This past November, Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, sponsored a three-day “international” conference entitled “Avant-Garde Art and Literature: Toward a Reappraisal of Modernism.” As originally conceived, the conference was meant to celebrate Hofstra’s collection of avant-garde art and literature, which was donated to the university by Howard L. and Muriel Weingrow in 1972 but only recently catalogued. The Weingrow Collection, a potpourri of some four thousand books, manuscripts, prints, manifestos, and ephemera by artists associated with Surrealism, Dada, Art Nouveau, Cubism, and kindred movements, was hailed by the conference organizers and press releases as the largest collection of such materials outside the Museum of Modern Art. A small sampling of the collection was on view in a gallery at Hofstra’s library during the conference.

But if the Weingrow Collection provided the original impetus for the conference, in the end it assumed a life of its own, quite overshadowing the artifacts it was meant to celebrate. It was difficult to get a clear idea of how many people participated in the conference. One administrator connected with Hofstra estimated that altogether there were some six-hundred people registered, including the speakers. Audiences in the sessions I attended ranged from about thirty to hundred people. In any case, in its final form, the conference comprised a stunning agglomerate of papers, presentations, exhibitions, and sundry other events, including, to quote from the “Directors’ Message” that prefaced the program for the conference, “poetry, plays, music, film, a book fair, gala events, dining, dancing and dazzle.”

On the academic side, the conference featured dozens of forums and panels on the requisite avant-garde “isms,” including Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Surrealism, not to mention Modernism, Postmodernism, and Feminism. One could hear William Grange of the Department of Drama at Florida Southern College on “Father-Son Conflict in German Expressionist Drama,” or Erica Doctorow of the Swirbul Library at Adelphi University on “Hannah Höch Photomontage: Images of Women in Weimar Society.” In a panel entitled “Djuna Barnes and Modernism: The Self Inscribed,” Louise A. DeSalvo of the Department of English at Hunter College spoke on “‘To Make her Mutton at Sixteen’: Rape, Incest and Child Abuse in The Antiphon.” Then there were the obligatory sessions on “Women as Artists and Subjects of Art,” on Man Ray, Marcel Du-champ, “The Adventures of the Avant-Garde in Latin America and Spain,” and more— much more: a panel on “Periodicals as Instruments of the Avant-Garde,” for example, and a forum that mooted the question “Is There an Avant-Garde Theater Today?” (I had to miss that session, unfortunately, so I can’t tell you the answer.) All together, there were some sixty papers and talks.

One of my favorite sessions was the panel on “Theories of the Avant-Garde.” John R. Boly, Yale trained, but now on the English faculty at Dartmouth College, presented an elegantly nihilistic deconstructionist meditation on the avant-garde’s cult of novelty. Professor Boly’s paper was deeply, hermetically, obscure, a jewel of the genre, and he himself, demurely dressed in a conservative sportscoat and tie, communicated an air of impervious, if somewhat weary, irony. By contrast, Andrew Ross, who teaches English at Princeton, delivered a fervently engagé paper on “Politically Updating the Avant-Garde.” Predictably, Professor Ross’s contribution was full of talk of “emancipatory mass culture” and loving allusions to Brecht, Benjamin, and “alternative discourses that would be immune to the rationality of everyday trade and exchange.” Professor Ross spoke with a marked cockney accent, and, true to form, was dressed in a punk-inspired costume reminiscent of the East Village. The stylistic differences between the two men—between an academic aesthetic nihilist and a committed academic Marxist—provided a droll contrast.

The keynote speaker of the conference was Anna Balakian.

