Warhol, The Living Theatre, and Frankenstein
As a whole “Frankenstein” is the perfect foil for The Living Theatre’s peculiar talents. I don’t think there is anyone in the cast that really knows how to speak as an actor. Given a sentence, they sound dreadful. But each and every one of them know what to do with their body and their larynx. Give them a contortion and a howl and they can really perform.
GLENNA SYSE1
I. Scars, Erasure, and History: An Introduction
During an interview with Leticia Kent in September of 1968, just three months after Valerie Solanas nearly killed him, Andy Warhol offered what at first blush would seem to be a contradictory assessment of the disfiguring effect that Solanas’s act of violence had on his body. “It’s sort of awful, looking in the mirror and seeing all those scars,” he initially confided to Kent, yet he then supplemented his comments with the incongruous judgment: “The scars are really beautiful.”2 While it may not have been a conscious distinction, the contrast Warhol drew here between the “awful” and the “beautiful” subtly reaffirmed the radical sense of immediacy that was so much a part of his own aesthetics. In the contrast between the “awful” and the “beautiful,” Warhol differentiated between the represented effects of violence in a mirror and the manifested effects of violence in the actual scars across his reassembled body. Whereas the former was disparaged as a representation (“awful”), the latter was embraced for its tangible immediacy—an immediacy, in this particular instance, offering conclusive evidence of a past, and now absent, violent act that was nonetheless indexed by its present visible effect. Indeed, within three short months, that effect had become so much a part of Warhol’s everyday experience that he could lay claim to it in much the same way that he did to Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans, and any number of items from “the iconography of everyday life.”3 In their seeming immediacy, Warhol’s scars became a kind of paradigmatic found object. While he was not the author of them, they were nonetheless his. Made part of his body in the violence perpetrated against him, Warhol’s scars were, as his alter ego “B” would later describe them in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, “the best things you have because they’re proof of something. I always think it is nice to have the proof.” Of course, proof isn’t worth much unless one can do something with it, as “B” reminds Andy when he suggests, “I think you produced Frankenstein just so you could put your scars in the ad.”4
If truth and proof go hand and hand, however, “B’s” comments were a bit of a stretch. Those weren’t really Warhol’s scars in the movie ad—they weren’t even real scars—and he no more “produced” Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (1974) than he did the scars that marred his own body. But laying claim to Frankenstein had a lot to do with those scars, both the ones running across the movie ad and the ones running across his own body. Implicitly positioning himself as the producer of scars, of reproductions of scars, of an English romantic novel, and of a cinematic adaptation of that novel—none of which he actually produced—Warhol once again added his voice to that chorus of avant-garde artists who, by signing their names to work they did not produce, questioned the very idea of the artist as producer. Frankenstein offered a particularly important opportunity in this regard for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that in lending his name to the film made by his friend Paul Morrissey, Warhol not only associated his own disfigurement with what in Western popular culture is arguably the paragon of scarred bodies, but by so doing he personified avant-garde aesthetics in allegorical terms that would be accessible to the social mainstream. Baron von Frankenstein’s nameless creature, as an experimental product of the scalpel’s cutting edge, is quintessentially avant-garde. As an amalgam of discarded body parts, he is himself an animated assemblage of found objects, and in addition, as a subject appearing without a history, he embodies an avant-garde break with history. Most important of all, the Frankenstein narrative was a staple of popular culture—as were countless other subjects of Warhol’s work—which, when appropriated as art, could simultaneously challenge the elitism feeding the conventional understanding of art and literature.
Particularly in this latter respect, Warhol’s interest in Frankenstein was but one example of the widespread and intense fascination that various avant-gardes had with the Frankenstein narrative in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, Warhol was by no means alone in recognizing the vital link that Frankenstein offered between the experimental aesthetics of the vanguard and the popular cultural preoccupations of the social mainstream. His involvement with the production of the semi-pornographic Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (1974) not only followed his own nearly fatal encounter with violence, it also followed a decade of at least six Frankenstein films and at least three major adaptations of the narrative for the stage—most notably O’Brien and Sharman’s Rocky Horror Show (1973) in London and The Living Theatre’s productions of Frankenstein (1965) in Venice and Berlin during its exile in Europe. While all of these productions responded in one way or another to the increasingly lucrative trend of marketing violence as erotically charged entertainment, there is nonetheless much room for reflection on the rich magnetism that the Frankenstein narrative held for avant-garde factions as divergent in their political-aesthetic inclinations as Warhol and The Living Theatre. Despite the significant political chasm that separated Warhol and The Living Theatre, their shared interest in the Frankenstein narrative linked them both to the legacies of the late romantic period in which Mary Shelley penned her tale of the experimental scientist Victor Frankenstein, who sutures together a creature from found and stolen body parts.
Critics have long argued that the avant-gardes owe a substantial intellectual debt to romanticism.5 But none have really explored how problematic that debt is with regard to the patriarchal legacies that it injects into the conceptual discourses of and about the avant-gardes. In this respect, the interest that Warhol and The Living Theatre shared in the Frankenstein narrative offers a unique opportunity to examine not only the debt that the avant-gardes owe to romanticism, but also the gendered economies that this debt sustains. The opportunity here is all the greater since the history of the Frankenstein narrative as a cultural artifact stretches from the romantic period on through the twentieth century. While that history begins with the publication of Shelley’s novel in 1816 and includes countless adaptations of the narrative for the cinema and stage over the next two centuries, the history of Frankenstein is also haunted by Shelley’s vexed relationship with the patriarchal structures of romantic literary culture. Indeed, there is a noticeable overlap in the work of Warhol and of The Living Theatre with regard to this haunting. I would suggest that the overlap can tell us much about the avant-gardes more generally, particularly with regard to their historical ties to the patriarchal foundations of romanticism.
