Cut

By the word “cut” I mean to reference a prominent tactic in what James Snead has called a black cultural insistence on repetition. In a passage on musical form Snead writes: “The ‘cut’ overtly insists on the repetitive nature of the music, by abruptly skipping it back to another beginning which we have already heard.” (1) In “cut,” then, I reiterate the repetition in difference that is both “again,” or the same, and “an other” – “another beginning we have already heard.”
In an essay published in 1981, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Snead warns readers not to prop up the false divide that articulates white cultural forms as devoid of repetition and black cultural forms as redolent with the repetitive. Rather, Snead asks that we interrogate what is at stake in different cultural stances toward repetition and their relations to the issue of origin – that is, that we examine attitudes toward repetition and “originality” as those attitudes take diverse cultural forms. Is it possible that panic about the ideality of origin and the fear of potential debauchery in the mimetic has more valence in white cultural approaches to repetition than in other cultural modes? (2) If so, looking to black cultural heritage in the widespread embrace of repetition as a key quality of postmodern performance may raise further questions about the drive to “legitimacy” that results in the isolation of white “fathers” of performance art. (3)

Cut

The twentieth century was uniquely hospitable to, and enamored of, solo performance, with an increasing fascination as the century wore on. This was the premise of a conference at the Centre National de la Danse in October 2001 in Paris to which I was invited. I typed out a polite note declining the invitation thinking that “solo” was against the grain of my thought. What more could I offer on the topic? Hadn’t we already critiqued the category of the singular and its link to “origin” and “originality”?Would doing it again be repetitive, redundant? Shouldn’t I rather attempt tomake an original contribution to the field, not riff on the contributions ofothers – Griselda Pollock, Rosalind Krauss, Pollock Krauss Pollock Krauss? Should I not try and pronounce my singular voice? Resist repetition?
I’d just brought out “Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The Double and its Theater.” That essay took up the topic of cloning, fear of mimesis, and operations of surrogacy in performance art. I’d also been at work for a long time on a project concerning the “playing” of Abraham Lincoln in Linda Mussmann’s theatre piece Cross Way Cross (in which a woman, traveling south in a Lincoln Continental, has an accident with history and becomes Lincoln himself). I thought of the actress as double in her solo: “she” and “Lincoln.” I was also thinking about Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play which features the re-enactment of Lincoln by a black man whom Parks calls the “Foundling Father” and a “Faux Father” (in spoken Black English “faux father” sounds exactly like “forefather” and “foefather,” etc.). These playings, it was obvious, concern double play and triple play – and if these doublings were concerned with singular figures, such as Lincoln, they were concerned on the level of multiplicity, reproduction, the inane hyper-appearance of the singular father.
Of course, the hyper-copy and the thrall to the double was latetwentiethcentury Warholian common sense. The Lincoln study had tripped me into a discovery of legions of “real-life” Abraham Lincoln impersonators who re-enact their “solo performances” of the Founder en masse. (4) To think of these solo acts as “solo” seemed absurd. But I had to think twice.

Cut

The conference was in Paris.
I accepted the invitation.

Cut

How to approach the topic of solo work without revalorizing the solo as singular, but also without re-erecting a too often binarized opposition: the middle-aged critique that singularity, like originality, is mythic? Feminist art historians, as well as post-structuralist writers in general, have deconstructed the myth of greatness and its relation to genius for both male and female artists. We are by now familiar with Griselda Pollock’s 1980 argument that modernist criticism’s production of artistic authorship takes “the fundamental form of the bourgeois subject; ‘creative, autonomous, proprietorial’.” (5) Works such as Rosalind Krauss’s 1986 The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths pressed the point, and Amelia Jones’s important 1998 Body Art: Performing the Subject pushed it farther. Pollock’s recent work continues in the same vein, reminding us that the proprietal bourgeois subject is substantially resilient – we are not beyond the point of reiteration. In Differencing the Canon (1999) Pollock notes that an individual work’s “authority” is still justified by its relationship to other “great” singular works as well as by an artist’s supposed originality in transcending “his” inheritance. Canons continue, she writes, to “actively create a patrilineal genealogy of father-son succession and replicate patriarchal mythologies of exclusively masculine creativity.” (6)
If originality is indeed a modernist masculinist myth, does the pressure on criticism to be original support that myth? Does our anxiety of influence engage in the same founding father patrionics that erects white painters like Jackson Pollock as father of postmodern performance art? If I make Griselda Pollock’s or Rosalind Krauss’s claim my own (because we have to hear it again) would my claim to origin (by my signature) be in error? Or, would challenging origin through error, engaging the familiar postmodern scam of, and thrall to, the copy, get something right in writing about postmodern art?
Enunciating the Barthesian assertion (to give the claim authority) that authorship is in the process of being displaced as the central paradigm of Western artistic creation, Antoinette LaFarge has recently founded a museum of forgery. In a paper titled “The Mimetic Museum” presented at the College of Art Association Meetings in 1999, LaFarge argued that forgery both illuminates and deeply informs current art practice, contrary to traditional formulations of forgery as a degenerate activity. (7) A timeline for her virtual museum, available as a link at the museum’s site, humorously cites Adam (as in Adam and Eve), then Marcel Duchamp, then Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Hans Haacke, and J. S. G. Boggs before arriving at the institution of LaFarge’s founding. (8) It is unclear whether this is a lineage, or a spoof on lineage, which is probably exactly the point. And yet, the notion of forgery is haunted by its association with crime, and in that association anxieties are as much courted as displaced. LaFarge declares that, thanks to Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Gilles Deleuze, and others, the copy has fully arrived and that repetition is no longer a barrier – though note that it is still sameness she lauds (identicality being a hallmark of ideality): “In short, we have reached the point where the problem of reproduction set against the enduring primacy of authorship and the Signature have made art virtually identical with its dark twin, forgery.” My question is this: why is the twin marked as dark? Why is it color that draws a line between onetwin and its criminalized other? How far “beyond” color lines is this? What link to anxieties about femininity, Freud’s “dark continent,” and anxieties of other (racialized) cultural influences still riddle LaFarge’s assertion? Or, is my very question going back over ground we have supposedly already traversed? How much is too much “again”?
Perhaps repetition is precisely a mode of scholarly approach worth engaging explicitly. I’ll say “Griselda” Pollock and I’ll say Krauss saying “Pollock” again – remembering that “again” bears a persistent politics haunted by white cultural orientations to repetition still invested inproperty (and its idealized twin, propriety). Indeed, “again” seemed newly important to me in the conservative-again climate of the 2000s when a senior colleague recently nonchalantly remarked that my reiteration of the critique of origin is unoriginal “feminist old hat in a post-identity age.” To him, critiquing our cultural thrall to originality and the general project of fauxing founding fathers is, and I quote, “been there, done that.” And yet this scholar could merrily dismiss my work as what he called “illegitimate history” as if his choice of the language of legitimacy did not expose his investment in the very patrilineages we had supposedly “already” and “overly” troubled. Been there. Done that.

