(1933)
An American from Boston with an advanced degree in literature, she became a European artist renowned for pictures with images and handwritten words, usually in English (which became the ART WORLD’s lingua franca after 1960), sometimes elegantly phrased, often about a female body, usually hers with uniquely stylized genitals, sometimes remembering her own ecstatic experiences with men. Extending this theme, thanks to superior European support of innovative American-German artists, Iannone has produced video and audio, in addition to distinguished BOOK ART, that looks and feels distinctly hers. In more ways than one, Iannone benefitted from residing mostly in BERLIN after invited there in 1976 as a guest of the DAAD KUNSTLERPROGRAMM.
This is the closest semblance of a country as a work of unique art, much as LAS VEGAS is a unique city; but if the latter’s originality was man-(corporation-)made, Iceland is a natural rock promontory in the upper north Atlantic. Its gray barren terrain is uniquely beautiful; as are its sky and natural ice sculptures, all changing with the seasons and visibly different in winter from summer, though always awesome. Because of underground “geothermal” heat, complimented by the Gulf Stream, land so close to the Arctic Circle is surprisingly temperate the year-round; its ocean air bracingly fresh and its ground warm. As nearly every town has a swimming pool with welcoming warm water, some additionally have outdoor hot tubs, often in groups with different temperatures. Such physical amenities represent, at least to me, a highly civilized society. So culturally classy are Icelanders that a population of only a few hundred thousand, the size of a small America city, supports a world-class symphony orchestra, more than one newspaper, book publishers, printings plants, all in a palpably mellow society. No place elsewhere looks and feels like this art work that no human beings could have made, even with unlimited funds.
Any artist or work promoted with details about the author/artist’s putatively special background is ipso facto revealing her/him/itself as inferior. Probably not genuinely avant-garde either. The truth is, fads notwithstanding, that neither identity nor biography make art excellent or formally innovative; nor, say, does one or another old school tie or (un)fashionable personal experience, though any of these tags may be waved to attract some audience(s) that might otherwise ignore certain favored work.
Similarly, allusions to whatever “theory” or “school” is currently familiar, if not fashionable, serve the same advertising inflation of what might otherwise go unnoticed. As in engaging any other competitive marketplace plagued by hype, caveat emptor.
(21 April 1894–25 December 1975; b. Ilia Mikhailovich Zdanevich)
One of the most radical of Russian CUBO -F UTURISTS, lliazd grew up in Tiflis on the Caucasus, the son of a professor of French, and by 1911, while still a teenager, became an active proponent of ITALIAN F UTURISM. While studying law in St. Petersburg, he became especially close to the painters Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964), Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962), and Mikhail Le-Dantiu (1891–1917) and wrote the first monograph on Larionov and Goncharova in 1913 under the pseudonym Eli Eganbuh. He developed the theory of “Everythingism,” an early manifestation of postmodernism, which declared “all forms of art past and present, here and elsewhere, are contemporary for us” –thus an artist was free to use them as desired. Beginning in 1913, he composed a series of five oneact “dras” called “Dunkeeness” that use ZAUM (transrational language) as an important ingredient. The action of these plays is satirical-absurdist, in the style of ALEKSEI K RUCHONYKH’s VICTORY OVER THE SUN (1913) and ALFRED J ARRY’s Ubu Roi (1896). They feature a donkey as a character, either explicitly or metaphorically. Themes range from political power to the role of free artistic creativity. In contrast to other Russian poets who used Zaum, lliazd adopted phonetic spelling to facilitate correct pronunciation of his invented words. He arranged them in quasi-musical ensembles, such as duets, trios, and choruses of increasing complexity, concluding the fifth dra, Le-Dantiu as a Beacon (Paris, 1923), with an ensemble of eleven separate simultaneous voice lines. Collectively, lliazd’s dras constitute the largest work of Zaum yet composed. For Le-Dantiu alone, he coined over 1,600 new words. As lliazd was also an expert typographer, these works, Le-Dantiu in particular, are also noteworthy for their visual elaborateness.
Instead of pursuing a law career in St. Petersburg, lliazd in 1917 returned to Tiflis where, with Kruchonykh and Igor Terentyev (1892–1937), he formed the group 41° and created the Fantastic Little Inn cabaret, which became a focal point for Futurist- and Dada-style evenings and lectures. The first four dras were performed in Tiflis and lliazd’s typographical creativity was applied to publishing his own works and those of his colleagues, the most spectacular being his 1919 anthology dedicated to the local actress Sofia Melnikova.
In 1921, lliazd moved to Paris and for several years led the Russian avant-garde there, giving lectures publicizing the achievements of the RUSSIAN F UTURISTS and allying with the Paris Dadaists. He organized the famous “Coeur à barbe,” a ball at which the split between Dada and SURREALISM erupted. Thereafter he led a quieter life, writing several innovative novels, only one of which was published during his lifetime, and cycles of poems that were formally conservative, if unusual in content and style. He devoted the later part of his life to the creation of elegantly designed limited editions of rare literary works with original illustrations by artists such as PABLO P ICASSO, MAX ERNST, and Joan Miró (1893–1983).
