There is a spectre that haunts the
contemporary arts. It whispers dark mockery in the ear of the conceptualist,
hobbles the choreographer and detunes the melodies of the composer. Anxiety of
influence isn’t merely the late night panic attack striking down the critic as
he tries to say something original about yet another rendition of Macbeth. It grows in a straight line
from 1913’s Rite of Spring, which
both heralded the arrival of the contemporary age and offended a conservative
public, through to Andy Warhol and the 1960s, when it became the popular and
froze a generation into a series of strategies that replaced genuine
experimentation.
The failure of originality has become a
strategy in itself. The current celebrations and reflections on The Rite’s anniversary only underline
how this moment in the arts’ history has become a symbol of potential and a
headstone for experimentation. Rob Drummond’s Riot of Spring was a sideways look at the way in which Stravinsky’s
music has become part of the establishment – the music is now protected by
copyright to such an extent that even displaying the score on stage is illegal.
Meanwhile, Gob Squad’s Kitchen
simultaneously praises the potential of Warhol’s cinema and mourns the loss of
the innocent spirit that allowed such bold experiments.
Post-modernism, still a vital
interpretative philosophy doesn’t help. The emphasis on a diversity of opinions
and its distrust of sincerity can encourage artists towards trivial positions –
any grand narrative is fundamentally dishonest. Taylor Mac, as part of his
recent show at The Arches, observed that self-consciousness has destroyed the
unashamed intensity that drove much of the pop music before the 1990s: the
irony that permits the most absurd lyric to be readmitted to the musical cannon
also cripples the modern song-writer. The continued distaste for U2 is as much
about their brazen sincerity as the predictable sound of their latest album.
Simon Reynolds pokes around in the
contemporary confusion in his book Retromania,
but the problems he detects are not limited to music. Indeed, although he takes
up the story implied in the name of indie-dance also-rans Pop Will Eat Itself, pop music is the art least damaged by the
trend towards recycling of ideas.
Even in its early years, rock’n’roll was
all about reworking older ideas, and the cult of the artist maintains at least
the aura of originality. Drummond, in an interview before his Riot, talks about the impossibility of
creating something genuinely new. Like many theatre-makers, he is interested in
experimentation. Yet he is honest enough to recognise that he is caught within
a tradition, and that “the new” is usually a mere variation on a theme.
Gob Squad are even more explicit in Kitchen. Basing their performance on a
series of Warhol’s films – including the one about the blow job, Kitchen itself and his series of screen
tests – they are simultaneously sentimental about the freedoms of the 1960s and
ambivalent about its social and aesthetic impact. While their Kitchen takes on a diverse range of
themes, including the battles between youth and experience, audience and
artists, it seems to mourn the last moment in which true experimentation was
possible.
The signs of an artistic culture in crisis,
a crisis that can only come about when there is a sense that everything has
been done, are manifold. Last year, every other production at the Fringe seemed
to be a version of Macbeth. Never
mind that some versions – Song of the Goat’s polyphonic spree, David Greig’s
imaginative sequel Dunsinane – added
new readings. A proliferation of Shakespeare hints at a theatre tied up with
the past and lacking confidence in the present, or even the recent past. It’s
more miserable in that Macbeth has
elements that are utterly irrelevant to contemporary life – the plot is driven
by a concern about regal hereditary, a matter of interest to Prince Charles but
not leaders of terrorist cells.
Then there are the works-in-progress.
Again, this isn’t a question of individual pieces relative quality: far too
much work is being offered in a tentative, incomplete state. That critics have
taken to treating works-in-progress as completed is problematic: there have
been five star reviews of shows that are being presented with actors still
reading from the script. Combine this with the pieces that explicitly take
other works as their guiding idea, and theatre isn’t just eating itself, it’s
becoming a middle class version of Two
Girls, One Cup.
And the festival is becoming the unit of
artistic presentation: plays are clustered together, hiding from individual
exposure. All of these strategies are valid, intriguing, and there are good
performances in the mix. But taken together, they suggest a certain aesthetic
cowardice.
It’s worth saying that no individual work
of art – especially those that get mentioned here – is necessarily an act of
cowardice in itself. And the strategies being used by the artists don’t imply a
capitulation of either ambition or seriousness. Rather, there are trends in art
that reflect a cultural malaise. It’s bold to attempt any analysis of this
malaise, but sitting through five or six plays that use reproduction of past
songs to make a political point tends to lead to grand statements. And if the
problem is a lack of ambition, perhaps it is time for a critic to make a
ridiculous and large theory, the better to be shot down by artists making work
that argues with the contention that “art is being hamstrung by its own
self-conscious awareness of the past.”
END OF PART ONE
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