Cut

First I had to think. What is “solo” performance?
It is true that it is a uniquely twentieth-century term. It is also true that there was a sharp rise both in “solo” and non-script-based “performance” in elite venues for both theater and visual art. This increase occurred most pointedly mid-century when the center of the avant-garde shifted, after the Second World War, to New York City where, by the 1960s, we find an almost frenzied intersection between visual arts, film, dance, poetry, and theater (Dick Higgins’ phrase “intermedia” catches the sense of the intersection if not the feel of the frenzy). In thinking it over, I becameintrigued that “solo,” as well as performance, should be a signature of the shifttoward American-centered modernism and I wanted to think more about whether (and why) “solo” and “performance” might bear a particularly American valence. (9)

Cut

Having accepted an appearance at the Paris conference, set for October 2001, I set about procrastinating. In August 2001, for reasons that are still unclear to me, I began to think repeatedly about Yves Klein’s Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void). This annoyed me because I had already settled on asking what “solo” and “performance” had to do with America as new art center. I had decided to reinterrogate the mythic delegation of Jackson Pollock as Originator, as Founding Father of Solo Performance, Founder of Performance Art – the latest to re-herald this patrilineage being Paul Schimmel in Out of Actions (1998). (10) But, despite that decision, I kept returning to Klein’s Parisian Leap. Why? Was it because Klein made a failed bid for founder? Was it perhaps because he went over like a lead balloon when he exhibited his monochromes in his first “solo” show in New York in 1961?
To rehearse the well known: Klein was a judo master and an artist in Paris. An artist with a plan for “world conquest” by color, Klein had appropriated a color to himself – his particular aquamarine blue. He wanted to interrogate color and line (making an unintentional riff on W. E. B. DuBois’ prediction of 1903 that the central problem of the twentieth century would be the color line). Klein was an artist painting (though he refused to call it painting) in Paris just after the art metropolis had crossed the Atlantic. Making his bid from Paris for “art world domination,” he sought formal global recognition for International Kleinian Blue. Savvy about the life/art line as well as the fact that “domination” was the game, he wrote letters to presidents and heads of state as part of his bid, but it was too late. Americans already had control of origin stories and foundation narratives – the macho drip flicks of 1947 had become the International Pollockian Act. And despite the fact that Klein dated his “leap” retrocessively as occurring in 1946, (11) Klein is not repeatedly cited (recited) as Founding Father of the performative turn. Pollock, tragic hero, is.

Cut

Looking forward. Looking back. Because it was still August and then early September, I let myself continue to dwell on Klein’s leap. Everything changed after the 11th, again.

Cut

The photograph appeared in a newspaper Klein created on November 27, 1960, in Paris – a day he appropriated as a Theater of the Void. A body is leaping from a building. I have trouble thinking between the then and the now of falling bodies and media deployments. Is this confusion an error of origin? (12)

Cut

Klein’s art/news declares itself both “theater” and “actual.” Such a double definition is the paradoxical property of “an act” – a paradox thatcontinues to concern us today as we struggle to parse performance from performativity, but also as we think about theatricalities of war and the complicities of media, the role of the image in productions of “terror.”
Like almost all of the event-arts of the early 1960s, Klein’s “actual” event (involving a “real” leap) required the construction and circulation of a document to substantiate, retroactively, that the act had taken place. (13) The document produced appears to stand as witness, articulating an event as having already occurred, even as the photograph itself is the event’s very ongoing spectator, still sitting at attention in its theater of action: the archive, the art book, the art museum, the web page.
Like the document-dependency of most event-arts in visual culture, Leap into the Void is a retrocession (the photograph cites backward, witnessing an event as having taken place) and a calling ahead, or leaping forward (Klein’s flight is a fall that will never hit bottom even as it cites that fall in advance of its impossibility). In the undecidable direction that the act romances (is he flying up or falling down? is he citing backwards or forwards?), the “art” is illustrative of the general “Leap into Performance” of mid-century artwork where the artist’s body – in dance, in movement, in “live” uncertainty – is both implicated, “actual,” and imprecise. If the piece looks backward to the “solo” dance of Pollock in Hans Namuth’s photographs of 1950, and back further to art in action of the European avant-garde, it also calls forward to the “performative turn” as the center of the avant-garde both shifted to New York and died (14) in increasingly “literalist” or “theatrical” art-making (to use Michael Fried’s still apt phrasing).