The path to those foundations, inasmuch as it journeys through Warhol’s production of Frankenstein as well as The Living Theatre’s production of Frankenstein is a complicated one. The narratives of both productions are idiosyncratic enough that providing an overview of them is a necessary prerequisite not only to assessing the ways in which they are both deeply committed to a common set of assumptions about the avant-garde and its aesthetic strategies, but also to assessing the ways in which those assumptions have sustained fundamentally patriarchal tendencies in some of the most basic categories associated with avant-garde practice. From a practical standpoint, this means that the following discussion is divided into three major sections: an overview of the productions themselves, an assessment of both productions’ reliance on a common set of avant-garde strategies, and a critique of the assumptions governing those strategies—a critique that demands a fundamental reassessment of some of the most basic aesthetic categories associated with the avant-gardes.
II. Overview of Productions
By the mid-twentieth century, adaptions of Frankenstein barely resembled the narrative originally penned by Mary Shelley in 1816. Indeed, the narrative (like the creature whose story it tells) literally had taken on a life of its own in the popular cultural imaginary where it was cobbled together from multiple adaptations in literature, theater, and, above all, cinema. A century and a half of adaptations thus gave Warhol and The Living Theatre a wide range of possibilities for constructing their own version of Shelley’s tale and positioned their adaptations within a tradition where broad license was the rule, rather than the exception. Indeed, the two productions drew upon such a diverse mélange of material that, particularly in the case of The Living Theatre’s production, it was often difficult to identify any direct connection with Shelley’s Frankenstein, other than the construction of the Frankenstein creature out of disparate parts and cultural fragments.
Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein is probably better remembered for its calculated use of semi-pornographic imagery and 3D technologies than for its narrative. But of the two adaptations, Warhol’s narrative was arguably the more recognizable because it drew heavily on the most famous Hollywood versions of Frankenstein—James Whale’s two films Frankenstein (Universal Pictures, 1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (Universal Pictures, 1933)—both of which included defining performances by Boris Karloff as the creature. The Warhol film playfully combined the conceits of these two films, producing an idiosyncratic narrative in which Victor Frankenstein (played by Udo Kier) is a scientist obsessed with the simultaneous construction of both male and female creatures whom he plans to mate, thereby initiating the creation of a “perfect Serbian race.” As was the case in the Whale films, the Baron works in a modern laboratory and is accompanied by an incompetent assistant (played by Arno Juerging), whose name “Otto” riffs on the character that first appeared as “Fritz” in Whale’s Frankenstein, and then as “Karl” in The Bride of Frankenstein.
Neither the laboratory, nor the female creature, nor the assistant was a part of Shelley’s original narrative. But Fritz / Karl quickly became a stock character in Hollywood horror films, and Warhol’s character Otto is a kind of parodic homage to the character Whale added to the original narrative. Despite the character’s seemingly minor role, the addition of Fritz / Karl to the Frankenstein narrative was no small matter. The addition of this new character altered the ideological dimensions of Shelley’s narrative by generating a significantly different account of the creature’s antisocial and violent behavior. That shift is evident in the pivotal role Fritz plays in the plot of the first Whale film—specifically when Fritz goes to a medical laboratory to procure a brain for the creature and ends up inadvertently supplying the Baron with a criminal brain. The basic structure of this part of the narrative, which implies that the creature’s violent actions are the product of a congenital abnormality rather than a revolt against injustice, recurs both in the Warhol film and in The Living Theatre’s production. Momentarily, I will consider its larger significance, but first, more about the narratives of Warhol’s and The Living Theatre’s productions.
In one of many subsequent parodies of the above-mentioned scene, Warhol’s Frankenstein replaces the search for a brain with a campy search for a head that leads Frankenstein and his assistant Otto to a bordello where they lie in wait just outside of the exit. Their plan is to hide in the bushes with a large pair of extendable scissors, decapitate a young male with strong sexual appetites as he leaves the bordello, and then use the head to create a creature capable of procreating a new race. This plan runs amok when, rather than getting the head of a virile servant by the name of Nicholas (played by Joe Dallesandro) who is having an affair with the Baron’s wife,6 Frankenstein and Otto end up decapitating Nicholas’s friend Sasha, a celibate and sexually squeamish theology student. As Joan Hawkins has noted, “in a scene reminiscent of the bungled brain theft in James Whale’s Frankenstein (in which Fritz accidentally chooses a ‘criminal brain’ for the creature), the Baron and Otto mistake which of the two brothel patrons would best suit their plans.”7 Sasha’s head gives the Baron’s creature absolutely no visible libidinal drive. The creature is despairing and suicidal. Viewing himself as an abomination, he kills the Baron, rips his own body apart, and thus thwarts Frankenstein’s plans to create a Serbian master race.
