In 1995 the poet Alan Shapiro impatiently awaited a flight to Houston, where his sister lay dying of breast cancer. At the airport he noticed members of the Bill T. Jones dance troupe waiting for the same flight. Shapiro told a dancer that that weekend he had seen and liked the troupe’s production Still/Here—which incorporates the video testimony of terminally ill patients, mixing documentary evidence and artistic representation, as well as primarily fictional and nonfictional genres such as dance, video art, and medical and autobiographical narrative. The dancer thanked him; other members of the troupe, overhearing the conversation, accepted the compliment with similar graciousness, smiling at their admirer. As Shapiro wondered what to say next, the airline announced that the flight had been canceled. A line formed to rebook the passengers, but Shapiro found himself at the back. As he pushed toward the counter, the dancer objected, “Hey, you’re not gonna cut in line, are you?” “I have a dying sister!” Shapiro exclaimed, truthful but somewhat incoherent. “Yeah,” the dancer retorted. “Doesn’t everybody.” Remembering this moment in his memoir of his sister’s illness, Vigil, Shapiro observed, “The boundary between art and life at that particular moment, to me if not to them, had never seemed so absolute.” But at the moment he could manage only, “Fuck you!”

By the time the Still/Here production reached North Carolina, it generated considerable controversy for precisely the opposite reason: it seemed to violate “[t]he boundary between art and life.” The dancer whom Shapiro exchanged pleasantries and insults with “told the story of his mother’s death from cancer” while he performed a solo. In a widely noticed essay, the New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce vowed never to see the production and urged readers to follow her example. Calling it “victim art,” Croce decried Still/Here for contributing to a widespread problem: the narcissism that marks contemporary culture. She characterized Jones as a member of “the new tribe of artists parading their wounds” and as “the most extreme case among the many now representing themselves to the public not as artists but as victims and as martyrs.”

Croce’s essay generated many passionate responses, including a book that collected it and several responses in order to address (as its title perhaps too grandly proclaimed) The Crisis of Criticism. To rebut Croce’s argument, Joyce Carol Oates pointed to “a long and honorable tradition of art that ‘bears witness’ to human suffering.” Pitting artist against critic, Oates positions Jones as an artist who produces “new and startling” work that “professional criticism” dismisses “in terms of the old and familiar.” In his contribution, Homi Bhabha illuminates Oates’s method. After quoting Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” he wonders if Still/Here represents “the attempt, as in Plath’s poem, to counter the privacy and primacy of the individual self with the collective historical memory?” Bhabha answers his question with remarkable candor:

From the Winter 2007 Issue

“Ethical Suffering: On the Work of Alan Shapiro” is part of the Winter 2007 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, which also features essays, fiction, poetry, book reviews, and humor. Subscribe today for just $32.

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