4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

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actuals
10 feet wide, and 8 feet high. The structures are built by people who
decide to meet a truck carrying 650 ice blocks per structure. They set
this thing up using rock salt as a binder – which hastens melting and
fuses the block together. The structures are to be built (and were) in
about 20 places throughout Los Angeles. If you were crossing the city
you might suddenly be confronted by these mute and meaningless
blank structures which have been left to melt. Obviously, what’s taken
place is a mystery of sorts.
(Kaprow 1968b) 1
I could multiply examples of similar “mysteries.” The avant-garde
from the Italian Futurists through the Dadaists, surrealists, and on to
practitioners of earth art 2 and happenings introduces us to the idea that
art is not a way of imitating reality or expressing states of mind. At the
heart of what Kaprow calls a mystery is the simple but altogether
upsetting idea of art as an event – an “actual.”
Plato in Book X of The Republic attacks the arts. “The tragic poet, too,
is an artist who represents things; so this will apply to him: he and
all other artists are, as it were, third in succession from the throne
of truth” (Plato 1945: 327). Art is an imitation of life and life
merely a shadow of the ideal forms. Thus “the work of the artist is
a third remove from the essential nature of the thing” (ibid.). Plato’s
translator, Francis Cornford, comments that “the view that a work
of art is an image of likeness (eikon) of some original, or holds up a
mirror to nature, became prominent towards the end of the fifth
century together with the realistic drama of Euripides and the
illusionist painting of Zeuxis. Plato’s attack adopts this theory” (Plato
1945: 323–4).
Plato’s student Aristotle agrees that art is mimetic but asks precisely
what does art imitate and how? Art does not imitate things or even
experience, but “action.” Action is a problematical idea and, at best, I
can only sketch an interpretation of what Aristotle might have meant.
Art imitates patterns, rhythms, and developments. In art, as in nature,
things are born, they grow, they flourish, they decline, they die. Form,
which is crystalline in Plato, is fluid in Aristotle. Each organism (animate,
natural, artistic 3 ) conceals a determining pattern-factor that governs
its development. This DNA-like factor determines the growth rate,