If Warhol’s film adaptation seems far afield from Shelley’s original narrative, The Living Theatre’s adaption strayed even further from the novel and from all but the most rudimentary elements of Whale’s film as well. Both the novel and the Hollywood films served primarily as a “springboard for action”8 rather than as the narrative basis for adaptation. In many respects, the Frankenstein narrative was subordinate to The Living Theatre’s three-act exploration of how Enlightenment projects have repeatedly caused additional suffering in their efforts to end it. The Frankenstein narrative, which could be summoned merely by vague suggestion and allusion, thus served as an easily accessible metaphor for the problematic that The Living Theatre addressed. The piece contained virtually no dialogue. From a technical standpoint, it was notable for its innovative use of a three-tiered scaffolding that was constructed out of iron pipes, ropes, ladders, nets, slides, and other objects and that formed fifteen cubicles in which the individual members of the troupe frequently and simultaneously performed different actions.9 The edifice served at times as a museum of torture or an execution chambers, at times as a structural representation of the Frankenstein creature himself, and at times as a prison block.
The Living Theatre’s production opened with fifteen actors in street clothes sitting in front of the edifice, facing the audience and meditating in a concerted and apparently sincere effort to levitate the performer Mary Mary.10 When this quasi-spiritual effort ended in failure (as it did every time they performed the work), a torrent of simulated political violence began, which was portrayed as the source of much suffering. The performers simulated the execution of Mary Mary in one of the cubicles, leading in turn to the graphically-simulated execution of all but three of members of the troupe: Julian Beck, who then assumed the role of Victor Frankenstein, and two other performers who served as his assistants. At the end of this cycle of execution, Beck began repeating the question “How can we end human suffering?” He accompanied “the ghost of Paracelsus”11 in a tour of the cubicles of the scaffolding where the bodies of the executed were strewn. As he did so, he responded to the brutal violence all around him by using the bodies of the executed victims to construct what became the Frankenstein creature. When at the conclusion of this tour Frankenstein screamed “Turn the Creature on,” the corpses in their cubicles began to “quiver and shake and make weird sounds, moving into positions that formed a twenty-foot-high figure,”12 which critic Margaret Croyden described as “a stunning but horrifying configuration formed from the arrangement of the actor’s bodies hanging from the poles of the scaffolding.”13
If the initial implication of the first act was that scientific advancement might be able to end the suffering the audience had just witnessed, the second act took a more skeptical attitude toward scientific endeavors. The bodies that previously constructed the Frankenstein creature were replaced by a string of lights hung from the scaffolding, this time in the shape of what doubled as giant versions of the creature’s head and an outline of a huge phrenology chart. The promise of scientific advancement thus symbolically fell prey to the biases and prejudices of pseudo-science. The composite image of the creature’s head as a phrenology chart suggested a kind of determinism reminiscent of Hollywood narratives like Whale’s Frankenstein, in which an abnormal brain is presented as the source of the creature’s violent behavior. Once established visually on the stage, this image of pseudo-science became the object of a sustained critique.
Against the backdrop of the towering phrenology chart, one of the members of the cast assumed the role of the Frankenstein creature himself and, in this role, gradually revolted against the pseudo-scientific determinism represented in the image behind him. In the final act of the production, this same actor—still playing the creature—made his way to the center of the scaffolding, while the rest of the troupe transformed all the remaining cubicles into individual jail cells where they were incarcerated. Through a visual transformation of the scaffolding, they thus likened the pseudo-sciences of phrenology to a kind of prison. At the center of this prison, the creature instigated a massive jail break14 that not only enacted a revolt against the previous pseudo-scientific image, but also equated the creature’s own fate with the fate of the collective. The creature’s body was, in short, the body politic. Indeed, the production ended with a final visual transformation of the scaffolding that underscored this latter point. The attempted jail break culminated in a simulated catastrophic fire that consumed the escaping prisoners, who then rose “from the dead, and with their ‘charred’ bodies create[d] once again the configuration of the Creature,” by hanging from the scaffolding as they had done in the first Act.15 The reconfigured creature on the scaffolding and the image of it raising its “arms to the heavens” while signaling “through the flames”16 ended The Living Theatre’s performance of Frankenstein with a cry against injustice. It seemed designed to provoke the audience into a revolt against injustices they themselves had encountered as members of society. But the cry that concluded The Living Theatre’s performance of Frankenstein also reflected the sense of immediacy that the group believed could radicalize the body politic by first revolutionizing the theatre. That sense of immediacy drew heavily on the theories of Artaud, and the final images of The Living Theatre’s production gestured toward the theatre he envisioned.
III. Frankenstein and Strategies of the Avant-Gardes
The Living Theatre’s gesture took the form of a visual citation of a key phrase in Artaud’s call for a new kind of theater, capable of delving beneath the “surface of fact,” extending beyond a mere “dallying with forms,” and conveying a visceral sense of immediacy comparable to that experienced by “victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”17 Crucial to this vision of an immediacy where one no longer dallied with forms was the embrace of a language for the theater that was not bound by the abstract representational quality of the spoken or written word. The closing scene of The Living Theatre’s production certainly moved in this direction, at least in terms of the sheer intensity of the spectacle it presented and in the actual image of the creature signaling through the flames. But whatever intensity The Living Theatre achieved in their performance, the gesture toward Artaud’s vision of theater and the realization of that vision were two entirely different matters. The Living Theatre’s closing gesture was, in fact, less of a realization of Artaud’s vision than it was an echo of the vision itself—an echo remarkable more for what it rejected than for what it realized. Rather than producing gestures of immediacy, The Living Theatre chose a path of negation that is arguably typical of avant-garde gestures generally and of Artaud’s vision specifically. The logic at work involved seeking immediacy through artistic rejection—a rejection of “dallying with forms,” for example. Pivotal in this regard was a rejection of traditional categories of artistic production, particularly those associated with literary production (e.g., “textual authority” and “authorship”).18 Such rejections resonated playfully with Frankenstein’s rejection of traditional categories of reproduction. Andy Warhol’s production of Frankenstein was marked by similar rejections as well. Indeed, the refutation of textual authority and authorship in The Living Theatre’s production of Frankenstein was echoed in the rejection of conventional artistic production and of the notion of the artist as producer in Warhol’s Frankenstein. For both The Living Theatre and for Warhol, an objection to the artist’s privileged status as author and/or producer was, at the most basic level, evident in the merely nominal relation that their adaptations had to Shelley’s novel. But beyond that, the rejection of traditional categories of artistic production took a decisively self-reflective turn in both works. That turn was most evident in the way that both projects played the concept of individuality against collective enterprise.