—Gerald Janecek
(1970)
This registered pseudo-acronym, written entirely in capitals, means “Maximum Image” offered by a projection technology that the Canadian Graeme Ferguson (1929) developed in the wake of the brilliantly successful multiscreen films shown at EXPO 67 in Montreal. Using special cameras (and thus special projectors as well), a 70-mm film runs sideways through the camera, so that the equivalent space of three frames is shot at once. Producing a negative image several times the size of the standard 35-mm frame, such footage offers far finer detail on large screens than the prior expanded projection techniques of CINERAMA and CINEMA -S COPE. In specially installed theaters around the world, IMAX films are customarily screened with six-channel sound. The paradox is that, in this age of ever smaller public motion picture theaters, certain developments exploit the possibilities of bigger screens. OMNIMAX is a derivative technology for smaller spaces, with a wide, deeply dished, concave, almost spherical screen. The IMAX company also developed three-dimensional film projection more popular than the cumbersome system briefly popular in the 1950s, and IMAX HD, which doubles the speed at which its film passes through the camera.
(1874)
The innovations introduced by Impressionist techniques are as significant in the negation of old formulas as in the affirmation of the novelties. They may be summarized in the following categories:
—Nicolas Slonimsky
(1918)
Since electronic instruments are capable of generating any frequency, it is possible to reproduce sounds below and above the audible range. The first work for infra-sonic and ultrasonic wavelengths was the inaudible symphony entitled Symphonie Humaine by the French composer Michel Magne, conducted by him in Paris on 26 May 1955. Its movements were entitled Epileptic Dance, Thanatological Berceuse, and Interior View of an Assassin. The inaudible version was unheard first, followed by a hearing of an audible transcription. The mystical Russian composer Nicolas ObouhovNikolai Obukhov devised in 1918 an inaudible instrument which he named Ether, theoretically capable of producing infrasonic and ultrasonic sounds ranging from five octaves below the lowest audible tone to five octaves above the highest audible tone. But Obouhov’s instrument was never constructed. Avant-garde composers working in mixed media often compose visual music, which can be seen but not heard. A poetic example is the act of releasing a jar full of butterflies “composed” by LA MONTE Y OUNG. Imagination plays a crucial part in the appreciation of inaudible music. An interviewer on a broadcast of the British Broadcasting Corporation was sent a defective copy of John and Yoko’s Wedding Album in which two sides were blank except for an engineer’s line-up tone. The broadcaster gave it a warmly favorable review, noting that the pitches differed only by microtones, and that “this oscillation produces an almost subliminal uneven beat which maintains interest on a more basic level,” and further observing that the listener could improvise an Indian raga, plainsong, or Gaelic mouth music against the drone. John and his Japanese bride Yoko sent him a congratulatory telegram, announcing their intention to release the blank sides for their next album. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”
—Nicolas
(forever)
Always with us, alas, incomprehensible writing about culture and the arts became more frequent, if not more acceptable, in the wake of intellectual invasions from France, beginning in the 1970s, continuing into the 1980s and perhaps later. Examples became so plentiful, not only in books but pretentious magazines, that I fear singling out examples, because readers might think I picked one or another whopper out of revenge or personal distaste.
The theme of incomprehensible critical prose is pride in privilege, no matter what its writer is trying or pretending to say (including her or his exposure of privilege in others); its implicit purpose is demonstrating that its author can brazenly write (or talk) as you and I can’t, for fear we might be criticized, demoted, dismissed, or simply ignored. Incomprehensible authors customarily benefit from belonging (or aspiring) to one or another exclusive social class, to which compensatory intellectual privileges are extended –whether female, hued, or third-world-born (or, ideally, at least two of the three, if not a triple play) –the recital of which can be turned into a shield against obvious criticism.
Rest assured, dear reader, that the following excerpts come from people I don’t know and, in truth, would rather not know, thinking, as I do, that incomprehensible prose is a symptom of more serious intellectual and moral defects.
If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate efforts to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.
(In this context, a book titled Locations of Culture [1994], Homi Bhabha’s final phrase packs a particularly mighty fluff punch.)
Consider this about the German-American Dada baroness ELSA VAN FREYTAG -L ORINGHOVEN, who reportedly made a plaster cast of a penis (since lost), and the French American MARCEL D UCHAMP:
It was imperative that the New Woman, per Pica-bia, be contained within the anxiety-reducing mechanomorphic forms of the facetious machine image, not parading freely through the streets wielding a penis clearly disattached from its conventional role as guarantor of male privilege. The baroness’ per-formative (rather than biological) penis, along with Marcel’s erotically invested gargonne-esque eros/rose-as-commodity, were the ultimate weapons against the bourgeois norms that Dada in general is thought of as radically antagonizing.
