Category Archives: New Expressionism

Archives: Readings in New Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit

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Originally posted on 18 February 2011.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Potsdamer Platz. 1914. Oil on canvas. 6′ 6 3/4 x 59 1/16″ (200 x 150 cm). Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. © Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York

Though he wrote more extensively about it in his English Drama Since 1940, David Ian Rabey first suggested a “New Expressionism” as one of the strands of contemporary theatre in his 1997 book on David Rudkin:

Rudkin’s drive to express the poetry of otherness, from the wellspring of conventionally submerged inner possibilities, has some affinities with the objectives of the early twentieth century German Expressionists, whose savage and passionate affirmations of Dionysian dynamism sprang defiantly from their profound sense of individual isolation and fascination with sickness and death. In 1917, Kasimir Edschmid described the visionary imagination of the Expressionist writer as crucially different to that of the documentary or social realist: “The Expressionist does not see, he beholds. He does not describe, he experiences. He does not reproduce, he creates. He does not accept, he seeks.” In 1918, Kurt Pinthus extolled drama as “the most passionate and effective form” for expressionism: “There Man explodes in front of Man.” Lotte H. Eisner notes how expressionist phraseology is ruled by a desire to amplify the “metaphysical” meaning of words towards a “total extravasation of self,” where “exterior facts are continually being transformed into interior elements and psychic events are exteriorized.” Michael Patterson observes that “the very name of the movement suggested that … having rejected realism, artistic creation could have its source only in the subjective personality of the artist; and yet, especially in a public medium like the theatre, the artist’s desire to communicate remained intense.” To this end, the Expressionist “sought renewal not in mass movements” but in the “passionate search for individual regeneration,” where dramatic progression is dictated by the writer/protagonist’s search for self-realization as possible redemption of his suffering. Expressionism’s “bold violence of images …” made the theatre once again a place of intense sensory experience.” [1]

Rabey goes on to mention that Rudkin himself identifies his own drama with gothic art, but I’d like to back up a little to the historical basis of New Expressionism and examine for a moment its relationship to the Neue Sachlichkeit movement that followed it in Germany and which suggests an additional dimension of this description. Although the Neue Sachlichkeit movement is often characterized as a reaction against the internal and personal vision of Expressionist writers and painters, it can in another sense be seen as its continuation. The painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement like Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad reacted against Expressionism’s abstractions but did not entirely abandon them for photo-realism. The paintings and portraits rendered by the painters retained the two-dimensional quality of Expressionist work, which foregrounded all the subjects of an individual painting rather than dispersing some of them through perspective, and in their subject matter seemed to claim some of the dream-like qualities of Surrealism as well. More importantly, the Neue Sachlichkeit movement foregrounded art’s relationship to urban modernity (though, as the above Kirchner painting demonstrates, the Expressionists themselves also rendered urban scenes and subjects).

Schopenhauer’s will operates through urban modernity and its residents as well as any other site, and the new sharpness with which both painters and writers of the Neue Sachlichkeit foregrounded the sensuality of the human body suggests various avenues for the exploration of both New Expressionism and erotic tragedy, especially in its ambivalent relationship to gender roles and erotic experience. In a 2001 study, Richard W. McCormick discusses the emergence of the Neue Sachlichkeit from the decline of the historical Expressionist movement, a movement “that began in German painting around 1905, became important in literature around 1910, flourished just before and during the war (especially in the theatre), but by 1920 was nearly exhausted. Only then, when this once revolutionary aesthetic had begun to degenerate into a fashionable, decorative visual style, did it enter the cinema, and by 1924 it was pretty much over there too.” [2]

More observations from McCormick follow below.

Otto Dix. Portrait of Dancer Anita Berber, 1925. Oil & tempera on plywood. 47 1/4″ x 25 5/8″.

… I want to make a point of affirming as emancipatory the blurring of fixed gender and sexual identities — not just to take a position that is now much more acceptable, but because the enmity to such blurring seems to me clearly connected to the crimes of the Third Reich. In this I differ with more canonical interpretations of Weimar “decadence”: in my opinion what ought to be celebrated includes precisely that wich has been derided as decadence and “effeminate weakness” by many writers on the left — work in the postwar era on Weimar culture by Peter Gay and by Siegfried Kracauer come to mind….

