Avant-Garde Sounds the Bugle of Retreat
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.
—Flannery O’Connor
Did you ever in your younger days come face-to-face with a certain poster depicting a celebrity glancing up at you from behind a book? Sorry, Bono, I didn’t mean to distract you from your perusal of Barnaby Rudge beneath the spreading willow or whatever background the studio’s selected, you sputter with embarrassment, while his translucent-sunglassed eyes shimmer back to you, “Not a problem, boyo. The written word gentles my rock star condition, and, hell, I’m just glad to see you inch closer to reading a chapter book.” Your eyes drop quickly to the foot-tall white letters instructing you to “READ!”
The cumulative effect for me of these laminated Oprahs and Drew Careys was to question seriously whether, considering the odious company they kept, books were really all they were cracked up to be. Surely another factor was the awful “young adult” genre, in which you’re treated to two hundred pages of an intellectually stunted narrator coming to terms with the fact that he’s sprouting hairs where the sun don’t shine and characters so perfunctorily drawn they make Sonic the Hedgehog seem positively Shakespearean. Not to mention the staunch refusal to include a plot beyond the cataloguing of “relevant” adolescent experiences. I still resent the “READ!” movement for wasting so many hours of my youth in the name of getting children to read anything at all. If you don’t have anything nice to read, I came to believe, don’t read anything at all.
I was visited by traumatic flashbacks to my time as a “young adult” galley slave when I heard about an earnest new student group called the Arts Ambassadors. They are a band apart, dedicated to their mission of getting the populace psyched on the arts. Dance troupes, slam poets, dabblers in the plastic arts, string quartets, high-wire acts, playwrights, crooners, puppeteers, masters of the banjolele, painters, lyricists, choreographers, tumblers, and vamping honky-tonk piano players all look to them as tireless advocates for their radical ways.
The group’s founder, Michael Amico ’07, says the Ambassadors will employ “untraditional types of marketing, guerilla-type marketing.” For instance? One idea was to stage a “mock arrest” of draft dodgers in Food Court to get students excited for the upcoming student production of the musical “Hair.” The Daily Dartmouth wrote that “Amico hopes that such interactive displays will take issues seen on stage—like the threat of getting drafted—and place them firmly in a context people can relate to.”
Ignore for the time being the blimp-sized question of whether people attend plays because they’re frog-marched away from their Muffalato sandwiches and tossed into the back of a paddywagon. Focus instead on whether people visit art shows and plays because they’re relevant. “Young adult” fiction is relevant as can be—therefore horrendous and unpalatable. If some fool were convinced that he was about to be shoved into a sailor’s uniform and shipped off to the Strait of Hormuz because a member of Amico’s b-side Project Mayhem had beaned him with a plastic billy-club, he’d be more likely to write his congressman or start a blog. By what logic would he get himself to a “Hair” matinee?
It’s not just the Up with Bohemia pep squad scooting art out onto the sidewalk. Wenda Gu’s installation “the green house” has been almost universally panned in student publications, which led to a few sharp rebukes from the mandarins to the students. Their implication was that a refusal to like “the green house” meant hostility to this amorphous thing called “the arts,” an argument which is just a few measly notches above “READ!” in sophistication. Most who truly love art and literature in general hate at least a few specific works; if someone did not, there would be no evidence of any sort of critical faculty. And general support for “the arts” does not entail relinquishment of the right to despise shoddy works.
“When Hood Museum Director Brian Kennedy arrived more than two years ago,” wrote Provost Barry Scherr, “I shared with him my vision of infusing Dartmouth with art, and he has embraced my call to take art directly to the broader public and place it in ‘unexpected places’ on the campus.” I wonder if some upstart asked them exactly why they wanted art in unexpected places. Épater la bourgeoisie has become mandatory.
In a tremendous review in a recent New Republic, Richard Taruskin rightly slapped around the clowns who arranged to have renowned violinist Joshua Bell play in a Washington metro stop as commuters flowed by him. The shocking conclusion was that, lo, the plebes took little notice of his spectacular double stops as they sped to work. Taruskin cited commentary by writer Ben H.: “Perhaps the Post could do a whole series of articles about philistines ignoring Joshua Bell’s sublime music-making in different locations: 1. Outside a burning building (not one fireman stopped to listen!) 2. At a car crash site (one paramedic actually pushed him aside!) 3. During a graduation exam (shushed by the invigilators!) 4. At a school play (thrown out by angry parents!) 5. On an airport runway (passing jet liners seemed oblivious!)”
Those who use art merely for transgression are often after a status-boost for themselves and when it comes down to spending time, the actual art has about as much significance as a hipster’s ironic t-shirt. A columnist for Asia Times Online writing under the pseudonym Spengler wondered why atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg and his brother-in-aesthetics, the painter Wassily Kandinsky, were received so differently by the public. “The most striking difference between the two founding fathers of modernism is this,” he wrote, “the price of Kandinsky’s smallest work probably exceeds the aggregate royalties paid for the performances of Schoenberg’s music.” He concluded that while one must stay seated while suffering through Schoenberg’s pieces, one can skip through the Kandinsky gallery casting cursory glances and still collect the merit badge of artistic sophisticate.
If you want to be avant-garde, don’t expect the amenities of the rear-guard. Schoenberg certainly didn’t. When he conducted the premier of his song cycle Gurre-Lieder, he walked onstage to thank the musicians but kept his back turned to the audience and did not acknowledge the applause. And audiences hated him back. At a performance of one of his operas in 1999, someone overheard an old lady say, “I survived Auschwitz—I don’t have to sit through this.” It’s hard to imagine Schoenberg whining in the Daily Dartmouth that some undergraduates have expressed dislike for his art. It’s heartwarming to realize that for all the talk about shocking students out of their complacency, the counterstrike in support of Wenda Gu as avatar of the arts shows that what the “radicals” really want are all those nice bourgeois things: good press and sufficient remuneration. How’s that for community togetherness? n
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