FLOODESIGN

"I'LL TAKE A PLOT OF LEVEL TERRITORY AND STAKE OUT A CLAIM TO LIE DOWN ON IT AND CRITICIZE THE CONSTELLATIONS IF THAT'S WHAT I HAPPEN TO BE LOOKING AT. I ALSO STAKE OUT A CLAIM TO BE AN ARTIST, A WRITER, IF THAT'S WHAT I'M DOING WHEN I GET TO THE TYPEWRITER AND DECIDE THAT I LIKED SOMETHING WELL ENOUGH TO SAY WHAT I THINK IT'S ALL ABOUT." — JILL JOHNSTON Jill Johnston. Photo: Charles Beyer McCarthy went at her marks with unreserved wit and ferocity, invariably writing her reviews, as she explained, "late at night, after the dishes were done." 1 In hindsight, she held American theatrical productions to a standard they hardly seemed to hold for themselves: as works of literature, cultural productions worthy of rigorous intellectual dissection. She bowed to no sacred cow: Clifford Odets ("each new play seems a more shocking caricature of the first" 2 ), Thornton Wilder ("an elaborate system of mystification … to persuade the audience that it is witnessing a complex and difficult play"), and Tennessee Williams ("it is impossible to witness one of Mr. Williams' plays without being aware of the pervading smell of careerism" 3 ). Because the majority of produced plays then were written by men, it isn't far-fetched to read certain of her reviews as precisely aimed at a quaking mid- century machismo when it saw fit to soothe its aching conscience (around capital A-art, money, success, women) by giving its audiences undue middlebrow beatings. I happen to agree with many of McCarthy's assessments of those playwrights, but agreeing with her — or any critic — isn't really the point. "I'll take a plot of level territory and stake out a claim to lie down on it and criticize the constellations if that's what I happen to be looking at," Jill Johnston, the notorious dance critic for The Village Voice, famously declared in 1965 in her landmark essay, "Critics' Critics." "I also stake out a claim to be an artist, a writer, if that's what I'm doing when I get to the typewriter and decide that I liked something well enough to say what I think it's all about." 4 Johnston joined the weekly paper in 1959, writing the "Dance Journal" column at a time when art and dance and performance were dissolving rigid cultural boundaries. She was an early proponent of Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris and Merce Cunningham, writing in perambulatory prose that not only mapped her labyrinthine mind, but also liquefied the art/life divide: I wanna tip my bangs to that man in The Voice last week saying nice remarks about me. But I must assure him I don't have an interesting life at all. I make it all up. 5 Making it all up: It was Johnston who, with her casual candor and feminist politics, outed critical writing as a strain of fiction, or at least the beneficiary of a certain invention. (In the early '70s, Johnston would come out as one of the first openly gay journalists in America.) It was she who made clear that criticism 8 www.peakperfs.org

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