(16 June 1938)
Buried in Oates’s topless bibliography are several genuinely experimental stories, most of them ironic take-offs on conventional forms, such as the contributors’ notes in the back of a literary magazine. Quite wonderful, such fictions suggested a direction for Oates’s work far more avant-garde and fundamentally more distinguished than those she has since pursued. In the New York Review of Books (29 June 2000), she wrote of modern American writers whose short stories “are a greater accomplishment than the novels that brought [them] wealth and celebrity.” That judgment is incidentally self-applicable.
More than most ambitious writers, she has sought the signs of bourgeois success in money, position, celebrity, rewards, and real estate, probably without recognizing the costs of such “success” upon the quality of her own work as both a fictioner and book reviewer, which has become inconsequential. Sad becomes the fate of winners who survive long enough to discover what they’ve lost. Odder still, as this last theme appears often in traditional literature.
(late 1920s)
An acronym for “Union of Real Art,” this turned out to be the last important development of the Russian avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century. A group of poets who came together in St. Petersburg in the late twenties, this consisted of ALEKSANDR V VEDENSKY, DANIIL K HARMS, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Igor Bakhterev and sometime collaborators Konstantin Vaginov and Nikolai Oleynikov.
A poster from an OBERIU theatricalized evening, Three Left Hours, presented on 24 January 1928, states that it involved a poetry reading, a staging of D. Kharms’s play Elizaveta Bam, movie shorts presentation, and a jazz band playing in intermissions.
While sharing ideals and goals of the most radical Futurists like KASIMIR M ALEVICH and ALEXEI K RUCHONYKH, the OBERIU poets found their own direction exploring concepts of nonsense and the absurd. Their influences, besides Futurism, included “outsider” genres like Russian nonsense folklore, children’s poems, poems of the mad, and even bad amateur poetry. Unlike Z AUM, OBERIU writing stayed mostly within the limits of Russian traditional vocabulary and meter, and yet was infinitely inventive in juxtaposing different semantic layers of language. Filled with dark humor of the most subversive kind, their works were particularly unacceptable to Stalin’s regime.
Because few of OBERIU members’ major works appeared in print in the late twenties, their greater immediate impact was in performance and theater. OBERIU plays like Vvedensky and Kharms’s “All in Clocks My Mother Walks” (1926) or Kharms’s “Elizaveta Bam” (1928) defined THEATER OF THE A BSURD well before this term was invented.
Though most of the OBERIU poets were arrested and prosecuted by 1931, individual members continued to create innovative works well into the late 1930s, before perishing in the Soviet Gulags. Their works were rediscovered by the younger generation of Russian poets in the ’60s, in large part thanks to the last surviving OBERIU member, Igor Bakherev (1908–96).
—Igor Satanovsky
(5 October 1911–1 April 1966; b. Brian O’Nolan; aka Myles na Copaleen, Brian Ó Nualláin)
As a civil servant who wrote a newspaper column under the name Myles na Copaleen, Brian O’Nolan needed yet another pseudonym for his fiction, and so chose Flann O’Brien. His supremely clever masterpiece is At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), a novel about an author whose characters turn against him by writing a novel about him. Because the initial narrator is a student writing a book, At Swim-Two-Birds has three beginnings and three endings. The extremely witty writing includes this interrogation of a cow: “State your name…. /That is a thing I have never attained, replied the cow. Her voice was low and guttural and of a quality not normally associated with the female mammalia.” Though this novel initially failed in the marketplace, it became a genuine underground classic that is reissued from time to time. Its sequel, written around the same time, was posthumously published as The Third Policeman (1967).
About another novel Flann O’Brien novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964), HUGH K ENNER writes:
Neither James Joyce nor he ever surpassed the nested ingenuity of its contrivances, the insidious taut language to make everything at all seem plausible, or the unforced beauty of such episodes as our man’s dialogue with his soul, when, not knowing he’s already dead, he supposes he’s about to be hanged.
O’Brien also published another novel entirely in Gaelic. Some would nominate him to be the lower wing of the Irish trinity of JAMES J OYCE and SAMUEL B ECKETT.