I disagree strongly with this intepretation both of Weimar culture and of “decadence.” The comparison with the Third Reich is instructive, however, for in that regime “decadence” was denounced as biological degeneracy, a denunciation that was clearly connected not only to anti-Semitism but to misogyny and homophobia as well. As opposed to the open anxieties about gender expressed in Weimar culture, Nazi misogyny was embodied in a cultural politics that had much less space for any acknowledgement of male weakness (except in submission to the state) or for any confusion on the part of either sex about “natural” gender roles — not to mention confusion about “race.” It ought to be obvious today that this drive for clear boundaries and identities led only to barbarism.

In contrast, I want to emphasize again that what was most emancipatory about Weimar’s crises of identity was precisely the blurring and confusion of traditional categories of identity. We find in Weimar culture a relatively open discussion of the hollowness — indeed, cynicism — of the masquerade that prescribed roles and identities seemed to demand. … [In both masculine and feminine masquerade] one notes an anxious attempt to conceal any deviation from traditional norms for gendered behavior. This anxiety in turn can be interpreted as a tacit admission of what Judith Butler has called the performativity of gender roles, a concept that involves the realization that there is no underlying “essence” to them at all: “If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is not a preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.”

… [T]he New Objectivity and Expressionism were in many ways merely two sides of the same “coin,” as it were — a rather undialectical shift from a romantic and idealistic inwardness to a somewhat forced “unsentimental,” materialistic affirmation of the external surfaces of modernity — and it was a transition made by many artists and intellectuals of more or less the same generation. Furthermore, it is clear that to the extent that this move to “sober” New Objectivity was an attempt to come down from the idealist, anti-modern heights of “auratic” art to embrace modernity, the masses, and the metropolis, it was a moved that was marked by ambivalence on the part of the intellectuals and artists who were engaged in it. It is also true that this move can be seen as the attempt of an endangered social group, the intelligentsia, to find a niche for itself in the emerging modern society that preserved some of its former prestige and autonomy. It was also an attempt that largely failed. The book burning in May of 1933, soon after the end of the Republic, would provide the most visible demonstration of this failure. …

But I want to stress again that there is a need to celebrate the emancipatory aspects, especially those emancipatory, indeed utopian moments of “polymorphous perversity” in Weimar culture — an emancipatory “queerness,” if you will, that still fascinates us to this day. I use this term not just to imply a questioning of traditional norms with regard to gender and sexuality, but also to imply a contestation of fixed categories and identities that must be seen as crucial to the project of radical democratic politics. This, I would insist, is a project important for people of all identities. What better legacy from the Weimar Republic can we salvage as we face the new millennium? [3]

Footnotes
  1. David Ian Rabey, David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997, p. 12. [↩]
  2. Richard W. McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity.” New York: Palgrave, 2001, p. 7. [↩]
  3. Selected from Ibid., pp. 7-14. [↩]

From the archives: New Expressionism

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As I continue to write Erlkönig I’ll be republishing several entries to keep the fire here going.

Originally posted on 18 October 2010.

In Schopenhauer’s conception of knowledge and the world, mankind is phenomenon par excellence, the object through which subjectivity can be known and the will as thing-in-itself recognized, if not described or describable in the symbol-system of language available to the individual. The will itself, because it is not describable, can’t be characterized as tragic, but this locution is available to describe the phenomenal world in relation to that will. Only that which can be directly experienced by the individual can be said to exist: it is far preferable to the abstract concept as a valid recognition, as a valid object of knowledge. Just as color cannot be described to the blind, or music to the deaf (for the vibrations under foot and hand at the concert hall are not in essence dissimilar to the vibrations of the subway or the earth), one who does not experience an extreme or a quality cannot recognize it as something known. The individual body through which the will can be recognized, and the words with which it can be explored, become the instrument of exploration and experience.