I also suspect that anyone who reads widely has his or her favorite bête-noirs perhaps mounted on walls that accept darts.
Incidentally, the best antidote for such contagiously bad medicine is reading or rereading GEORGE ORWELL’s concise and classic Politics and the English Language” (1946), whose clearly expressed insights into peculiar language are more prophetically true than he could have foreseen.
(c. 1954)
Incidentally the title of JOHN C AGE’s first solo record (1957), this term refers to music composed with the assistance of chance operations –such as throwing dice in order to make decisions, observing the imperfections in paper to discover notes on staves, or using random tables –and to musical instructions likely to produce radically unpredictable results. In the latter case, the composer may provide only generalized directions; or collections of notes that may be played in any order, at any speed, in any combination, etc.; or allow for a surprise that, if observed, will necessarily redirect the performance. Indeterminate performance differs from improvisation in providing ground rules that will prevent its performers from seeking familiar solutions.
Indeterminacy differs as well from ALEATORY MUSIC, which was an alternative popularized by PIERRE B OULEZ in the 1960s, with compromises typical of him, purportedly to represent a saner avant-garde. In my experience, indeterminacy, aka “chance,” functioned as a divisive issue in talking, say, about John Cage’s music until the late 1970s, when everyone both opposed and predisposed realized that the issue wasn’t as important as it once seemed.
(13 September 1928–19 May 2018; b. R. Clarke)
Initially classified among the POP artists, Indiana is actually a word painter, at his best among the best of its kind, which is to say that the innovation of his strongest paintings comes from making them mostly, if not exclusively, of language. Using bold letters and sometimes numerals, rendered in the clean-edge tradition of American commercial sign painting, Indiana exposed very short Americanisms to art, or vice versa, establishing himself as a master of color, shape, and craftsman-ship (though repetitiously favoring Roman letters and numerals within circles, as well as circles within circles) well before JENNY H OLZER, among others. Indiana’s single most famous work, Love (1966), depends upon tilting the letter O, which in this heavy Roman style evokes the sexuality embodied in its shape, and then upon the fact that all four letters are literally touching each of their adjacent letters. One version is a painting, since reproduced on a USA postage stamp, with the red, blue, and green so even in value that the foreground does not protrude from the background. Four of these LOVE shapes, each 5 by 5 feet, were grouped into a magisterial LoveWall (1966), 10 feet by 10 feet of rearrangeable panels, each deployed perpendicularly to its companions, all of which can be rotated so that different common letters meet at the center of the field. My favorite numerical Indiana is Cardinal Numbers, an extended vertical progression from zero to nine that was displayed at EXPO 67. I rank Indiana’s design for the basketball court at the Milwaukee Mecca (1977, since destroyed) as the best floor done by an American artist in recent memory.
(1990)
Another taxonomical poetic term of mine, this one has to do with poetry in which what is done inside words becomes significant. I divide the class into the following four subclasses: (1) fissional poetry (e.g., RICHARD K OSTELANETZ’s “TheRapist”); fusional poetry (e.g., GEOF H UTH’s “shadowl”); microherent poetry (e.g., Michael Basinski’s “cedkwmeyme”); and alphaconceptual poetry (e.g., ARAM S AROYAN’s “lighght,” which exploits the concept of silent letters). The intentional misspelling of words for poetic effect probably began with LEWIS C ARROLL’s portmanteau words in the latter part of the 19th century, though he was probably aiming more for comedy than poetry (e.g., “slithy toves” to suggest slimy/slippery/lithe toads/cloves/coves/groves). The first genuine genius of the art was JAMES J OYCE, particularly in F INNEGANS W AKE (1939) where he used such coinages as “cropse,” “trwth,” “pftjschute,” and “sylble.” Some twenty years later Aram Saroyan took the simple-seeming but crucial step of making poems, one to a page, of single infraverbally enhanced words, like his famous “lighght” and “blod.” Since then, many have followed his example, among them Kostelanetz (an inventor of such bilingual pwoermds as the “Spanglish” “dmionneeryo,” in which the fusion of “money” and “dinero” glistens with appropriate connotations), KARL K EMPTON and Huth–Huth, among several, expanding to longer lyrics in which infraverbalisms are embedded naturally, as simply one kind of the many devices available for use, as it was for Joyce, albeit in prose rather than lyric poetry.
—Bob Grumman
(c. 1980)
The term “installation” has come to identify art made for a particular space, which need not be a gallery. Such art theoretically exploits certain qualities of that space that the work of art will inhabit forever or will be destroyed when the exhibition is terminated. The category arose in the 1980s as an open and yet debased term for what had previously been called “site-specific art,” as exemplified by the sculptors Nancy Holt (1938) and Mary Miss (1944), among others. Examples include WALTER DE M ARIA’s Earth Room (1968), which, in its third incarnation (or installation), has been permanently on display in SOHO since the late 1970s. One theme of a major retrospective of Installation Art, Blurring the Boundaries (1997, San Diego) is that many of the best received support from the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS when it was last supportive of avant-garde art. Both installations and site-specific art differ from an E NVIRONMENT, which is an artistically enhanced circumscribed space.
