How Many Ostriches Can Dance on a Pinhead?
SIMON, JOHN
Culture Watching HOW MANY OSTRICHES CAN DANCE ON A PINHEAD? BY JOHN SIMON Robert Wilson's The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin takes 12 hours to perform, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. It ran for four...
...Accretion, agglomeration, reiteration, extension—the devices that come easiest, and can most readily be reduced to triviality and banality—are Wilson's mainstays...
...Even such an extreme case as Mallarme's pursuit of the perfection of the blank page—nothingness recreated by the poem—is a rational choice: the attempt to recreate the self-sufficiency of inanimate, uncaring matter and space within the friendly, because man-made and human, poem...
...or when Rene Magritte's paradoxically interpenetrating indoors and outdoors, day and night, foot and shoe, become objectifications of the eternal yearning to have things both ways...
...Or take that pretentious and untal-ented painter, Robert Motherwell, who had the arrogance to palm off his vacuous daubs as "Elegies for the Spanish Republic," another great historic catastrophe, although they could more appropriately be called "Laments for the State of Painting," testimonials to a different kind of disaster...
...Stalin appears briefly as a photograph in the beginning, is cursorily mentioned a few times, provides the justification for a character labeled Stalin's Wife (though unrecognizable as such without, and even with, the program), becomes the pretext for the protracted background readings from Marxist texts, and, finally, gives rise to some simulated broadcasts denying the sickness or death of the dictator...
...And subtracting from a medium, diminishing it, is as mindless and arrogant as expecting an audience to stare for 12 hours into a giant kaleidoscope...
...By constantly reshuffling images, you get not a work of art but a deck of cards...
...and so on and on and on...
...The point is that the doodlings and diddlings of a Robert Wilson, however brontosaurian their proportions, belong in a much more modest niche of infamy than that reserved for the gigantic tyrant in whose posthumous memory the Sol-zhenitsyns and Sakharovs, the Ros-tropoviches and Panovs, as well as countless others of our day, continue to be harassed and victimized...
...But what is it really...
...There is no resonance here, still less integration of details into a meaningful whole...
...Stalin is made up of seven unconnected acts, yet so loath is Wilson to let go of his audience that scenes are offered in front of the curtain during the intermissions...
...It does not make clear its intent: that the four-footed cave-dwellers are purer or more genuine than the two-footed paraders outside the cave's mouth...
...It is for escapees from thought, feeling and confrontations with reality, however transfigured by art—food for Philistines...
...Yet the drug experience is not art...
...Wilson, in trying to hypnotize his spectators with the sheer length and soporific pace of his spectacle, wants to blur, blunt, break down our faculties...
...It is an artistic and human scandal that falls somewhere between Watermill and Watergate...
...Wilson's creatures are all pretty much the same, and that, precisely, is the trouble—the interchangeability of all that goes on on stage...
...Wilson's opus has been compared also—approvingly—to drug fantasies, and 12 hours of it, I dare say, constitutes drug addiction...
...in visual art, by certain primitives, and by the Dadaists and Surrealists...
...so, for instance, the Women's Wear Daily critic, who went on to define the quality of genius as "creating something unlike anything created before...
...Wilson's agglomerations are, despite the elaborate mise en scene, an invitation to indiscriminateness, to a kind of passivity that, along with its opposite, hysteria, is the favorite mode of American audience participation...
...In 12 hours of your short life you can see the three late masterpieces of Eugene O'Neill...
...In fact, when an honest-to-goodness dog and sheep are thrust among the animal puppets or performers in beasts' clothing, the real animals very quickly, and sensibly, leave...
...If what mind Wilson possesses does not strike me as particularly original, however, this has not prevented it from being, in turn, an influence on things like his great admirer Jerome Robbins' dismal ballet Watermill, or some of Peter Brook's most recent pseudotheatrical Happenings...
...There have been similarly extravagant Wilson premieres from Paris to Persepolis, sponsored by no lesser potentates than Pierre Cardin and the Shah of Iran...
...Of course, there are people who are fascinated by watching, for example, a man in a huge frog mask sit at a banquet table for two hours, be served food and drink by a lackey, and mumble "Thank you...
...In Iran, one of his works spread over a whole week (the way Persian culture has been going lately, the Andersen tale may have to be rewritten as "The Shah's New Clothes...
...of Robert Rauschenberg nailing a stuffed, green goat to an oversize canvas, or hanging a stuffed eagle from it...
...For Wilson's beasts express little or nothing about animal being, or about being per se: They loaf around, or move about aimlessly, or perform a clumsy little dance fragment...
