Superfluities Redux

What Would Jesus Buy?

If on its first release you missed the Morgan Spurlock-produced, Rob VanAlkemade-directed What Would Jesus Buy?, a 2007 documentary about Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping, you can now find it at better video stores everywhere (as well as through amazon.com). The film chronicles a nationwide tour that Billy, church director Savitri Durkee and the choir itself made through America the year before – a mission to inform consumers through guerilla satire about the extent to which corporate America had undermined the spiritual basis of the Christmas holiday, as well as the idea of community itself, with a new gospel of consumerism.

If you're converted, the film will preach to you already, but Spurlock and VanAlkemade have also made a concerted effort to provide some historical background on the rise of credit industry practices that still pose a profound threat to the health of American economic life (as this front-page article in last Sunday's New York Times indicates). At the center of the film however are the Rev and his choir as they invade the Mall of America and Walmart headquarters in California to bring enlightenment to Christmas shoppers. It's almost always very funny, and Billy is a potent, charismatic personality, but we also get a glimpse of a few intimate moments of private exhaustion and self-doubt, as well as a bus crash that injured several church members and had the potential to devastate the tour, before a celebratory finish at Disneyland in Anaheim on Christmas Day.

Purchase it at amazon.com today. Or, if that's a little too ironic for you, you can always add it to your Netflix queue, like I did, or borrow it from your local library. I wrote about Billy's performance at the Spiegeltent for the New York Times in 2006.

More Defenders

It's a strange issue that makes bedfellows of Terry Teachout and myself on the one side, and A.C. Douglas and David Byrne on the other. That unpleasant word-picture out of the way, this issue was also a central concern of Kyle Gann's PostClassic blog on Monday.

Nothing here really changes anything I said in my own original post on the matter earlier this week. There seems to be general agreement that Byrne's argument was poorly considered in his choice of Die Soldaten as the specific target of his dismay, but one or two things in Kyle's comments section should be addressed. Kyle mentions there that "[My agreement with Byrne] hinges on one assertion that I hope to god we can all agree with: Not every composer who writes thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music is a genius." Sure; so long as we can also say that not every composer who writes accessible and easy-to-understand music is a genius either, in which case I'm not sure I get the point. Composers write what they feel they have to write, for the most part, conditioned by many things, but I don't think that their self-assessment as geniuses (or such an assessment by their critics or audiences) is necessarily one of them. Both the aesthete and the populist possess their own forms of smugness. In any case, I don't find in Byrne's original post where he makes that assertion.

Byrne does, however, question the motives of composers of this thorny, complex, etc. music:

There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music. Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of Zimmermann, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other multimedia aspects? Were these composers competing to see whose works could be heard and performed the least? Why would anyone do that?

The only response to that is that composers (or playwrights or painters for that matter) wouldn't do any of those things. This is an oddly anti-modernist prejudice from this successful prog-rocker celebrity, whose current project at the Battery Maritime Building itself plays with some of the very dimensions of music – timbre, color, duration – that also formed the basis of some of the most profoundly experimental (and, needless to add, controversial and marginalised) work of the 20th century. His primary target, that old bugaboo atonality, is only the beginning of 20th-century musical innovation (and it began with Wagner and Debussy, not Schoenberg and the Viennese School) – Playing the Building builds on experiments in resonance, timbre and color made by some of the very composers he condemns. (And I'm not sure that the "total theatre" use of the Park Avenue Armory is much different than Byrne's co-opting another huge public space like the Battery Maritime Building.) The question can be turned right around: Why would Byrne do what he does? Along with the composers he castigates, he seeks to introduce new elements into our aural imagination and consciousness of the world.

However valid Byrne's and Gann's charges of self-marginalisation might be (and frankly I don't think that they are), certainly the rhetoric and vitriol that have traditionally been directed at some of this new music under discussion haven't contributed to its wider acceptance either, and if the former isn't good for the state of music as an art form in the 21st century, I don't see how the latter is – especially from an artist like Byrne, who considers himself an innovator and should at the very least avoid vitriolic condemnation of other innovators.