Cut

But solo performance? What is the status of the singular in this appellation, and how can we apply it here? The photograph appears to represent a singular event. It appears to document a performance by a singular artist and to stand as a trace of that original solo action. (15)
Let us rehearse the story. What occurred here? In staging the action, Klein performed his judo-inspired leap from a provincial two-story building, wearing a three-piece suit. He had performed the piece first on January 12, 1960, and invited two witnesses, but one – Pierre Restany – did not show up, and the other witness, Bernadette Allain, was not (it seems) witness enough. So, Klein wanted a photograph to capture the leap and to stand in for Allain having stood watch. But because he had hurt himself when he had “really” leapt, he wanted only to re-enact the real leap for the camera, not make the real leap again. Thus, for this October 1960 capturing of the January 1960 event, he had a tarpaulin held by 12 judokas from a judo club across the street to catch him. In this way the staging was projected both toward a future (an audience to witness the photograph as evidence) and in reference to a past (an event that had already taken place and had even already been witnessed as having taken place). This leap was, that is, not for a present audience but for a photograph that would record an event that had taken place at a prior time for a future audience that would see the leap on Theater of the Void Day, November 27, 1960, in the pages of the tabloid Dimanche.
For the re-enactment of the real, the photographer Harry Shunk took not one, but two photos. One was taken with a net situated beneath Klein. The other was taken a few moments later from the same angle, but with the street empty. Shunk made a seamless montage of the two photos resulting in the “performance” of an act that will never have takensingular place, and resulting as well in generations of witnesses to a body caught in that act. This was, then, a live act pitched toward a future misrecognition: a call to misread, or. . . a response in advance of a future that cannot occur, cannot have occurred – the body that will not hit ground again and again and again. Perhaps, as Barthes responded after Vernant: “perpetual misunderstanding is exactly ‘the tragic’.” (16)

Cut

My reading is redolent with intimations of trauma and the missed event: that is, I appear to be posing an invitation to read Klein’s leap as a choreography for a fall never adequately witnessed, repeating into a future that cannot arrive. (17) It looks as though the leaping artist is headed for the sky (he is not). It looks as though he’ll hit the ground (he will not). The leap also appears to be an act, and the photograph appears to stand as a record of a “real” art-event (the status of photography as capturing the real, and as “documenting” art-making, adds to this reality effect). But, as the historical record makes clear, the event and the image is a re-enactment of an event, not the event itself. And, it is a re-enactment that never took place “as real” – there were judokas, there was a mattress. It is, thus, a record of a re-enactment that never arrives at the “real” it sought to cite via repetition, even as it strives to make that act present for witness. Thus the art marks a present as unachievable, “void”: both composed of disavowals, and, like the medium of photography, compelled to cite, to repeat, to render witnessing as constant (leap) deferral. But, how “void” the present? (18)

Cut

Klein’s 1960 leap took place in advance of an earlier work, The Void. In the spring of 1958, at the Galérie Iris Clert, Klein hung a large blue velvet drapery around the doorway leading into a space that was entirely white – walls, doors, everything, nothing but white – a white Klein called “true blue.” (19) In a serious flare-up before, during, and after the opening night of Klein’s exhibit of The Void, the city of Paris was home to a stream of massive street protests as the Algerian war of independence escalated. Racist rhetoric was virulent, translating physically to street violence. It was still three years before the October 1961 massacre that would leave the Seine choked with the bodies of Algerian Moslems killed by police. Parisians crammed into the whiteness of The Void, filling it beyond capacity.

Cut

“Illegitimate history,” said the senior colleague. He had not raised his hand. His face was red. Color and line is not color line. Klein is more properly read relative to French existential philosophy, meaning, he said (dismissing other existentialists as not proper father figures?) to Sartre. You can’t read Leap into the Void and The Void relative to hitting the street. Miss – you play with words.
I want to make a cut and move to the side to pass.
I will read for an “illegitimate” history – if illegitimate history means listening for a syncopation of intention not “properly” resolvable in direct lineage, and, more radically perhaps, joining that syncopation as a critic with one reading among many. Can we listen for other voices in seeming “solo” work, like the multiple directions of reference figured in the way Klein’s Leap is both citational (referencing backward) and invocational (calling forward), readable as part of an antiphonal conversation beyond the frame or whitewash of the walls; a response to a call and a call for a response (including mine) beyond the confines of singular intention or policed legitimacies? Let’s remember: the Field of Founding Fathers is a minefield marked by gravestones erected for legitimacy of lineage, legitimacies marked for white race and male gender. Antiphony is a formal property of the “black cultural insistence on repetition” with which we began this essay. “Begin again,” then, wrote The Mother of Us All, Gertrude Stein, sitting in Paris, listening to jazz.

