Lecture: Savage Sight/Constructed Noise: Poetic Adaptations of Painterly Techniques in the French and American Avant-Gardes (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Revised and expanded version of a book talk I gave to the Department of Comparative Literature at The American University in Cairo in 2004.
Although I’ve given lectures in the past on the French and American Avant-Gardes here at AUC, this is the first opportunity I’ve had to discuss my own work on the topic in its completed form. It’s very satisfying, of course, to see years of research, tortured first drafts, and the touchy business of revision finally assume concrete form as a book. But the meticulous and time-consuming demands of the process sometimes make the sense of accomplishment seem more like relief from pain than enjoyment of a pleasure.
Savage Sight/ Constructed Noise: Poetic Adaptations of Painterly Techniques in the French and American Avant-Gardes [fig. 1] admittedly has a longish, pompously academic-sounding title, but one that also has the advantage of consisting of more or less disposable parts: the long descriptive subtitle, while perhaps being the most useful component, is also the most forgettable, leaving the juxtaposition of “Savage Sight/ Constructed Noise” as a conundrum of an analogy. Although the adjectives “savage” and “constructed” suggest an opposition along the lines of nature versus culture, or underdevelopment versus overdevelopment, why, specifically, is sight savage, and when is noise ever constructed? And while sight and noise suggest a sensory pairing of the visual and the auditory, they seem strangely asymmetrical, since sight is both the sense of sight and the object sensed, while noise is only the latter, an object or clamor of objects heard, and not the hearing itself. Furthermore, as a thing produced, noise is perhaps more characteristic of the mouth than the ear. This is a question perhaps too puzzling for me to bother with right now, so I’ll cut it down to simple Savage Sight, a reference to André Breton’s statement that the eye exists in a savage state[1] and just leave it at that.
Perhaps the most gratifying thing about seeing one’s work become a consumer object has to do with the packaging—in this case, a book cover. While Heidi Perov, the designer, may have over-dramatized the word “savage”—visually suggesting a violent swipe across the retina—, she has also deftly organized the verbal components of the title in a way that exemplifies what semiologist Nelson Goodman once said of verbal exemplification per se: that it does what it says, or enacts what it talks about.[2] While a title can talk about poems, it doesn’t usually try to be one, too, yet the organization of the words and the type suggests that at least visually, i.e., in a painterly way, it can, and thus commits a kind of inter-genre impertinence. It performs a cross-border infiltration of the kind my book attempts to analyze with respect to relations between the visual and the verbal in avant-garde practice.
The idea of the book, and perhaps its primary, if modest, claim to originality, was to superimpose, in a kind of nexus of interpretation, three almost classic preoccupations of comparative study: the relation between poetry and painting; the relation between two national literatures, in this case French and American literature; and the relation between the old and the new, in this case as a function of avant-garde practice. However, in each relation, I found I could never fully adhere to the binary terms of the comparisons to be made, and found instead that, with respect to poetry and painting, I sometimes also had to talk about sculpture or mixed media, prose or rhetoric, not to mention poetry’s relation to music. With respect to the French and the Americans, I sometimes had to talk about Rumanian Dadaists and Italian Futurists, or North Americans of Latin American descent, such as William Carlos Williams, or French Surrealists of Martinican or Chilean origin, such as, respectively, the poet Aimé Césaire or the painter Matta (Echaurren), though these latter are only briefly. Therefore, in some respects (but not all), my focus on the three French poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy and Andé Breton, and the two New York poets, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery [fig. 2, Photo, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery],
represents a convenient grouping, that answers to my concern with studying poets who wrote extensively on the visual arts. In this respect, the five I have selected, while not alone among poet-art critics of the Twentieth Century, are more or less unparalleled for sheer output and aesthetic acumen. Each one of them has produced a substantial body of critical and journalistic writing collected in a volume, writing not only on avant-garde art, but on a wide range of other works available to them in museum exhibitions, commercial galleries, private studios or collections. Finally, with respect to the old and the new—well, I was immediately confronted with what art critic Harold Rosenberg has called the “tradition of the new,” in which we discover how the Avant-Garde always simultaneously repeats and outdates itself in an ever-accelerating process, one that continues, nevertheless to identify its chief practitioners with poets and painters who were active during the Nineteen-teens and twenties, even if important precursors, such as Rimbaud, Lautréamont, or the Impressionists, remain fully embedded, indeed buried, in the Nineteenth Century. Thus, the periodization of the new becomes a function, in a sense, of the ontology of the new.
