Dispatch from the Ideas Combat Zone:
This year's fiercest battle has erupted not directly from or in books, but rather from the dance. We are not talking tango. The concept and the controversy run deep into prose and poetry, painting and music, but broke surface in modern dance theater.
The war cry is " victim art." You are free to decide who is the victim and who or what may be art.
In essence, this is the idea: Can real life be real art?
The debate goes deeper: Can a performance that depends for its force on the demonstration of actual human misery legitimately be called art, or is it something else: politics, propaganda, psychotherapy?
Thus the term " victim" -- the real, live sufferer, in contrast to a character fashioned for exemplary effect by a novelist, playwright, poet, composer, painter, sculptor -- or choreographer.
The controversy was ignited by an article in the New Yorker, dated Dec. 26, 1994/Jan. 2, 1995, written by Arlene Croce, that magazine's dance critic for more than 20 years. It has been taken very seriously because Ms. Croce is almost universally recognized as the most knowledgeable and respected dance critic in America, and one of the finest critical writers in any field.
She titled the article " Discussing the Undiscussible." The " undiscussible" work in question is a full-length theater-dance piece conceived, choreographed and presented by Bill T. Jones, a highly acclaimed, major figure in the modern dance world. Titled " Still/Here," it was originally performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is now on nationwide tour.
Mr. Jones developed the piece from material gathered in " survival workshops" he conducted with people terminally ill, principally with AIDS or cancer. That material is presented through audio or video tapes. Additionally, Mr. Jones is publicly known to be HIV-positive.
Ms. Croce wrote that artists have " crossed the line between theater and reality" by making pieces with or about people she feels " forced to feel sorry for."
She is tough: " By working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism. I think of him literally as undiscussible-- the most extreme case among the distressingly many now representing themselves to the public not as artists but as victims and martyrs."
This goes to the core of the larger issue. And that lies at the foundation of the purpose and effect of artistic endeavor.
Of course, Ms. Croce's purpose was to bring about confrontation with that larger issue. To make that happen, she decided not to see " Still/Here," and to begin her essay by saying she would not see it.
That had the effect of blowing the loudest possible trumpet for the battle to commence. That decision defined the debate as being about the issue and not about the merits of the particular work.
Responses filled pages of magazines, journals and newspapers. The overwhelming bulk of the respondents attacked Ms. Croce -- not for her idea, but for not going to the show, thereby missing the point entirely. Those few who actually confronted her concept tended to condemn her not for the position she took but for taking a position on the issue at all.
The novelist Joyce Carol Oates, in a most obvious example, insisted in last Sunday's New York Times that " The very concept of 'victim art' is an appalling one. . . . There is a long and honorable tradition of art that 'bears witness' to human suffering." The rest of Ms. Oates' long article cited a mini-encyclopedic list of works of art that have been attacked over the ages for a variety of reasons -- not one of them, though, for what Ms. Croce's essay is about.
The issue -- both Ms. Croce's article and the phrase and concept of " victim art" -- has emerged as a sort of ideological and aesthetic Rorschach test. Everybody in sight or hearing of the debate is imposing his, her or its individual values on it.
What are mine? I find myself swinging back and forth, pulled and pushed, sometimes torn. Beneath the transparent ideological subtexts, there are deep passions, powerful strengths, fine minds working earnestly. Almost all of those estimable arguments and arguers fall into chasms of passion from time to time, losing sight of the real issue, which is about propaganda (which tends to bore me) and about art (which seldom does).
I find the whole thing immensely exciting. Perhaps if I were, as many of my friends are, a sure-certain ideologue, a celebrant of Divinely Revealed Truth, I would be either depressed, bitterly angry or elevated to the ecstasy of a cultural jihad.
I am not. Rather, I find myself feeling nourished and cheered. Out of all this will come other battles, redefinings of positions. But the battle says most loudly to me that today we are in a period in the development of intellectual history which is intensely rich. People are as free and as energized as in any time in human history to explore and express extremes,without fear of serious punishment.