All that said, in Queenan's and Byrne's original writings, something still irked me. Where had I heard this condemnation of artist, critic and audience before? Where in the recent past had I heard much of this same rhetoric? And then it struck me. The recent Bill Henson controversy also gave rise to much of the same kind of hostile vocabulary, political and cultural recidivism, and puritanical rhetoric; so much for the assumed cultural and inclusive progressivism of the Western left. Henson's motives in creating his work were questioned; artists themselves, as an elitist cabal, were charged with a deliberate attack on the nation's morals in defending Henson's work (as if two or more artists could be gathered as a collective to do anything in which they all agreed; the music and theatre blogospheres are evidence enough against that); the audiences for this work were characterised as potential paedophiles themselves. The situations are of course not at all identical, but there's some similarity; Australia's children needed to be defended from the depredations of photographers like Henson, and David Byrne's and Joe Queenan's ears (as well as the ears of others) needed to be defended from the subversive, "ugly" sounds that contemporary composers produce.

The Australian Prime Minister's office is a different, more chilling bully pulpit than the pages of the Guardian or the entries on a popular art-rocker's blog, and nobody, least of all me, is suggesting that Byrne and Queenan want to toss Zimmermann et al. in jail for their offenses against the tender ear. But the determination of what should be accepted as art and what should not is still an issue here. Queenan says, "I consider myself to be the kind of listener contemporary composers would need to reach if they had any hope of achieving a breakthrough," implying that Queenan and his peers could ultimately determine which work was truly music and which wasn't, as Kevin Rudd could determine what art was acceptable to the citizens of Australia and what art was not. And many of the tactics against artists, their art, and their audiences are the same: vilification, insult, condemnation.

On Monday, David Ian Rabey added to the comments section of my original post a carefully-worded excerpt from Howard Barker's poem Don't Exaggerate (all poems, I would hope, are carefully-worded):

The final solution to the problem of art
Art is a problem, after all
Is to call it incomprehensible
To burn it only lends it grace

I agree with Kyle again when he writes, "There are no easy lines to draw here, which I think is part of the value of art, that it plunges us into ambiguity; but there are some important principles, which perhaps it will take another blog entry to puzzle out." So let's not draw easy lines, and I hate to say this, but I think it might take more than one more blog entry to puzzle out. The question is far more important than that.

Samuel Beckett: Medium Cool?

Garrett Eisler mulled over the economic presumptions of the Lincoln Center Festival's Samuel Beckett series at The Playgoer yesterday; it seems that, where Samuel Beckett is concerned, the stars come out in New York. Lincoln Center boasts Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes. Last season, of course, there was Mikhail Baryshnikov in a Beckett evening at the New York Theatre Workshop, and next season, according to this Theatermania story, Bill Irwin will appear in a Gerry Hynes-directed Waiting for Godot on Broadway.

In all this, the real news might be the addition of a new play to the Beckett stage canon – Eh Joe, originally written for television in 1965. In the past few years there have been no fewer than three productions of the work onstage: Joanne Akalaitis's production at the NYTW last season, the current New York staging, and Atom Egoyan's staging with Michael Gambon in the role of Joe at the Gate Theatre in 2006 (this production the basis for the Lincoln Center presentation, which Obscene Jester reviewed yesterday here).

This points to a development in stage technology that permits a crossover from video to theatre. The original Eh Joe was an intimate chamber drama, the camera focusing on Joe's face, the communication one-to-one with the viewer sitting alone at home; the extreme close-up was impossible to reproduce onstage in 1965. Now, with real-time video technology and projection methods, the same intense focus on the character's face can be reproduced onstage, before an audience of hundreds. The unusual result has been to broaden, ever so slightly, the Beckett stage canon (and focus attention on the physiognomies of popular Hollywood, Broadway and West End actors). One more Beckett stage play, after we thought we'd seen them all? Well, no harm there, and the addition is welcome.