...How long will Wilson's next work, incorporating Stalin, stretch our endurance...
...His visions, if such they be, were anticipated in poetry by Rimbaud and Lautrea-mont and their followers...
...Camp...
...The work has been described as an opera, although there is no singing, and the musical background, when there is one, is apt to be either diluted neoromantic claptrap or the same two scratchily recorded bars of music repeated to near-infinitum...
...These are always Happenings, in which diverse, tenuously connected events litter the stage and surrounding area...
...Stalin, which has virtually nothing to do with Stalin (whose name Wilson, during one of his several on-stage appearances, manages to mispronounce), incorporates shorter, revised versions of all of Wilson's previous works, e.g., The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, which dragged in Freud quite gratuitously and brazenly...
...people in animal suits lolling about in a barred-off cave while, outside, gamboling seminudes are superseded by Goyaesque figures in a stately processional (something about lost animal innocence here...
...Wilson is anywhere from 50-100 years too late...
...nonetheless the finished works, carefully articulated, always strive to enhance and sharpen their audience's perceptions and understanding...
...It has been called pantomime, too, although mime distills scattered human busy-ness, whereas Wilson's stage animals (some of them real) and people (none of them real) mosey around in a somnolent phantasmagoria with no discernible relation to reality...
...Frequently, though, his borrowings are more immediate: The mumbling heads sticking out of holes were managed far more purposefully by Beckett...
...Yet there is, for me, a basic fallacy in this argument: A modern painting (classical painting is hardly relevant here) works because of its immutability and equilibrium, through which it reorganizes or reinterprets form and space, evoking an alternative world that clarifies or criticizes this one...
...Pot, moreover, is unpretentious...
...Yet all art consists of actively making choices—not necessarily what we would consider the right ones, but choices susceptible of evaluation...
...of this Stalin that drags on for 12 hours and drags in some 140 or 150 performers, some of them in drag, and including Wilson's own aged grandmother, who should have been in bed long before...
...If this dissolves, if we no longer feel it in existence and action about and above us, whatever is social in us is deprived of all objective foundation...
...All that remains is an artificial combination of illusory images, a phantasmagoria vanishing at the least reflection...
...The King of Spain, which did the same for Philip II...
...But when Wilson gives us, in slower-than-slow motion, a black woman murdering her children, before and after which she mopes around for hours with a stuffed crow attached to her wrist, the meaning is purely private—an incident from the life of a dumb boy that struck Wilson, a former stutterer who worked with dumb children, and who still seems to be gesturing in public for an audience he takes to be made up of dumb children...
...The sheer, absurd excess of Warhol letting one shot of the Empire State Building turn into an 8-hour movie...
...Painting utilizes permanence: Its power is in capturing something, not in dissipating it...
...It ran for four nights only at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but Wilson is considered such a unique prodigy that no money or effort was spared even for such a noncommercial venture...
...a huge but effete black man parading on stage from time to time in ever more outrageous get-ups, and with genitals ever more outrageously thrust out...
...later, one cavorting ostrich similarly proliferates into 19—not 16, as a bleary-eyed Clive Barnes reckoned it around six in the morning...
...in the theater, by Alfred Jarry and his successors, from Apollinaire to Artaud...
...Basically, camp represents the homosexual sensibility defying a heterosexual world by flinging enormous exaggeration into the faces of the smug straights: If they swallow it, and proclaim it genius, the joke is on them...
...The show cost some $200,000, largely foundation money, and it costs the viewer 12 hours of his short waking life-though some people, like the Time drama critic, sensibly converted several of these into sleeping hours...
...The most plausible defense of Wilson's work is based on its pic-torialness, the creation of "a flowing gallery of pictures," in Stanley Kauffmann's words, "with theatrical means...
...The fact that the particular big name is a heinous one does not lessen the distastefulness of its being used for self-indulgent and self-promotional purposes...
...He is as much an artist as is Timothy Leary...
...or you can even five a little...
...In Moral Education, the French sociologist writes: "Social man necessarily presupposes a society which he expresses and serves...
...Auschwitz and Hiroshima are surely as ghastly as Stalin, yet nothing is more unappetizing than their being dragged in as the moral excuse for the excesses of countless underground movies and two-bit theatrical experiments, by way of a facile hortatory climax...
...not by foisting restrictive models on us, but by eliciting self-discoveries we can variously apply...
...For something truly unique, you must go outside art—say, to Hitler's extermination camps or to America's nonimpeachment of Nixon...
...and so forth...