The keynote speaker of the conference was Anna Balakian, Chairperson of the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. Professor Balakian was introduced by her former student, Barbara Lekatsas, Co-Director of the Hofstra conference and Special Assistant to the Director of Hofstra’s Cultural Center. Dr. Lekatsas, who also, it happens, holds a brown belt in karate, presented Professor Balakian to us as “one of the leading scholars of our century in the field of modernism.” Presumably, this was meant as a rhetorical flourish. For Professor Balakian can by no stretch of the imagination be considered one of the century’s leading scholars of anything. The truth is, she enjoys what we might generously describe as a modest reputation as a scholar of Surrealism. But as the conference proceeded, I began to suspect that, at least at Hofstra, such wild hyperbole was de rigeur. Professor Balakian began her talk, “The Problematics of Modernism,” by confiding that she liked to play the devil’s advocate. In fact, though, her paper offered nothing new or controversial. It merely rehearsed, with stupefying verbosity, the familiar clichés about the self-defeating nature of the avant-garde’s demand for novelty, retailing along the way the usual stories about modernism’s search for the absolute. “The Problematics of Modernism” opened the conference, and I knew then that it was going to be a long three days.

Probably the best-known participant in the conference was Rosalind E. Krauss, co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a prolific and influential writer on modernist art and Professor of Art at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Professor Krauss (who was renamed “Kraus” in the Hofstra literature) delivered a paper on Surrealist photography entitled “Photography’s Exquisite Corpse.” Readers familiar with her work on Surrealism will not be surprised to learn that she discovered in the photography of Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, and others a sustained effort to explode our taken-for-granted assumptions about the way the world is structured, especially as regards gender and sexual identity.

In order to appreciate the force of Professor Krauss’s position, however, one must realize that she likes to pretend that her work has revolutionary epistemological implications. She is particularly fond of acting as if one can somehow abrogate the laws of logic merely by asserting contradictions. This is no doubt one reason why she has been so smitten by the quasi-philosophical argot of post-structuralism, for which the strictures of traditional epistemology are anathema. In Professor Krauss’s writing, we are often told that this or that work of art in effect contravenes the “repressive” laws of identity or non-contradiction. In the present lecture, Surrealism, having been credited with dissolving “the natural in which normalcy can be grounded,” was said to be “at least potentially open” to “dissolving” the fundamental distinctions and categories through which we constitute reality, among which categories Professor Krauss numbers gender. For the Surrealist, she said, “no biologically determined idea of the normal” should operate.

What all this might mean is never really examined, of course; at bottom, like much of Surrealism’s overheated rhetoric, it is the sheerest nonsense. And it certainly has precious little to do with the experience of Surrealist photography as art. But it does have the unquestioned virtue of allowing one to enlist Surrealism in the cause of radical feminism. Because Surrealism attacks our basic “fabrications of the real,” the usual view of Surrealism as anti-feminist is, according to Professor Krauss, “mistaken.” In a way, though, this is not a surprising conclusion. After all, if one can dispense with the law of identity, then it is no great feat to rehabilitate even such notorious male chauvinists as Breton and Man Ray as covert feminists.

Among the supporting events at the conference were an “Avant-Garde Art and Literature Book Fair,” poetry readings (avant-garde poetry, of course: lots of poems about the hazards of nuclear war and so on), and—as the press release put it—two “major” art shows, which included a smorgasbord of minor works by Dali, Chagall, Max Ernst, Duchamp, and other certified “avant-garde” artists. (The mindless use of the term “major” by institutions wishing to publicize their wares has by now rendered it almost as meaningless as the term “avant-garde”— every exhibition, performance, or event is described as “major” nowadays, no matter how insignificant it is.) At the Book Fair, the writer Richard Kostelanetz gave a special address on “Grants, Alternative Publishing and the Avant-Garde.” The Book Fair itself consisted essentially of a few titles from Oxford University Press and a motley assortment of small “avant-garde” publishing houses and presses. “Boss Books,” for example, described itself as emphasizing “provocative materials, experimental in nature or controversial in implication,” whereas “Mixed Breed” publishes mainstream fiction “for tomorrow’s reader.” The “Heresies Collective, Inc.” is “a feminist Art and Politics Publication” and “Yellow Silk: Journal of Erotic Arts” is a quarterly that boasted of being “truly erotic without being pornographic.” I was only surprised not to see any “Avant-Garde Art and Literature” tee shirts for sale, though perhaps they were available at a concession I missed.

