The Long Kiss Goodbye to the 20th Century
Last night I caught the final Seattle performance of Lipstick Traces, a stage adaptation of Greil Marcus’s history of the artistic expression of anarchism that culminated in the punk rock moment of 1976-77. Difficult subject matter for a dramatic performance to be sure, especially since the production design complemented the confrontational nature of the text. It wasn’t easy viewing, but it was definitely successful in raising issues about the way certain kinds of art achieve effect and purpose not through aesthetics, but by the ability to create situations of immediacy that open the eyes of the audience to new possibilities, if only for a fleeting moment.
Marcus traces the development of “situation as art” from its rude beginnings in certain heretical movements of the Middle Ages to the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. Dada performances were designed to confound expectations as a way of illuminating the voluntary nature of social constructs. The “art” of Dada is not in the artifact or the passive consumption of the performance, but in the audience’s active exploration of its own responses to the absurd, the unexpected, the tasteless. Only by seeing these things can we engage the questions of what is sensible, what are our expectations, on what do we base our taste? And in the examination of them, we come to grips with the reality that inhibitions, obligations and repression do not arise from nature but require our consent, and are subject to change through concerted action. In that moment of realization, life ceases to be inevitable and becomes intentional.
As the 20th century careened from depths of atrocity to periods of stultifying boredom and conformity, people’s need to feel alive through the experience became increasingly urgent. The market recognized the demand for authentic experience and built a vast apparatus for the manufacture, distribution and promotion of spectacle. Advertising imagery taunted the public with the promise of peak experiences available only through the consumption of particular products. But the more desperately people chased this mirage, the more rare and precious actual transcendence became.
Enter Malcom McLaren, a shrewd entrepreneur who succeeded, briefly, in performing the Great Work of capitalist alchemy – commodifying an experience that completely satisfied the public desire for negation. He called it The Sex Pistols. Of course, the recipe was far too volatile to last, and both the band and the punk moment quickly decayed into base metal like the results of some atomic particle experiment. But he showed it could be done, and since that time, the Spectacle Industry has labored mightily to profit from the howling alienation that it has itself propagated.
Punk rock, like Dada, forced the audience to confront its expectations and its complicity in the corruption of culture. But that realization is, by nature, fleeting. I was too young to see the Sex Pistols in ’77, but I remember experiencing a landmark Nirvana show in 1990 and realizing that something very powerful and important was happening. Then, in 1992 and ’93, you could see the energy drain out of Seattle like the receding tide exposing a stretch of mudflats. Today, as audiences come to expect the outrageous and demand the transcendent as part of the price of their ticket, even the most shocking and spontaneous performances fail to deliver. The ante has been upped. The line between spectacle and reality begins to dissolve. This dissolution, according to Marcus, constitutes the “Secret History of the 20th Century.”
The 20th century ended on September 11th, 2001. On that day, the implications of the theory of spectacle came home to roost. On that day, the world was presented with a spectacle of monumental proportions – an act of total negation so extreme that it was almost beyond conception.
Time stopped. The reality of events had pierced through the stultifying layers of mediation. Images tumbled out of the screen. If this could happen, anything could happen. The nearly panicked, unrehearsed shock in the voice of Peter Jennings when he was informed that the first tower of the World Trade Center had collapsed was riveting because it made us alive to the possibility of spontaneity in even the most controlled channels of communication. For an instant it appeared that a horrifying catastrophe might give birth to a whole new, more authentic reality. It was the moment of universal transcendence that art had been striving for since Dada. But when it came, it was not artists who provided it but mass murderers.
With that realization came a profound guilt. The electrifying images were whisked out of sight like dirty magazines when a parent enters the room. We were told, and many of us felt, that to derive exhilaration from such ghastly events was unseemly, almost inhuman. And yet, in a culture that constantly tantalized itself with false promises and mediated experience, that was locked into an escalating spiral of extreme experiences and sensations – the real thing was irresistible. Now it’s too late. We’re addicted to the pursuit of authenticity because the simulations that the market provides are getting more and more sophisticated but less and less satisfying.
The tragedy of 9/11 is that it took airplanes flying into buildings to blast away the accumulated layers of phoniness, commercialism and propaganda that cloud our vision. And even that didn’t last.
12:37:31 PM 
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