Leap

... to America. November 27, 1960. Theater of the Void Day. The reaction to Action Art was in full swing. Happenings were in early bloom in white America – and Fluxus, Judson Dance, Pop Art, Minimalism, feminist Fluxus, feminist performance all around the corner – all with their emphasis on performance, all pushing the “dance” of action art to further blur the boundary between art and life, or street and gallery, store and museum. All of these could come to be considered solo performance, and yet, most of them were deeply critical of the cult of the singular artist they saw privileged in the history of painting as well as in contemporary Action Art.
From a theater and dance perspective, we can understand solo performance to be, simply, a single body performing on a stage (or in any space). We might add to this that in solo performance as it developed in the latter half of the twentieth century, the single body increasingly performed in a piece authored and/or choreographed and/or staged and/or designed by that single body. Such solo performance is often (though sometimes erroneously) labeled performance art. As the category “solo” extended beyond the stage space to the entire creative project, we might include the general rise of auteurism in theater directing. In many ways, an auteur theater director can be considered a solo artist, working with mediums of other people’s bodies, light, space, sound, text, etc., but generating a work that is primarily regarded as his.
We have become accustomed to posit the rise of (solo) performance art as a direct result of late capitalism and the object’s famous loss of aura. When the aura of the discrete art object dissipated under the habits and pressures of indiscriminate reproduction, the aura was displaced onto the artist himself – a figure supposedly not given to duplication – i.e., there was only one Jackson Pollock, the biological man, and he was not subject to reproduction. Thus, such a theory spins, in reaction to the commodification of art and the loss of the auratic object, emphasis shifted to the (singular) artist making that object. With the object in crisis, artists abandoned the object as site and collected under the awning of performance. Under this awning the site of the work shifted to the space between the object and the maker, the object and the viewer, the object and any given context (often with a resulting “theatricality,” in Michael Fried’s derisive sense). (20) This space between viewer and viewed was closely aligned with dance and theater, where any product is more profoundly in the process, in the action, in the exchange, than in any formally discrete object.
The Solo Artist making art became, then, the auratic object itself. The artist stepped (or danced) into the place of the object and rescued origin, originality, and authenticity in the very unrepeatable and unapproachable nature of his precise and human gesture – his solo act. At mid-century in America the artist’s gesture indicated the seeming non-exchangeableentity of the artist’s “self” and the supposed uniqueness of the artist’s persona. To this day, the language of “liberation” – both of the canvas and of the self – so often accompanies the story of Pollock’s “revolutionary” act. The artist performing was a solo artist – but more to the point, a soloperceived as the self. It was art critic Harold Rosenberg who wrote in 1952: “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. . . The act – painting – is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.” (21) The action artist was performing, but not delivering a script capable of reproduction by anyone other than that self as solo: could anyone other than Pollock have painted a Pollock by re-enacting the Pollock “dance”? Would the work produced by such a re-enacting dancer have been a Pollock in the way that a Graham dance danced by another dancer remains a Graham dance?
No. Strangely, in the mid-century Euro-American art world, performance abruptly (and momentarily) appeared unitary, not available to reenactment or exchange. An act could be an origin of non-repeatable purity, a portal, indeed, of pure selfhood, of “existence.” To theater historians, of course, this has always seemed odd since performance had so long been the very means of re-enactment, the very means of repetition. But perhaps here we can begin to find a distinction between performance and theatricality taking shape that would separate the virile men (action performers) from the effeminate boys (acting performers) in line with a longstanding feminization of, and heterosocial gender panic toward, theatricality as debased mimesis, debauched and hollow hysteria, wombastic copy machine. (22) In fact it seems remarkable that, for a while, a virile artist might even get away with performing woman and still not be considered an actor. Could anyone other than Duchamp have been Rrose Selavy? Not in the visual art world where the singular artist reigns on the basis of his signature versus his gesture – a strange Rrose indeed for theater artists whose history is studded with men playing Juliet, the rose by any other name. (23)
And yet, perhaps we should think again. The slippery slope of the theatricalities of identity very quickly dirtied the neat auratic screen through which Rosenberg had spied Pollock’s “artist’s existence.” For it wasn’t long after Pollock’s artist-as-self appeared to rescue the auratic object, that the theatricality and performative bases of identity began again to trouble the promise that the Authentic Living Artist might be anything other than Debauched Copy, Tawdry Stand-in, Theater Artist, Whore. This is to say that if originality was seemingly salvaged via “the act” of the macho action artist (an act of inner passion left as a trace in the painting), the authenticity of any “act” was very soon rendered unstable via “the act” of theatrical performance that would become Happenings, Minimalism, Judson, and Pop.
Jim Dine’s brief 1960 “act” – The Smiling Workman – is a case in point. Dine’s piece (sometimes discussed as a Happening) consisted of a canvas, tacked up rather like a large bedsheet hung lazily on a wall, and a bucket of paint. After scrawling “I Love What I’m Doing” on the canvas, Dine, made up as a deranged clown in a paint-splattered smock, drank paint from his bucket, paint dripping on his body. When he finished, he dumped the rest of the paint on his head and leapt directly into the canvas as if diving into the void, making the canvas into theater curtains and rendering literal the Pollockian aim to “put HIMSELF into his paintings.” (24) Here Dine was puncturing the screen, literally, with an antic that spoofed the Platonic bravado of claims such as Pollock’s Ideal “I am nature” with a counter-ideational bravado.
But Dine’s translation of Pollock need not be read as entirely parodic. The effort to put one’s “self” into one’s work was rendered literal in Dine’s puncture of the screen, as it had been in various Gutai works such as Saburo Murakami’s “Breaking Through Many Paper Screens.” In 1956, in Tokyo, Murakami hurled himself through a series of paper screens so that his body “burst through the traditional flat surface of painted art.” (25) In the afterlife of the document, Murakami appears to “burst” toward the viewer, as if entering the scene. The exuberant rupturing of the screen(s), however, not only enabled the entering of the painter as “self,” but, in making the canvas a theater curtain, enabled the opposite move more sardonically exhibited by Dine: the exit of the artist.
Interestingly, Dine’s exit of the solo action artist did not necessarily undo the notion of solo. That is, whether working for authentic expression of self or parodying the “authentic self” as always theatrical (necessarily multiple), the single artist was singled out as unitary. Even Warhol’s labeling his studio a Factory, and his mass production not only of “art” but of art “stars,” did not dismantle the notion of singular Artist-Genius he so obviously both parodied and played for all it was worth. Like Griselda Pollock, though in some distinction to her early work, Amelia Jones has recently underscored the point that our art-critical and art-historical practices are not very far beyond traditional modernist conceptions of the artist as genius. We still repeatedly deploy the category of “artist” to delimit challenges set forward by the works themselves. Jones writes, “As with Duchamp, whose ‘nonsense and nihilism’ are marshaled to support celebration of him as ‘pioneer,’ Warhol’s ‘wigged-outness,’ his continual challenges to any attempt to fix him as definitive artistic origin, are commandeered as examples of his ‘genius’.” (26) Thus, despite his obvious slam on the singular as singular, Warhol has been repeatedly produced as “one of a kind.”
The drive to “single out” a unitary artist as against a consideration of the broader contexts of cross-national, cross-ethnic, cross-temporal pollination, dialogic collaboration, and broadly diasporic influence is alsoapparent in art-historical attempts to pinpoint a father for the twentieth-century rise of performative arts of solo actions. We continued to need, it seems, a seminal figure, a progenitor for the wellspring of solo works in the latter half of the century that cross between art, theater, dance, and painting to create that performative mash of intermedia most often called performance art. Time and again we are told (in a reverberating echo from Alan Kaprow) that the American Action Artist Jackson Pollock was responsible for the supremely masculine act of liberating art from the canvas and setting the entire performance-based art of the latter half of the twentieth century into motion. All other possibilities become as if relegated to a footnote. (27)

