"When Taste Politics Meet Terror:
The Critical Art Ensemble on Trial"
Joan Hawkins, C Theory
"And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has
been created to teach us that first of all." — Antonin Artaud, "No More Masterpieces," 1938. [1]
Setting the Stage
In late September 2001, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus
Ohio, announced that the performances of ~Charlie Victor Romeo~
scheduled for September 26-30 had been cancelled. "We hope you'll
understand that this is not an appropriate time to present this
award-winning Off-Broadway show," the letter accompanying my refund
said. "We will continue to stay in contact with the Collective
Unconscious company who created and perform ~Charlie Victor Romeo~
regarding the potential for rescheduling CVR at the Wexner Center at
an appropriate time in the future."
~Charlie Victor Romeo~ is a documentary play, based on transcripts
taken from the black boxes of downed airplanes, the final
communication between air personnel and the tower. A serious and
sober look at the way people actually behave during a crisis, it won
the 2000 Drama Desk Awards for Best Unique Theatrical Experience and
Outstanding Sound Design, the 2000 New York Fringe Festival awards
for Excellence in Drama and Outstanding Sound Design, and the
Backstage West Garland Award for Best Sound Design. It was filmed by
the U.S. Air Force to be used as a training video for pilots and "has
been invited to be performed for groups of physicians and healthcare
administrators studying the effects of human error and emergencies in
a medical context" (www.charlievictorromeo.com). It also belongs to a
group of experimental dramas — the plays of Anna Devere Smith, ~The
Laramie Project~, etc — which have been mixing ethnography,
documentary (with the emphasis here on documents) and theater in
provocative and compelling ways. Theater which has learned and
borrowed from performance art, one could say.
In late September 2001, I was still badly shaken by the events of
9/11. I had cancelled my planned sabbatical trip to New York when the
apartment I had sublet was needed to house a writer-friend who'd been
evacuated from her flat, and nothing I heard from her about life in
the City in the immediate aftermath of tragedy bore any resemblance
to anything I was hearing on the mainstream news (with the exception
of "Democracy Now", U.S. news broadcasts were all about spin). Weary
of platitudes and patriotic cant, I was looking forward to seeing the
play, to hearing something real (in the street sense of that term)
and to feeling some connection with the New York art scene that had
been. I wanted to be challenged and I wanted to think, to be
addressed as an adult rather than as a slightly addled child. I was
disappointed when the play was cancelled. The box office staff member
who took my call was surprised at my reaction. "Most people have been
telling us they're happy we're rescheduling the show," she told me.
"When has it been rescheduled for?" I asked. "We don't know yet," she
said.
I've chosen to open this essay on the recent harassment of the
Critical Art Ensemble with this older story because it seems to me to
highlight some of the problems confronting the art world in this post
9/11, Patriot Act-hysterical, time. I understand some of the reasons
the Wexner felt it had to postpone the performance. The Wexner Center
for the Arts is small, and totally dependent on public funding and
the support of its patrons and members for survival. It certainly
cannot afford to bring a New York show to Columbus and play to a
near-empty house. And it probably can't really afford the loss of
community good will which such a move might entail.
But the cancellation also served to unmask the ambivalence with which
we (even those of us in the art world) regard truly provocative,
risk-taking art. ~Charlie Victor Romeo~ was rescheduled because of
its content, because it wasn't "an appropriate time" to present the
material.[2] As I indicated above, for me it was exactly the
appropriate time. And my initial reaction of disappointment remains
my final one. But I'm disappointed not only because I didn't get to
see the show when I wanted, but because the cancellation seemed to
trivialize (or at least to contain) the entire project of cutting-
edge art. By cancelling the performance, the Wexner effectively
communicated that provocative and radical theater can be mounted and
tolerated only when nothing serious is at stake. That to mount
provocative art — especially art which deals with disaster — when
something real IS at stake is somehow in bad taste. And that to raise
the question of the politics of taste — the fact that the whole
notion of bad taste is itself an ideologically inflected construct —
is also intolerable in the face of real crisis. This episode, then,
seemed to signal that art and theory both are reduced, in times of
crisis, "to an academic parlor game" — something we do when there's
nothing really on anyone's radar screen.[3] Something we do only when
it's "appropriate."
The question of the appropriate role and function of art post 9/11 is
one which has been framed largely in terms of taste. The removal of
Eric Fischl's commemorative sculpture, ~Tumbling Woman~, from
Rockefeller Center, the elimination of three choruses from John
Adams' opera ~The Death of Klinghoffer~ from a November 2001 Boston
Symphony program, and the quiet de-funding of work by performance
artist William Pope (he lost an NEA grant for a series of works on
racial and social injustice; the Andy Warhol Foundation magnanimously
stepped in and funded the exhibition) all were done in the name of
taste — the fear of offending the public in its still-sensitive,
post 9-11, traumatized state.
But as I have written elsewhere [4], questions of taste are never
ideologically neutral, and almost immediately the issue of taste in
post 9/11 cultural production began to overlap with heavy-handed
manifestations of political corporate and state power. Bill Maher's
television show, ~Politically Incorrect~, was taken off the air by
several ABC affiliates after Maher called the U.S violent response to
the 9/11 attacks "cowardly." John Lennon's song "Imagine" and all music
by Rage Against the Machine were placed on a "don't play" list by the
corporate giant Clear Channel. The woefully misnamed group "Students
for Academic Freedom" launched a number of websites, inviting
students to turn in professors who had made "anti-patriotic" remarks
in class and the U.S Legislature introduced a bill that would tie the
continued funding of area studies programs in American universities
(American Studies, Near Eastern Studies etc.) to governmental
"curriculum oversight." In the bill, renowned scholar Edward Said was
specifically named as the kind of thinker we have to guard against in
these troubled post 9/11 times. Finally, Steve Kurtz, founding member
of the Critical Art Ensemble, was arrested for bio-terrorism.