So, for the sake of clarity, I will reverse the order of my three main categories of comparison and begin with some words about the Avant-Garde. Just what is it and what are the conditions that make it possible? Is it a universal or a local phenomenon; hence, is there one pure Avant-Garde with lots of imitators, or many Avant-Gardes, each one singularly adapted to specific historical conditions? And also, is it a thing that essentially ceases once its work is complete and therefore only repeats itself to reinforce (or pathetically commemorate) its original message, or does it continue in some authentic way?
Clearly the Avant-Garde has a European necessity, if not origin, and one that bears comparison to practices both within the academy and without it in the field of production in general. The Avant-Garde is unthinkable except as a symptom of capitalist production and industrialization, hence as a reaction to the institutional persistence of certain modes of aesthetic production—painting, poetry, sculpture and musical composition—modes of aesthetic production that seem artificially constrained by habits of taste and the exigencies of technical mastery. But the challenge represented by the Avant-Garde attitude toward aesthetic production goes beyond questions of mere technique or taste: it is a critique, at least in its earliest, most naïve formulation, of the category of Art itself, a critique made possible by late nineteenth-century Aestheticism and its contention that Art exists solely for itself, or at least for the non-utilitarian production of the Beautiful, and not as an adjunct to any morally instructive purpose or extra-artistic imperative. At the historical moment when Aestheticism emerges, what might otherwise have been a mere reaction to it in terms of taste becomes an institutional critique that logically culminates in a purely anti-aesthetic attitude. Aestheticism responds, in turn, with a process of rigorous self-definition culminating in modern abstract art, which, on the face of it, seems equally anti-aesthetic by virtue of its radical anti-representationalism, or more correctly, its anti-figurative tendency. Since figuration had seemed to constitute the function of artistic representation in the West for millennia, the radical self-definition or abstraction of art becomes a kind of anti-aestheticism in its own right, though largely through public miscomprehension. Hence, the avant-garde artist’s or poet’s production increasingly becomes, or appears to become, Art’s opposite, what theorist Peter Bürger has called a life-praxis (or cultural politics).[3] [Fig. 3, Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde] This praxis, by undermining the institutional basis of art and literature, or at least the basis for artistic and literary representation of the real, initiates their historical disappearance. To the extent that they actually seem to thrive, however, avant-garde art and literature only do so insofar as “anachronistic” institutions [i.e., non-integrated and supposedly parasitic institutions] such as the museum and the academy artificially sustain them.
Ironically, once this critique has fully manifested itself in some form of life praxis—preferably something pro-vocatively self-deconstructing or non-representational —it can only repeat the message of that gesture through a series of technical innovations. Indeed, for Bürger, the only truly avant-garde work of art would seem to be Marcel Duchamp’s
Fountain (1913)
[fig. 4], after which the Avant-Garde, along with the category of Art that it has destroyed, essentially disappears.
[4] (At the abstract end, historians often cite Kazimir Malevich’s
White on White as a Suprematist alternative
[fig. 5, Malevich, White on White)].) The Avant-Garde disappears: and this is what it’s supposed to do from the standpoint of rigorous Marxist theory. It is the end of art, a forerunner to the end of history, something I guess a lot of politically-committed people thought would happen in the Twentieth Century. All subsequent avant-garde art, from this perspective, constitutes a repetition, or variation on that primary critique, and thus becomes another tradition, without the [presumed] authenticity of previous traditions.