Cut

Despite our citing of singulars, so much late-century “solo” performance work appears as a critique of singularity – as if to show up the cracks in the face paint we call unitary subjectivity. Often a “solo” artist performs as if alone or singled out, only to perform a kind of echo palette of others, a map of citations and a subjectivity so multiply connected as to be collective. One of the most obvious instances of “solo” working against its own singular status was Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 Trio A. Indeed, Rainer said of her dance work with the Judson School that one of the frustrating things about her fame in the 1960s was the knowledge that she was not so much being singled out because of something she did, but because she “existed in a world that felt the need to single one person out of a group of peers as a ‘star’ or ‘genius’.” (28) In Trio A Rainer composed a solo dance, performed at various times as a trio, as a solo, or by and for multitudes “skilled, unskilled, professional, fat, old, sick, amateur.” (29) The title of Trio A underscores a certain absurdity in denomination (because the trio is a solo, but also, the solo is a trio). As a trio, when the piece is performed by one person it unbecomes its name. To my mind, in this way Rainer’s solo “trio” is reminiscent of Gertrude Stein. For example, Stein’s 1927 Four Saints in Three Acts is an “opera to be sung” that has four acts and at least twelve saints. Again, a viewer or reader or performer is caught undoing the formal indication of what is contained on the level of the (performative) name. In Stein’s words, as in Rainer’s sequence, a title, like a signature, comes undone at the point of performance – an undoing, or unbecoming, which can also critically point to our ongoing investments in the titular, our investments in the signature as discrete. Such an undoing can, perhaps, make the literal word no more than material substance, make the gesture nothing more than a “task” given to repetition, and the name no more than indiscrete sound given to play and replay in infinite combination – a solo played and replayed in infinite and collective variation. (30) Of course, Rainer did admit that when she encountered Trio A performed by a soloist at a fifth-generation remove she didn’t recognize the dance at all (and she didn’t like it). In that instance, Trio A was no longer “hers.” But this “decomposition” or “recomposition” is part of the possibility, the“countersigning” of riff contained in the indiscriminate, the illegitimate solo.

Riff

Approach solo work rather more like call and response. Take up antiphony as a model for reading.
If we think against the grain of the solo as discrete, we can begin to hear solo in collectivity – and not just by tracing influence in uni-directional lines of influence, but lines of influence or reverberation that, rather like Klein’s leap, shoot the call backward as well as forward, anticipate misrecognition, court it, and, simultaneously, redirect the past as having become itself through re-enactment. We can approach solo rather in the way that “solo” is indicated in jazz or blues – as an artist makes a call and anotherresponds and another responds to that response as a call and a response is made which, again, becomes a call citing, or reciting, a response as call.
Solos, in jazz, cite each other, bleed into each other, react to each other, re-enact each other, and perform an entire cross-hatch of work in which the “solo” quality of any one action becomes profoundly riddled with the echoes of precedence and the fore-cast echoes of future response (as one waits for the response after a call, mishearing that response in the call, before a response is even uttered). We might make a cross-hatch of works to produce a kind of visual or performance jam where we read sets of solo performance works as “riffing” across media, and across time, undoing any clear access to “origin” (mythic or otherwise). In such a jam, one could, indeed, play Pollock – rather like Lynda Benglis played Pollock in 1970 or Keith Boadwee in 1995. 31 After all, this kind of play – this sense of playing, even play-acting – is the primary principle of postmodern production. But what kind of historical “lineage machine” can fully adopt this as scholarly practice? Since such a history could not offer a lineage that allows for singularity or discrete or unitary origins, “lineage” seems like a profoundly inadequate word. Perhaps an illegitimate history, a history of illegitimacy – that which we leave out, put back – is more (im)precisely the point.

Cut

In “black expressive traditions” the solo is pointedly not inflected by singularity but exists relative to collaboration. Theorists and practitioners of jazz and blues make the point repeatedly: “Sometimes,” Albert Murray tells us, “musicians refer to solos as choruses.” Sometimes, he goes on, “the riff chorus is used as background for the lead melody as choral response to a solo call line.” (32) Similarly, in referring to the antiphonal nature of what he calls “black communication,” Robert Ferris Thompson writes that the call and response is like “solo and circle.” Here it becomes clear that a solo is hardly a solo if solo means unitary – the biggest insult in this tradition is for a solo performer to find that he performs without co-signers, co-performers. The successful solo, then, is no solo at all.
But why turn to black expressive culture when thinking about solo performance in the twentieth century? And why do that when every artist I’m writing about here is seemingly white?
Traditionally, African art forms are largely performance-based, with extremely porous or interactive distinctions between genres such as, for example, music and dance. African diasporic influence is absolutely key to white European avant-garde development (think of the mimetic pseudo African masks of the Dada soirées, think of the “negrophilia” of Paris in the 1920s, think of the early Brecht and his Baal, his Jungle of Cities, his Drums in the Night). Such cross-culture imagining is also basic in aesthetic production in general in America. In fact, when the center of the avantgarde shifted to New York after the Second World War – a shift accredited to Jackson Pollock as if he single-handedly maneuvered it (33) – it should not be surprising that the primary signature of a new American art scene should be performance. Before the world wars the primary contribution America had made to the landscape of aesthetic practice, that is, the unique American export – that which could be understood as American – was largely African American in derivation and was, significantly, performancebased: jazz, blues, black-face minstrelsy, and various dance styles. The fact that performance, citation, and repetition became the signature elements of multiple styles when the “center” shifted to New York from Paris should cause us to pause and revisit the “influence” of African American expressive culture. In such a pause we might recall the heritage of “love and theft,” as Eric Lott has written of white appropriation of black “source” material without name and without acknowledgment of source. (34) Thus the erection of white Founding Fathers stands as a monument of “discovery” that erases or renders “illegitimate” the legacies of long-standing nonwhite (or non-male) practices.
Writing on what he calls the “blues aesthetic,” Richard Powell hasargued that the blues provides much contemporary literature, theatre, dance, and visual arts with the necessary elements for defining these various art forms as intrinsically “Afro-American.” Jackson Pollock, for example, often listened to blues when painting – in order to “overcome the blockage” (35) – and those whom Pollock claimed as predecessors, the Surrealists, claimed “jazz” for their subconscious. Powell backsteps, however, and says that he would not call such aesthetics as Pollock’s African American – but he would call them “blues aesthetics” (which are nevertheless informed by African American experience). This question of influence returns us to the Founding Father of performance art. The aesthetic of much contemporary American work in theater, dance, etc., is directly heir to a black cultural aesthetic (at least in part because a distinguishing factor between American performance work and European performance work, especially in nineteenth-century theater practice, was the inflection of African and Native America), and yet we rarely cite African American or Nativeheritage in any more substantial way than influential “informant.” In one sensethis is to ask about color and line(age) in the “founding” of the turn toward performance at a newly American center.

