Abstract :
This essay resituates the early reception of Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings within the framework of the untitled theatrical event that John Cage and David Tudor organised at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1952, and the writing of Antonin Artaud that was its inspiration. Artaud’s polemical theatre manifesto Le Théâtre et son double, the English translation of which was begun by the poet M. C. Richards at Black Mountain College in the first years of the 1950s, proposes a shifting position outside of the constraints of conventional signification, and rejects the authority of the text as epitomising a ‘petrified idea of a culture without shadows. Drawing on queer theory, I propose an account of Cage’s encounter with Artaud that emphasizes cacophony, unrepeatability, and the queer potential offered by the ungraspable shadow. In offering a reading that is based on a queering of Artaud’s notion of ‘cruelty,’ this paper seeks to expand the Duchampian model offered by Moira Roth’s ‘aesthetic of indifference’ and Jonathan D. Katz’s ‘politics of negation’; the sense of plenitude, immediacy and unrepeatability to be found in these works is less Duchampian, I argue, than it is an articulation of Artaud’s ‘space stocked with silence.