Yet avant-garde art and poetry continue to be produced, even sometimes to shock, in high visibility milieus, those durable anachronisms known as the museum and the university, the commercial gallery and the publishing house. Paradoxically, the critique of the category of Art depends as much on the commercial success of and academic respect accorded to individual avant-garde works as that success would seem to depend on the persistence of the institutional critique. Indeed, the Avant-Garde absolutely requires this circularity or ironic inter-discursive topography to maintain its cultural viability. As an anti-aesthetical movement, it finds its most stable domicile in the ivory tower and the private collection where its crypto-aesthetics are decoded. In its anti-establishment or oppositional stance, it almost always proves commercially affirmative. In its emphasis on the worthless, it magically transforms its materials into priceless objects. And in turning against art and toward life-praxis, it ends up aestheticizing the world as a society of the spectacle, or at least of spectacles. Thus, while the discourse of the Avant-Garde demands its disappearance, its practice thrives on the very success it says it doesn’t want. This persistent reappearance is indicative of another interpretation of the Avant-Garde as something tirelessly improvising on the model of fashion or innovating on the model of technology and thus rendering all previous innovations almost immediately obsolete.
Given this situation, technical innovation--that aspect of avant-garde practice that avant-garde discourse often disparages—becomes the path toward cultural survival and variation, something necessary to the Avant-Garde insofar as it presumably addresses itself to the future as well as the present. Technical innovation helps maintain the appearance of perpetual revolution among the arts, albeit a revolution necessitated by the implicit assumption of the obsolescence of any medium or technique that affirms artistic ideals. It is thus in the area of technical innovation that the varieties of avant-gardisme manifest themselves, either synchronically or diachronically. This happens in the form of currents or movements within the larger historical phenomenon (movements such as Futurism, Cubism, Machinism, Unanisme, Simultaneism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Orphism, Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Neo-Plasticism, Situationism, and Art Brut in Europe, or Abstract Expressionism, Beat, Black Mountain, Pop Art, Fluxus, New York Poets, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Earth Art, Neo-Expressionism, Concrete and LANGUAGE poetry in the United States, not to mention innumerable individual modalities of avant-garde practice) [fig. 6, Braque, Man with a Guitar; fig. 7, Miró, The Harlequin’s Carnival]. Each of these movements—whether literary or plastic—deliberately situates itself within a continuum of avant-garde discourses ranging from the subversion or rejection of Art to the abstraction or purification of Art in ways that seem to extend the arguments, respectively, of anti-Aestheticism or aesthetic self-definition.
The preceding list also makes a primary distinction between the European and the American Avant-Gardes, a distinction that illustrates a certain shift away from the European metropolis that were culturally dominant before the Second World War, to American ones like New York in which the sense of an avant-garde tradition had begun to assert itself. For many of the Americans, there was always an ironic attitude toward the bombastic anti-aestheticism and overt politicization that characterized so much of the European Avant-Garde. There was often the feeling that, as second-generation avant-gardists, the role of the Americans was to parody the earlier gestures, sometimes with an anxious sense of lateness, sometimes a cool sense of sophistication, even entitlement, as the inheritors of the “tradition of the new” even if they were sometimes categorized as “late modern.”[5][5]They seemed to think that the anti-art gestures of the “heroic generation” (or “Fathers of Dada” as Frank O’Hara jokingly referred to them)—that these gestures were just that: gestures, empty signs, necessary pretexts that made possible the continued production of critical art in an increasingly uncritical era of mass consumption. Nevertheless, by reusing some of the gestures, recombining and inventing, many in the Amer-ican Avant-Garde would gradually insert themselves, not only into the museum and the academy, but—as Andy Warhol and others did—into the greater enter- tainment or culture industry, one that, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, implements a form of mass distraction and control through the capitalist integ- ration and management of a variety of modes of ex- pression.
[6] [fig. 8, War- hol, Mao II] Perhaps the distinction, then, of the early American Avant-Garde—particularly the New York poets in their heyday—was to confine itself to a limited audience of urban cognoscenti (or “a small contingent of foolhardy warriors” as John Ashbery once called the pre-Sixties Avant-Garde),
[7] cognoscenti for whom a cooler kind of avant-garde idiom was required.