(forever, alas)
In art, as well as writing about art, it epitomizes pretentiousness disguised.
(20 April 1940)
Born Dutch in Indonesia, Ockerse came to America in the late 1950s and was initially active among those producing VISUAL P OETRY at Indiana University in the middle 1960s. Trained in visual art, he differed from other early visual poets in using colors, at the same time respecting the literary convention of 8½” by 11 inch sheets of paper. One distinguishing mark of his first major collection, the self-published T. O. P. (or Tom Ockerse Project; 1970), is design solutions so various that the book as a whole lacks stylistic character. However, in his works that are most frequently reproduced elsewhere, there is a distinct SIGNATURE reflecting verbal-visual elegance and CONSTRUCTIVIST simplicity.
Around this time, Ockerse also produced The A–Z Book (1970), an awesomely inventive alphabet, a foot square, in which he used die-cutting to produce a sequence of pages in which the portion cut away from a foreground page belongs to the letter behind it. Considering that many visual poets have made alphabet books (including me), I rank Ockerse’s among the greatest of all time.
(4 May 1928)
Born in Ireland, educated in England, O’Doherty began his American career as an art critic who then worked primarily as an imaginative administrator for the NATIONAL E NDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS as the director of the esthetically most progressive departments, successively visual arts and media arts, apparently with remarkable political skill, because little, if any, of the negative attention aimed at the NEA ever mentioned him.
As a visual artist customarily exhibiting under the name Patrick Ireland, he realized a highly original, rigorously relational C ONSTRUCTIVISM, at times in drawings on paper, at other times with installations of taut strings stretched to the edges of a space, interacting in geometric ways. As elaborate investigations of the new circumstances of art galleries and museums, the essays he collected as Inside the White Cube are true avant-garde criticism. O’Doherty edited the most distinguished issue of ASPEN t hat came in a box, much in the tradition of MARCEL DUCHAMP’s Valise. He also co-curated, co-wrote, and then narrated Video: The New Wave (1973), which was an early attempt to identify the strongest VIDEO ART as distinct from video documentaries that became more prominent in later curating, even by curators who should have known better.
(1942–45)
In America at least, these were probably the only government agencies to employ avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Instructed to produce propaganda not only for distribution abroad but for domestic consumption, the former, commonly called OWI, hired such poets, artists, and filmmakers as the poet CHARLES OLSON, the painter/graphic artist Ben Shahn (1898–1969), and the filmmaker ALEXANDER HAMMID. By contrast, the OSS sought brilliant and original young minds to collect and analyze strategic information for the American military. On its staff in its short life were the future intellectual historian CARL SCHORSKE, the radical social philosophers Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Norman O. Brown (1913–2002), the cookbook guru Julia Child (1912–2004), the Marxist-Hollywood filmmaker Abraham Polonsky (1910–99), and the major-league baseball player Moe Berg (1902–72), who, Princeton-educated, incidentally knew several languages.
For a while during the 1970s, certain well-educated musicologists with higher competence with computers earned paychecks from the latter’s successor, the Central Intelligence Agency, supposedly the information processor’s totem information processor; but by the 21st century, such superior computer competence became more common.
(27 October 1906–1 June 2010)
Considered to be the soul and cofounder of B UTOH, Ohno began dance studies with Baku Ishii (1886–1962) in 1933 and later studied with Takaya Eguchi (1900–77), who had been a pupil of the German EXPRESSIONIST dancer MARY W IGMAN. In 1977, Ohno created and performed Admiring La Argentina, in which, dressed in a flowing gown, he impersonated and honored the Spanish dancer Antonia Merce (1888–1936), whose performances had inspired Ohno early in his career. Ohno’s son, Yoshita, is also a Butoh performer.