This places particular weight on the theatre and drama as aesthetic means of this exploration of the phenomenon; it is a quality of the art which most theatre practitioners (dramatists, directors, producers and critics alike) and audiences today are loathe to admit. It makes of the art a far more urgent discipline than they’re comfortable with, in that it renders the entertainment, amusement and business that attaches to the form irrelevant, especially in the forms of mimetic social realism or ironic post-modernist distance that attach to its practice even today. Obviously, in this conception, theatre and drama are the truly experiential arts, for the mediation is through the body, not the page or canvas, and it is the body that is the primary vehicle for experience. Apart from music, tragic drama is at the apex of the aesthetic imagination as conceived by Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer was prophetic in more senses than one, inspiring many of the artists, writers and composers of the Expressionist school that arose in Austria and Germany beginning in the late 19th century. But there is a New Expressionism as well, and one which has its philosophical roots in the old. David Ian Rabey in his English Drama Since 1940 identifies a stream of post-war drama which he names a “New Expressionism,” which predated In-Yer-Face theatre, an off-shoot of this New Expressionism, by several decades, citing the work of David Rudkin, Heathcote Williams and other dramatists. “This involves a consciously heightened form of presentation which is unapologetic about its anti-conventional strageness, in which often ‘exterior facts are continually being transformed into interior elements and psychic events are exteriorized,’ in a passionate expression of, and search for, individual regeneration. … This form of renewal is prioritised as preliminary to epic theatre’s foregrounding of social relations to address the political collective. [Emphasis mine] … Unlike Absurdism, which may reflect a loss of faith in language, reference, action and consequence, Expressionism recreates an unconventional faith in consequence: the power of individual defiance to trigger wider seismic upheavals of power, countering ‘information’ and passivity with a demonstrative capacity for active transformation.” (Rabey 128) [1]

Rabey’s description takes in a broad swathe of post-1970 drama in his book, but it is also a useful corrective to the characterization of a dramatist like Samuel Beckett as “absurdist,” especially when it comes to Beckett’s prose and drama after 1960, when the novel How It Is and the play Play marked a division between his early work and his later; especially in the late plays Catastrophe and What Where, political and ideological considerations are secondary and founded upon a metaphysical ground. What’s more, all of this later work, especially pieces like Not I, are experiential rather than discursive, and the subjective psychic events are those which provide the necessary sensation. Because they also exhibit “a demonstrative capacity for active transformation,” they are immediately relevant to a consideration of the plays of Howard Barker, David Rudkin and Sarah Kane.

The later work of Beckett and the plays of Barker, Rudkin and Kane are beyond considerations of optimistic and pessimistic. Or, more accurately, they may be both. A capacity may exist, but it may or may not be fulfilled, and possibility may or may not become probability or ever realized: it is these that are demonstrated in the theatre; it remains to the individual spectator to fulfill or realize these capacities and possibilities in their own lives, having first recognized them through the aesthetic experience. But it is this capacity and possibility that is demonstrated in the theatre, and because it is beyond the currently fashionable Procrustean formal beds of social realism or post-modern irony, it remains marginalized, however awesome may be its power to transform both the art of theatre and the experience of those who attend it.

The “In-Yer-Face theatre” that emerged in the 1990s, and of whom Sarah Kane is a common (if inappropriate) exemplar, is described by Aleks Sierz; it is interesting to note in this context, since it too is a theatre founded in experience:

[In Yer Face theatre] is any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation. … Questioning moral norms, it affronts the ruling ideas of what can or should be shown onstage; it also taps into more primitive feelings, smashing taboos, mentioning the forbidden, creating discomfort. Crucially, it tells us more about who we really are. Unlike the type of theatre that allows us to sit back and contemplate what we see in detachment, the best in-yer-face theatre takes us on an emotional journey, getting under our skin. In other words, it is experiential, not speculative. [Emphasis mine] (Sierz 4)

This is correct in so far as it goes, but I would insist that it is this theatrical experience itself that becomes the object of speculation; it must do so, if it is not to remain a solipsistic sensual experience which ends at the theatre door. Howard Barker’s conception of theatre as a crucible for moral speculation certainly does not obviate the practice of extreme and excessive stage activity and dramatic language. Indeed, speculation and experience revolve and feed upon each other on the New Expressionist stage. The theatre remains an arena of contemplation and speculation, even as this is generated by the experiential events that take place between performer and spectator, mediated by the symbol-system of dramatic language.

