Lee Breuer and Mabou Mines

Abstract

For many artists of the 1960s and 1970s, interiority, that post-Enlightenment fetish explored darkly by Romantic poets, painters and musicians, and the symbolist poets, flaunted in a radical theory of colour by the Fauves and in terms of cubist distortions by the German expressionists, squeezed into a Freudian paradigm by Andre Breton and the surrealists to give shape to Dada’s nihilism, plunged into its pre-ideational realm, into its inchoate, universally mythic sphere by the abstract expressionists and some fluxus performers, had run its course. At least with the embrace of popular culture by the American cubist Stuart Davis, who in 1950 proclaimed ‘I like popular art, topical ideas, and not high culture or modernistic formalism’ (Hughes, p. 330), art began its fascination with the surface texture of its culture, with popular signs, popular media and popular myths.