—Katy Matheson
(15 November 1887–6 March 1986)
Apparently learning from photography about the esthetic advantages of enlargement, O’Keeffe initially discovered formal qualities and radiant colors in the extremely close observations of biomorphic objects, such as flowers, plants, and pelvic bones, often painting similar objects many times over, in series. Moving to rural New Mexico in the late 1940s, she again echoed photography by using the contrary strategy of painting broad expanses in a compressed scale. These paintings in turn echo her remarkably stark and lyrical 1920s horizontal views of New York. The thin paint of her early watercolors presages the innovations of MORRIS L OUIS and HELEN FRANKENTHALER, among others. O’Keeffe lived long enough to become a feminist exemplar whose celebrity could support a commercial publisher releasing a strong collection of images accompanied by her writings.
(28 January 1929)
Born in Sweden, raised in Chicago as the son of a Swedish diplomat, educated in English literature at Yale, Oldenburg mounted a 1959 exhibition of sculpture made from urban junk and soon afterward created his first truly memorable works: semblances of such common objects as ice-cream cones, hamburgers both with and without an accompanying pickle, cigarette ends, pastries, clothespins, toasters, telephones, plumbing pipes, and so forth. Compared to their models, Oldenburg’s fabrications are usually exaggerated in size, distorted in detail, and/or dog-eared in surface texture.
By such transformations, these pedestal-less sculptures usually gained, or accentuated, several other, less obvious resonances, most of them archetypal or sexual in theme, in the latter respect echoing FRANCIS P ICABIA. Epitomizing POP A RT, Oldenburg’s Ice Cream Cone (1962) is indubitably phallic; Soft Wall Switches (1964) looks like a pair of nipples; the soft Giant Hamburger (1963), several feet across, is distinctly vaginal; and so forth. “Appearances are not what counts,” he once succinctly wrote, “it is the forms that count.”
After 1962, Oldenburg’s strategy of ironic displacement took another elaborate form in his “soft” sculpture, in which semblances of originally hard objects are fabricated in slick-surfaced, nonrigid materials different from the traditional sculptural staples. These representations of a toilet, a bathtub, a typewriter, and a drum set are so flabby that they behave contrary to the original object’s nature and thus customarily need some external support for effective display. They also create a perversely ironic, if not ghostly, relation between the sculpture and its original model.
Thanks to an adventurous imagination (and perhaps an education not in art but in literature), Oldenburg has worked successfully in various media. The Store (1962) was a real Lower East Side store-front filled with artistically fabricated but faintly representational (storelike) objects. Because regular hours were kept, people could browse through the place and even purchase objects, so that The Store was indeed an authentic store, but it was also an artistically defined space, an E NVIRONMENT, wholly in Oldenburg’s early 1960s style of colorful but ironic renditions of seedy objects.
As an ingenious writer, whose first job after Yale University was working as a newspaper reporter, who once acknowledged F.-L. CÉLINE as a major influence, Oldenburg authored Store Days (1967), a large-format, glossy book that contains a disconnected collection of prose and pictures as miscellaneous in form as the stuff of his store: historical data, replicas of important printed materials (such as a business card), sketches, price lists for the objects, photographs, scripts for his staged performances, various recipes, esthetic statements, parodies, declarations, and even an occasional aphorism (which may not be entirely serious). The result is an original open-ended potpourri of bookish materials that, unlike a conventional artist’s manifesto, “explains” Oldenburg’s Environmental art less by declarative statements than by implied resemblances. He has also published books of his theatrical scripts, some of which were staged as MIXED-MEANS performance. As I’ve advised him several times, more of his special writings, especially from his journals, should appear in print. Perhaps best of kind, they can be both stylish and informative.
One question raised by his work of nearly six decades was whether it declined. Those who think it did point to the ameliorative influence of his second wife, Coosje van Bruggen (1942–2009), an art historian/ curator who became his close collaborator, especially for public projects where her own name was added. My own sense is that, while Oldenberg didn’t “develop,” so profound were his initial ideas that they sustained later variations.
