Robert Wilson, in The Black Rider, co-opts tropes of historical popular entertainment to produce a piece of theater that exploits the collapse of the boundary between high and low culture by focusing on the tension between avant-garde art and popular theater. Rather than being directly oppositional to anything, the piece is postmodern in that it "operates in a field of tension between tradition and innovation, conservation and renewal, mass culture and high art..." (Huyssen, 216)

As The Black Rider visually references vaudeville, German expressionist film, American musical theater, and other entertainment media, it performs the function of what Jameson defines as pastiche, namely “blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor” (114).  Here I don't take Jameson to mean that pastiche is parody that has become unfunny, rather that pastiche is parody that has literally lost its sense of humor. Watching the show, the audience is not always sure whether or not the show is meaning to be funny. Quoting styles without explaining why, without winking at the audience to let them in on the joke/non-joke, produces a kind of unease (or easy dismissal) that typifies the postmodern subject’s position.  The audience isn’t given directions about how to watch, or what to expect.

The high/low conflation is exemplified by the opening sequence of the show.  There, on the bare stage, sits a large black box which metaphorically could be read as a coffin, but more explicitly quotes the entire minimalist art historical narrative (not only the originary sculptures from the Primary Structures show, but the fluorescents of Dan Flavin in its backlighting).  Alone onstage the box takes on an almost mythic quality, as though the last forty art-historical years had been essentialized and displayed.  Then the music starts, and over a goofball repeating musical phrase, the entire cast parades out of this minimalist monument, turning it into a clown car for the deceased, not only bringing circus into high-brow avant-garde theater, but also making theater into minimalist sculpture.  By extension, the show influences the way The Black Rider’s audience will look at minimalist sculpture.

Robert Wilson may not have intended for The Black Rider to do exactly what I’m saying The Black Rider does, but The Black Rider also doesn’t care.  In a way, the show is lightly making fun of Wilson’s audience for expecting glacial, inscrutable, not-funny, six hour long theater.  In its most recent revival, The Black Rider subverts audience expectations by exploring tensions between avant-garde and popular modes of theater. Whatever the audience expected, chances are no one expected, in the (approximate) words of Brad Rothbart, “a vampire goth vaudeville klezmer musical variety show.”

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