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NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Talk Performance: Extemporaneous Speech, Artistic Discipline, and Media in the Post-1960s American Avant-garde A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Theatre & Drama By Ira S. Murfin EVANSTON, ILLINOIS December 2017 2 © Copyright by Ira S. Murfin 2017 All Rights Reserved 3 ABSTRACT This dissertation narrates the circulation and institutionalization of an emergent category of talk performance within the late-twentieth century US avant-garde through the career trajectories of three artists from disparate disciplinary backgrounds working in and around the 1970s: theatrical monologist Spalding Gray, poet David Antin, and dance artist and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. All established themselves through more obviously discipline-coherent work before turning to extemporaneous talk as a performance strategy within the shifting critical and cultural environments of post-1960s avant-gardes. Undertaking a comparative study collecting these practices under the label talk performance, this project uncovers the processes by which these artists both resisted and relied upon disciplinary structures, and the media technologies and formats that attend those structures, to configure their work within particular arts discourses. Talk performance becomes a provocative site for understanding how minimalist interventions into formal disciplinary categories helped define the reapportionment of the overall art situation in the aftermath of the 1960s along lines of rhetorical and institutional distinction that still persist. Employing newly available multimedia archives and a historiographic approach to the various narrow disciplinary accounts of the late-twentieth-century American avant-garde that have become standard, this project recuperates traces of an unacknowledged, interdisciplinary set of talk performance practices. Premised on their status as ephemeral, embodied, and collectively negotiated, the practices of these three artists actually prove to be deeply entwined with forms of media other than live performance, as found material on which extemporaneous performance is 4 scaffolded, as means to represent and circulate extemporaneous talk, or as an editorial model for the role that talk plays in realizing a performance. In each case, the aesthetic and procedural tendencies these artists established went on to circulate in or be adapted to secondary media formats that drew on traditional models of authorship to establish their reputations. Paradoxically, these works then tend to circulate more widely and even enter the mainstream based on the authenticating power of their embedded extemporaneity and the status bestowed by their apparent disciplinary resistance. Talk Performance articulates a performance history that understands arts disciplines as contingent categories determined by historical situation, critical intervention, and material possibility, upon which the creative and intellectual exigencies of performance practice, scholarship, and criticism are nonetheless built. 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation has benefitted immeasurably from the support, advice, and feedback of so many. Thanks to the relationship of my research to my artistic practice, that group encompasses many inside the academy and a number outside of it as well, who may not have even known they were contributing to my project. It would be difficult to express my gratitude to every person or institution that has made this project possible, but I mean to try. I am extremely fortunate to have had a supportive and collegial dissertation committee. My dissertation chair, Susan Manning, is an extraordinary mentor, her counsel and pedagogy were instrumental in shaping what was a very big and amorphous idea – to write about talking – into a researchable and executable project. She has been a critical guiding force at every stage of this project, providing guidance and feedback, while allowing me the space to forge my own way through the process. Her ever- present confidence that I would successfully complete my dissertation carried me through more often than I care to admit – “Susan seems to think I can do it, so I’ve decided to trust her” was my frequent refrain – and she has been a great person to celebrate successes with along the way as well, both big and small. I am also grateful to Susan for pointing me toward Harris Feinsod, who has also proved to be an ideal mentor and ally. My discussions with Harris on poetry, orality, and media are woven through the David Antin chapter in particular, and the dissertation as a whole. His careful feedback on my drafts is largely responsible for whatever clarity my prose can boast, and his guidance on navigating academia has been invaluable. I am privileged to have been the beneficiary of his immense generosity of time, intelligence, and good will through this process. 6 And Ramón Rivera-Servera has been a supporter of my writing from our earliest encounters in his courses. He seems to have intuited what I was after all along, and has offered incisive input and advice on where to look in the literature for interlocutors and how to build my argument, while also productively offering challenges to entrenched narratives about the disciplinary histories of performance and the avant-garde. I am privileged that Ramón was willing to take time from his many duties advising Performance Studies students to sit on my committee in a sister program. Of course, the committee is not the only source of faculty support. I am particularly grateful to Jacob Smith, of the Department of Radio, TV and Film, for his generous advice in one-on-one meetings, during a media studies seminar he co-taught as part of the Summer Institute Cologne in Germany in 2014, and as the invited respondent at a session of the Futures of Poetics Workshop sponsored by the Poetry and Poetics Colloquium discussing an early draft of my David Antin chapter, not to mention the excellent resource his own scholarship has been for my project. Harvey Young, who was Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) for most of my time in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama (IPTD), saw something worth fostering in my initial application to the program, and helped shape the earliest version of my project’s argument in his dissertation prospectus course. Dassia Posner, who took over as DGS from Harvey toward the end of my time in the program, has proven a fierce advocate for institutional support, especially after my son was born and I needed a year beyond that allotted by the school to finish my project and support my family. And Tracy C. Davis has been a model of scholarly inquiry, whose mentorship outside of the dissertation – on pedagogy, research methods, and other aspects of the profession – has made writing the dissertation seem much more manageable. 7 Finally, I am grateful to the program administrators who have ensured my doctoral career did not collapse under the weight of bureaucracy: Liz Luby, Elizabeth “Zee” Cronin, Eunice Woods, and Arthur Murton all operated with kindness and an inexplicable level of organization. This project is also the beneficiary of the support and feedback of exceptional colleagues. My doctoral cohort, Christine Simonian Bean, Lauren Beck, Carla Della Gatta, Megan Geigner, and Jessica Hinds-Bond, have been the most amazing peers with whom to share this process. Their insight shaped my project at its foundations, and their friendship has carried me through the task of writing. The various configurations of interdisciplinary writing groups I was part of, initially through the Graduate Writing Center, and then independently, were key in the later stages of writing, especially in helping me to understand not only what I knew, but also what I was successfully communicating. The membership of this group changed from term to term, but Margarita Rayzberg, Colin Fitzpatrick, and Shoniqua Roach were its most consistent members, and their feedback is reflected on every page of the Gray and Rainer chapters in particular. And special thanks are due to the informal “Spirits & Speculation” reading group, Danny Snelson, Mashinka Firunts, and Amanda Graham, who came along toward the end of my graduate school career to ground me in some key critical literature and remind me that academic inquiry could still be fun. I have been tremendously fortunate to receive support for my research from the institutions housing the archival collections of the three artists at the center of my project: The Getty Research Institute provided a Getty Library Research Grant in support of my work with the archives of David Antin and Yvonne Rainer, and The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin offered a Ransom Dissertation Research Fellowship for my work with Spalding 8 Gray’s archive. I particularly want to thank Virginia Mokslaveskas at the Getty, and Helen Baer at the Ransom Center for their help with the collections and with administering the funding. Eric Colleary, who took over as Performing Arts Curator from Helen Baer, was also very helpful on a briefer return visit I made to Austin. Similarly, the Special Collections staff at both institutions could not have been more helpful and gracious to the unusual researcher who mostly wanted to watch old videos and listen to old tape recordings. Additional aid came via grants from The Graduate School (TGS) and the School of Communications at Northwestern, and the Graduate Assistantship in Public Humanities with