Both adaptations were collective endeavors that, when placed in the public sphere, were attributed to specific individuals: Warhol and Julian Beck. Yet these attributions were of such openly questionable legitimacy that they carried with them an aura of ambiguity and parody. Writing about Warhol’s dubious and limited involvement with Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, for example, Hawkins notes, “it’s not clear what, if anything, [ . . . Warhol] provided besides funding and inspiration.” (This is true not only for Frankenstein but for any of the Morrissey films where Warhol is cited as producer.)19 Still, Hawkins adds, the film was nonetheless Warhol’s—at the very least, “in the sense that everything produced by members of the Factory was somehow Warhol’s.”20 If, in calling his studio “the Factory,” Warhol highlighted the extent to which commodity production and artistic endeavor were blurred in bourgeois conceptions of art and artists, The Living Theatre’s constant flirtation with bankruptcy in their rather uncompromising resistance to commodification tended to highlight the same argument from the opposite end of the economic spectrum.
While Warhol’s Frankenstein took shape in the Factory, The Living Theatre’s Frankenstein took shape, as Julian Beck recalled, “in Velletri, Italy, where we had holed up in a big house some one gave us for a month while we were out of work.”21 In that house, the members of The Living Theatre spent three weeks experimenting with ideas through a process that Beck characterized as an exhausting, “monster making orgy,” which left everyone “feeling limp and helpless.”22 Amid the company’s state of exhaustion, Beck took the opportunity to slip away, “hid[ing] for two days,” during which he reportedly distilled the group’s experiments into a semi-coherent form and wrote what is called the Velletri “Frankenstein Poem.” That poem, which Lawrence Ferlinghetti published in City Lights Journal the following year, became a rough score for the piece that The Living Theatre premiered in Venice, in late September of 1965. Although the poem and its related material, entitled “Munich Scenario” and “Venice Synopsis,” all appeared in City Lights Journal under Beck’s name, Kenneth H. Brown23 undercut this attribution in the very positive review of the Venice production that he wrote for the same issue of Ferlinghetti’s journal and that served as an introduction to Beck’s contribution. Indeed, Brown opened his piece with the assertion that “Frankenstein is a theatre experience developed by a commune of players from an unwritten script that was later ascribed merely as a formality.”24
Around the same time that Brown’s piece appeared, Saul Gottlieb25 published a comparably favorable review of Frankenstein in a piece called “The Living Theatre in Exile” that he wrote for TDR. Whereas Brown asserted that there was no written script for the work, Gottlieb maintains that the piece “does have a script, which was written by the Becks [i.e., by Julian Beck and Judith Malina] after months of study, discussion and improvisation.”26 Yet even these comments are undercut by Gottlieb’s introductory assertion that Frankenstein was “the result of the collective authorship of an entire company working deliberately with the concepts of Artaud.”27
Just as the Frankenstein creature appeared as a singular subject comprised of disparate body parts, so too, the work that bore Warhol’s name and the work that bore Beck’s name were in actuality composite products of the contributions of many. Inasmuch as those contributions were never masked, the seams holding Warhol’s aesthetic authority together as artist and producer, and the seams holding Beck’s literary authority together as poet28 and playwright, were not only visible, they were an immediate, calculated, and constant reminder of the work that was displaced and/or erased in the assertions of authority and agency that Warhol and Beck appeared to make. Indeed, that reminder was an integral part of the aesthetics governing the work of these two men. For Warhol, such moments constituted a calculated parody and subversion of his role as artist and producer, and they link him, at least partially, to Dada predecessors like Duchamp. For Beck, such moments constituted a calculated subversion of his role as poet and playwright and they link him and The Living Theatre to the theories of Artaud.
Beyond a general critique of the artist’s privileged status as author and producer, links to predecessors like Duchamp and Artaud serve as important reminders of the broad avant-grade traditions embraced by mid-twentieth century American experimental artists like Warhol, Beck, and the members of The Living Theatre. In many respects, those traditions converged in their adaptations of Frankenstein, and they did so in ways that offer telling insights into the assumptions that, beneath the “surface of fact” (to borrow Artaud’s phrase), governed the avant-gardes’ basic rethinking of artistic production as such. While the adaptations of Frankenstein by Warhol and The Living Theatre may be more remarkable for what they rejected than for what they realized, the two arguably worked from within a surprisingly common set of assumptions governing those rejections. Indeed, one need not look too far to see the link between Warhol’s interest in Duchamp’s use of found objects and The Living Theatre’s interest in Artaud’s embrace of a visceral immediacy. In the critique of artistic production, “the found” and “the immediate” come from the same conceptual terrain. Both enjoy a privileged status as presumably existing within the realm of the primary, the fundamental, and the non-representational. And I would like to suggest here that it was not a matter of coincidence that in the specific productions of Frankenstein by Warhol and The Living Theatre, this privileged status found safe harbor within the borders of popular culture.