(30 May 1932–24 November 2016)
Long an academic, Oliveros threw up, as the British would say, a full professorship at the University of California to become an itinerant musician, working with a wealth of superficially divergent ideas, including feminist consciousness, improvisation, meditative experience, and possibilities for playing the accordion (which is her unusual instrument of virtuosity). She wrote that “All of my work emphasizes attentional strategies, musicianship, and improvisational skills.” Oliveros’s most stunning recordings were produced in reverberant caves with the Deep Listening Band (mostly the trombonist Stuart Dempster).
(27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970)
On top of leaving politics for poetry, contributing early scholarship to HERMAN MELVILLE’s revival, and teaching at BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE, his life work included not only writing his 20-year epic poem project The Maximus Poems, but developing projective verse into a radical literary science. Olson thought his method intensely scientific, for the ethical stakes were high: “Value is perishing from the earth,” he wrote. In short, Western thinking had separated “Man” from “Nature,” and few cared. In saying “the literal is the same as the numeral,” Olson’s sense of science, mathematics, and poetry emerges as a compositional re-structuring device to mend the human-environment composition we call life. Using scientific terms, Olson mixed function theory with a non-Euclidean sense of form and content to create new modes of reader analysis regarding oneness, a topological sense of man-and-nature as an extended, singular surface (what he also called “skin”). This was an ecological topology to Olson. By harnessing probabilities to generate the construction of “an actual earth of value” (a “oneness,” also in terms of quantity, matter and energy), Olsonic verse enacts Riemann sphere transformations. It inverts flat two-dimensional commands from the poem-on-the-field-of-paper – via thermodynamics – all the way over to, not only the reader as he writes in his early “Projective Verse” essay, but later on, all the way over to the sphere of the earth. His poems are circuit boards embedded with historical coordinates that function as “vectors” (a programming and cartographical term). Coupling vectors and injunctions, his poems activate awareness of what history has done to us, reactivating one’s ethical “stance toward reality” (if Coca-Cola knows the art of melopoeia, “o Po-ets, you/should getta/job”). The technical aspects of vector and injunction produce ethical discoveries. Thus, Olsonic verse is ultimately algorithmic, programming a reader’s autodidactic discovery of “value” (the results of a calculation) induced by the equation-like poems. Considering the if/then, literal/numerical complexity, it’s no wonder the 6’9” Olson once explained it simply: “I teach posture.”
—Michael Peters
(1991, aka digital printing)
Thanks to this major development in centuries-old duplicating procedure, it’s possible to print complete spine-bound books one at a time at equal cost, thus enabling the publication of anything with minimal circulation. Prior to this development, even when printing from a digital file, smaller publishers were confronted by economics of scale that made the cost of manufacturing, say, a thousand copies scarcely more expensive in sum than the cost of 500, thus encouraging small publishers to print more books than they could quickly sell, thus incurring the expense of storage and disappointment in “remaindering” surplus copies, etc.
While the cost per copy of on-demand printing from a digital file might be greater per book than one thousand copies printed from a physical plate, the most immediate benefit offered by the new technology is transcending censorship-by-commerce, which in Western countries has always been more deleterious than government censorship. “Unpublishable” becomes an obsolete epithet with the elimination of gatekeepers to economical publication.
On-demand printing also enables a writer in the twilight of his career, such as myself, to make public his unpublished manuscripts in a public channel that, even if he charged an exorbitant price for what he’d rather keep out of circulation during his lifetime, he could expect to survive him, no doubt later at a more reasonable price.
(18 February 1933)
Born in Japan, she came of age in upper-middle-class America; and though she has returned to Japan for visits and speaks English with a Japanese accent, she has been an American CONCEPTUAL artist known initially for her radical proposals. She later gained international celebrity from her 1969 marriage to her third husband, the pop singer-songwriter JOHN L ENNON. Ono’s strongest avant-garde works are the PERFORMANCE texts collected in her book Grapefruit (1964).
For “Beat Piece,” the entire instruction is “Listen to a heartbeat.” Her “Cut Piece” requires the performer, usually herself, to come on the stage and sit down, “placing a pair of scissors in front of her and asking the audience to come up on the stage, one by one, and cut a portion of her clothing (anywhere they like) and take it.” (One charm of this piece is that the spectator courts as much embarrassment as the performer-author.)