(1997)
After 1970 or so, certain American advanced universities developed semi-autonomous tech-art entities called variously Lab or Institute to serve not only their faculty and students but also unaffiliated artists in production residencies. (Since they’ve not yet gotten a collective name, only one of its kind names this entry.) Customarily accepting gifts of obsolete functioning machinery from sympathetic hi-tech corporations, these facilities have offered ambitious artists not only machines but technicians unavailable in their home studios.
The first to invite me was Synapse at Syracuse University, where graduate students helped me produce in 1975 my first cameraless videotapes. A decade later I worked on electroacoustic composition with a single staff technician at the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music that was housed within two rooms above a campus performance center. By 2001, I was a guest of the larger and more renowned Media Lab at MIT where a team lead by a graduate student produced a multiscreen installation for a traveling exhibition. Much like other operations at MIT, the Media Lab accepted commercial work.
None were as various, as least for me, as the Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA) at Alfred University, in the middle of western New York State, where, thanks to available machines and technicians who knew how to use them, I produced not only large inkjet prints but a poem 200’ (that’s feet) long and a novel 50 feet long, among other indubitably unprecedented departures impossible before (and perhaps elsewhere). One of the Alfred students subsequently interned with me.
Incidentally, these institutions differ in their support from other production facilities inviting me. WBGH (Boston), WXXI (Rochester), and WDR (Köln) were all radio broadcast studios enabling me to produce electroacoustic music. Hart Perry’s Cabin Creek Center for Work and Environmental Studies collaborated with me in 1975 in producing my first hologram. My second hologram was made at the Dennis Gabor Laboratory (at the Museum of Holography). These, along with the Public Access Synthesizer Studio (NY) and EMS (Stockholm), where I worked as well, were all independent foundations receiving government grants. By contrast yet again, The Experimental Television Center (Owego, NY) began as a university facility before going independent and soliciting grants in its own name; and yet again, the more prodigious (and prominent) Media Lab at MIT remains connected to its initial host. At each of these venues, may I testify, I made important works that wouldn’t have otherwise happened –some acknowledged as avant-garde, some even credited in history books. Indispensable such production facilities no doubt also were for other artists.
Though rarely discussed as such, it always honored not only in appreciating artists’ careers but especially in measuring critics. To recall a baseball metaphor, higher integrity distinguishes major league players from minor.
Those lacking it, or failing to recognize it, customarily don’t know what they’re missing.
As intellectual history records the best that is thought and thus most likely to be remembered on the largest stage, all widely conceived arts history is a species of intellectual history. It has come to differ from Cultural History, which records the art and thought of one or another circumscribed group. Most of this Dictionary aims to be Intellectual History.
So what?
Trust the tale, not the teller, no matter what an artist claims he is doing or what his or her audience should think. Art can’t pretend to be what it isn’t, though, especially with innovative art, some third-party guidance (as in this book) might help.
A quality hard to measure, not as respected as it used to be, particularly not just in creating innovative art but also in understanding it. The truth is that a strong esthetic idea can enable a person to make work more intelligent than he is.
Decades ago a theater director told me that a true actor can play a person more intelligent than he or she is because they’ve worked to master the forms of appearing intelligent. Likewise with a mastery of profound forms or certain creative procedures can a good artist make work that is more intelligent than he or she is. For examples, consider, say, JACKSON POLLOCK or ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG. One informal test of autonomous esthetic intelligence comes from judging that only a few, if not just one, of a certain artist’s work is superior to others.
Another favorite story about actors’ mastery tells of a star who arrived for the performance quite drunk. Pushed onto the stage, he performed roughly as well as he usually did; but once off stage, he was still indisputably drunk. The truth was that in his body, not his woozy mind, was sufficient intelligence to redo his role.
(1966)
This term was recoined by DICK H IGGINS to define new genres of art that combined the aspects of two heretofore separate types of art. Intermedia differs from “multimedia,” which implies something much less unified –the inclusion of various art media, such as different kinds of material, within one work, usually a performance, thus in the tradition of a Gesamtkunstwerk epitomized by a RICHARD WAGNER opera.
One frequently cited example of intermedia is VISUAL POETRY, which results from an under-recognized combination of literary and visual arts. Although there is a long (and mostly unknown) tradition of visual literature, the modern fusion of the two arts becomes a distinct intermedium that is not conventional literature and not exclusively visual art. During the 20th century, experimentation with intermedia became more common as artists searched for radically alternative modes of expression.