One example of how the American poets self-consciously parodied their European precursors was in the production of art criticism, not only as a way to break down traditional boundaries between the arts, but as a way of re-enacting and thus improving upon a European tendency construed as utterly modern at least since the time of Baudelaire. This French tradition continued with Mallarmé, but perhaps found its fullest expression in the art writings of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who figures prominently in my study. Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob, André Breton and Paul Eluard continued the process, and so the New Yorkers seemed to think it was a good idea for them, too. This art writing was not simply an avocation, but, as I try to show in my book, a proto-poetics,[8] a way of examining avant-garde procedures in another medium in order to speculate on the basis for conducting similar experiments in poetry. So that, in a nutshell, explains at least some of the significance of comparing the French to the American poets: they both sought means of poetic innovation through critically examining and writing on the plastic arts, especially painting.
This brings me to the final and most interesting category of comparative or interdisciplinary study mentioned earlier: the relation between poetry and painting, or verbal and plastic art, in the context of avant-garde innovation. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, there was almost a sense of rivalry between poets and painters to meet the challenge of revolutionizing their respective media and thus assuring their viability in a world of such newer media as film and photography. Yet, it was a contest whose critical relevance depended on extinguishing either or both categories of painting or literature as suggested by the logic of the institutional critique. Whichever one disappeared first was the winner. While neither seems in danger of that today, early twentieth-century French poets experienced persistent anxiety about the possibility that the plastic arts had gotten too far ahead of them for sheer audacity, as demonstrated in the work of Picasso, Braque, Picabia and Duchamp (painters, ironically, who made considerable use of language in their works). [fig. 9, Picasso, Our Future Is in the Air; fig. 10, Picabia, Portrait of an American Girl in the Nude] Literature and poetry’s access to “life-praxis,” or what Apollinaire identified as l’esprit nouveau, required the reinvigoration of the verbal medium on the model of technological revolutions exemplified bysuch inventions as the telephone, the wireless, the automobile, the airplane, and perhaps even—for the Italian Futurists at least—the machine gun. How to make a poem more like an airplane, however, was a puzzle (William Carlos Williams later dictum that a poem is a machine made of words, notwithstanding).[9] But poetry, in the early decades of the last century, had the advantage of having a precocious sister art—painting—whose very medium placed it in vital proximity to the most advanced aspects of material culture at that time. In a vigorously secular age when the aura of the sacred had been reduced to the aura of the art object as Walter Benjamin has shown us,[10] the plastic arts had the significant advantage of being a conspicuously material medium, hence a physical index of the vicissitudes of material production. This was the new plastic virtue, even if what was traditionally sought in plastic media was insulation from those vicissitudes by virtue of the art object’s uniqueness, its institutionalized aura.
OK—what am I getting at here? What I am saying is that avant-garde impulses in poetry partly reflect and partly originate in impulses being acted upon in the visual arts, impulses that drew attention to the material basis of the work [and to the claims of such works to “aura”—claims that avant-garde works rely on for their insertion into the academy but which they also subvert in their use of non-art materials, the detritus of industrial and consumer society]. Hence, there is both an iconic and an indexical relation (i.e., both a structural and a causal relation) between the two kinds of production. These relations are distinctively modern, quintessentially different from the kinds of associations between the arts that the Western tradition consistently nourished until the latter half of the Nineteenth Century. Correspondences between poetry and painting have been theorized since antiquity, the most famous being Horace’s phrase “ut pictura poesis” (poetry is like painting) and a close second from Simonides the Greek, who described poetry as a talking picture. Many such comparisons assume a balance between the practices, if with a rigorous line of demarcation between them. Yet while each art was bound within certain limits, they could all be enhanced insofar as they paralleled or even imitated each other. Relations between the arts had always been idealized as a kind of harmonic interaction, a mutual accommodation that was exemplified in the theater or in the Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk. By the mid-Nineteenth Century, even the poet Baudelaire—taking his cue from Eugène Delacroix—was critically elaborating on parallel systems of tones and hues revealing correspondences but also an ineradicable separation between the domains of the visual and the auditory, the latter of which encompassed qualities of music as well as poetry. Thus, the literary and visual arts could be coordinated but not fused; they could interact but not interfere in each other’s aesthetic spheres of influence, though music and lyricism obviously could.