Ono’s films customarily have the same audacious image repeated to excess (e.g., human butts). She pioneered the essentially literary form of the verbal film script meant to stand on its own:
Ono also collaborated with Lennon on musical works in which her highly expressionist singing, part chanting and part screaming, sustained to excessive duration influenced PUNK musicians in the mid-1970s. Perhaps because her best works are too physically slight to warrant a museum exhibition, one at MoMA in 2005 was disappointing, implicitly supporting the unfortunate myth that, for too many dopes, Ono will never be more than a famous pop singer’s widow.
(1960)
This abbreviation for Optical Art was one of several developments in the wake of the general sense common in the early 1960s that ABSTACT EXPRESSIONISM had declined. (Another was POP ART.) The defining Op mark was an image that, if observed patiently, began to suggest the illusion of movement. Among the masters at creating such shimmer were BRIDGET RILEY in England, Richard Anuszkiewicz (1930) in America, VICTOR VASERELY as a Hungarian in Paris, WEN-YING TSAI as Chinese in America, and Julian Stanczak (1928–2017) as a Pole also in America.
A group exhibition at the MoMA, The Responsive Eye (1965), was more popular than most, in spite of negative newspaper reviews. This show, which I still remember among the greatest of that decade, became the subject of a nifty short film directed by Brian de Palma (1940), who later had a Hollywood career, and produced by my college buddy Kenneth David Burrows (1941), later a lawyer.
(1922–)
Given such extragavant obstacles as the huge expense and numbers of personnel required for producing fully staged operas in the past century, it’s no surprise that many of the most unusual modern operas began in more modest venues. Some extend the tradition of puppet operas, which actually date back to Joseph Haydn in the 18th century. A twenty-first-century Seattle production of Haydn’s The Burning House fit within a stage some 12 feet wide and 5 feet high, with supertitles (now so customary in America) in a changing banner above the stage.
In the 1920s, the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (1876–1946) presented El retablo de maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show), which he based upon an episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. My sometime sparring partner, the aspiring librettist Dana Gioia (1950), recalls the puppeteer Basil Twist’s 2005 production of Ottorino Respighi’s The Sleeping Beauty (1922; revised, 1934) as “one of the best opera productions I’ve ever seen.” The American composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003) was the first to tell me about puppet operas, beginning with his own Young Caesar (1971).
While many European live opera performances have been filmed and later videotaped, most auspiciously by Paul Czinner (1890–1972), a Hungarian who worked successively in Germany and England, the most distinguished opera production initially for film is Emric Pressberger and MICHAEL POWELL’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), which, given the possibilities of the newer medium, does the Offenbach opera differently from any live production and yet as spectacularly as a production of 19th-century opera should be.
Among the operas composed expressly for radio, I know about but have not heard the first radio opera as probably The Red Pen (1925) that the BBC commissioned from Geoffrey Toye (1889–1942) to a libretto by the British humorist A. P. Herbert (1890–1971). “The 1930s proved to be the high-point of radio opera,” Wikipedia’s scribes advise, “with at least twelve productions composed by German, American, Czech, Swiss, and French composers.” Among those produced in America were Charles Wakefield Cadman’s The Willow Tree (NBC Radio, 1932), Vittorio Giannini’s Flora and Beauty and the Beast (CBS Radio, 1937 & 1938), Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief (CBS, 1939), and Randall Thompson’s Solomon and Balkis (CBS, 1941). May I wish that these were all more available.
Taping only sounds recorded live at North American baseball games, I once composed wholly from those tapes two acts, each thirty minutes in length, in effect compressing two games into a two-part format each with a beginning and an end. Americas’ Game (1986) thus becomes a kind of double-header, to recall an obsolete sports epithet. The departure marking this as an acoustic opera is episodes suggesting particular activity without any visual specifics. While that last absence might in some minds mark the work as “abstract,” the continuous presence of sounds unique to baseball warrants something else, to be called perhaps “opera concrete.”