Other genres of intermedia are artistic machines (combining sculpture with technology), SOUND POETRY (combining music and literature), and artistically enclosed spaces (combining architecture with music, sculpture, or painting). It is possible, however, that sometime in the future such intermedia will be considered perfectly usual forms of art and that other intermedia will appear on the continuum of art forms.
My own (RK’s) considered opinion holds that, just as COLLAGE was the great fertile interart esthetic invention of the early 20th century, so will intermedia in its various forms came to represent retrospectively the end of that century. My own sense of the larger history of the past seventy years is that the radical developments in art came either from purifying the materials of a traditional form (whether printing or music) or from mixing forms. As COLORFIELD painters, say, represented purification, so ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG explored miscegenation; as MILTON BABBITT and ELLIOTT CARTER purified, so JOHN CAGE pushed his initially musical ideas into other arts.
(c. 1920)
Born in Germany, mostly at the BAUHAUS, this kind of architecture was popularized in America, first with the publication of Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s and Philip Johnson’s book The International Style (1932), and then with exhibitions at MoMA, which became its principal publicist. To quote the cultural historian Russell Lynes (1910–91), “If few people liked the International Style when it first appeared in America, it was the MoMA that did more than any other institution to bring about its acceptance.” With the immigration to the US of Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and MIES VAN DER R OHE, both masters of the mode, the International Style became the dominant architectural fashion, particularly in office buildings, in the 1950s.
Also known as the Functional Style and the Machine Style, this International Style stood for six general principles: the marriage of art and the latest technology; geometric CONSTRUCTIVIST forms whose “streamlining” symbolized the spirit of the machine more than intrinsic technological quality; the building as a volume rather than a mass (thus the penchant for glass walls that visually denied a building’s massive weight); a rejection of axial symmetry typical of classic cathedrals, in favor of noncentered, asymmetrical regularity, as epitomized by, say, rows of glass walls; the practice of making opposite sides, if not all four sides, resemble one another so that, formally at least, the building has no obvious “front” or “back”; and, finally, a scrupulous absence of surface ornament.
For these reasons, buildings cast in the International Style suggest no-nonsense efficiency and economy, if not a physical environment consonant with both modern technology and bureaucratic ideals, all tempered by geometric grandeur and numerous subtle visual effects produced, for instance, by colors in the glass or intersecting lines and planes.
What was initially called “POSTMODERN” in architecture represented various conscious reactions against the purported sterility of this International Style that has, in my opinion, nonetheless survived stronger than its antagonists.
(1969)
The secret truth is that the Internet began its existence as ARPAnet, a computer network developed for the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a prototype of a computer network that couldn’t be bombed out of existence. The original idea was that the network would be so large and robust that it could function even after some of its important nodes were destroyed. But the Internet could not stay true to its intended nature. By the late 1980s and then dramatically so in the early 1990s, the Internet became a network for outsiders on the fringe of society. At that time, the prevalent “netiquette” was that the Internet was for ideas and fun, not for financial gain. But that brief pioneering fling with the fringe was quickly overwhelmed by the peddlers, and now our concept of the Internet is primarily that of a giant multi-territorial mall with a quirky little automated encyclopedia thrown into the mix. Regardless, the Internet remains a multifarious presence, providing for both commerce and art. For some types of art, including kinetic poetry, it provides an easy and cheap method of distribution. By the late 1990s, there was a real and perceptible move of North American MICROPRESS away from print media and onto the Internet, which includes Facebook and other social media new to the 21st century. We have yet to see what long-term effects this will have on the art that is produced.
—Geof Huth
(1980s)
Since the first edition of this Dictionary in 1991, much on Internet Art has changed. For one, Internet Art has developed a history. For another, while artists have come and gone, some academic institutions are now teaching the practice of Internet Art, and museums are taking a cautious role in displaying Internet Art works. Support is not widespread, but is there. Most of the support has come from the artists themselves who’ve made the platforms for showing their work. Finally, the development of social media such as Facebook has provided a meeting place as well as a place to show work or links to new work. It is interactive, and easily accessible.
Simply, Internet art makes use of the Internet, not only as a means of distribution but as a virtual space for art to appear in. The space is defined by all the connections that make up a given computer network.
For the sake of clarity in the following article, early Internet Art will fall into the realm of historical artifacts, up to about 2005. After that, from 2005 to the present, Internet Art will be considered contemporary. By 2005, browsers such as Safari for the Macintosh and Internet Explorer for the PC were in common use. These browsers are the basic means of connecting to the Internet and cyberspace and Internet Art.
The history of Internet Art has been difficult to find until recently when MIT Press published Judy Malloy’s Social Media Archaeology and Poetics in August of 2016. This book covers work on the Internet done from 1973 with the development of ARPANET to the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web was firmly established.
Malloy’s genius in placing the arts in social media has been to include everyone working with microcomputers at that time in a creative way, including engineers, scientists, and military researchers and entrepreneurs along with artists, writers, and musicians to show the incredibly rich panoply that existed then, and how information flowed from one group to another enriching everyone. Social Media Archeology and Poetics is the source for the period.