It is my hope in this series of posts to explore this conception of New Expressionism as described by Rabey and Gritzner, and trace its development back through the original Expressionist movement to its philosophical origins in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and aesthetics. This is not to say that Beckett, Barker, Rudkin and Kane share much beyond these bare outlines. Beckett’s constricted, de-eroticized landscape is a far cry from Barker’s expansive, even excessive, re-eroticized imagination, and they are barely recognizable, perhaps, as exemplars of the same school. But it seems to me that their emphasis on the subjective experience, their deliberate intent to operate as far outside the Culture Industry as it may be possible to do, is a critique of the same metaphysical, moral and aesthetic stance in which that Industry stands as was Schopenhauer’s opposition to the ameliorist Enlightenment of his time.

All four dramatists begin with dislocation: dislocations of narrative and character. These dislocations are similar, if not identical, to the freeing of dissonance — that is, the thing-in-itself allowed liberty to express itself phenomenally — that defines the work of Arnold Schoenberg, that twentieth-century composer who provided the underscore to the Expressionist movements of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Footnotes
  1. Rabey’s discussion is the basis of Karoline Gritzner’s 2008 essay “(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment,” which is crucial to the start of any discussion of this dramatic and theatrical mode. It was published in Contemporary Theatre Review: 18:3. [↩]

Erlkönig notebook: Terry Eagleton

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… Nothingness is a profoundly political notion. It is an implicit critique of a social order obscenely bulging with matter. In Beckett’s case, of course, it has a more particular political resonance as well, as a riposte to what he takes to be the rhetorical flatulence of nationalism, whether Irish or otherwise. Yet it isn’t hard to detect a subliminal memory of famished Ireland in those starved, stagnant landscapes, with its disaffected masses waiting listlessly on a redemption that never quite comes. Perhaps there’s a particular irony in this respect in the name Vladimir. Negativity is the way Beckett, whose art is profoundly antifascist without needing to speak of the Nazis, maintains a secret pact with failure and finitude, of which the prime signifier is the material body; and without such a pact no political order will endure for very long. The fact that so boldly avant-garde an art is also so scant, modest, humdrum, and quotidian is one of the most striking ironies of his work, as it is of Joyce’s. If it is an art after Auschwitz, it is that because it keeps faith with silence and terror by paring itself almost to vanishing point. The world will not of course be destroyed by bleak-eyed cynics and hardheaded pragmatists. It will be annihilated by starry-eyed visionaries stuffed with hope and prating of freedom and democracy. It is hubris we have to fear, not nihilism — though … the two are in some ways sides of the same coin. When the ancient Greeks heard this Faustian talk of infinite striving and sublime potential they trembled and looked fearfully to the skies, aware that such blasphemous overreaching would have its comeuppance. And it is from the skies that the comeuppance has come.

Terry Eagleton
“Beckett and Nothing”
Reflections on Beckett: A Centenary Celebration
University of Michigan Press (2009)

 

Erlkönig notebook: Schiele, Klimt, Expressionism

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Egon Schiele. Madonna and Child, c. 1906.

Egon Schiele. Madonna and Child, c. 1906.

In the introduction to his 1980 study of Egon Schiele, Simon Wilson offers a cogent, concise definition of painterly Expressionism of the early 20th century:

Expressionist art at its highest, as in the work of Schiele, achieves a perfect synthesis and balance between the modernist demand for abstraction — for an autonomous art independent of appearances — and the powerful European “Renaissance” tradition in which man is represented naturalistically and themes expressed through narrative, symbol and allegory.

