Individuals and Autonomists: 1970s Group Theater and 1980s Performance Art

...In other plays of the Wooster Group, Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Crucible, and The Cocktail Party are also presented in reconditioned fragments as pieces of the common knowledge of our culture...

...The groups therefore took relationships as their text and re-taught themselves and their audiences how to read, casually linking the practice of their art with the practice of democracy in the process...

...It casually links a problem of art to a problem of democracy...

...But the monologue leaves this anecdote behind as Gray becomes more and more fascinated with the way "the camera eroticizes the space" around certain individuals, and so seems to lift them out of history...

...As a result, the style they forged was a virtuoso blend of techniques, and their texts often quoted the Western theater canon as if it were a privileged language...

...Mabou Mines, however, is still together after seventeen years, which Breuer depicts as stormy but ultimately rewarding: "Now it's a true ensemble— the first thinking ensemble...

...In the monologue as in the movie, our view of historical process is restricted to the few glimpses we can get through the eyes of certain star personalities...

...Performance artists simply accept the "inevitable...

...When Andrei Serban and Elizabeth Swados translated Aeschylus into an invented language for their group piece Fragments of a Trilogy, or Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company rendered Camille as a drag tour-de-force, they drew their audiences into the work of recognizing quotations, and thereby into their project of recovering theater as a cultural lingua franca...

...They became members of various group theaters, who produced a rich and confident body of work in New York in the 1970s...

...and Nam June Paik (basically a Dadaist who updated the style by incorporating video and other technology in his performances) were alike mainly in their failure to appreciate in cash value at the same rate as paintings and sculptures...

...Gray joined Richard Schechner's Performance Group in 1970, quit in 1975 to co-found the Wooster Group, then in 1986 quit it to pursue the solo career he had begun as a sideline in 1979...

...In the shadow of mass culture, then, the groups and their audiences kept returning to the theater to relearn the language of direct experience...

...And finally, the subtext of group work, the tissue of relations between members, makes their productions -seem especially fragile next to the hardy products of mass culture...

...Once America became overwhelmingly dependent on the mass media, both our political representatives and our dramatic representations began to seem alien to us, although a full sense of their estrangement may come to us only in moments of doubt...

...Along with the play's meaning, Route 1 & 9 retrieves the memory of those productions, of the school and community theaters where so many of us acquired our first theatergoing habits—of an experience and a text we had almost forgotten we had in common, because they fall outside the power of mass culture...

...He finally resorts to his own theory of "an invisible cloud of evil that circles the world and lands at random in Germany, Cambodia, possibly Iran and Beirut, maybe even America...

...From that perspective, the isolation of the "autonomist" looks like an escapist fantasy...

...In the 1980s, Gray and a generation of performers too young to have had his chances have rerouted the impulses of that avant-garde back into the channels of consumption...

...Images of cooperation are harder to come by...

...In the 1970s, the group theater scene offered a disgruntled actor like Gray the chance to achieve genuine independence from the entertainment industry...

...and in return the art world allotted spaces and funds to performance art, sometimes extending these to performers from the dance, theater, or music worlds...

...The notion of a coherent body politic is hedged with quotation marks in Route 1 & 9's first part, which consists of a videotape, played on monitors hung over the performance space, of the group's re-creation of an Encyclopedia Britannica film on how to read Our Town...

...In his monologue Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding FALL • 1987 . 589 THE CULTURE OF THE CITY Gray cites a series of carefully disconnected facts about the American invasion and internal politics of Cambodia, but still finds himself at a loss to explain the reign of the Khmer Rouge...

...But then, so do vaudeville acts, pop stars, and, especially, stand-up comedians—who take a more defensive stance toward their audience than other types of solo act (think of Don Rickles's insults, or Joan Rivers's preemptive self-deprecation) and appear naked of props or accompaniment...

...The group theaters' models for community are often makeshifts, unelaborated but suggestive, like the bare frame of a house that keeps reappearing in the Wooster Group's plays...

...but, aware that their forte was art, not government, they relied chiefly on a common language to mediate the clash of wills...

...In our "self-directed" society, images of autonomy are so familiar as to seem inevitable...

...The two styles came together in the career of Spalding Gray, whose autobiographical monologues estabFALL • 1987 585 THE CULTURE OF THE CITY lished a genre of performance art...

...But all that does is make me more self-centered"— and so on—until he ends up "beside myself . . . I'm on the edge...

...and the man turns out to be none other than history with a human face, not so much Gray's magnification as his distorted (because previously repressed) reflection...

