The Changing of the Avant-Garde

WATCHING the arts at Harvard this year was a lot like drinking a pitcher of warm beer, interrupted with occasional swigs of Tabasco sauce.

The year was largely bland and deadening, with artists and performers taking few chances. But occasionally it was punctuated by a few risky ventures that proved artistic victories: meritorious failures or, at the very least, comic relief. A few concerts, plays and works of art did reach out to observers, making them think, feel or just laugh.

Slapstick--intentional or not--seemed to draw the most attention in the visual arts. After all, this was the year that students in a Visual and Environmental Studies course were asked to kill a chicken and make a sculpture out of its bones.

It was also the year that chickenwire was transformed into shimmering, seven-foot walls of ice in the Quad as part of a landscape art project. This was one of three such projects that tried to turn the newly-remodeled greensward into a postmodern palette. One artist threatened to tiger-stripe the lawn with strips of orange sod, but angry Quadlings forced her to content herself with some white lime lines that made the Quad into an airplane runway.

At least the pastel picnic tables that, as the third project, still dot the Quad do serve some useful purpose, but they too are little more than burlesque--thanks to Office for the Arts Director Myra Mayman's infamous observation about picnic tables: "Either you've sat on them or you've gotten laid on them." It wasn't the most practical idea to allow artists to indulge their whimsy at the expense of the hundreds of students who wanted to play frisbee on the field or walk across it unimpeded, but the concept and the execution alike were good for a few chuckles. The picnic tables and the ice walls were even as aesthetically pleasing as they were visually disarming.

The Carpenter Center showcased seniors' works, some of which are still on view. The exhibition was notable for using the outside surfaces of the building as a display space, filling a courtyard with sculptured grass, setting a sequence of canvases along a sloping lawn and hanging synthetic tree branches from a pillar and the roof. The pieces engaged not only intentional viewers but also students on their way to class.

Only a handful of musical events livened up an otherwise lackluster year. HarvAid brought Pete Seeger and many too-rarely-seen folk artists to Sanders Theatre for a two-night divestment benefit. The Din and Tonics gave away free gewgaws, such as cheap toys and cans of WD-40, to everyone in their Sanders audience. Sophomore Jonathan Shecter started a rap group, B.M.O.C., and released a single about Harvard that showed surprising candor about his creative motivations: "I'm a Harvard undergrad, a scholarly scholar/And I'm using rap music to make me dollars." Musically, these events weren't much to crow over, but their perpetrators deserve kudos for trying something different.

THEATER was the medium that held the most promise--and thus the one that proved the most disappointing when it failed to live up to that promise. Tepid revivals of high school warhorses and plays that had become screenplays dominated the stages.

Some of the best and most interesting theater on campus came from outside the College. A troupe of Irish university student actors began their American tour by treating Harvard audiences to strong, unorthodox performances of four plays by modern Irish dramatists, including J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Two creative forces in Harvard theater tried to break down the barriers between audiences and performers. Senior Randy Weiner's troupe Project Space Six (PSS) toured Winthrop House one night, knocking on doors and performing a short play in people's common rooms. PSS drew raves for its rap musical, The Gang's New Threads, which was really The Emperor's New Clothes updated to critique present-day fashion trends in Harvard Square. It was hip, it was funny, it was even socially relevant--and the all-original raps, produced in dorm-room jam sessions, were fresh.

The other force was Senior Mark Prascak's organization, Undergraduate Histrionics (UGH). Prascak set out to direct interactive plays, staging them in such places as the Adams House swimming pool and among the tables and chairs of the Adams dining hall. Audiences found his confrontational staging and his absurdist revisions of classic plays either inventive or infuriating, but the shows got people talking, even people who hadn't seen them. That is no small achievement, considering that most campus theater productions are seen by few and forgotten by most after their two-weekend runs end.

PSS and UGH teamed up for one memorable project that brought most of the Harvard artistic community--and its observers--together for a single event. The "Sea Monkeys Sideshow" turned the whole Carpenter Center into a piece of performance art for an evening. Actors, storytellers, musicians, directors, dancers, painters and intrigued onlookers participated in the variety of peripatetic performances. In one room, you could watch a pianist, a trumpeter, a dancer and a muralist all creating and improvising at once--and you could even pick up a paintbrush and join in yourself, on the adjacent wall. Even the ideas that didn't work worked--being in the spirit of creation and daring to try something new was all that mattered.

The artistic prospects for next year seem dim. It's hard to anticipate greatness after a year in which the Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III declared that Spenser for Hire was quality television, a year in which the Advocate published a parody of the New Yorker and nobody got the joke, a year in which the city of Cambridge silenced Harvard Square street folk singer Luke because a city councillor thought he attracted skinheads. Still, there is enough creativity and activity on campus to insure more innovation--to make us think, or at least keep us awake.