I wonder, though, whether the progress of technology may have the effect of rendering some of Beckett's other plays anachronistic. When Beckett wrote Krapp's Last Tape in 1958, the personal, portable reel-to-reel tape recorder was a recent enough invention that Beckett felt the need to obviate the wobbly time scheme of the play (for Krapp would have been unable to dictate his thoughts into a similar recorder in 1928) with a stage direction: the play is set during a "late evening in the future."

Even now, it's unlikely that audiences will come across a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder anywhere except a stage production of Krapp's Last Tape; in just a few years, it will be an undeniably moribund medium, the machine itself less and less recognisable, its place having been taken up by iPods and digital voice recorders. Seeing Krapp's Last Tape now, it's just as easy to imagine the play set during a late evening in the past. How directors and actors approach this aspect of Krapp's Last Tape will introduce a new, unexpected dimension to the play's staging and reception. Will it become a period piece as prone to nostalgic sentiment as second-rate productions of Chekhov, the tape recorder as polished samovar, or will we have new approaches to the matter? Thirty years from now, will audiences be buying tickets to Krapp's Last .mp3?

The status of Beckett's work in a technology-rich theatre, as well as the rapidly evolving technologies of mass media, has led to a certain anxiety of genre. The Beckett on Film project captured all 19 of Beckett's stage plays for film (or high-definition video), but perversely exempted from the project all of Beckett's work written specifically for television and film, an odd choice given the very title of the effort. None of the three stage works at Lincoln Center originated in Beckett's imagination as stage plays: Barry McGovern presents a staged reading of portions of the Molloy trilogy, and Fiennes reads First Love, a short prose work. Although there have been one or two other productions of Film since the Alan Schneider/Buster Keaton effort of 1965, few of Beckett's later video plays, like ... but the clouds (1976) and Nacht und Träume (1982), are readily available for viewing in any form in the United States, leaving our conception of his later career quite incomplete.

That Beckett himself was not averse to moving his work from one medium into another is demonstrated by his own oversight of the film of his 1972 play Not I as well as his permission to Mabou Mines to produce a stage adaptation of the short novel Company during his lifetime. As Eh Joe demonstrates, the canon of Beckett's work continues to challenge theatrical innovators and audiences – a mark of the unique nature of his work, and an indication that Beckett's modernist stage practice will continue to infest the postmodern era. As Garrett notes, his work also challenges the imaginations of the Lincoln Center marketing and development office; but this is the lesser part of the story.

Defenders of the Faith

UPDATE: There's more on this at Terry Teachout's blog today, along with a link to Ethan Iverson's response. Ever the loyal opposition, A.C. Douglas takes exception to my own conclusion.

Because it seems to have everything to do with modern music and little to do with modern theatre, Joe Queenan's 9 July essay in the Guardian, "Admit it, you're as bored as I am", has gone by the boards in the theatre blogosphere, but it shouldn't have, really. Queenan's screed is a weak and unpersuasive broadside against contemporary music, its composers and its audience; in placing himself on the side of those who have tried it and quite disliked it (while at the same time parading his as-it-were Average-Joe roots – "Because of my working-class background, 'serious' music was important to me ... I consider myself to be the kind of listener contemporary composers would need to reach if they had any hope of achieving a breakthrough," he says, a line of thought apropos of nothing in particular and in which I fail to see a logical progression), he defends ... well, I'm not sure what his point was, exactly, unless it was only to demean the status of contemporary music and lard various ad hominem attacks on composers, audiences and critics in general in an attempt to validate and rationalise his own lack of appreciation for the music.

A defense of new music comes from Terry Teachout in this past Saturday's Wall Street Journal (Terry's tastes and mine differ by a measurement of light-years, but I'm glad to read it); more comment, however, much more comment, comes from Tom Service's response on the Guardian music blog of 9 July.