Cut

As suggested by artists like Gertrude Stein and Yvonne Rainer, can we pick up the formal emphasis by which solo is not read as discrete but as imbricated in and punctuated by the movements of participants in what John Chernoff, writing on African aesthetics, called “a swinging back and forth from solo to chorus or from solo to an emphatic instrumentalreply”? (36) Can we read solo as collective? If Jackson Pollock would listen to blues while painting and if he was responding, as he claimed, to Southwestern Indian work, why is Southwest Indian sand painting – clearlyperformancebased work – not given foundational status? Why are the blues musicians Pollock was responding to not erected to the art apex, “fathering” performance form? Is it because their solos were understood, already, as non-discrete? As illegitimate? It cannot be that music is too discrete from painting if we remember that Pollock’s painting became itself as Pollock’s dance (and Namuth’s film). Perhaps the blues cannot be named as origin as they always already riff on origin, given to play and replay, existing in reiteration – origin as in performance and as essentially oral cultural transmission? Why then was Pollock’s response not also read as riff? Was Klein right? Was the bid for world art domination about color after all?

Cut

If we read on the riff, we find Pollock jamming blues and native work. Dine’s entry into Pollock’s citational jam make another riff on Pollock’s riff, signifying on Pollock signifying on Charlie Parker, and simultaneously making a call to re-read Pollock re-reading Parker as well as to incite future re-reading, re-actions, in “art.” The works cite each other, bleed into each other, react to each other, re-enact each other, and perform a cross-hatch of work in which the “solo” quality of any one action becomes profoundly riddled with the echoes of precedence and the fore-cast echoes of future response.
Of course, the question becomes, can I write a history this way?
If an original is composed always already of citation, sometimes citing laterally or peripherally or multiply, how can I draw any discrete line, how can I legitimate any discrete family tree? As Paul Gilroy, theorizing diaspora in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, has written, the original, or the thrall to the original, takes on a different valence under the influence of African expressive culture as the original is always subject to, and the subject of, repetition. The original is recited and re-sited in a “kinetic orality” – a recitation that situates any solo site, like any act, relative to the past it cites and the future it incites in the form of a call. Any work, then, exists in its own future – in the response that a call will elicit, as well as in that work’s own material properties – properties which, composed of citation, are never discrete. Authenticity, in such a scenario, emerges as “anachronistic” and often a matter of hotly contested debate. (37)
What I am getting at, here, is in keeping with the logic of citation generally, but it is also an extremely theatrical logic. Read as involved in call and response, or read as imbricated in collective or choral actions, “solo” in some senses casts itself into the future as becoming ensemble even as it re-cites itself backward, answering a thousand calls. This becoming ensemble in the solo work as I see it across the century is made apparentin the citational quality of performance – citing other work, co-opting other work, creating an action by acting or reacting, enacting or re-enacting, making of the single body a stage across which whole histories (the multitudes) are brought to bear. Any action, here, is already a palimpsest of other actions, a motion set in motion by precedent motion or anticipating future motion or lateral motion. Here, image, text, and gesture occur through, as Gertrude Stein instructed (informed by the crucible of Paris and jazz), beginning again and again. But this beginning, by virtue of its “again-ness,” is never for the first time and never for the only time – beginning again and again in an entirely haunted domain of repetition: image, text, and gesture.

