventional sense.

15. Origins of The Avant-Garde • The American avant-garde theatre that made its first appearance with a production of Erik Satie’s Ruse of the Medusa at Black Mountain College in 1948 and evolved slowly over the next ten years drew its energy and inspiration from the compositions and theories of John Cage, the writings of Gertrude Stein, action painting, the work of Antonin Artaud, and a dash of Bertolt Brecht.

16. Origins of The Avant-Garde • And from those artists who sought refuge in the United States from the ravages of Nazism and World War II came the ideas of symbolism, expressionism, futurism, surrealism, and especially Dada. These influences intermingled in the American artistic melting pot to create a new avant-garde theatre.

17. Origins of The Avant-Garde • The historical roots of the term “avant-garde” lie in French military terminology. The term was apparently first tied to art by Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825).

18. Origins of The Avant-Garde • Because of the self-referential and formalistic tendencies of much of the avant-garde throughout its history, it is often forgotten that initially the avant-garde was meant to transform society, that it was seen initially as a utopian program for creating an idealistic world for the future.

19. Origins of The Avant-Garde • For avant-garde artists the challenge was to transform society while standing apart from it. • In fact, a true avant-garde theatre mist seek an essential change in audience perceptions that, in turn, will have a profound impact on the relationship of the spectator to the world.

20. Origins of The Avant-Garde • Avant-garde performance strives toward a radical restructuring of the way in which an audience views and experiences the very act of theatre, which in turn must transform the way in which the spectators view themselves and their world.

21. Origins of The Avant-Garde • On one level, the concept of the avant-garde is best explained through reference to semiotics. • Performer and audience alike must be able to interpret the signs to achieve what Keir Elam calls “theatrical competence”.

22. Origins of The Avant-Garde • Much of the history of the avant-garde can be seen as an attempt to create strategies that will undermine theatrical competence. • For the traditional spectator, the rules that govern how one views a musical, a comedy, or a drama have long been established.

23. Origins of The Avant-Garde • In many forms of drama, especially in Western theatre, the predominant structural device has been the narrative. This was particularly true of the American theatre that emerged out of the nineteenth century.

24. Origins of The Avant-Garde • If theatre is to be a place for art, that is, for an experiential alternative to everyday life, then it must, according to the artists of the avant-garde, present a work or event not available through normal systems of behavior. • Not only images and ideas, but whole patterns of reception and response to events must be challenged, disrupted, and reconfigured.

25. Origins of The Avant-Garde • Why did it take sixty to seventy years from the beginnings of the historical avant-garde to the development of an American avant-garde theatre – from the symbolist productions of the Théâtre d’Art to the John Cage events at Black Mountain College, Happenings, and the work of the Living Theatre?

26. Origins of The Avant-Garde • Part of the answer lies in the necessity of the avant-garde’s adversarial position within the traditional culture, the need for the avant-garde to emerge in opposition to an established, dominant culture – an ensonced and static culture.

27. Origins of The Avant-Garde • While “high culture” may not have entered the mainstream of American society until the 1950s , it is questionable whether a theatrical high culture ever entered the mainstream.

28. Origins of The Avant-Garde • The new ”official culture” that emerged with a self-consciously American identity was inevitably a product and reflection of the general perception of the country itself, which had become mythologized in a romantic aura.

29. Origins of The Avant-Garde • While Stephen Mallarmé and Paul Fort were attempting to overthrow the stifling effects of a centuries-old cultural heritage in Paris, Clyde Fitch and David Belasco were trying to discover and define America. Avant-garde as metaphor was unnecessary in a land where the folk heroes were a true avant-garde in every sense of the word.

30. Origins of The Avant-Garde • The idea of the individual quest and the boundless horizon were well established in American consciousness even before the Revolution. • America saw itself as a grand narrative in which manifest destiny served as a thematic thread guiding the “story” to its denouement.

31. Origins of The Avant-Garde • The most successful vehicle for establishing the characters of this narrative and disseminating the story to the greatest number of spectators was the melodrama. • Melodrama, by becoming the first mass cultural phenomenon of the United States, became the young nation’s classicism – but it was , of course, simultaneously a popular art.

32. Origins of The Avant-Garde • “The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown therritory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden, shocking encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future,” wrote Jürgen Habermas. “ The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured.”

33. Origins of The Avant-Garde • Thus the avant-garde could be seen as the logical outgrowth of the romantic movement that had spawned the European revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century. • For an avant-garde theatre to emerge in the US it was necessary to disrupt the central position of narrative in the American mythos, and for artists to take an oppositional stance to established culture.

34. Origins of The Avant-Garde • The process that led to the triumphant establishment of an American avant-garde took place largely in the world of the plastic arts. • Modern art in America was no longer something confined to an elite world of aesthetes – it was hotly debated in the public forums of the media.

35. Origins of The Avant-Garde • WWII effectively ended Parisian dominance of the art world, and American culture was able to rush in and fill the vacuum. • The supreme confidence, built upon clear and obvious military and economic superiority, combined with the return of many expatriate European artists to their homelands, allowed American artists to break free of their subservience to European art and ideas and find a unique voice.

36. Origins of The Avant-Garde • So while the new art expressed fear and doubt over the instability and uncertainty of the world’s future and the confusion over the contradictions of American society, with its mix of unprecedented wealth and abject poverty, democratic ideals and social injustice, it also embodied the energy and spirit of the confident, powerful, and exuberant new American society.

37. Origins of The Avant-Garde • The first wave of the American avant-garde, primarily in the visual arts and embodied in abstract expressionism, moved toward an objective formalism with roots going back to Mondrian and Kandinsky, and even Monet and Cézanne, as well as the Bauhaus.

38. Origins of The Avant-Garde • The modern art movement in America captured the mantle of democratic righteousness after the war through a sort of chauvinistic assault – successfully elevating American artists to a level and prestige previously conferred only on European painters and sculptors – and then launching what today would be called a “buy American” campaign, suggesting that supporting American avant-garde artists was virtually a patriotic duty.

39. Origins of The Avant-Garde • In the US trough the 1920s and 1930s, the avant-garde in art was associated with, even dominated by, left-wing political movement, and the product was a politically engaged and imagistically accessible art.

40. Origins of The Avant-Garde • With abstract expressionism established as the voice of both rebellion and American individualism, modern art emerged as the true expression of the new American spirit. Painters such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Pollock could rise to the status of cultural icons.

41. Origins of The Avant-Garde • In artistic and intellectual cauldron that was New York city at the time, theatre artists, painters, writers, and musicians came together and shared ideas. • The energy and innovations of one form flowed freely into others and back again. • For theatre artists dismayed with the perceived banality of mainstream theatre, the raw energy and freedom embodied in avant-garde art pointed the way toward a dynamic renovation of the theatre. By the end of the 1950s, there was a veritable explosion of theatrical activity.