This division had already been profoundly reinforced by the aesthetic philosophy of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who, following Kant’s important distinction between the intuitions of space and time, established a hierarchy between literature and art in his treatise Laocoön. In that treatise the visual arts, which occupy space, are necessarily more sensuous, hence feminine, than the literary arts, which reveal their forms through time, and hence are more intellectual and masculine according to Lessing’s patriarchal system.[11] These hierarchical dualities persisted well until the late Nineteenth Century and help explain many of the assumptions behind the aesthetics of Baudelaire, Delacroix and even Walter Pater in his dictum that all the arts aspire to the condition of music.
The cultural situation of the early Twentieth Century changed all that. The Avant-Garde undertook a deliberately provocative intervention between the two media, intruding upon the traditional domains of each art—borrowing, appropriating, expropriating from one or the other in ways that resulted in dissonance, shock, or confusion for the reader/viewer—a kind of calculated chaos, or what Rimbaud anticipated as “un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.”[12] Hierarchies of thought were coming down and the transcendence associated with certain arts—especially music—seemed suspiciously evocative of the an obsolete sacred. The work of art, formerly exemplifying notions of unity/ coherence/ perfection (Meyer Schapiro)[13] was now subject to the interventions of chance and other disorienting, dehumanizing, and defamiliarizing processes. The balance or unity of the art work or poem was now—from the avant-gardist stance—subject to interference from the other arts in a way that was analogous to how all arts and letters were subject to interference from life categories: society, politics, the world. Now the arts, including poetry, aspired to the condition, as it were, of mere matter--even if certain poets still discussed such matter as being ennobled or redeemed by art.
But what was poetry’s “matter”? A system of signs, articulated sounds corresponding to referents and meanings? While such linguistic-based forms functioned perfectly well in the world system of production and consumption by virtue of their linkage with the print medium and, in this way, with mechanical reproduction, their basis as a sign system seemed to require a more material grounding, something to focus attention on the literary work as a material entity, a physical artifact. They wanted to give it a kind of “conspicuous construction” that would be immediately apparent to the attentive ear in the way that recent innovations in the plastic arts were immediately apparent to the eye. As I’ve already said, the eye exists in a savage state, and thus perceives at the speed of light. This is why the graphic basis of poetry became so conspicuous in the early Twentieth Century for certain poets coming to grips with the implications of modernization. It also explains why so much avant-garde poetry of that time resists oral performance and requires visual reception. Indeed, some oral performances were deliberately cacophonous, such as those at the Cabaret Voltaire of the Zurich Dadaists, in which poems were read simultaneously to dissociate sound from sense completely, if also for the pleasure of making noise.
Apollinaire, taking cues from Picasso, Braque, the Futurists, and Robert Delaunay, pushed hardest to deregulate all the senses through the creation of a new genre that fused the resources of verbal and visual expression. He achieved this first by introducing fragmented, randomly-associated, non-literary verbal and visual elements into his poems in ways intended to show up their strangeness, their discontinuity: such elements as overheard conversations, slang expressions, newspaper headlines, and snatches of advertising copy. Sometimes print and typographic features would be emphasized. All of these procedures were influenced by cubist experiments with collage such as Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) [fig. 11, Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning] in which he glued a cheap, industrially-produced wallpaper with a chair-caning pattern, an ovoid-shaped canvas with some hemp rope around it to suggest a seat—though never intended to be sat on. Apollinaire had written about such experiments in his art reviews, saying: “Picasso sometimes abandoned customary paints in order to compose three dimensional pictures of cardboard or collages; in these instances, he was obeying a plastic inspiration, and these strange, rough, and disparate materials became ennobled because the artist endowed them with his own strong and sensitive personality.”[14]