For Warhol, those borders were common territory, and they gave shape to one of the most celebrated aspects of Warhol’s aesthetics: what Arthur Danto, in his classic discussion of the 1962 “Brillo Boxes,” characterizes as Warhol’s “celebration of the commonplace”29—a celebration that coincided with a late twentieth century conceptual relocation of the notion of found objects. In contrast to the deliberately arcane and aesthetically bland quality of Duchamp’s readymades, Warhol’s “Brillo Boxes” and a whole host of other artifacts that he found and presented as art were, Danto argues, consciously “mainstream,” and represented a “celebration rather than a criticism of contemporary life.”30 Moreover, Danto maintains that for Warhol (and Pop) it was essential that the artifacts and images he found for his works belonged to “the iconography of everyday life” and were “so familiar that ‘stealing’ them was impossible.”31
This question of found objects and the impossibility of theft has particular relevance to Frankenstein, especially since the scientist constructs the creature from stolen body parts. I want to discuss the question of found objects and theft at length momentarily, both with regard to the plot of the narrative and with regard to the history of Shelley’s work of fiction as a cultural artifact. But first, it is important to note that there is perhaps no better example of material literally belonging to what Danto calls “the iconography of everyday life” than the material that Warhol and also The Living Theatre drew upon in their adaptions of Frankenstein. In their critique of artistic production and of the artist’s privileged status as author and producer, Warhol and The Living Theatre bridged Artaud’s theories of performance with what is arguably the quintessential source of “the iconography of everyday life”: a Hollywood cinematic tradition of adaptations that, in terms of disregard for textual authority, could rival even the finest anti-cultural/anti-textual gestures of the avant-gardes. For both productions, that cinematic tradition became a found object in its own right.
It was not just that The Living Theatre’s work included specific instances where such bridging was identifiable—say, for example, in the closing images of their production, with the creature’s signaling through the flames carrying a double citation. Not only did it allude to Artaud, as I mentioned before, but, importantly, it also alluded to the closing scene of Whale’s Hollywood Frankenstein (1931), when the creature, played by Boris Karloff, waves frantically from a burning windmill amid the flames that ultimately consume him. But in terms of spectacle alone, the abundance of gore and the excessiveness of grossly and violently mutilated bodies that littered the Hollywood adaptations of the Frankenstein narrative suggested links to Artaud’s theories. The 3-D format of Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein—a format that at one level gestured toward completing the eclipse of theatre by the cinema—certainly took the excessiveness of the cinematic spectacles to new extremes. As Albert LaValley has noted, the abundance of gore in Warhol’s film not only recalled “the excessive and often ludicrous ends of Jacobean tragedy but also some of the truth in excess that Artaud found in that dramatic form.”32 While the spectacle of excess in Warhol’s 3-D format culminates in the illusion of guts and gore spilling out across the audience—as the tagline promised, the film “Brings the Horror Off the Screen . . . And Into Your Lap”—The Living Theatre more directly disrupted the audience’s passive position, with actors climbing over the auditorium seats and repeatedly simulating the violent pursuit, apprehension, and ultimate execution of individuals who, in a synoptic reign of terror, found themselves recast from the role of executioner into that of victim.33
Not coincidentally, The Living Theatre conceptualized this pouring out into the audience much in the same way that LaValley characterized Warhol’s 3-D movie. Indeed, Beck associated the opening cycle of violence in The Living Theatre’s production with Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” and conceptualized the spilling out into the audience as a kind of intense, visceral immediacy akin to the notion of found objects in the non-representational physicality that it presumably offered. The act of spilling out into the audience was, Beck argued, the first salvo of “a work in the tradition of Artaud’s concept of a non-literary theatre which, through ritual, horror and spectacle might become an even more valid theatrical event than much of the wordy theatre of Ideas which has dominated our stages for so long.”34 The underlying assumption here was that in spilling out into the audience and transgressing the invisible but accepted boundaries separating performers and spectators, the members of The Living Theatre would move from the realms of dramatic presentation into moments of direct, unmediated confrontation. Such confrontations presumably would cut beneath what Artaud called the “surface of fact,” and access something presumably more immediate than fact itself, the effect of which would radicalize members of the audience.
IV. Operative Assumptions of an Avant-Garde
Conceptually at least, the belief in a fundamental immediacy—like that which The Living Theatre embraced in their extension of Artaud’s theories—has almost always had strong ties to a whole host of humanistic assumptions about essence, authenticity, and truth. Those same assumptions have enjoyed wide currency in the social mainstream beneath the protective guise of “common sense.” Under this umbrella, they have accommodated not radical but rather commonplace prescriptive conceptions about gender, race, and class, among other things. The Living Theatre did not escape the trappings of these assumptions from the mainstream—in part because their production had taken a decisive turn toward the popular mainstream in its use of Hollywood versions of Frankenstein as a frame. They were certainly not alone in this regard. Warhol’s “iconography of everyday life” circulated within the same economy. Indeed, as far as Warhol’s aesthetics were concerned, one would be hard-pressed to separate his “celebration of the commonplace” from a tacit affirmation of popular but deeply problematic notions of “common sense.” It was thus not just in the trajectory of their aesthetics that The Living Theatre and Warhol followed similar paths. In that trajectory, neither The Living Theatre nor Warhol could discard the problematic baggage that comes with positing “the un-mediated” as an ideal—regardless of whether that ideal takes the form of a presumed immediacy of action or of a presumed neutrality in discovered, commonplace artifacts from everyday life.