...And for that, marijuana is both easier to come by and less expensive to produce...
...But a dream is made artistically relevant when its individuality is rendered universal: as, for example, when Joyce's dream subsumes history and myth...
...a bunch of women in a Victorian dormitory jumping in and out of bed as an incoherently muttering Father Time inches his way forward and backward...
...the chorus line of ostriches pranced about more hilariously in Disney's Fantasia...
...Most curiously, some have called Wilson a genius...
...once—the WWD critic laughed blissfully at this...
...Still others have dubbed this choreography, although ballet, at its most rarefied, remains an orderly translation of music into visual terms (without in any way diminishing the music), and modern dance, at its most tellurian, is still a celebration of the human body's mobility and nobility...
...If you consider the sentence I have italicized, you have a discerning diagnosis of Wilson...
...In Stalin, movement consists of things like a bathing-suited jogger trotting to and fro across the stage at irregular intervals (a marathon running gag...
...Or, perhaps, not so sensibly, because they would have slept better in bed...
...Art is, loosely but not flaccidly interpreted, something that points toward a goal for spiritual action...
...What dance there is is repetitious, aimless, barely coordinated slithering or circling about, mostly watered-down Merce Cunningham, of which the original is deliquescent and amorphous enough...
...Oddly enough, a work of Emile Durkheim that I chanced upon offers what strikes me as a perfect critique of Wilson's "art...
...But whereas steak au poivre is tasty, who would dine on pepper on pepper...
...It is a way of making us feel and understand, think and exist...
...Yet this social man is the essence of civilized man...
...a man periodically coming through the audience with a long pole, to set large metal rings on a wire strung over the spectators' heads jangling and humming (a marathon humming gag...
...There is no such choice in Wilson, where pure, or impure, arbitrariness is merely given a grandiosely wasteful orchestration...
...Countless artists have used drugs to stimulate their creativity...
...Wilson's main device is accumulation ?repetition in ever larger quantities at ever greater duration...
...if they end up outraged, with mudpies on their mugs, the laugh is still on them...
...This is a poor definition: Bartok, Stravinsky and Webern, let's say, are not simply unlike Strauss, Debussy and Mahler, any more than Balan-chine and Cranko are essentially and ultimately unlike Petipa and Ivanov...
...In 12 hours of Wilson's farrago, you merely age and die a little...
...or The Rake's Progress, Ariadne on Naxos, Wozzeck, and Bluebeard's Castle...
...Many have tried to justify Wilson's work on the basis of its resemblance to dreams...
...Now Wilson's Stalin tosses out images that are artificially rather than artistically combined, that vanish from the consciousness not only on the least reflection, but also on the slightest passage of time, and that cannot tell us anything we need to know...
...or the best ballets of Balan-chine, Cranko and Robbins...
...Well, dreams have been exploited in works of art since time immemorial: from the Bible, which is full of them, to Finnegans Wake, which is all a dream...
...In using Stalin, Freud and the rest as nominal excuses for his nonsense, Wilson becomes guilty of pretentiousness to the point of indecency...
...If everything were reversed in time, place or meaning, it would make exactly as much—or as little—sense...
...a pair of legs doing a fake high-wire act just beneath the proscenium arch...
...or all the best current films, from The New Land to American Graffiti...
...Even when Wilson comes closest to significant imagery, as in the cave where people become cut off from beasts, slowly but definitively, by bar after thuddingly dropping bar, the image has no resonance...
...Except for his elephantine elaboration and misuse of his mediums, Wilson is, in fact, all too like some of his predecessors...
...Quantity is set not just above quality, but indeed above meaning itself: If one Negro mammy appears, soon there are 4, 8, 16, and still more...
...It has also been called a play, although it contains only a few, often reiterated verbal fragments here and there—a further denaturation of the already very watery Gertrude Stein —and long, droning readings of Marxist texts to which amateurish dancers unfocusedly sashay about...
...All this is sheer rodomontade, invocation of a big name on which to sell one's paltry wares...
...If there is no more than that to being an animal, we might as well remain human...
...As for using the stage for purely painterly purposes, it means depriving theater of two of its essential modes of making a lasting impact: words and meaningful actions...
...Genius is the wedding of the traditional and the new—arduous, as many marriages are—into an individual vision that is as like as it is unlike what has been...
...that is, nothing which can be a goal for our action...
...In small doses, as a spice, camp can be effective—see some of Al Carmines, or the current, cleverly campy Candide...
...I see nothing more in The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin than its tune-in-turn-on-and-drop-out value...
Vol. 57 • February 1974 • No. 4