In a more futurist vein, Apollinaire strove to achieve a simultaneity of modern effects by creating a new genre called the calligram, which combines verbal and visual elements and subjects conventional, linear reading patterns to visual ones, often resulting in a kind of verbal chaos for readers who might be unwilling to respond to both visual and verbal cues in a supposedly literary medium. Even today, in our visually- oriented techno-culture, a calligram such as Apollinaire’s “Lettre-Océan” can cause consternation. [fig. 12, 13, Apollinaire, “Lettre-Océan”] After scrutinizing the work—its narrative elements at the top (including a collaged-in letter from the poet’s brother in Mexico), its floating sentence fragments and onomatopoeic phonemes that circle around two central reference points, one of which says “Sur la rive gauche devant le pont d’Iéna” and the other, “Hautes de 300 mêtres” to identify the Eiffel Tower—after scrutinizing
By contrast, the poetry of Pierre Reverdy illustrates a compromise between such visual interventions and the former autonomy of poetry by emphasizing the graphic basis of poetry in print. Reverdy’s poetry has often been described as cubist in its emphasis on the graphic basis of his medium, his use of broken phrases and ambiguous shifters to suggest multiplicities of perspective, and the delicate cantilevering of verbal structures to create an effect of physical precariousness. But Reverdy’s work represents a cautiously conservative path of the Avant-Garde. For poetry and painting to have any integrity in Reverdy’s view, their autonomy against life, as it were, had to be jealously safeguarded. A position staunchly opposed to that of Apollinaire and others. For all his associations with Cubism, Reverdy stressed the idea that poetry and painting must parallel or evoke each other, not impose on their respective, autonomous spheres. In this way, his poetics, vis-à-vis the verbal and visual, duplicate the structure of his famous definition of the image, which he described as the bringing together of distant realities; the more distant these elements are, the more successful the image will be.[15] Thus, it is possible to say that Reverdy’s avant-gardisme verges on abstraction or purity and thus a kind of high modernity akin to that of the early Ezra Pound, whose famous pseudo-haiku “In a Station of the Metro” seems to illustrate Reverdy’s definition of the image. Distance, separation, distinction are integral to the combined effect of both arts as modern aesthetic practices.
The third French poet in my pentarchy of poet-art critics, is André Breton, the so-called pope of Surrealism, who made use of Reverdy’s definition of the image to describe the Surrealist image, but differed strongly with him by privileging the role of chance, accident, and speed, in the production of those images. What for Reverdy was a controlled process could be achieved by free association for Breton, who was the inaugurator, along with Philippe Soupault, of automatic writing as an avant-garde technique. The illogicalities, absurdities, anti-climaxes and general oneiric quality of the succession of poetic images thus attained would be the signs for Breton of a poetic that had converged with life itself and the promptings of the unconscious. But although this would seem to constitute a technique in itself, Breton was deeply suspicious of any technique that required virtuosity or polish. Apollinaire’s calligrammatic fusions of poetry and painting provoked Breton and he dismissed the avant-garde value of such experiments as calculated, synthetic and technically ambitious. Strangely, for those who identify Surrealism primarily as an art movement, Breton was equally suspicious of the plastic arts and for the same reason. All plastic expression in his view required a modicum of technical mastery that invalidated the painter’s claims to spontaneous, uncontrolled expression. Automatism was available to writers but not to painters. At the same time, he was fascinated by the works of such artists as Max Ernst, André Masson, and Joan Miró, not to mention Picasso and, for a while, Salvador Dalí. It becomes clear from his extensive writings on art that Breton finally accepted painting as a surrealist medium only as an expedience. He managed this by theoretically justifying painterly virtuosity as a necessary means of capturing or reproducing what he called the interior model, a kind of eidetic image or “non-objective correlative,” to invert Eliot’s phrase, that corresponded to and affirmed unconscious impulses and desires. Some kinds of painting won his unequivocal acceptance since they posed no technical problem for him, as in the automatic drawings and paintings of Masson and Miró [fig. 14, Miró, La Courtisane], works that anticipate strategies utilized by the New York painters Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline and others in the Forties and Fifties. [fig. 15, Pollock, Autumn Rhythmnd; fig. 16, De Kooning, Woman I]
The essential divide between Breton’s conception of poetry and art as uncontrolled expression that would automatically yield the marvelous, and that of Apollinaire and Reverdy who emphasized technical strategies of either a synthesis or a purification of the verbal medium, would be duplicated to some extent in the distinct poetic attitudes of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, whose competing “poetics of attention” (O’Hara) and ironic stagings of the self through “self-abnegating” techniques (John Ashbery)[16] reveal a continuing tension between spontaneous and mediated expression. Yet for both poets the sense of engineering