With Expressionism the modern artist, unlike his abstract colleagues, continues to deal with the great humanist themes of the Renaissance tradition but does so in a fresh and new way. He grapples directly with the reality he depicts, reshaping and re-creating it so that it becomes a new independent pictorial entity, a kind of super reality charged with the psychic power of the artist’s vision, with his ideas, feelings and emotions. This reshaping is not only of form but of colour and texture — the actual handling of paint — as well. Indeed the use of colour for effect rather than description, that is expressively rather than naturalistically, is central to Expressionist art. Similarly, the surfaces of Expressionist paintings are never imitative — the paint is applied freely, under the impulse of the artist’s inspiration, so that in some way the very texture of the paint becomes infused with both his feelings about the object, which it still nevertheless represents, and with the pure vitality or dynamism of the creative process — the paint surface is alive, not flat and dead. (7)

This description is just as appropriate to a New Expressionist drama about which I have written before, and is the way in to my own new play Erlkönig. Replace “pictorial” with “dramatic” and “paint” with “language” in the above excerpt and we are just about there.

The Neue Galerie in New York is currently offering an exhibition of some important works in their collection, German Expressionism 1900-1930. And below, Klimt’s Death and Life from 1916. Both this and the Schiele work above are in front of me as I begin what I hope will be the final approach to Erlkönig.

Gustav Klimt. Death and Life, 1916.

Gustav Klimt. Death and Life, 1916.

The two traditions of modern drama

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Eric Bentley.

There appears to be something of a revival of good old Chekhovian Realism at the moment in New York, both in its original Russian and Clifford Odetsian forms. In that spirit, I repost below “The Two Traditions of Modern Drama,” first published here on 13 June 2011. (Because he is prominently mentioned in the post below, I take this opportunity to point to Eric Bentley’s acceptance speech for the 2006 Thalia Prize from the International Association of Theatre Critics, published at Hot Review. Even at 90, Bentley could bite: “Newspapers want their drama critics taken more seriously, as if they were experts to be envied their expertise, or even prophets to be revered. And so for this, as for other reasons, a certain falsity enters into newspaper criticism. It is hard for it to be on the level, and it usually isn’t. To make matters worse, it adapts itself, often, to the hit-and-flop mentality of commercial theater. To help a show succeed the poor critic feels he has to exaggerate his enthusiasm. To force it to close on Saturday night he has to think up the devastating one-liner. It is true that such a one-liner can be truly witty. More often, though, it sounds forced and affected and, produced year after year by the same critic, conveys only a sense of a critic’s dyspepsia, or even misanthropy.”)

Our conception of realism needs to be broad and political, free from aesthetic restrictions and independent of convention. Realist means: laying bare society’s causal network / showing up the dominant viewpoint as the viewpoint of the dominators / writing from the standpoint of the class which has prepared the broadest solutions for the most pressing problems afflicting human society / emphasizing the dynamics of development / concrete and so as to encourage abstraction. … One cannot decide if a work is realist or not by finding out whether it resembles existing, reputedly realist works which must be counted realist for their time. In each individual case the picture given of life must be compared, not with another picture, but with the actual life portrayed.
Bertolt Brecht
“The Popular and the Realistic” (1938)
Brecht on Theatre, pp.109, 112

Nothing is more real than nothing.
Samuel Beckett
Malone Dies (1951)

“I am going to suggest that the dominant mode of the nineteenth century — perhaps even of the twentieth — is naturalism, and that this is important for interpreting modern drama,” Eric Bentley wrote in the first chapter of The Playwright as Thinker, published in 1946.  [1] “What is not so obvious,” he goes on, “is that the triumph of naturalism is a positive achievement.” Bentley warns of the slipperiness of literary categories such as naturalism and realism before offering an operative definition of naturalism itself: “an increasing closeness to objective facts; special techniques for their reproduction; an empiricist outlook.” [2] If it is possible to say that, as Bentley also says, “To search out all the Naturalism in modern drama we would have to look almost everywhere,” then it may be best to shift the semantic ground somewhat from the literary to the philosophical and ask similarly, in the wake of the drama of the second half of the twentieth century, “What is real?”