The irony of this inability is that in their productions of Frankenstein both The Living Theatre and Warhol presented narratives that suggested radically different conceptual possibilities from their own aesthetics. The found objects that are central to the tale of Frankenstein’s creature—the body parts that give the creature substance and form—are artifacts of history rather than objects of immediacy. They are never neutral, never solely “found,” and never immediate. In the narratives of both productions, immediacy as a concept is little more than an ideological veil obscuring both a history of repression and a repression of history. Even the rapid sequence of executions in The Living Theatre’s adaptation of Frankenstein—the sequence Beck described as “a work in the tradition of Artaud”—played out a history of repression followed by a repression of that same history. The executions provided parts for the twenty-foot creature The Living Theatre constructed on their three-story scaffolding, thus representing countless dissidents who had been persecuted for their political nonconformity and criminalized for purposes of ideological expediency. At one level, then, their execution, dismemberment, and ultimate incorporation into the creature’s frame were emblematic of a repressive incorporation of the disaffected into the body politic and of an assimilated, political uniformity achieved only under duress.
As an allegorical trope, this portrayal complicated the notions of immediacy that were a crucial component of The Living Theatre’s aesthetics. The immediacy of the creature’s body vied against the displaced historicity of the individual body parts that gave him form. The individual cubicles of The Living Theatre’s scaffolding, where one execution after another had transpired, were in this respect a constant reminder that each of the seemingly discarded, found, or stolen objects of physical anatomy that made up the creature’s structure had a unique, albeit erased, history all its own. Directly following the scene when the members of The Living Theatre spilled out into the audience, the twenty-foot creature thus emerged not as a tool of non-representational immediacy but as a representation of a historical artifact, an artifact that was always already mediated. The actual physical immediacy of the individual members of The Living Theatre was challenged by the theoretical implications of the historicity of the creature’s body. In fact, there are similar suggestions of this historicity in Warhol’s Frankenstein as well, particularly at the end of the film when Nicholas, the stableboy, encounters the male creature who possesses the head of Nicholas’s murdered friend Sasha. In the ensuing exchange between the two figures, it is Sasha, oddly enough, and not the newly formed creature, who addresses Nicholas—the last historical traces of his former identity speaking out against the animated physical structure of which he involuntarily has become a part, and which, in a quasi-suicidal moment, he decides to destroy by mustering up enough volution from his previous existence to literally rip his newly sutured body apart, spilling 3-D guts and gore into the audience one final time. If the earlier 3-D images of guts and gore spilling out onto the audience evoked what LaValley called Artaud’s “truth in excess,” here they evoke not a sense of immediacy or truth, but rather, a graphic return of repressed historicity in the creature’s literal deconstruction.
In light of such moments, the creature’s scars, which are the only parts of his body that he can claim as uniquely his own, become, in no uncertain terms, a disturbing and hideous record of erasure. They are the seams of a living history constructed by eliding the history of others. Yet the image of Warhol’s creature ripping apart the seams of his newly constructed body is more than a fictional gesture of reasserting a historical order that Baron von Frankenstein’s experiments have disturbed. Beyond the image of the creature deconstructing itself, this scene carries implications that challenge both Warhol’s and The Living Theatre’s casual appropriation of the Frankenstein narrative as if it were so commonplace—so much a part of the public domain—that “stealing . . . [it] was impossible.” There are, in other words, important parallels to be drawn between the residual history obscured by the creature’s construction and, for example, the residual history obscured by the productions of Frankenstein by Warhol and The Living Theatre—a history that is directly connected to Mary Shelley, her novel, and the gendered cultural politics of romanticism. If the creature is produced only at the expense of the history of others, it is worth asking at whose expense Warhol’s and The Living Theatre’s adaptations of Frankenstein were produced. Indeed, the question is not just at whose expense their adaptations were possible. I would suggest the need to question even further, to also ask at whose expense their critiques of the artist as producer and/or author comes.
Ultimately, these basic questions about the productions of Frankenstein and about the critique of artistic production have as much to do with the avant-gardes in general as they do with Warhol or The Living Theatre in particular. While there is a compelling analogy to be drawn between the residues, on the one hand, of Sasha’s identity literally deconstructing the creature of whom he has been made a part, and the residues, on the other hand, of Shelley’s novel Frankenstein metaphorically ripping at the seams of these two adaptations, the issue in this analogy involves more than merely giving Shelley more of the credit that she is certainly due. Her status as a female author seeking venues for her work within the patriarchal cultural structures of romanticism is, to draw the analogy more precisely, like the voice of Sasha (the trace of repressed history), both in terms of the historical ties that critics have cited between the avant-gardes and romanticism and in terms of the key aesthetic categories of avant-garde expression that these ties reinforce. Indeed, Shelley’s troubled relation to romanticism is a stark reminder that the historical ties connecting the avant-gardes to romanticism are only maintained by the history that they repress.