I had to marvel at the intuition that led the conference co-directors, Dr. Lekatsas and Pellegrino D’Acierno, Assistant Professor of Italian at Hofstra, to begin their “Directors’ Message”—printed in the conference program—with the headline Ceci n’est pas une conference: “This is not a conference.” The tag, of course, recalls the famous Magritte painting, Ceci n’est pas une pipe. But it was doubly appropriate in a conference devoted to the avant-garde because Magritte’s title has been enshrined by its appearance on the cover of a book by Michel Foucault, a patron saint of post-structuralism and kindred “avant-garde” enthusiasms.

More, or perhaps less, in any case decidedly something other than a mere conference, the proceedings at Hofstra, according to Drs. Lekatsas and D’Acierno, would attempt “to ‘bring into crisis’ the pedagogical with the artistic.” This was not meant to be just another academic conference, but was to be an avant-garde event in its own right. It seemed somehow unsporting, then, when Dr. D’Acierno expressed his concern about finishing a paper on Marinetti that he was due to give in an hour or so: what a perfect opportunity to proceed in the spirit of the avant-garde with a bit of automatic writing, or least automatic speaking! Still, what with the “gala events, dining, dancing and dazzle,” the co-directors were confident enough to write that the conference was “the type of encounter that André Breton and Marcel Duchamp would have enjoyed: a total event. Not a conference, but a feast of ideas and a celebration, something between a variety show and a Platonic symposium.” As it happened, they were quite right about its likeness to a variety show; whether it bore any meaningful resemblance to a Platonic symposium, however, is another matter. If we are to judge by the quality of discourse, then I’m afraid that it had much more in common with Xenophon’s Symposium—which, after all, is little more than a description of a voluble dinner party—than Plato’s, though in truth even that comparison suggests a nobility and refinement quite absent from the events at Hofstra.

This absence of refinement was strikingly evident in the forum on “Avant-Garde Ideology and Practice in the Artist’s Studio.”

This absence of refinement was strikingly evident in the forum on “Avant-Garde Ideology and Practice in the Artist’s Studio,” in which several artists and the poet David Shapiro were to tell us what it was like to be a practicing avant-garde artist. The New York artist Vito Acconci spoke first. His contribution consisted of a narrated slide show of his works from 1969 to the present. Mr. Acconci began his career as a writer, he told us, but turned to art in the late Sixties when he realized that what he had always been primarily interested in was the physical activity of “moving across the page” and the exploration of “real space” that that involved. His first “works” as a visual artist consisted of picking people out arbitrarily and then following them around the real space of the city until they went into an office or private residence. I forget exactly which traditional assumptions about art this was supposed to liberate us from: by this time, two days into the conference, I was languishing in that slough of boredom that I trust will be familiar to anyone who has braved such events.

But I woke up when Mr. Acconci began describing Seed Bed, a work presented at the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo in the early Seventies. Seed Bed consisted of an empty room in which there was placed a platform that sloped up several feet to the back wall, creating a false floor. The piece was “activated” throughout gallery hours, Mr. Acconci explained, when he would secrete himself underneath the platform and attempt to masturbate continuously, broadcasting his moans over loudspeakers to the gallery’s patrons. While Mr. Acconci apparently felt that Seed Bed was an artistic success, he subsequently abandoned such works because he began to sense that they might be too narcissistic and lack social focus. That was, I thought, astute of him.

Previously unacquainted with Mr. Acconci’s work, I listened to his account of Seed Bed and other works with a mixture of bewilderment and incredulity. Naïvely, perhaps, I at first thought he must be kidding. It seemed too much like a vulgar parody of the avant-garde to be true. But then it dawned on me that not only Mr. Acconci’s presentation, but the entire event was just that—a vulgar parody, a caricature of the avant-garde.