"The last couple of times [Stockhausen] came to London, the repellent trend-jumpers – technoheads, avant rockers, goateed Shoreditch types – were all over the place," one commenter on Service's entry says, and this tone and vocabulary are not far different from Queenan's own. Harrison Birtwistle's new opera, The Minotaur, is "harsh and ugly and monotonous and generically apocalyptic. Birtwistleites might dismiss me as a Luddite who despises new music, but the truth is, I find nothing new in The Minotaur's dreary, brutish score; it's the same funereal caterwauling that bourgeoisie-loathing composers have been churning out since the 1930s," says Queenan, who is renowned as a humorist (though I see nothing particularly chuckle-inducing here).

Queenan drags out a few more warhorses from the anti-modernist songbook as well. The idea that art should be more like ... well, more like sports, with an adherence to arbitrary rules and forms that the audience brings a priori to their experience as an audience (though a sporting event is a paradigm that fails theatre almost entirely – while there's no knowing which team will "win," one team will; also, sporting events invite self-identification with one team or the other, not unlike the perceived necessity by some theatre artists that the audience has to empathise with one character or another on the stage for a play to be effective, a presumption with us for some time now and perhaps ripe for retirement). An innovative art, however, moves forward, while sports continuously reifies its own forms, only rarely revising them with things like the designated hitter rule. Queenan also takes to task the small audiences for these events, assuming that this is some kind of indication of this music's intrinsic worth. (This will be news to people who recently saw Zimmermann's sold-out Die Soldaten during the Lincoln Center Festival. It's news to me too, who enjoyed, with another sold-out house, a James Levine-led concert of Schoenberg's piano music and Pierrot Lunaire as well as other chamber works by Berg and Webern at Carnegie Hall last season.) In any event, audience size is the product of too many factors to quantify successfully: the role of marketing, familiarity with composers and performers, press relations, ticket prices – none of which has anything, really, to do with the music itself.

Once all these poor rhetorical flourishes are chipped away, one is left with a sense that what drives all this is the emergence of an inferiority complex – that Queenan feels that he just doesn't "get it"; his current response is to imply that there's nothing to "get" in the first place. Setting aside for the moment the assumption that art is something that one has to "get," whatever that means, one doesn't need to get past more than an introductory course in Freud to recognise that Queenan's attack on this music is an act of aggression towards that which makes him feel inferior. It comes as no surprise, then, that Queenan descends to impugning and condemning the motives of the composers themselves – though to know those motives would be an act of mindreading generally beyond the parapsychic abilities of middling American humorists. Who to blame? The composers, made up of "dozens of academics who give each other awards for music nobody likes"? No? Then maybe it's that other awful influence on society, those damn kids who make up the audience for the music: "A certain market for demanding new music can always be found among brash young urbanites, but this audience is not large, nor well-heeled. Moreover, it is by no means certain that the affection for new work survives one's youth, when sonically grating music is mostly a way of antagonising older people. The central problem in writing music targeting hipsters is that even hipsters one day stop being hip ..." Touché, I guess, says this brash young 46-year-old only-moderately-heeled hipster. Or it could be programmers and musical directors of musical groups. Scheduling these works on programs with Liszt and Brahms "is not just asking striplings to compete with titans; it is asking obscure, academically trained liquid interfacers to compete with titans at the top of their game." Though one needs to be reminded, perhaps, that neither Liszt or Brahms were born titans, but became so through experimentation with form and sound, which experiments were not always greeted with unanimous cheering. Quite the opposite, sometimes.

At least Queenan stops one step short of calling this work "fraudulent" in trying to sell a corrupt bill of goods to a gullible audience. Accusations of fraudulence might work well in determining the behavior of a car salesman or a mortgage banker, but in art the definition of "fraudulent" is, like most definitions in art, in the eye of the beholder. Many have found the work of a director like Jan Fabre "fraudulent"; I and many others do not. On the other hand, I found Romeo Castellucci's production of Hey Girl! last season particularly susceptible to such charges, and I was in the minority there. To each his own, but the use of the word attempts to pin a moral or ethical motive on a work of art which, by some lights, is beyond simple dichotomies as true or false, sincere or fraudulent. In this conception, such labels are irrelevant in discussing a piece of music or a play.