Contrary to what one might expect, it was not so much the use of Shelley’s novel as it was the embrace of popular cultural forms like Hollywood films that situated the adaptations of Frankenstein by Warhol and The Living Theatre in the historical currents that scholars cite when linking the avant-gardes to romanticism. A few years before The Living Theatre mounted their production of Frankenstein, for example, Renato Poggioli, who was one of the most prominent historians to trace the lines of continuity “between romanticism and avantgardism,”35 noted that the romantics not only encouraged “the cult of novelty and even of the strange” long “before it became typically avant-garde”36 but that the avant-gardes also echoed the romantics in their interest in the general public and in the popular cultural mainstream. Indeed, for the romantics, and later for the avant-gardes as well, these two lines of continuity converged in what Poggioli identifies as a common strategy to subvert established notions of taste and cultivated artistic sensibilities.37 But whether coming from the romantics or the avant-gardes, this interest in the commonplace, the public, and the popular lent tacit support to basic assumptions about gender that have long had wide circulation within the cultural mainstream. If the embrace of Frankenstein and its spin-offs in popular culture by avant-gardists like Warhol and The Living Theatre highlighted a continuity between romanticism and avant-gardism, so too did that embrace expose a contiguous patriarchal undercurrent linking the romantics to the avant-gardes, one that historians like Poggioli and his successors have never really acknowledged.
It is worth remembering that as a movement romanticism was by and large a project that affirmed male cultural prerogatives. Scholars of early nineteenth-century culture have been arguing precisely this point for some time. In “Romantic Quest and Conquest,” for example, Marlon Ross has argued that “romanticism is historically a masculine phenomenon,” in which the romantic, “self-conscious search for poetic identity” blurred with a project of “masculine empowerment.”38 It is not difficult to understand how appeals to popular opinion figured into this project, for popular opinion has long supported such empowerment in the public sphere, clearing the way for male prerogatives by reinforcing notions of gender that relegate women to domestic spaces, away from the open economies to which men have had ready access. Not only did this division between the public and domestic spheres reinforce the privileged social advantages that men have historically presumed to be a natural birthright, but it also sustained a system that consistently absorbed the labor of women without remuneration.
The injustices of this kind of patriarchal system have profound implications for avant-garde aesthetics. This is especially true with regard to the avant-garde critique of artistic production and variations of that critique, such as Warhol’s celebration of the commonplace and his use in that celebration of objects presumed to be “so familiar that ‘stealing’ them was impossible.” The more one considers the economies of such a system, the more difficult it becomes to assume that wide dissemination and popular cultural familiarity preclude the possibility of theft. When it comes to objects and cultural artifacts produced by women, these conditions have historically signified theft and appropriation rather than the neutrality that Warhol’s aesthetics assume. Indeed, with regard to its own history within the economies of print (and celluloid) culture, Shelley’s Frankenstein underscores time and again how blurred the boundaries between the found and the appropriated are with respect to works produced by women.
When Frankenstein was first published, it didn’t even have Shelley’s name on it. Although, generally speaking, it is hard to steal what no one claims, in this particular case anonymity was more a matter of necessity than choice. The anonymous publication of Frankenstein was one of the few avenues open to Shelley if she wanted her work to be taken seriously by her male peers. But in practical terms, that anonymous publication, which was a direct response to the cultural assumptions regulating gender during the Romantic period, nominally removed her from the material processes of production, and invited a kind of appropriation that could easily be passed off as merely embracing what appeared to be freely given to the public domain. Appropriations of Frankenstein in literature and in the theater followed quickly after publication of Shelley’s novel. As Albert LaValley has noted, “in the 1820s, even before Mary Shelley’s authorship was widely known, there were several [theatrical] productions playing simultaneously in London.”39 Not only do these appropriations trouble the lines of continuity between romanticism and avant-gardism, but the circumstances of the appropriations also raise troubling questions about the idea that one could challenge the role of the artist as producer by presenting ostensibly found objects, images, or ideas as newly produced works of art. However provocative it might be as an artistic gesture to sign one’s name to something one did not produce, it clashes with a gendered history, of which Shelley is merely a prominent example. Against the backdrop of avant-gardists questioning artistic production by signing what they did not produce, there is the long, often unacknowledged history of women not being able to sign what they did produce. In this respect, the very notion of the artist as such, like the category of authorship, proves to be a highly gendered category. Amid this engendering of the artist, found objects are a lot like the body parts used to construct Frankenstein’s creature. Frequently, they turn out to be stolen goods.
Inasmuch as artists like Warhol conceptualized their art in aesthetic categories that, on the one hand encourage a self-reflective critique of the artist as producer, and yet, on the other, elide serious consideration of how the very categories of artist, producer, and found objects are grounded in gendered exclusions, they fall in line with a tradition that has consistently positioned the avant-garde critique of the institutions of art within a subtle affirmation of patriarchal prerogatives. This same tradition governed the adaptation of Shelley’s Frankenstein. But as an object of interest to the avant-gardes, Frankenstein proved to be as unruly as the creature whose story the novel tells. The historical contexts of the novel ultimately challenge many of the governing assumptions of the much-celebrated critique of the institution of art by avant-garde artists. Running directly counter to the break with the past that this critique purportedly represents, the historical residues associated with the publication and reception of Shelley’s novel highlighted a line of continuity between romanticism and avantgardism that ran not through their common aesthetic goals and objectives, but beneath them, in the deep, erased history of aesthetic categories that cultural historians have overlooked and that have long been implicated in the repression of women.