In itself, a conference on avant-garde art and literature at Hofstra University would hardly be worth noticing. But the sad truth is that such conferences—some of which, of course, are better than others—have become a staple of academic life. The place of the conference in contemporary academia was brilliantly satirized by the English writer David Lodge in his recent novel, Small World. Mr. Lodge is an accomplished literary critic as well as a novelist, and he has a discerning eye for the vagaries of academic life. “The modern conference,” he writes, “resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self-improvement.” He also notes that today’s conferences have the additional advantage over the pilgrimages of old in that expenses are usually paid or at least heavily subsidized by the participants’ institutions. Conferences thus afford one the opportunity to “eat, drink and make merry . . . every evening; and yet, at the end of it all, return home with an enhanced reputation for seriousness of mind.”

Yet of course not all conferences are equal, and the one with which Small World opens, at a place called Rummidge—modeled conspicuously on the University of Birmingham, where Mr. Lodge teaches—seemed to provide the closest parallel to the affair at Hofstra:

But Mr. Lodge puts his most telling insight into the mouth of his character Morris Zapp. Having just finished giving an analysis of literature in which all interpretation is discounted as more or less subjective projection, Professor Zapp entertains questions from the floor. One character, obviously impatient with Zapp’s post-structuralist rhetoric, asks what the point of discussing his paper is if, according to his own theory, they would not be discussing what he actually said but merely some subjective interpretation. “There is no point,” replies Zapp. “Then what in God’s name is the point of it all?”

Small World offers a devastatingly accurate portrayal of the ethos of the modern academic conference. What it doesn’t dwell upon, however, are the institutional considerations that have helped make such conferences so familiar a fixture at colleges and universities throughout the Free World. For not only do the participants “return home with an enhanced reputation for seriousness of mind”: the sponsoring institutions, too, partake of an enhanced reputation for seriousness, regardless of the intellectual merit of the activity in question. The Hofstra administration obviously knows this well.

Hofstra would seem to have become something of a specialist in giving conferences.

In fact, Hofstra would seem to have become something of a specialist in giving conferences. According to an article announcing the conference in The New York Times, it has sponsored thirty-six of them since 1976. Hofstra’s president, James M. Shuart, is clearly very proud of such activity. In the remarks he delivered to welcome us all to the conference, he provided some edifying statistics about Hofstra’s enormous growth—it now boasts over eleven thousand students and seven hundred faculty members—and revealed that in the last decade alone the university has sponsored conferences on figures as diverse as “Albert Einstein, Fyodor Dostoevski, José Ortega y Gasset, Johann Sebastian Bach . . . and I can go on and on. It’s a wonderful array of topics and subject areas.” What this wonderful array of topics and subject areas had to do with Hofstra’s task of educating its students —most of whom, in truth, will never have heard of Ortega—wasn’t specified. But President Shuart did note that Hofstra had be come “an international scholarly conference center.” The present conference, the largest to date, only confirmed this. And for President Shuart, it also confirmed Hofstra’s keen interest in the arts. Drawing on what he described as the “amazing resource” of the Weingrow Collection, the conference on avant-garde art and literature was said to demonstrate that the arts were “part of the life blood of the university.”

That, I think, is open to question. But there is no question that Hofstra went all out for its conference on avant-garde art and literature. Françoise Gilot, author of Life with Picasso, and herself a professional painter, was named “Honorary Chairperson of the Conference Committee” and was a ubiquitous, totemic presence at the conference. Mme Gilot has apparently had various dealings with Hofstra over the years, and the university was only too willing to exploit her association with Picasso in its attempt to endow the conference with the sheen of “advanced” culture. She also went a long way toward legitimating the conference’s billing as “international,” for, together with one Canadian and one Australian speaker, she apparently made up its entire international contingent.