There's nothing wrong with being indifferent to, or even actively disliking, this kind of music. I don't like some of it myself (though I must say I find far more in Stockhausen, Penderecki and Berio than Queenan does). But 1,000-word essays in the Guardian about indifference or dislike don't garner readers; broadside attacks do. I post about this at length here because I often hear the same kinds of vitriol directed at contemporary theatre artists as well: that their attempts at "offending" the audience are content-less attempts to epater le bourgeoisie; that their advocates are toff-nosed artists, academics and intellectuals whose sole motive is to raise themselves above everyone else, the philistine mob. No doubt some few individuals do this. But not all, or even most.

Most often the rhetoric is aimed at Modernist or Romantic conceptions of the artist – indeed, Modernists and Romantics, rather than Modernism or Romanticism themselves. Even if this were germane to the reception of this music, without Modernism or Modernists we'd have no Baudelaire, Eliot or Beckett (or Wagner, Ibsen or Chekhov, come to that); without Romanticism or Romantics, no Keats, Shelley or Byron. And it is true that these writers (and composers like those mentioned above) find that undermining traditional conceptions of form and content is the only means by which they can express their own innovative, liberating perspectives. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, and art does not continue to live and breathe from generation to generation without forms, expectations and assumptions being shattered. That the bourgeoisie is epatered should come as no surprise. The aggression directed at these artists and this art, like Queenan's against these contemporary composers and their music, is indicative not of indifference or dislike, but a need to suppress, to condemn – a puritanical and reactionary project to dump us back in the 18th century, before the work of Darwin, Marx, and Freud indicated the paucity of rationalistic, meliorist Enlightenment thought and social philosophy.

An admission of dislike or indifference towards this art, as I said, is understandable. Taste is personal; it takes all kinds to make up an audience. But hostility towards its audiences and artists is the expression of reactionary hatred towards persons – and, as Freud would point out, hatred emerges from fear. What is it that Queenan and his advocates at Tom Service's blog are so afraid of?

Scenes from an Execution

Scenes from an Execution by Howard Barker. Directed by Richard Romagnoli. Original music by Peter Nilsson. Sound design by Ben Schiffer. Lighting design by Laura J. Eckelman. Scenic design by Mark Evancho. Costume design by Julie Emerson. With Jan Maxwell (Galactia), David Barlow (Carpeta), Alex Draper (Urgentino), Patricia Buckley (Gina Rivera), Timothy Deenihan (Ostensible), Peter Schmitz (Prodo/Sordo/Man in Next Cell), Robert Zukerman (Suffici) and Allison Corke (Sketchbook). Also with Lucy Faust, Justine Katzenbach, Rachel Ann Cole, Will Damron, Jordon Tirrell-Wysocki and Willie Orbison. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes; one intermission. A presentation of the Potomac Theatre Project. Reviewed at the 9 July 2008 performance. At The Atlantic Stage 2, 330 West 16th Street, New York, 1-26 July 2008. Ticket and schedule information at Ticket Central.

Making art in Renaissance Venice and the 21st century Western world in Howard Barker's contemporary classic, in a brilliant production with Jan Maxwell by the Potomac Theatre Project

Peter Schmitz and Jan Maxwell
in Scenes from an Execution
(Photo: Stan Barouh)

Anna Galactia (not unlike the historical Artemisia Gentileschi) is a middle-aged woman, a brilliant and stubborn sensualist and the greatest painter of Renaissance Venice. Commissioned by the state of Venice through Urgentino, the Doge, to commemorate the Battle of Lepanto, Galactia determines instead to depict the suffering of the soldiers in battle and the commanders' indifference to that suffering. Needless to say the Doge (as well as the Church and the Military, whose interests the Doge must juggle for the continued health of the democracy) is not pleased, though the work itself is unutterably powerful. Galactia fully expects to see the painting burned and herself martyred for her intransigence, but she gets neither: ultimately, the painting is displayed for all the public to see and becomes a great popular success; applause is rendered to the government for its humanistic and democratic open-mindedness; and Galactia becomes a celebrity, welcome at the tables of Venice's most rich and powerful representatives.

