The avant-garde, according to those who are supposed to know, has been entering the mainstream, but the commentators busy cataloging this development for future art historians seem to have forgotten that “avant-garde” and “mainstream” are mutually exclusive terms. Once our present has become past, it may become clearer that the greatest artists of this period are not the celebrated painters and playwrights we hear so much about but those responsible for their celebrity: the media packagers and press agents, always adept at bending definitions and abusing language to serve their own ends.

If the avant-garde is suddenly finding exposure on your local TV network, in your neighborhood mall, or at your downtown theater, then maybe you should question how avant-garde it is anymore. It would not be the first time in history that the unconventional has become popular.

In a curious way, the so-called art known as avant-garde in recent decades tends to be without substance for both those who are perpetrating it and those who are embracing it. Much of its appeal for the masses depends on its being arcane: a puzzle that only some can solve, a religion that only some have discovered. It delights in exploiting competition: that sense of I-saw-it-before-you-did or I-understand-it-even-if-you-don’t. While Spalding Gray and Whoopi Goldberg and Eric Bogosian all have something to offer, their reputations always suggest that they are newer and more different than they really are. The media response to their work seems carefully to avoid comparison with Ruth Draper, Shelly Berman, Phyllis Diller, or Lenny Bruce.

After his mid-70’s landmark opus, Einstein on the Beach (a collaboration with composer Phil Glass), and his ongoing fiasco with six self-contained works collectively entitled The CIVIL WarS, Robert Wilson is probably the preeminent name of avant-garde performance art. His name alone inspires awe. Even as the availability in English this year of Cocteau’s Diaries reveals that perhaps this artist’s greatest genius was for self-promotion, in Wilson we can see a similar phenomenon at work.

A perfect demonstration of the hype surrounding Wilson occurred last year when the Pulitzer Prize committee made something of a fool of itself For the 13th time in its 70-year history, the Pulitzer board did not elect a winner for drama. But the three-member subcommittee for Drama indeed had recommended a single work to the board—one which no one anywhere has ever seen—Wilson’s epic, The CIVIL WarS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down. As explained by Michael G. Gartner, a member of the Pulitzer board, “I felt very leery of awarding a Pulitzer Prize, with all the prestige it carries, to a performance no one on the board had read or seen or was able to see.”

Whatever that says about the Pulitzer Prize committee, it speaks even more about Wilson’s reputation. The chain of events becomes particularly ludicrous since it’s next to impossible to review a Wilson work from its script alone—usually there is none, in the standard sense.

Wilson’s career is also remarkable in view of his background. Born in Waco, Texas, in 1941, he was working towards a degree in business administration when he left the University of Texas to study architecture in New York. The architecture degree he subsequently received from Pratt Institute proved- perhaps less relevant to his theater career than the business acumen required to raise the funds for his pieces. But neither business nor architecture would be cited as influential on his theatrical concoctions as much as his experience with autistic and handicapped children (without dwelling on it, some have related this to his own stuttering as a child). In fact, portions of the text for Einstein on the Beach, which some consider the most important theater event in our lifetime, were written by an autistic youth.

Wilson’s reputation peaked in 1976 with Einstein, an epic, intermissionless, four-and-a-half-hour opera that had two showings only, during its American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. (Previously, it was performed in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, German, Belgium, and Holland.) In retrospect, that unusually limited exposure proved sufficient to form what can only be summarized as a cult surrounding the event. As Samuel Lipman has observed since, it “managed, in two 1976 performances . . . to enter into the consciousness of artistically knowing New Yorkers. A measure of the fame the work has gained with the passing of time is that so many people now claim to have been present that these performances must have been given, not at the Met, but at Madison Square Garden.”

The Einstein legend received renewed life when the Brooklyn Academy of Music (that bastion of the avant-garde) produced a replica revival in 1984. A PBS hour-long documentary, based on the BAM production and first broadcast in January 1986, played no small part in extending Wilson’s fame. But as one critic noted at the time, the PBS offering “is a compromise: a souvenir for those who know the work, an artfully constructed sample for those who don’t.” At best, it inadvertently uncovered the greatest irony concerning Wilson. At the height of our technological evolution, here is Wilson—a maestro of avant-garde theater who has introduced a level of technology previously unknown to the stage, yet is limited precisely by the nontechnological, ephemeral nature of his chosen medium.