a staged revolution of forms is acute. O’Hara, who was an associate curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, greatly admired the heroic automatism that Pollock energetically enacted “on the scale of the body” as O’Hara has written.[17] When he wrote this, he was referring to how the painter immersed himself in the “action” of his drip method. But O’Hara himself seems able to summon up the same resources mostly only in interpersonal contexts in which the scale of the body becomes a figure of social relations limited by the demands of his schedule—the lunch break, the party, the inter-office memo, the quick urban jaunt, the weekend at Fire Island. Poetry is a party for O’Hara, and the Avant-Garde is good because it’s fun. For this reason, the painting of Larry Rivers, much of whose oeuvre is a series of hilarious parodies of Old Masters, seems to have inspired O’Hara’s poetics more thoroughly than Pollock’s. As in Rivers’ paintings in which traces of the recognizable dissolve into painterly abstraction [fig. 17, Rivers, The Greatest Homosexual], O’Hara’s semi-sonnets, broken odes, fractured lays and ironic epithalamia often collapse into deliberately private discourses, obscurities, in-joking, trivia and scatology as if to reveal a language in the process of putrefaction that is sometimes comparable to the glossalalia of Antonin Artaud writing in an asylum: “oops! And no nail polish, yak/ yak, yak, Lieut./ no flesh to taste no flash to tusk/ no flood to flee no fleed do dlown flom ther iceth loot…”[18]
John Ashbery wrote art criticism not only in New York but in Paris where he composed his most radically avant-garde poems collected in a book called The Tennis Court Oath (1962). The collection includes a poem entitled “Europe” which annoyed critic Harold Bloom so much he declared it a work of “calculated incoherence.”[19] Indeed, it was—a sustained series of fractured texts under erasure or grafted together to create a monumental assemblage poem of one hundred and eleven parts, many of them cut from a girls’ adventure story, a kind of found object Ashbery picked up in a Parisian bookstall along the Seine. It’s an incomprehensible work, unless one takes account of the plastic strategies of assembly utilized throughout. One gradually discovers that the poem is a catalogue of plastic interventions upon a textual field, the text has become lost and found material, trash literature, erased messages, shredded news, waste paper, failed calligrams. In one of the lines
of the poem someone announces: “He had mistaken his book for garage.” Some of the sections have a surrealist aura of mystery about them until one realizes the literary effect has been created simply by whiting out most of the words from a page of advertising copy. Other sections are made up of words that accidentally formed the left margin of a missing prose text, while some sections consist of two or three words that yield nothing at all to interpretation. It is as if Ashbery were alternating artist Robert Rauschenberg’s painterly strategies of assemblage and erasure, strategies he knew about from such works as his famous Monogram and Erased De Kooning. [figs. 18, Rauschenberg, Monogram]
Later poems such as Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror completely draw away from these strategies, taking a more discursive and ekphrastic approach to the plastic arts, i.e., through sustained speculative examination of the representational implications, limitations, and excesses of self-portraiture and self-expression. But at the same time, the discourse of the work delves deeply into the calculated poetic processes of inclusion and exclusion (or, “the leaving out business” as Ashbery calls it). Thus Ashbery, while no longer resorting to such plastic strategies as the found object or the cut-up, is now discussing classic artworks such as Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a way that continues to highlight avant-garde concerns, treating the works as occasions for long discursive poems on the nature of representation and the distortions involved in all such representation. In essence, while his later poetry has become more ekphrastic in its approach to the arts, there is often a potential for avant-gardist inquiries to erupt suddenly, to accuse and discompose the work, as when he addresses Parmigianino: “I see in this only the chaos/ Of your round mirror which organizes everything/ Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty,/ Know nothing, dream but reveal nothing.”[20] [fig. 19, Jasper Johns, Three Flags; Fig. 20, Parmigianino, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror] In this way, Ashbery intermittently situates his work in what he has calls “the other tradition”—only he manages to do it at the margins, in a way that could be said to constitute an “other,” other tradition.