Retell

I became very curious about the fact that in the theater, the “auteur” director is usually understood as a “solo artist” precisely because he or she has abandoned the primacy, or at least the authority, of script or playtext. Conversely, in dance, we often find the category of auteur is born when a choreographer incorporates text. One begins to suspect that a director or choreographer becomes a “solo artist” or auteur when working in a medium of bodies in ways that run counter to, or unbecome, sedimented practices of genre or media distinctions. As part of the rise of the solo we find a painter becoming a dancer (Pollock); a painter becoming an actor painting or marking her body as stage (Carolee Schneemann); an architect building a structure becoming an auteur dancing a structure (Robert Wilson); a dancer becoming an opera maker (Meredith Monk); a conceptual artist becoming a musician (Yoko Ono); a musician becoming a painter (LeMonte Young). Each of these becoming solos underscores an unbecoming – a kind of double move: we find a bleeding or collapsing of genres simultaneously with a congealing of an artist into a seeming “active agent.” We find a slippage in genre boundaries together with a shifting of the site of art onto performance understood as an artist’s act. Thus, these artists become agents or actors (the emphasis on the active) by deploying gestures that seem to resist (or undo or unbecome) the very media through which they emerge and, often, by or through which they are recorded. In this way, act-based art makes itself available to become in different form, to be retold.
This becoming different as retelling is key. There are many examples. We can think of composer Nam Jun Paik’s head painting, Zen for Head. This performance, which occurred on the stage of the auditorium of the Städtisches Museum in Wiesbaden, consisted of Paik dipping his hands, his head, and his necktie into a bowl of ink and tomato juice and then dragging his head along a paper on the floor. As Elizabeth Armstrong has written, this was Paik’s 1962 “interpretation of a composition by fellow composer La Monte Young, whose 1960 score simply directed the performer to ‘Draw a straight line and follow it’.” (38) As part of a festival of “Very New Music” this “act” becomes music, but it is also, in interpreting music, performance. Interpreting music with the body, it is dance. It is the music itself. It is dance. It is a drawn line, a painting on paper, and ultimately a preserved object in the museum in Wiesbaden. It is, then, more than any one of the things it might be said to be.
As an act, work such as Zen for Head seems to resist delimitation to frame and canvas, even though it produces a document in a frame that then gestures toward its own excess (ironically, it is the framed object that stands to testify that the act was “more” than the object). Such work also seems to require audience (it was seen that “that” is what the artist did). And yet, even as it necessitates an audience, the work results in a denial of audience by producing a document that will be exhibited as an indication that “you” (the viewer) were not present at the event – you missed the action contained by the frame but more than the frame. The paper, frame, and photo of the action all represent to the viewer that which the viewer missed – that which, standing before the document, you witness yourself missing again. And yet, in missing you are somehow more available to this “excess” of the object than you would be in a situation of “presence.” Missing it, you are available to hear it otherwise, through the retelling, the recitation of the document, and thus are “present” to it otherwise, in a mode of transmission – a re-enactment.
Looking across examples, much intermedia “solo” work depends on the fact that “solo” acts produce choruses of witnesses – that is, various audiences of persons, objects, documents, photos or testimonies that stand as witnesses, each, in different ways, rendering accounts in diverse but collective reiteration. Such objects, like the framed image of Paik’s head dragging print, stand as witness to the event as seen and make the museum viewer witness to the event as missed. In such a scene, a viewer becomes, like the object, a witness. Thus the piece, producing witnesses ad infinitum, might be called a veritable witness machine. The site of the event is in the witnessing, the re-telling/re-seeing, not in the “event” itself; and yet the “event itself” becomes what is told in retelling. The mechanism of retelling is thus pitched toward eliciting a response which can stand as another generation of retelling, and function, in retelling, as yet another call. Thus the media undoes the media, resists the very mode of its manifestation, and pitches itself toward re-enactment in a variety of forms always alternative to the event itself.

Miss

This essay has missed one mark in hitting others. It never precisely arrived in Paris in October 2001 – fear of flying perhaps. The closest we came was August or early September. We made it, instead, to November 1960, and witnessed somewhere a body leaping from a building, or two, backwards or forwards, still undecided, not yet having hit but still coming down. Like lineage, coming down. Begin again.

Notes

(1) James Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Black American Literature Forum, 15 (4) (1981): 150.

(2) Much has been written on the long-standing Euro-cultural distrust of imitation most often associated with Platonism and referred to as “antitheatricality.” In a recent essay developing his 1981 thoughts on white and black cultural figures of repetition, Snead reminds his readers that “black culture” is a concept, traceable though Hegel, largely inflected by white European concerns about “race” and (re)production. He cites a difference in approaches to repetition on the level of material culture, worth reproducing here: “The discourse of capital in European economic parlance reveals a more general insight about how this culture differs from black culture in its handling of repetition. In black culture, repetition means that the thing circulates (exactly in the manner of any flow, including capital flows) there in an equilibrium. In European culture, repetition must be seen to be not just circulation and flow but accumulation and growth. In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there for you to pick it up when you come back to get it.’ If there is a goal (Zweck) in such a culture, it is always deferred; it continually ‘cuts’ back to the start, in the musical meaning of ‘cut’ as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break (an accidental da capo) with a series already in progress and a willed return to a prior series”: “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Robert G. O’Meally (ed.), The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 69.

(3) For an attempt to chart circum-Atlantic diasporic influences on performance while marking repetition as the key modality in performance see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

(4) See the website www.lincolnpresenters.org

(5) Griselda Pollock, “Artist’s Mythologies and Media Genius, Madness and Art History,” Screen, 21 (3) (1980): 57–96.

(6) Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 5.

(7) LaFarge’s paper is available at http://yin.arts.uci.edu/~mof/LibraryF/meme.html

(8) See the website http://yin.arts.uci.edu/~mof/

(9) Of course, performance (if not “solo”) had been a staple of the European historical avant-garde. Figures like Alfred Jarry’s and his alter-ego “Ubu” made scatological waves in 1896 that greatly influenced the art world toward linking performance with anti-art. The pseudo-Africanisms of Dada relied on the “immediacy” of live enactment, coupled with the thrall to “negro rhythms” and an interest in the repetitions of ritual, underscoring the performative nature of the artworks generated in these contexts. The shift of emphasis to New York as art metropolis after the Second World Wararguably increased the performance energies, however, as if there might be something American in the “immediacy” of performance.

(10) Paul Schimmel, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949– 1979 (Los Angeles, CA: The Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998).

(11) See Klein’s retrocessing history in his “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto.” This was written precisely as his New York solo show was floundering in 1961. The manifesto is on the web at www.artep.net/kam/manifesto.html

(12) Yves Klein, “Leap Into the Void” can be viewed at the website www.cca.kiev.ua/exhib/museum/museum19.html

(13) This reliance on the document that comes after is one major way in which event-arts diverge from theater. Western theater, and we could say theater drawing on white cultural heritage, commonly relies on a document that precedes, such as a play script.

(14) The common and often repeated position that the “avant-garde” died with modernism mid-century is also fascinating relative to the geographic shift (did it die mid-passage?). That the avant-garde should so often have been perceived to die (again and again like a Swan who overacts her solo), deserves analysis relative to the increase in performance as the mode of either avant-garde transgression or its supposed rebirth as neo-avant-garde resistance. The relationship between performance and death, like theory and death, is hardly an under-discussed topic. Theater theorists have been fascinated with the ephemerality of performance as a death that never dies, as after the curtain falls actors (unlike painters) almost always give the ruse away with a bow that (imprecisely) distinguishes them from their acts. See Herb Blau, The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987); Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing PublicMemories (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Spencer Golub, Infinity (Stage) (AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). See also Kristine Stiles, “Never Enough is Something Else: Feminist Performance Art, Avant-Gardes, and Probity,” in James M. Harding (ed.), Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

(15) Klein himself adored the trace to the point of impossibility, considering himself to be searching for “the trace itself” and “the trace of theimmediate.” See his “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto.”