...At that moment, the fact that theater is a non-mass art took on a new relevance for some of its students, trained in the collectivist ideals and improvisatory theater practices of the 1960s, and immersed in the anomalous street culture of Manhattan, where the most valued performances are the least reproducible ones...

...The Lost Ones had to be taken out of repertory when David Warrilow left Mabou Mines...

...This theory is the fruit of a political education that began with Gray's participation in the film The Killing Fields (when he confessed his ignorance of politics in an audition, the director's response was "Perfect...

...Although in the art world the label of "performance art" is still a token of relative integrity, in the entertainment world it has started to stick to any solo act that smacks of the outr...

...Performance artists usually write, and often direct, their own acts...

...This brand of naked individualism has had a recent surge in popularity, spawning the publicist's proverb, "Comedy is the rock and roll of the 1980s...

...q FALL • 1987 • 591 592 • DISSENT...

...Much as Greenberg's modernist painter emphasized painting's flatness, the quality distinguishing it not only from sculpture but also from inherently illusionistic media like film and photography, so the groups drew attention to theater's liveness, the volatile quality of the relationship between the members of the audience and their "representatives" onstage, which sets theater apart from inherently alienating media like films and television...

...These gestures of protest were nonetheless worked out entirely within the terms of current art-history debate...

...Their dominating presence tempts us to infer that the remainder of history (everything that can't be seen through the star's mask) must be "invisible" — that is, unknowable by the isolate personalities in the audience of whom the star is only a magnification...

...The vacuum they left in avant-garde theater was then filled by a new breed of solo performers who call themselves "performance artists...

...The moment Gray almost realizes how much his isolation costs is the most powerful in Swimming to Cambodia...

...Not coincidentally, performance artists tend to model their acts on those of vaudevillians (Bill Irwin), pop stars (Laurie Anderson), and, especially, stand-up comedians (Eric Bogosian, Ann Magnuson, and Spalding Gray, among others...

...Laurie Anderson, the first successful (recordings, videos, movies) entertainer/performance artist, acquired her art world credentials in the 1970s, then went on to build her reputation as an entertainer in the clubs and theaters that became her springboard to media prominence in the 1980s...

...But that's self-defeating...

...In Route 1 & 9 (1981), the actors assemble the house while blindfolded by taped-over sunglasses, so that their close cooperation is seen to be not just desirable but necessary...

...Yet Gray the perceiver stands for "all of America" quite as much as the button-pusher...

...He met a man once...

...I don't know what my platform was—I mean, he was standing for all of America and I was just concerned for myself at that point...

...Some groups had votes and called meetings...

...The group's indirect route to a possible social future thus lies through part of our shared past, leading back from American theater history to fragmentary memories of community—not the media community of interchangeable consumers, but the communities represented in concentrated form at civic gatherings, which audience and performers alike attend so as to feel their character tested and confirmed by the strains of relation...

...Since the character is represented by a bunraku puppet, he is in fact beside himself, dependent for his every move on an onstage puppeteer, actor Bill Raymond, who plays both his double and his agent, "Bill Morris...

...The only big picture they can form is that of the paranoid: since none of it fits together, it must all fit together...

...Projects as different as those of Chris Burden (a masochist who specialized in putting himself in danger of getting electrocuted, shot, suffocated, etc...

...There ensued, for those who made this observation, a moment of doubt as to whether we could in fact realize democratic ideals within the mass modes...

...As Mabou Mines's Lee Breuer noted in a recent interview, "the power struggle under the surface" of collaborative groups often tore them apart after "a half-life of about five years...

...They would admit that the model communities they built on the system's shrinking margin were small-scale and fragile, not in the manner of someone confessing a weakness, but of someone imparting a difficult truth about democratic ideals...

...The main character in Mabou Mines's A Prelude to Death in Venice (1979) details the process: "I go into myself...

...but a blackout was followed by a third shift in scale as Warrilow appeared, suddenly naked, on the steps...

...The individualism of the group theaters was formed in the context of a permanent struggle between dependence and independence, cooperation and individuation...

...The audience of Mabou Mines's The Lost Ones, adapted by Lee Breuer from a Beckett novel, were crowded into a miniature amphitheater with binoculars scattered on its steps...

...Those who obligingly enter on the task of self-making apart from any social context often find themselves (like Psycho's Norman in the archetypically American isolation of the Bates Motel) developing borderline personalities...

