I was very pleased to have this review published in the brilliant magazine Critique d’Art 64 – with a translation into French
64 | Printemps/été : CRITIQUE D’ART 64
Articles –https://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/122227
The above is a link that will disappear in a few months time.
Aristotle Versus Ad Reinhardt
Anthony Howell
p. 39-47Traduction(s) :Aristote contre Ad Reinhardt
Références | Texte | Notes | Citation | Auteur
Meredith Monk Calling
Amsterdam : Hartwig Art Foundation ; Munich : Haus der Kunst ; Berlin : Hatje Kantz, 2024, 400p. ill. en noir et en coul. 29 x 23cm, eng
Biogr.
ISBN : 9783775754811. _ 58,00 €
Sous la dir. de Beatrix Ruf, Anna Schneider, Peter Sciscioli
Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today
London : Verso, 2024, 265p. ill. 22 x 15cm, eng
Index
ISBN : 9781804292884
Dance First Think Later, vol. 1 : le corps pensant entre danse et arts visuels = the thinking body between danse and visual arts
Dijon : Les presses du réel ; Genève : Arta Sperto, 2024, 271p. ill. en coul. 29 x 21cm, fre/eng
Biogr.
ISBN : 9782970184003. _ 30,00 €
Sous la dir. d’Olivier Kaeser
Texte intégral
Ce numéro sera publié en ligne en texte intégral et en libre accès en juin 2026.
1Three books to review. The editors ask me “to give a critical reading of these books, which approach performance from an interventionist and political point of view while offering a reflection on the contemporary.” But where am I coming from? Well, I am a poet and a fox-hunting anarcho-communist who danced briefly with the Royal Ballet, who pioneered performance art in the seventies, and who teaches Argentine tango. I shall make no attempt to be objective in my reaction.
2Least interesting is the mega-monograph on Meredith Monk. It is basically a ‘coffee-table book’ – enormous, lavishly illustrated, with extra-large text (but to what purpose?). Monk embraces all the arts, combining singing and movement, installation, sculpture – you name it, she’s done it. But this is precisely my problem with her work, and, incidentally, that of Pina Bausch and Twyla Tharp. They sample. They pick up and steal snippets of concepts that were more deeply explored by the performance artists of their time.
3In London, for many years, we have tended to distinguish between performing arts and performance art. Performing arts is an all-embracing definition. So dance, opera, theatre, and all amalgamations of these, are included. Performance art, on the other hand, is a specific term referring to ‘actions’. These have largely (but not exclusively) derived from concepts developed in visual art. They include the live work of the surrealists and the dadaists between the wars; the work of actionist artists creating events in Austria then, Germany from the sixties onwards; the ‘happenings’ that visual artists performed in the 60s and 70s, Shamanistic art, spectacles that include bodily interventions such as cutting, bondage and cupping, and Stelarc flying over Amsterdam suspended from a crane on hooks inserted through his skin. Sometimes performance art is referred to as Live Art – I find this term confusing.
4Performance art is not dance. Dance is an illustrative medium. Merce Cunningham may have gone some way towards its liberation from music by dancing to the random noise generated by John Cage. But there was still the notion of accompaniment. Aristotle considered that “all arts aspire towards the condition of theatre” (where they served the common purpose of illustrating their subject). Ad Reinhardt maintained “that all the arts seek emancipation from each other”. Performance art is associated with the latter. It liberates action from illustrating music (dance) or accompanying a narrative (theatre). Action becomes an art in its own right. None of these books so much as mentions this issue. Because they confuse dance with action and never seriously address performance art, they all lean towards the Aristotelian notion – and naturally attempt to approach performance “from an interventionist and political point of view” – because that was the whole point of the drama and its catharsis. There was always a social subject.
5Dance First Think Later is largely a visual experience and some of its spreads I enjoyed, particularly those of Xavier Le Roy. I was pleased to see that it included at least a quote from Simone Forti, admittedly one related to dance. But Forti has created work that is genuine performance art – I recall being impressed by her action studies of animal movements back in the seventies. Nevertheless, this tome is not up my street. It is a book on contemporary dance that seeks to amalgamate dance with the ambience of international art exhibitions. This echoes my viewpoint that we’re still being led towards the trend to merge everything into a mish-mash – which must lead to a diversion from art itself (which is always concerned with its constraints – even when advertising its freedoms). Let me be even more subjective in my reaction: I have a problem with much that goes under the label of “contemporary dance”. While I enjoyed seeing Cage and Cunningham perform at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the sixties, amid sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, what they did was actually inimitable. Chance action’s interplay with chance sound was their particular contribution to art philosophy. What we see today is dull imitation. Cage simply gives dancers the excuse not to listen to the music – so again, there is no constraint.
6At least, when I dance the tango, I must dance to the music – whether my movement be syncopated or not. But so much contemporary dance consists of endless undisciplined gestures, vapid technique, no need to dance to any beat. In her heyday, Martha Graham was involved in a far more considered discipline of movement, while the more or less forgotten Alwin Nikolais created fantastic dehumanisations of movement through costume innovations connected to kites.