Scenes from an Execution, originally written in 1985 as a radio play and adapted for the stage a few years later, is Howard Barker's most popular and most frequently-revived play; though it's not his best play of that period (that designation belongs more to The Castle, his first formal tragedy, or Victory), it is nonetheless an accessible, often very funny and terrifically entertaining evening. The energetic production directed by Richard Romagnoli (an associate of Barker's Wrestling School) for the Potomac Stage Project, running here through 26 July, is fortunate to have Jan Maxwell for its Galactia. Seizing on the character's arrogance and headstrong will, Maxwell owns the play throughout.

As Galactia's personal faults become more and more evident, she is more and more at the mercy of the Doge (Alex Draper), an immeasurably better politician who nonetheless is a genuine connoisseur of the painter and her work. At the end of the play, explaining the decision to exhibit the work, he says:

To have lost such a canvas would have been an offence against the artistic primacy of Venice. To have said this work could not be absorbed by the spirit of the Republic would be to belittle the Republic, and our barbarian neighbors would have jeered at us. So we absorb all, and in absorbing it we show our greater majesty. It offends today, but we look harder and we know, it will not offend tomorrow. We force the canvas and the stretcher down the gagging throat, and coughing a little, and spluttering a little, we find, on digestion, it nourishes us! There will be no art outside. Only art inside.

It is this idea of absorption into the community that renders the art powerless to offend, as well as powerless to change the community or the world. (And Galactia's status as a woman in Venice helps this along. "If it had been painted by a man it would have been an indictment of the war, but as it is, painted by the most promiscuous female within a hundred miles of the Lagoon, I think we are entitled to a different speculation," another painter says.) Though it might be easy to leave the Doge with the last word of the play, it belongs as it should to Galactia, whose "Yes" leads her to an honored seat at the table of the powers that first sought to suppress the painting and punish the artist.

Barker denies closure to the issues he raises: these are questions, this is the situation of the artist who accepts patronage and the democratic community which seeks to recognise her in promoting its own self-validation and self-congratulation, and there we have it. Romagnoli's spare production sharpens the focus of the conflict; we never see Galactia's work (indeed, we don't even get to see her sketch; Maxwell's hand as it travels over her sketchpad holds no pencil). We see only the artist and her condition.

Maxwell is a powerful, energetic and sensuous Galactia, who leads her younger lover, Carpeta (a comically effective David Barlow, who may as well physically wrap himself around Maxwell's little finger), like a puppy on a leash; a good lover, not even he can contain her arrogance and stubbornness. With loose hair flying in all directions, loose clothing draping over her body's curves and little make-up on her sharp-featured face, Maxwell is not afraid of being disliked, of refusing the audience's sympathies. Her performance is matched by Alex Draper as the Doge, supercilious but emotionally rich and engaged. Among the rest of the ensemble cast, Peter Schmitz must also be mentioned – as a victim of the battle who learns from Galactia that there's more than one way to exploit one's own suffering for cash, he delivers a delightfully memorable performance.

The day-job beckons so I can write little more right now (much as I would like to), except to urge you to see Scenes from an Execution before it closes, all too soon, on 26 July. Artists (as well as Urgentino-like arts administrators) will all find something to turn towards themselves in Barker's coruscating self-criticism; for the audience, it's a peek into the deepest recesses of the kitchen, as well as their own responses to demanding work. (At the end of the play, a character describes the reactions of the Venetian public to Galactia's painting. "It is [at] the other end, the exit, you should listen," he tells Galactia as they watch the visitors to the gallery. "Some have catalogues, but most can't read. The ones who can't read gasp, the ones with catalogues go 'mmm.' So it's either gasp or mmm, take yer pick.") This creates an admirable bookend to the PTP's previous production in New York, last season's staging of Barker's other portrait-of-the-artist play, No End of Blame. Next summer, I hope we can look forward to one of Barker's tragedies – perhaps the aforementioned The Castle, or his most remarkable recent work, Gertrude –The Cry. But for now, get yourself to West 16th Street for some of the best theatre of the year.