...The group theaters, however, in turning away from mass culture chose to resume what Clement GreenFALL • 1987 • 587 THE CULTURE OF THE CITY berg identified as the modernist artist's proper task, "the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself—not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence...

...but in the 1970s more grants became available to experimental artists, and in Manhattan rehearsal and performance space was still affordable...

...This straightforward image rests at the center point of a play that otherwise offers no direct answer to the question of how we might imagine and construct new communities...

...But theater can actually reproduce that sense of presence, although contemporary theater more often tries to simulate the alienating effects of the media (e.g., Neil Simon's sitcomlike one-liners and the cinematic special effects of Trevor Nunn and Andrew Lloyd Webber spectaculars like Cats and Starlight Express...

...By that time, in downtown New York, theater and nightclub owners needed low-overhead entertainment, and theater audiences were no longer opposed to the idea of a star system...

...The mass media can only simulate (in laugh tracks or fireside chats) the living presence of others...

...Part of that cachet derives from the term "performance art" itself, which has one meaning in theory but two in practice...

...The Lost Ones taught its audience how to see others (as Emerson says) as if they were real, as well as to see themselves not just as perceivers of, but as participants in, a common experience...

...Group theaters tended to have corporate names—e.g., Mabou Mines, the Wooster Group, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, the Talking Band— with more or less explicit charters that ceded decision making to all the members, and original repertories whose style and content drew on the peculiar characters of, and relations among, the members...

...Why bother to construct images when you can find them ready-made...

...By accepting its terms, performance art ultimately confirmed the art world's power...

...They continued to value the principle even as they endured the agonies of trying to put it into practice...

...The group theaters knew that consumer capitalism was not just one of those user-friendly systems now becoming widely available to the 590 • DISSENT THE CULTURE OF THE CITY non-pro...

...Still, Gray and his audiences assume that he brings with him the anti-establishment cachet of the milieu from which he emerged when he plugs his movie on the David Letterman show or muses on his success in the pages of Rolling Stone...

...Certain other performers had an affinity for solo work that drove them from the group-dominated 1970s theater scene into the art world, where their theatrical instincts set them apart from the visual artists (who, having defined performance art as anticommercial, had a stake in keeping it so...

...It is a big machine, one which is, moreover, designed to make relationships unreadable...

...The term was coined in the 1960s to describe a variety of acts staged by visual artists who were concerned less with entertaining than with registering a protest against art marketers whose hunger for durable objects increased with their skill at manipulating the objects' prices...

...Gray's success—in the last few years he's had two best-selling books, talk-show appearances, and a feature film accompanied by a publicity blitz—serves both as a measure of performance art's growing popularity, and as a contrast to the group theaters' complete failure to attract the attention of the media...

...They compete for the same grants and perform at each other's benefits...

...Even so, that process, and the complexity and refinement of its products, were the groups' chief luxuries...

...Gray's studious detachment (he calls himself "the perceiver") leaves him helpless in a confrontation with his opposite number...

...The groups shared a belief that figures could not be separated from their social ground...

...unlike movie or television stars, they seem to control their means of production...

...The groups also peppered this theater language with the icons and styles of pop culture, both to reclaim them as parts of live speech, and to remind themselves and their audiences of mass culture's capacity for absorbing and alienating us from our means of direct experience...

...the biggest grants barely covered several salaries, and the group ethos restrained members from becoming stars...

...Both value their isolation (which they would call independence) and imagine that the best way to preserve that isolation is to defer, when in doubt, to the fully worked-out platform of the powers that be...

...I indulge in self-recrimination...

...This brand of individualism is thereby strongly at odds with that of performance artists, who style 588 • DISSENT THE CULTURE OF THE CITY themselves outsiders (hence Eric Bogosian's gallery of addicts and killers, or Karen Finley's compulsive taboo-breaking...

...Later in the play, as the performers below evoke a community torn apart by near-demonic forces, excerpts from Our Town reappear on the monitors...

...Whereas mainstream entertainers employ conventions that smooth the transitions between bits of material, performance artists draw attention to the gaps in their stories, which they see as the necessary consequence of their isolation from others who might fill them in...

...The would-be self-maker represses his conscious sense of dependence on others, only to feel it return as the sense of being manipulated by outside forces...

...He was at once a giant figure, the poor, bare, forked animal, and unmistakably one of us...

...But whereas Gray believes that sex, drugs, and travel broaden the mind, and isolation fosters a healthy skepticism, his acquaintance has carried self-seeking to its logical conclusions: self-alienation— "I wouldn't mind watching her get fucked by a guy once" is his one thought about his wife—and isolation, which has bred in him a delusive identification with state power...