But Wilson’s works are limited as well by the inordinate resources and funding they usually demand. To return to The CIVIL WarS as a case in point, it was conceived in the early 80’s as a 12-hour extravaganza, consisting of six segments. (Wilson originally schemed a 16-hour work, which is less outrageous than it sounds, in view of an earlier work that took three days to perform.) Originally, it was to enlist six different countries to produce, finance, and execute each part, before bringing it together for the first time during the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles in 1984. But even after it had been pared down to eight hours with additional cuts pending, the five million dollars that had been raised proved insufficient to realize the Los Angeles project. The world premiere of the complete work was abandoned amidst much controversy. It resurfaced last fall in Austin, scheduled as part of Texas’ 150th anniversary, but once again the 6.2 million dollar budget could not be met; so it was canceled, despite the efforts of the de Menil family, “one of his principal patrons.”

As far as can be gathered, the Japanese and French segments have yet to be performed in anything other than workshop productions, while some portions have shown up in the last two years at Robert Brustein’s American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, at Lincoln Center, and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, mostly to negative reactions. In the meantime, Wilson has been busy. Only this year he has premiered his idiosyncratic version of Salome in Milan and an even newer work, Death Destruction & Detroit II, in West Berlin, which has become his regular outpost.

In the summer of 1986, under the auspices of New. York University, he presented an unusually modest but particularly evocative and successful version of Heiner Muller’s Hamletmachine, some months after his more massive, if critically panned, The Golden Windows.

Wilson’s Hamletmachine was virtually a 30-minute play repeated five times. Each time, the entire set is rotated 90 degrees to the right. The actors repeat their methodical (and mechanical) motions accordingly, so that the “Woman in swivel chair” who had her back to us in Act I has her right side towards us in Act II.

In keeping with this scheme, the first and the fifth acts are offered from identical perspective. But during the first, not a word is spoken. In fact, the ostensibly simple tactic of repetition becomes vastly more complicated than it appears, since Wilson releases Muller’s script sporadically throughout, and different lines are spoken in different acts.

It’s hard to write about Robert Wilson without sounding like a press agent. His career is like his works—ubiquitous, enormous, and defiant. Hyperbole and superlatives are not only appropriate but unavoidable. But there is also much about Wilson’s performance that suggests obfuscation.

As if to confirm that the avant-garde has entered the mainstream, a revival of a segment of one of Wilson’s first works, Deafman Glance (1970), appeared at Lincoln Center mid-summer as the premiere event. Although Wilson has had a number of his pieces performed at Lincoln Center in the past, this revival was part of a larger program with the express purpose of bringing a fiercely “downtown” work to a wider, “uptown” audience. Even so, it remained far too tedious and unrewarding for a number of attendees who stormed up the aisles and out of the theater before either of its two performances was over. (Frank Rich found it “desultory” and “intellectually banal.”)

Earlier in the Lincoln Center program, Wilson himself explained that his Deafman Glance was based on the work of Dr. Daniel Stern, a psychologist at Columbia University. “He had made over three hundred films of mothers and their babies in natural situations where the baby was crying and the mother would pick up and comfort the child. When these films were shown at normal speed, that was what we saw. But when they were shown frame by frame . . . what one sees in eight out of ten cases is that the initial reaction of the mother in the first three frames . . . is to lunge at the child and that the infant is recoiling in terror. . . . When the mother is shown the film she is horrified and responds, ‘But I love my child! I want to comfort the child.'”

Overture to the Fourth Act of Deafman Glance occurs in silence for its 90-minute duration while it depicts a parental figure who first nurtures and then murders two children in sequence, with the activities performed in slow motion. It requires roughly 10 minutes for the black-clad parent to pour a glass of milk, another 10 minutes to carry the milk to a child seated motionless in a chair only five feet away, another 10 minutes to return to the child and mortally stab him in the neck or chest (the child’s back is facing the audience). This entire ordeal or sequence of events is repeated for a second child who is sleeping in a bed on the other corner of the platform; and all is performed with a noticeable lack of expression or emotion.

If this unit from Wilson’s Deafman Glance functions neatly both as a historical artifact and as a succinct introduction to his work, it also reminds us that Wilson is more suggestive and evocative than he is declarative or precise. Part of the controversy surrounding Wilson is that his detractors abhor what his advocates applaud: his refusal to be clear beyond being abstract.

In his critical autobiography, Music by Philip Glass (New York: Harper & Row), Glass writes about his genesis of Einstein on the Beach with Wilson. “In a sense, we didn’t need to tell an Einstein story because everyone who eventually saw our Einstein brought their own story with them. In the four months that we toured Einstein in Europe we had many occasions to meet with our audiences, and people occasionally would ask us what it ‘meant.’ But far more often people told us what it meant to them, sometimes even giving us plot elucidation and complete scenario. The point about Einstein was clearly not what it ‘meant’ but that it was meaningful as generally experienced by the people who saw it. . . . I am sure that the absence of direct connotative ‘meaning’ made it all the easier for the spectator to personalize the experience by supplying his own special ‘meaning’ out of his own experience, while the work itself remained resolutely abstract. “