Because Bentley is right, and he is right because it is the theatre which is the art form most predominantly concerned with the real, especially as a mode of aesthetic presentation: space, time and causality are the ground for its being, in all three dimensions for space, in the irreversible and unshatterable duration for time and in the function of narrative and character as modal engines for the dramatic and theatrical work itself. No other discipline concerns itself with all three simultaneously. Sculpture may be a three-dimensional mode, but it is frozen in the moment of its creation; film may stand as a work in time, but only in two-dimensions (even the recent revival of three-dimensional technologies cannot hide the fact that the projected image itself remains two-dimensional), and filmic time and location too are famously at the mercy of the editor; in the novel, narrative, character and language drive the work, but its reception in the mind of the reader is conceptual, not physical, at least not explicitly. Whether naturalistic or expressionistic, narrative or lyrical, all theatre, by this light, is real.

That use of the word “real,” in the aftermath of Baudrillard and Debord, may be more fraught with peril than even the words “realism” or “naturalism.” Dr. Johnson famously refuted the Idealism of Kant and Berkeley by kicking a rock, and today he’d no doubt save a few kicks for French philosophers as well. But even Schopenhauer said that it was folly to deny the reality of Dr. Johnson’s rock; it was not that with which he or metaphysics was concerned. Time, space and causality are of course the categories necessary to the experience of the world as representation; without these, experience is not possible. This is the gift of Kant to human understanding, a gift most fully recognized by Schopenhauer (along with the notion of a Thing-in-itself that lies behind or beyond the world conditioned by those categories). The German term Vorstellung, which has such a central place of importance in the title of Schopenhauer’s primary work, signifies not only “idea” or “representation” but, helpfully, “performance” as well, theatrical performance in particular. As the modern drama progressed in the twentieth century, these categories became not only the condition of the drama and the theatre, but also the subject and content of that drama and theatre.

Realism’s primary enemy in the twentieth century, Bentley argues, was Expressionism; but by the above lights both Expressionism and Naturalism (and expressionism and naturalism, or anti-naturalism and naturalism, as Bentley would more precisely have it) in the theatre are equally real. The challenge to dramatists in the late twentieth century was the exploration of this reality from both the Brechtian and Beckettian perspectives quoted above. The materialist Brecht might suggest that there is no Thing-in-itself beyond it, and the metaphysician Beckett might suggest that the Thing-in-itself is the only key to experience in the material world, but this is an oversimplification. Since Martin Esslin, critics have explored the more metaphysical speculations of the German dramatist Brecht, and the new generation of Beckett scholars, especially Mark Nixon and Andrew Gibson, are suggesting particular historical and material bases of the Irish Beckett’s seemingly more abstract dramas.

Critics are fond of drawing up lists of oppositions, and so is Bentley, who offers this list as a dichotomy between naturalistic and anti-naturalistic drama:

slice of life vs. convention
realism vs. fantasy
social vs. individual
political vs. religious
propagandist vs. aesthetic
prosaic vs. poetic
objective vs. subjective

“As useful as it is misleading,” Bentley admits, [3] and similarly both useful and misleading for limning the two traditions of modern drama as they’ve come down to us after Brecht and Beckett. But both oppositional columns are real in the space of the theatre, because they are bodied before us as three-dimensional, moving, speaking objects. I would suggest that Bentley’s categories of Naturalism and Expressionism can be extended beyond the historical past into the historical present: that these oppositions remain useful (and misleading) in looking at post-war theatre to define a New Naturalism and a New Expressionism, to “seek out the mind and art — the real identity — of our imaginative modern playwrights.” This New Naturalism may be the genre of Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, John Osborne and Arnold Wesker; the New Expressionism the domain of David Rudkin, Caryl Churchill, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane. As the listing of these names and my attempts to shove them into the procrustean beds of these revised generic categories — even though they’re my own — may attest, it is an imperfect fit. And each of these writers partakes of aesthetic elements of both Brecht and Beckett, rendering this study foolhardy. But still useful, to determine where theatre and drama has been in the past fifty years, and, as Bentley said, to put us “in a better position to confirm, reject, or qualify our impression that the theatre is dead.”

Footnotes
  1. Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987, p. 22. [↩]
  2. Bentley, ibid., p. 25. [↩]
  3. Bentley, ibid., p. 42 [↩]