No doubt Hofstra went to ambitious lengths with its conference on avant-garde art and literature partly because the conference coincided with its fiftieth anniversary in 1985. Hofstra—which is perhaps known to most New Yorkers, through its radio advertisements, as “The College that Teaches Success”—has been anything but shy about publicizing itself in recent years. And what better way to garner public notice in the academic world than by sponsoring an elaborate, three-day conference? The packet of materials distributed to participants in the conference included a “Special Commemorative Advertising Supplement” celebrating Hofstra’s fiftieth anniversary as well as a glossy brochure emblazoned with the slogan, “They say, ‘Quality shows’ and it shows at Hofstra.” The brochure then goes on to retail some revelatory facts about the university—the number of computer terminals and library books and faculty members it has, for example, and, under “Quality of Life,” its proximity to the New York Jets football team.

While Small World probably remains the most incisive literary parallel for the conference at Hofstra, the mixture of pretension and provinciality brought to mind a somewhat more remote literary comparison—I mean Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief. That novel, the reader will recall, tells the story of Seth, the young African emperor who attended Oxford between the wars. His eyes opened, Seth returned to his tiny island empire determined to bring the wonders of modern industrial culture to his still essentially tribal population. Among other things, Seth tries with hilarious but pathetic earnestness to replicate the protocol of a European court, organizing elaborate feasts and ceremonies that never come off as planned. For example, when two English ladies, staunch vegetarians, come crusading against cruelty to animals, Seth provides an imperial banquet to welcome them. Unfortunately, he has mistaken their cause, thinking them proselytizers on behalf of cruelty to animals. The menu is thus addressed to “The English Cruelty to Animals,” and includes several varieties of roasted meats for his guests’ gustatory delectation.

As the novel opens, Seth is embroiled in a fierce civil war against his father, Seyid. The war is not going well for Seth; the enemy is rumored to be at the outskirts of the capital; desertion is rife. He is apprised of the situation, but proclaims grandly,

Seth had the Tank. Hofstra has the Conference. Looking back on the avant-garde conference, I think particularly of what Dr. D’Acierno described to me as the various “nocturnal events” associated with the conference, such as the “SALSA! OYE!” reception and dance that concluded the affair. I had to miss the “nocturnal events,” alas, but the one I most lamented missing, and the one whose description reminded me most of Black Mischief, was the “Gala Avant-Garde Evening” on Friday, November 15, which included “A Surrealist Buffet and Cocktails,” a preview of art exhibitions, a production of Picasso’s absurdist play “Catch Desire by the Tail” by the Ubu Repertory Theater, and a “Gala After-Theater Supper.” The program for the conference explained that the festivity was under the patronage of “H. E. The Ambassador of France and Mrs. Emmanuel de Margerie, The Consul General of France and Mrs. André Gadaud, H. E. The Ambassador to the United Nations and Mrs. Claude de Kemoularia,” and so on. What precisely does this effort at “society” have to do with the study of avant-garde art and literature? Nothing, of course, but together with the rest of the conference it does perhaps succeed in a small way in achieving the directors’ ambition to embody the avant-garde in their conference; the effect, at any rate, can justly be described as surrealistic.

The cover of the program for the conference thanks the National Endowment for the Humanities for funds that have supported Hofstra’s Cultural Center, under whose auspices the conference was run. According to the notice, monies from the NEH have for some time enabled Hofstra “to increase humanities activities on campus for the benefit of the community, students, and faculty.” Presumably, the present conference was such an activity, and one was naturally led to ponder what benefits it might have afforded. It did give the human ities faculty at Hofstra something to do, and perhaps that should be counted a benefit. But that it offered very little to the community seems clear, since one suspects that the population of Hempstead, New York, has no particular interest in the intricacies of avant-garde art and literature, especially as filtered through the obscure jargon of an academic conference. And what it meant to Hofstra’s students was revealed with some poignancy in a forum on “Greek Surrealism,” at which Dr. Lekatsas and the Greek poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke spoke. As the session started, a small group of students filed into the row of seats behind me, joining a handful of their fellows who had arrived early. One of the newcomers asked the woman next to him what the session was about. “Oh, Greek culture, or something, I think,” she said doubtfully, and continued doodling. I hope she wasn’t confusing it with the culture of Periclean Athens.