Much contemporary Internet Art had its roots in the’80s and’90s because that was the time when artists working on the Internet set down fundamental notions of what made Internet Art. Key to this experience was breaking down the barriers between all that could be art and the necessity to program the computer to control the platform. Perhaps the most famous of all was JOHN CAGE’s The First Meeting of the Satie Society, which was carried on the Art Com Electronic Network. This long mesostic poem was not simply a long text displayed on a monitor. Satie had an intricate UNIX driver that displayed the poem in 15-line chunks. Then delivery of the poem paused, while the user read. Delivery continued when the user pressed the space bar. However, it is no longer online.
Judith Malloy, who began her writing in the Internet Art mode with her Uncle Roger in 1986 is still active today, creating extremely intricate texts that extend stream of consciousness writing pioneered by Virginia Woolf in the early years of the 20th century. In The Whole Room (work in progress) parts of which have appeared on Facebook, she merges stream of consciousness techniques with computer coding to generate new and unimagined texts that expand awareness.
The animation in Fred Truck’s The Milk Bottle Reliquary in 2016, connects his virtual sculptures with his real-space objects in an artist’s museum form through a unique but practical video index. In this work, Truck created 3D models of all his sculptures in a wide variety of modeling programs, and then ran them through an animation program. The animation program wrote the code, responding to movements he orchestrated as he placed the models in the scene. www.fredtruck.com/reliquary/
The resources listed below, kindly provided by Judy Malloy are light and playful, and are a joy to experience. These works are Internet-based:
Phillipe Bootz, petite brosse à dépoussiérer la fiction
www.bootz.fr/brosse/brosse.html
JR Carpenter, “Along the Briny Beach”
http://luckysoap.com/alongthebrinybeach/index.html
Sharif Ezzat, “Like Stars in a Clear Night Sky”
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/ezzat__like_stars_in_a_clear_night_sky.html
Bill Harris, “Fireflies”
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Hyper-Poetry/fireflies.html
Rob Kendell, Soothcircuit
http://logozoa.com/soothcircuit/
Judy Malloy, The Roar of Destiny
www.well.com/user/jmalloy/control.html
Mark Marino, a show of hands
http://hands.literatronica.net/src/initium.aspx
Maria Mencia, Birds Singing Other Birds Songs –
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/mencia__birds_singing_other_birds_songs/index.html
Emily Short, Bronze
www.well.com/user/jmalloy/elit/emily_short_bronze.html
Nanette Wylde: Storyland–http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/wylde__storyland/storyland2.swf
Many thanks to Judy Malloy (1942) for the URLs for these Internet works.
—Fred Truck
(1990s–)
As the most common name for a brand of visual poetry that expresses itself over the Internet, rather than on the page, on film or across the air, Internet poetry came into its own as of the mid-1990s. Examples existed before that time, but without the development of HTML, the regularization of the Internet, and the mass ingress of people to that venue, little occurred.
Internet poetry may take many shapes. Some are kinetic poems that extend the experiments with kinetic object poems in the 1960s. Sometimes, Internet poetry consists of text found on the Internet, massaged, and then recontextualized. Much of the work of the Flarf school of poets was based on collecting weirdly bad writing from the Web to create a pastiche of awful yet sometimes hauntingly human poetry.
Internet poetry also includes small animated movies with text floating through the mise-en-scene. To some degree, any poetry presented on the Internet, whether taking advantage of the affordances of that creative platform or not, is considered Internet poetry by some –the means of presentation becoming just as important as the means of production to the definition of the term.
—Geof Huth
(26 November 1912–28 March 1994)
Born in Rumania of a French mother, Ionesco grew up in both his parents’ countries before moving permanently to France in 1938. Most famous for his plays, he also wrote fiction and criticism. Ionesco’s play The Chairs (1952) is the epitome of the THEATER OF THE A BSURD. Ionesco had a keen ear for authoritarian lingo that, for all its fashionable propriety, does not make sense. This example comes from The Lesson (1951):
That which distinguishes them, I repeat, is their striking resemblance which makes it so hard to distinguish them from each other –I’m speaking of the neo-Spanish languages which one is able to distinguish from one another, however, only thanks to their distinctive characteristics, absolutely indisputable proofs of their extraordinary resemblance, which renders indisputable their common origin, and which, at the same time, differentiates them profoundly –through the continuation of the distinctive traits which I’ve just cited.
And, of course, the student responds: “Oooh! Ye-e-ee-ss-s. Professor!” The tragedy of his career was that nothing Ionesco wrote after the early 1950s, in any genre, equaled those few short plays for satirical edge and weighty originality.
See BOULEZ, PIERRE.
See O’DOHERTY, BRIAN.
