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'Why Even Parody These Characters?': Jill Johnston, the Wooster Group, and Vanguard-Itis
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'Why Even Parody These Characters?': Jill Johnston, the Wooster Group, and Vanguard-Itis
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'Why Even Parody These Characters?': Jill Johnston, the Wooster Group, and Vanguard-Itis
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Journal Article
'Why Even Parody These Characters?': Jill Johnston, the Wooster Group, and Vanguard-Itis
2023
Overview
Since its founding in 1980, the WOOSTER GROUP has developed practices that heighten theatrical contrasts; they are known for experimental pieces that juxtapose historical reenactments with surprising texts and technologically mediated relations between performers on stage. The Wooster Group's métier offers a symbiotic platform for Johnston's contradictions and ambivalences in the 1970s—a crucial decade for the development of feminist/queer activism and thought as well as the postmodern avant-garde on stage.14 The Town Hall Affair addresses these two currents simultaneously; Johnston's presence on the stage of Mailer's event and within the feminist movement doubles as an encounter in the present with the Wooster Group's own practices and influences. José Esteban Muñoz considers Johnston a model \"of queer presence in the public sphere that preceded current models\" of political pragmatism; Sally Banes marvels at Johnston's dance criticism for its attention to the \"chaotic, messy, raw vitality of movement and materials\"; Sara Warner theorizes Johnston's performance protests as queer \"joker citizenship\".15 Dance scholar Clare Croft builds on these foundations; she writes of Johnston's \"lesbian dancing body as a form of public disruption\" and her resonance in the lesbian archive.16 Art historian Jennifer Sichel focuses on the intertwined careers of Johnston, Gene Swendon, and Andy Warhol.17 Much of this work is motivated by a desire to address the caricaturing of Johnston's contributions as reducible to the (often misunderstood) ideology of lesbian separatism. The same impetus has led artists and curators to also mount their own performative returns to Johnston, frequently relying on archival materials to communicate the elided political and aesthetic phases of her biography and career.18 This attention has contributed nuance and precision to understandings of Johnston in feminist and art history; the Johnston at the center of her autobiographical writings—Valk's Johnston—remains a restless subject who insistently resists categorization.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