...In an interview, Laurie Anderson tried to talk around the fact that by doing the job herself she had simply saved the machine the trouble of packaging another commodity...

...and these images fit into the promotional machinery already firmly in place...

...This sudden conversion to star worship comes late in the career of a man who said he had given up on professional acting partly because he "couldn't stand all the waiting while that big, indifferent machine made up its so-called mind...

...Some multipurpose "performance spaces," like the Kitchen, the Performing Garage, and La Mama, host both (the groups also play more traditional theaters, while performance artists often work nightclubs...

...So far the audience was reminded that art distances...

...We're looking for the American ambassador's aide") and later ended in a monologue...

...They appropriate familiar forms in the name of parody or hommage and in the interest 586 • DISSENT THE CULTURE OF THE CITY of efficient packaging ("performance art" has itself become a publicist's handle, while "group theater" is my provisional name for a movement never marketed as such...

...The Reagan 1980s brought cuts in arts funding and skyrocketing New York rents that finished some of the groups and left others struggling to survive...

...and that they were accustomed to viewing the "lost ones" as if through glass...

...I become selfinvolved...

...I really felt as if I were looking my death in the face...

...The play's images imply that the lesson can't be reproduced on a mass scale...

...Whereas both group theater and the earlier kind of performance art expressed resistance to the culture market, the later strain of performance art presents itself as a "new, improved" variant of commodities already on the market...

...Still, no one likes to abandon ideals outright...

...Mass culture, however, is all "outside," since it denies the existence of any specific social context that might impede the reduction of individuals to those depersonalized consumers and replaceable stars who keep filling roles predetermined for them by the entertainment industry...

...This time the quotation marks restore a pathos we had almost forgotten how to read into Our Town, after seeing so many productions that treated its small-town values as if it were our unchanging reality rather than a fading myth of lost paradise...

...He ends the film and part I of the stage and book versions of Swimming to Cambodia with a new theory: "I suddenly thought I knew what it was that killed Marilyn Monroe...

...The political movements of the 1960s seemed to counter the expressive power of the media in their own mass terms, but also proved to be too easily assimilable by the media...

...But performance artists take this fantasy for a fact, and they focus on it with an intensity that sets them apart from the mainstream types they might otherwise resemble...

...In a 1960s ensemble like the Living Theater, group impulse was exalted over individual will, but the 1970s ensembles felt that the truest expression of group impulse would allow (if just barely) for the greatest possible measure of individual will...

...I'm on the edge of being a self-made, man...

...And a record . . . it's skinny, it's small, and it's cheap, and it's exactly the piece and everybody gets exactly the same thing, and it's affordable . . . I like the idea, also, of using a system like a large record company to do it...

...This complaint was aired by the Mabou Mines theater collective in its Red Horse Animation, first performed at the Guggenheim Museum in 1970...

...Just as the collective image of the groups reflected their audiences' still-cherished commitment to social experiment, the performance artists' stance of go-it-alone appeals to those self-seekers of the 1980s who want to believe there is something radical about their individualism...

...This Navy man he met in the no-context of a train's lounge car was, like Gray, a hedonist, a globe-hopper, a solitary...

...When Gray's own try at personifying history breaks down in the worst sort of abstraction, he pauses, then reverts to the sort of personal anecdote he tells best...

...Some group theaters used the margin occupied by performance art as a temporary refuge for work that commercial theaters were not yet ready to accept (Mabou Mines, for instance, graduated from museums to a long association with the Public Theater...

...I try to be self-effacing...

...They needed the binoculars to accommodate themselves to a second shift in scale effected when an actor, David Warrilow, opened a small case to reveal another amphitheater in which he placed tiny figures, who, he explained at length, were the disinherited, the not-us...

...The groups first tested the principle of full democratic representation under the lab conditions of rehearsal...

...Observers of the small world of New York avant-garde theater seldom make much distinction between performance artists and the remaining group theaters...

...Common sense adds that so small an audience requires subsidy...

...My idea with making things like records satisfied me because as a performance artist I produce no real physical objects...

...The groups' collaborative process was time-consuming, and its products anything but commercial...

...What most group members had in common were extended 1960s picaresque educations in theater, in the course of which they absorbed a wide variety of texts and techniques...

...Delusive but dangerous, since this anti-Gray is literally connected to history, chained for five hours a day to a button that activates a nuclear warhead...