Examining Martin Crimp’s Political Aesthetic in The Country and The City

Abstract

This article compares Martin Crimp’s portrayal of the artist in The Country (2000) and The City (2008) to contextualize his oeuvre within late capitalism, suggesting that Crimp moves from a predominantly social critique of art as a transmitter of ruling-class ideology to a more nuanced exploration of the challenge of producing art that is not governed by dehumanizing laws of exchange. In The Country, Crimp uses pastoral imagery and the characterization of Corinne, the romantic protagonist, to espouse a social critique of art by showing how it has propped up a fundamentally conservative set of ideals and thus has preserved the status quo. The City, on the other hand, takes up an artistic critique of capitalism through metatheatre to reveal the ways in which human creativity and freedom are restrained by the logic of the market. By considering the role of the artist in these two plays, I argue that Crimp’s political aesthetic seeks to disrupt the exchange value of art and foreground the human impulse toward creativity.