Traditionally identifying a literary move that reveals the presence of a second, often contradictory meaning, comic irony becomes more radical in avant-garde art, if not so original that it shocks and/or blows blithely by allegedly knowledgeable people. When MARCEL DUCHAMP submitted to an officially curated art exhibition a common urinal that he titled Fountain, his move exemplified extreme irony. (No wonder it was “rejected,” though not forgotten.)
Recall as well how many years it took for music-lovers to accept that the ironic theme of JOHN CAGE’s so-called silent piece (of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of a prominent pianist stationary at a keyboard in a concert venue) was that the noise within that time-space frame constituted its Art. One strictly painterly classic in this mode is KOMAR & MELAMID’s Double Self-Portrait (1972) of their own profiles posed to resemble Lenin’s and Stalin’s. When artists appropriate historic texts or images under their own names, the result can epitomize extreme irony (e.g., RICHARD PRINCE’s pilfering of J. D. Salinger). Avant-garde irony at is best is so serious it’s funny. (Wouldn’t pilfering devoid of comedy be plagiarism?) Since most ironists proceed instinctively, rather than with premeditation, consider that some entries in this book unintentionally might realize such extreme irony.
(5 November 1930)
MARK HOFMANN’s departure as a mad literary forger was not just penning holographs (manuscripts) by historic figures but then creating pseudo-documents by an historic Mormon whose holographs were previously unknown. Once these initial samples were accepted as authentic, Hofmann was empowered to forge some more paper with this man’s name. By contrast, Clifford Irving’s subversive achievement around 1970 was getting a commercial publisher to commission his “Autobiography of Howard Hughes,” allegedly “as told to” Irving, while the American entrepreneur was still alive. To score a lucrative advance from a gullible publisher, Irving initially forged letters purportedly from Hughes himself, with whom Irving fictitiously claimed to have a personal relationship. Irving’s assumption must have been that Hughes, a notorious recluse, wouldn’t come out of hiding once the manuscript was published, or perhaps Hughes would die before its appearance. Allegedly on Hughes’s behalf, Irving even accepted his gullible publisher’s check (for several hundred thousand dollars) that his wife deposited in a Swiss bank. The level of invention in the Irvings’ project was quite audacious.
Though the Irvings miscalculated, went to jail, and reportedly returned the ill-gotten money, his manuscript had enough intrinsic interest and putative credibility to appear from another commercial publisher. (So, recall, did MEEGEREN’s acknowledged forgeries have some value.) Disinclined to censor himself, Irving also published his confessional Hoax (1981), which became a Hollywood movie (2007), as well as writing other books, often as ebooks. In 2014 Irving sold his literary archive (including several boxes of his Howard Hughes research) to the University of Texas, his literary immortality assured. All these secondary successes notwithstanding, no aspiring forger since has dared duplicate Clifford Irving’s particular stunt.
(12 September 1928)
The initial Robert Irwin work for me, first seen at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, was an untitled white circular disk 5 feet in diameter, painted white with automobile laquer, centrally mounted from behind to stand 18 inches away from the background wall. When illuminated by four foodlights distributed to the corners of a rectangle in front of the disk, an illusion is formed on the background wall of four overlapping disks, creating a three-dimensional tension between the original disk (that initially appears nearly flush with the wall) and its shadows, as well as faint concentric bands of color on the real disc’s face. The supporting wall, the surrounding space, and the quality of the light all become as crucial to esthetic experience as the disk. Because Irwin regarded visual perception as the principal subject of his art, he favored objects with little physical substance. “Inquiry” is a favorite epithet for his own activity. Ever articulate, Irwin once declared, “To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings and objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perceptions.”
In 1992 at New York’s Pace Gallery, Irwin made an untitled installation where one initially sees a black rectangle behind several layers of rectangular gauze. As the illumination in the spaces between the gauze changes color, so does the black. Because the spectator is allowed to go between the layers, he or she can look back on the piece in different ways. In discussing Irwin, as well as his colleague JAMES T URRELL, simple descriptions scarcely convey the remarkable experience of his light transformations, apart from any object. For obvious reasons, photographs of Irwin’s art are rarely sufficient.
(11 November 1888–25 March 1967)
As a Swiss eccentric among eccentrics at the original BAUHAUS, where he developed the basic painting course from 1919 to 1922, he taught not just color but several kinds of color contrasts. His Chromatic Squares (c. 1919) precede visibly similar paintings by JOSEPH ALBERS that are more familiar. Solid though this was esthetically, Itten’s passionate interests in esoteric philosophies became problematic.
A Wikipedia scribe noted in 2017 that Itten’s work “is also said to be an inspiration for seasonal color analysis. Itten had been the first to associate color palettes with four types of people.” Even a century later, his highly unusual thinking may not be fully understood.