(16) Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1978), p. 148.

(17) A great deal has been written in the last ten years on trauma, the compulsion to repeat, and the return of the real as a condition of late modernity informing art practices. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1991). See also Hal Foster, Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

(18) A related question might be “How present the void?” This question dovetails interestingly with contemporary attempts to represent (and remember) the Jewish Holocaust without naturalizing a history that might render such an event comprehensible through the (masterful) logics of straight-line lineage. On postmodern (“postnational national”) architectures of the void, see Peter Chametzky, “Rebuilding the Nation: Norman Foster’s Reichstag Renovation and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, Berlin,” Centropa, 1 (3) (2001): 245–64.

(19) In Sidra Stich, Yves Klein (London: Hayward Gallery 1994), p. 136.

(20) Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (June 1967). Reprinted in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1998), pp. 116–47.

(21) Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News, 51 (1952): 22–3.
(
22) J. L. Austin’s fascinating and abrupt dismissal of theater in his 1955 articulation of “performative acts” is illustrative of this bias. On this issue see Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (eds), Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 3–5. If we remember the long-standing derision of theatricality as feminized, debauched, downfall of ideality and origin (see Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1981)), it is no surprise that the performing action artists, or the art critics writing about them, who wanted “the act” to rescue aura, would underscore that act as macho. The rescue of “origin” could only be amasculine act. A feminine act would be just an act. Thus, masculinity was a constant byword for action art, as if this iteration would counter the feminizing debaucheries contained on the theatrical flipside of the notion “to act.”

(23) One suspects that if someone else could play Rrose Selavy, the act of Rrose would be theatrical, not “properly” artistic. It is Duchamp’s signature – or better, the aura of his singularity – that assures the “act” as art versus theater (origin versus feminized mimeticism) for the biases of the visual art world. The issue of the author’s or artist’s signature bearing the authenticating weight of singularity is a deeply vexed one. As Derrida made clear in “Signature, Event, Context” (in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)), “iterability,” or repetition, is a constitutive feature not only of all forms of language, but also of the convention of signatures. Even as signatures are the paramount mark of singularity, they are composed through repetition. Despite the fact that it is a mark of supposed origination or consent or authorship, a signature cannot be singular as it is a matter of convention beyond itself (it is a ritual act, as is its recognition). A signature is also a matter of repetition in that there needs to be more than one so that each can hold up, despite minor differences, as “same” and as index of the author’s hand. The performance bases of a signature then, and indeed the necessary “theatricality” or even “riffing” of any signature on itself, begins to undo the ontological status such a mark confers on that which it marks. Derrida did not go so far as to call signatures theatrical, as he was reserving the radical bases of citationality for writing (and theater is that scandalously murky place between writing and speech). But Derrida does provocatively remind us that the signature is necessarily “impure” (wanton? illegitimate?) even as it veils the necessity of its own condition (“the condition of its possibility is the condition of its impossibility” writes Jonathan Culler on Derrida’s notion of the signature, Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1982), p. 26). It bears remembering that impurity in this essay is a condition Derrida takes from Austin, where it is linked, most explicitly, to the parasitical and “etoliated” theatrical. On another note regarding “Signature, Event, Context,” it is interesting to note that Derrida uses the figure of the “cut” or break to underscore the condition of possibility contained within the citational (p. 320).

(24) The artist George Segal in 1967, quoted in Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p. 17.

(25) Tracey Warr (ed.), The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), p. 52.

(26) Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 270.

(27) Kaprow is credited with being the first to claim Pollock as father in “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News 57 (6) (October 1958). He is not the last. A recent instance of this patrilineal homage can be found in Paul Schimmel’s Out of Actions from 1998. On this phenomenon also see Amelia Jones’ important chapter “The ‘Pollockian Performative’ and the Revision of the Modernist Subject,” in Body Art/Performing the Subject. Though Jones is reticent to give Pollock the position of progenitor, smartly following Foucault to read Pollock’s positioning-as-progenitor as a function of discourse, she is also reticent to take it away. She replaces “father” language with “signifier” language, saying that the Pollockian performative (the performative enunciation of Pollock as Progenitor) “signaled” and “indicated” rather than “caused” a shift in artistic subjectivity (p. 55). Of course the difference between a prime signifier and father figuration is not very large – it was arguably a performative matter of pointing and following backward that relegated Pollock to “father” as sign in the first place. The repetitive “point” seems to be, in arthistorical analysis, to find and found singular figures, to “father” signposts like markers of property rather than to enable multiplicity. On “pointing” and feminist reading see Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 43–4.

(28) This quote appears in danceonline.com and in a criticaldance.com 2001 review of Quatuor Albrecht Knust. It is unattributed, but a sense of this sentiment comes through in an interview with Rainer by Lyn Blumenthal published in Profile, 4 (6) (1984).

(29) Yvonne Rainer, Work: 1961–1973 (Halifax, NS: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), p. 77.

(30) Another way in which Rainer’s dance is reminiscent of Stein’s aesthetic is in the way in which Trio A resists punctuation, becoming “itself a sort of runon sentence.” As Carrie Lambert writes in 1999, “Trio A disarticulates phrases and their internal hierarchies with the result that, as Rainer put it, in this dance ‘no one thing is any more important than any other’”: “Moving Still: Mediating Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A,” October, 89: 97.

(31) See Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, pp. 96–101.

(32) Albert Murray, “Playing the Blues” (1976), reprinted in Gena Dagel Caponi (ed.), Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin’, & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 98.

(33) See Landau, Jackson Pollock, p. 244. 34 Eric Lott, Love and Theft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

(35) Landau, Jackson Pollock, p. 31. 36 Cited in Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” p. 55. 37 Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 85, 96, 97, 101.