And this, to conclude, is what the New York poets finally made of avant-garde inter-artistic experiment: a specialized archive of anti-discursive practices, a closet of disconcerting mechanisms made up of words and things both, all at the ready and poised to self-destruct or even destroy. In his long prose-poem “The New Spirit,” which seems to be about the lateness of the Avant-Garde while invoking Apollinaire’s “l’esprit nouveau,” Ashbery describes the fate of avant-garde techniques and inter-artistic syntheses when he describes a dismantled juggernaut: “How harmless and even helpful the painted wooden components of the Juggernaut look scattered around the yard, patiently waiting to be reassembled! … the concave being, enfolding like air or spirit, does not dissolve when breathed upon but comes apart neatly, like a watch, and the parts may be stocked or stored, their potential does not leak away through inactivity but remains bright and firm, so that in a sense it is just as much there as if it were put back together again and even more so: with everything sorted and labeled you can keep an eye on it a lot better than if it were again free to assume protean shapes and senses, the genie once more let out of the bottle, and who can say where all these vacant premises should end?”[21] Ashbery, like many other postmodernists his work historically aligns with, seems here to have packed the Avant-Garde away for future use and with it its various techniques of inter-artistic appropriation. But who can say if its threatened dangers will ever be resurrected to perform a more perfect dismantling of a whole arsenal of forms fabricated by history?
[1] André Breton. “Le Surréalisme et la peinture” in Le Surréalisme et la peinture. Éditions Gallimard, 1965: 1.
[2] Nelson Goodman. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1976: 50-57.
[3] Peter Bürger. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Michael Shaw, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986: 34.
[5] As Edward Lucie-Smith refers to modern art since 1945 in his book, Late Modern: The Visual Arts since 1945. Thames and Hudson, 1975 (reprint 1980).
[6] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment. John Cumming, trans. Continuum, 1995: 120-167.
[7] John Ashbery. “The Invisible Avant-Garde” in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987. Alfred A. Knopf, 1989: 389-395.
[8] David L. Sweet. Savage Sight/Constructed Noise. University of North Carolina Press, 2003: 24.
[9] W. C. Williams. “Author’s Introduction to The Wedge (1944)” in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams. Random House, 1954: 256.
[10] Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Harry Zohn, trans. Schocken Books, 1969: 217-251.
[11] W. J. T. Mitchell. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. University of Chicago, 1986: 109-111.
[12] Arthur Rimbaud. “To Paul Demeny. Charleville 15 mai 1871” in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters. Walter Fowlie, trans. University of Chicago, 1966: 304-306.
[13] Schapiro, Meyer. “The Nature of Abstract Art” in Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Selected Papers. New York: George Braziller, 1978: 185-211.
[14] Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902-1918. Leroy Breunig, ed; Susan Suleiman, trans. Viking, 1972: 269.
[15] Pierre Reverdy, “L’Image” in Nord Sud, Self-Defence [sic] et autres écrits sur les arts et la poésie (1917-1926). Flammarion, 1975: 73.
[16] John Ashbery, “Yves Tanguy” in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987. Alfred A. Knopf, 1989: 26.
[17] Frank O’Hara, “Jackson Pollock” in Art Chronicles: 1954-1966. George Braziller, Maureen Granville-Smith, 1975: 34-35.
[18] Frank O’Hara, “Biotherm” in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Donald Allen, ed. Berkeley: University of California, 1995: 438.
[19] Harold Bloom, “The Charity of the Hard Moments” in John Ashbery. New York: Chelsea House, 1985: 53.
[20] John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Viking, 1975: 191.
[21] John Ashbery, Three Poems. Viking/Penguin, 1986: 20.