- 1 Sun & Sea (Marina) represented Lithuania at the 58th Venice Biennale. An opera-performance by
7Finally, to Disordered Attention, the most serious read of the three. Claire Bishop begins by identifying Sun and Sea – the installation by Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė at the Venice Biennale in 2019 as a key work of its time1, and it does sound wonderful: a sandy beach to look down on, where opera singers in swimsuits, children, even a dog, created a locale perfect for sun-bathing and the singers sporadically sang their complaints about needing more sunscreen or the sea filling with algae, mixing the personal with the environmental. Bishop continues by describing the nature of attention in our time – mobiles and selfies, the Internet and social media, and the tendency to skim and to sample the text, while we worry about the rise of ADHD (Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder). Rather than bemoan these tendencies, she embraces them, demanding new methods of teaching and a fluid acceptance of attention modes. She also offers a brief history of attention which is intriguing to read. She then presents four categories to be considered in contemporary art and performance: research-based art, the hybrid nature of spectatorship, interventions and déjà vu – the nostalgia for modernist architecture.
- 2 James, Williams. The Principles of Psychology (1890), vol. 1, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Pr (…)
8These categories do give an overview of the Zeitgeist prevailing today. She allows William James to define attention: “Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”2 She calls this normative attention, and she points out how this clashes with “a contemporary culture of digital activity.” People chattered quite happily during 17th century performances and made assignations in each other’s boxes. Normative attention is largely a 20th-century notion. I have a Japanese woodprint of a Noh play – where the goings-on in the pit (snack-selling and flirtation) are of more interest than the stilted action onstage.
- 3 Anthony McCall: Solid Light (27 June 2024–27 April 2025), Tate Modern, London
9The chapter on hybridisation discusses how “dance” has intruded on galleries once devoted to purely visual art. It is dance now merged with screenings, sometimes nostalgically projected through 16mm or some more antiquated technology. But as previously stated, all this aspiration towards the merger of forms leads to an overriding focus on subject-matter and a distraction from genuine sensation, where art is at is best – as attested by Anthony McCall’s Solid Light installations, shown recently at the Tate Modern3.
10Intervention is also problematic and Bishop fails to mention its precedents in the 20th century, as far as I could tell (there is no index). I would have mentioned the anti-oil demonstrations by Hayley Newman and others at the Tate (2010-2016). My own performance of a solo Table Move at the same gallery was attacked by a schizophrenic acquaintance back in the early 80s. This traumatised me, and I made no performances for several years after that. So I am not keen on interventions – again, most interventions assume an “accepted” political view.
11By the time I opened the final chapter on art based on a nostalgia for the architectural integrity of modernism my own eyes were beginning to glaze over, as Bishop says hers do when confronted by a Breuer chair, Oscar Niemeyer curves and deserted modernist buildings. What is it, then, that irritates me about this book, which does at least provide us with an authentic survey?
12Two things, first, the fairly skimpy acknowledgement of what had been achieved in the latter half of the 20th century. There is one mention of Robert Wilson, one of the writing on Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present by RosaLee Goldberg (1999). There is no understanding of what defined performance art in the first place, and when Bishop describes a street performance such as Kevin Beasley’s The Sound of Morning (2021), there is no reference to precedents in the street art of the 70s. There is a crisis of multitude. Blame it on creative writing classes perhaps, or the proliferation of arts PhDs. To make a survey of the contemporary scene is far more time-consuming than it would have been in my day.
13The second problem for me is the assumption of the author that we still admire the US and its artists and that most of us identify with the contemporary “democratic” values we associate with the Americans. I sometimes felt while reading this book that the artists chosen were useful as accompanists to Bishop’s political view: Pussy Riot good, Putin bad and so on, or whatever fits in comfortably with the current idées reçues. The soi-disant “Left” is no longer in any way left. It is instead a middle-class way of espousing “worthy” causes. The amalgamizing, algorithmic art of today is obliged to de-emphasise constraint and adopt such distractions. The language of this book is permeated with the irritating vocabulary of this trend – I am averse to the art generated by identity politics. There are artists I admire who happen to be black, green, queer, criminal, female and bestial –but – each of them defies categorisation of this nature.
Notes
1 Sun & Sea (Marina) represented Lithuania at the 58th Venice Biennale. An opera-performance by
Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė. Curator: Lucia Pietroiusti.
2 James, Williams. The Principles of Psychology (1890), vol. 1, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 381-382 quoted in: Bishop, Claire. Disordered Attention: How we look at art and performance today, London:Verso, 2024, p. 8
3 Anthony McCall: Solid Light (27 June 2024–27 April 2025), Tate Modern, LondonHaut de page
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Référence papier
Anthony Howell, « Aristotle Versus Ad Reinhardt », Critique d’art, 64 | 2025, 39-47.
Référence électronique
Anthony Howell, « Aristotle Versus Ad Reinhardt », Critique d’art [En ligne], 64 | Printemps/été, mis en ligne le 16 juin 2026, consulté le 11 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/critiquedart/122227 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/147klHaut de page
Auteur
Anthony Howell
Anthony Howell is an English poet, novelist and performance artist. He founded performance company The Theatre of Mistakes in 1974. This company made notable appearances at The Cambridge Poetry Festival (1975), at the Serpentine Gallery, and at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1976), at the Hayward Gallery, at the Biennale de Paris, and at FIAC in the Grand Palais (1977). His literary output includes poems and novels. He has also written a book on performance with Fiona Templeton, Elements of Performance Art (Ting Books, 1977). Howell was Senior Lecturer in Time Based Studies at the Faculty of Art, Design and Technology, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, and the editor of Grey Suit: Video for Art & Literature (1993-1995). See https://anthonyhowelljournal.com/Haut de page
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