(20 October 1874–19 May 1954)
It is perhaps typically American that an avant-garde composer so neglected in his own time should be so widely acclaimed by later generations. Though Ives’s works were so rarely played during his lifetime that he never heard some of his major pieces, nearly all of his music is currently available on disk. Though he taught no pupils and founded no school, Ives is generally considered the progenitor of nearly everything distinctly American in American music. He was not an intentional avant-gardist, conscientiously aiming for innovation, but a modest spare-time composer (who spent most of his adult days as an insurance salesman and then as a long-term convalescent).
A well-trained musician’s well-trained son, who worked as a church organist upon graduating from college, Ives was essentially a great inventor with several major musical patents to his name. While still in his teens, he developed his own system of polytonality –the technique of writing for two or more keys simultaneously. In a piece composed when he was twenty (Song for Harvest Season), he assigned four different keys to four instruments. Ives was the first modern composer who consistently didn’t resolve his dissonances. Many contemporary composers have followed Ives’s The Unanswered Question (1908) in strategically distributing musicians over a physical space, so that the acoustic source of the music affects not only PERFORMANCE but the sounds actually heard. For the Concord Sonata, composed between 1909 and 1915 (and arguably his masterpiece), Ives invented the tone cluster, where the pianist uses either his or her forearm or a block of wood to sound simultaneously whole groups, if not octaves, of notes.
He originated the esthetics of POP A RT, for Ives, like CLAES O LDENBURG and ROBERT I NDIANA after him, drew quotations from mundane culture –hymn tunes, patriotic ditties, etc. –and stitched them into his modernist artistic fabric. Though other composers had incorporated “found” sounds prior to Ives, he was probably the first to allow a quotation to stand out dissonantly from the context, as well as the first, like the Pop Artists after him, to distort a popular quotation into a comic semblance of the original. Just as Claes Oldenburg’s famous Giant Hamburger (1962) –7 feet in diameter, made of canvas, and stuffed with kapok –creates a comic tension with our memory of the original model, so Ives, decades before, evoked a similar effect in his Variations on a National Hymn [“America”] (1891, composed when he was seventeen!). In juxtaposing popular tunes like “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” in the same musical field with allusions to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Ives employed another Pop strategy to create a distinctly American style suggesting that both classical music and popular, both formal and informal cultures, are equally immediate and perhaps equally relevant.
Other Ivesian musical innovations include poly-rhythms –where various sections of the orchestra play in wholly different meters, often under the batons of separate conductors, all to create multiple cross-rhythms of great intricacy. In his rhythmic freedom, as well as his unashamed atonality, Ives clearly fathered the chaotic language of modern music, a tradition that runs through HENRY C OWELL and early EDGARD V ARÈSE to John Cage. Indeed, Ives anticipated Cage by inventing INDETERMINANCY –where the scripts offered the musicians are so indefinite at crucial points that they could not possibly play exactly the same sounds in successive performances. In The Unanswered Question, Ives further discouraged musical unanimity by placing three separate groups of musicians in such ways that one could not necessarily see the others.
As one of the first modern composers to develop a distinctly eccentric music notation, Ives anticipated contemporary use of graphs, charts, and abstract patterns –manuscripts that resemble everything but traditional musical scores –to make their works available to others. He also scored what he knew could not be played, such as a 1/1,024 note in the Concord Sonata, followed by the words “Play as fast as you can.” Indeed, Ives’s scripts were so unusually written, as well as misplaced and scrambled in big notebooks, that editors have labored valiantly to reconstruct definitive versions of his major pieces, some of which had their debuts long after his death. The independent scholar Maynard Solomon (1930), among others, has questioned the dates commonly attributed to some Ives compositions.
There is a remarkable intellectual similarity between Ives and GERTRUDE S TEIN, who, born in America in the same year, was as radically original in her art as Ives was in his. While we can now identify what each of them did quite precisely, given our awareness of the avant-garde traditions to which they significantly contributed, it is not so clear to us now what either of them thought they were doing –what exactly was on their minds when they made their most radical moves –so different was their art from even innovative work that was done before or around them.
(24 March 1901–7 July 1971; b. Ubbe Eert I.)
Befriending WALT DISNEY when both were teenage art students in Kansas City, Iwerks moved with his buddy to Los Angeles and, as the initial genius behind a genius, collaborated in the development of film animation. Some historians identify Iwerks as particularly responsible for the distinctive visual style of the earliest Disney shorts, which were at the time the best of their kind, as well as for the first sound animation. Wholly on his own perhaps, Iwerks developed the character of the iconic character of Mickey Mouse. Once he quit Disney Iwerks produced animations made only with his own name, the more marvelous cartoons featuring his later creation of Flip the Frog. (Whereas the FLEISCHER brothers as city boys animated people, these midwesterners created anthropomorphic animals. Another Kansas City boy working early with Iwerks and thus Disney was Friz Freleng [1905–95], who later at Warner Brothers produced classic animations under his own name.) As these were less successful financially, Iwerks returned in the early 1940s to Disney’s burgeoning operation, working mostly on advanced technical effects. His odd name comes from Ostfriesland (East Frisia).