If this effect challenged the underlying assumptions of the critique of the artist as producer, so too did it challenge The Living Theatre’s fascination with Artaud and his visionary interest in a non-literary theater. Indeed, the history of Frankenstein as a published text in the male-dominated literary economy of nineteenth-century England is a simple reminder of what Artaud’s theories leave unaddressed in their rejection of literary culture. For all its cries of “No More Masterpieces!,” Artaud’s non-literary theater still functions within a privileged economy of men, subtly affirming the patriarchal traditions of literary culture. Not only does Artaud negate that culture in toto without problematizing the exclusions that were an integral part of its construction in the first place, but even the crucial metaphors of that negation are cast in gendered forms. This is, for example, especially true of Artaud’s famous visionary theories of the plague, which he offers as an antidote to a moribund literary culture. Even here, Shelley’s novel provides a profoundly important point of contrast that highlights the gendered underpinnings of Artaud’s vision. In the narrative of the novel, it is worth recalling, Victor Frankenstein’s mother (Caroline Beaufort) “dies unnecessarily because she feels obligated to nurse her favorite Elizabeth during a smallpox epidemic.” Far from being a metaphor for a visceral performative contrast to literary theater, the image of the plague/epidemic in Frankenstein emerges thus as a symbol of “a sexual division of labor,” where “masculine work is kept outside of the domestic realm” and contagion results not from a profound performative immediacy but from a prescriptive, gendered proximity—in other words, from fulfilling “a patriarchal ideal of female self-sacrifice.”40 In what easily serves as a romantic metaphor for the gendered underpinnings of the avant-garde cult of the new, the male figure, e.g., Victor Frankenstein, ventures off into the uncharted topographies of human exploration and experimentation, while the female is bound, indeed falls prey, to a plague-ridden domestic space. In Shelley’s narrative, the plague is a domestic phenomenon that quarantines, restricts, and ultimately removes women from the public sphere.
In contrast to the idea of a non-literary theater and its related challenge to the notion of authorship as such, the specter of Shelley’s Frankenstein looms as a disturbing reminder of how gendered the notion of authorship has been in Western society. For even amid innovative adaptations like those by Warhol or The Living Theatre, there is always the disruptive fact that the history of Frankenstein as a cultural narrative begins with the erasure of its author, not in an Artaudian gesture of anti-textuality, but in a self-effacing, pragmatic concession to publish the novel anonymously, so as not to jeopardize its success within a market that generally presumed that the literary arts—similar to the scientific laboratories of Victor Frankenstein—belonged to the domain of men.41 Placing productions like those of Warhol and The Living Theatre in their own historical contexts, one might ask, furthermore, how it is that even after the early history of the novel became well known, subsequent avant-garde adaptations of Frankenstein offered little critical self-reflection on the implications that Shelley’s anonymity might have for the avant-gardes’ own notions of artistic production.
Perhaps the answer to this question might illuminate the more enduring and arguably least-discussed link between romanticism and the avant-gardes. Beyond the blurred boundaries between the found and the appropriated, beyond the privileged gendered conceptions of authorship itself, the critical perspective articulated in Shelley’s novel highlights what is perhaps the most significant oversight among the many parallels that Poggioli and other critics have drawn between romanticism and avant-gardism, an oversight that centers on the problematic concept of genius. Not only did that concept play a central ideological role in the male-centered aesthetics of romanticism, but it is arguably also the central functioning aesthetic category in the avant-gardes’ use of found objects and in their related critique of the artist as producer. Indeed, the very foundation of this latter critique is grounded in the assumption that what makes an artist is not technical skill but rather the gifts of artistic sensibility and insight.42 Even if, with regard to the avant-gardes, such abilities might be better characterized as a good sense for provocation, the point remains: critics have either left the source of such sensibilities unaddressed or have tended to represent them as an implied product of birth rather than of socialization. It is hard to dispute that historically such notions of innate artistic sensibility and superior insight have fed into a larger concept of genius. It is worth noting in this regard that within the period of romanticism such notions, implicitly tied as they were to prophetic foresight, prefigured the forward-looking tendencies of the avant-gardes. Donald Egbert has noted, for example, that “many romantics had long regarded the artist as the original genius and prophet-hero par excellence.”43 Nonetheless, this notion of the artist “as genius and prophet hero” largely remained a gendered category in romanticism and for the avant-gardes.
Against the backdrop of the romantic cultural category of genius, Shelley herself sketched an image in her novel not of genius but of delusory grandeur: a thinly veiled metaphor of the male romantic artist in the guise of a scientist whose visionary obsession, far from affirming genius, culminates in the creation of havoc, destruction, and violence—all of which are primarily directed against women. In its critical portrayal of the male romantic project, Shelley’s novel thus articulates what in some respects might be considered the most enduring, if not the definitive, critique of the notion of the artist as genius—a critique that in the larger context of nominal adaptations of Shelley’s narrative by figures like Warhol becomes all the more striking because of the critical bridge it builds between romanticism and the avant-gardes. It is, in fact, a bridge that forges an alternate route for our understanding of the avant-gardes.
Shelley’s novel not only sets the avant-gardes’ questioning of the role of the artist as producer into critical relief. In doing this, her work encourages scholars and historians to consider how, for all of their radical questioning of the artist as producer, the avant-gardes continued to embrace a notion of genius that had its grounding in eighteenth-century aesthetics. The history of Shelley’s text would suggest that this tendency has direct historical connections with the unequal social construction of gender. And it suggests the need not only to question the role of the artist as producer, but to do so in a manner that simultaneously exposes the bourgeois, patriarchal notions of genius lurking in the shadows of the avant-gardes.