For a video of this Americas’ Game, I added not scenes from games but a great variety of images based upon the true icon of a single baseball, the electronically generated visual element of action-without-performers thus complimenting, rather than illustrating.
Otherwise, the list of operas composed initially for television is substantial. A 2018 Wikipedia list mentions works by American composers such as Gian Carlo Menotti, Lukas Foss, Ezra Laderman, and Carlisle Floyd only from 1951 to 1963 and then mostly by Europeans since. And then none after 2006, which is unfortunate, as composing for less costly media is still more economical and thus feasible than staging in opera stadia.
Consider, aspiring opera composers, the advantages gained from imagining smaller over bigger? And for discriminating operagoers, a venue more intimate that a humongous barn?
This epithet has different meanings for old arts and for new. For the former, such as the performance of music from centuries ago, it classifies instruments physically different from modern ones, it refers to instruments constructed according to earlier physiques, such as horns or trumpets lacking valves. The term is sometimes applied to modern instrument reproductions built according to historical specifications, and sometimes to actual antiques that may have been restored to playing condition.
In avant-garde arts, it refers to the use of obsolete technologies in performance. KARLHEINZ STOCK-HAUSEN’s Kurzwellen (1968), for instance, depends in performance upon the tuning dial of a mid-20th-century short-wave radio to receive with differing acoustic quality various stations amid aural static. The subsequent development of digital tuning with its focusing powers made such chaotic surfing impossible. Likewise, “DJ” music of the 1970s and 1980s depended upon the performer’s manipulation of vinyl records for effects impossible with the later technology of compact disks. For certain writers in the 21st century, the TYPEWRITER becomes an original instrument.
(11 December 1895–24 February 2002; b. Yuda-Leyb Gornshteyn)
Born in the Ukraine, then under imperial Russian rule, he was a child prodigy as a pianist. Coming with his family to America in 1906, he studied at Juilliard and gave his debut recital in 1911 with classic piano pieces. Meanwhile Ornstein as a composer developed rapidly, reportedly giving, while still officially a teenager, a concert of his own “futurist” music, as he called it, the epithet referring to certain visual art new at the time. He particularly pioneered the use of tone-clusters played by groups of keys incidentally adjacent on a piano. In part because of his reputation as a pianist, Ornstein’s aggressively dissonant compositions received newspaper reviews. In 1917, JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER wrote: “I never thought I should live to hear Arnold Schoenberg sound tame, yet tame he sounds – almost timid and halting – after Ornstein who is, most emphatically, the only true-blue, genuine, Futurist composer alive.”
However, not unlike some other prodigies, Ornstein burned out, giving his last public performance in the early 1930s. Later in that decade he and his wife founded in Philadelphia the Ornstein School of Music. Among its more prominent sometime students were JOHN COLTRANE and Jimmy Smith (1925 [or 1928]–2005), who was generally ranked among the greatest jazz organists. After closing their eponymous school in 1953 the Ornsteins disappeared from public view. In the mid-1970s, they were found living in a Texas trailer park while summering in their home in New Hampshire.
Leo Ornstein died in 2002 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, of all places, having lived in three centuries – nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first, uniquely perhaps among the individuals featured in this book. His son Severo M. O. (1930) is a prominent pioneering computer scientist.
(14 November 1947; b. Patrick Jake O’R.)
What is he doing here, I can hear you say. Well, in 1975 he published (perhaps self-published under an otherwise unfamiliar imprint) a loose-leaf collection of TYPEWRITER P OEMS printed on legal-size (8½” inch by 14 inch) pages, and dedicated to the actress Shelly Plimpton. They are carefully wrought, witty, and at times delicate, especially in the opening dedication piece, which is as good as any typewriter poem done anywhere.
O’Rourke subsequently worked as a columnist for The National Lampoon and Rolling Stone, among other mass magazines, contributing witty, anti-liberal, political criticism that, while esthetically less distinguished and certainly less avant-garde, has been more remunerative, America being America. In this respect, his career resembles that of Hendrik Hertzberg (1943), who coauthored One Million (1970), an imaginatively designed BOOK-ART essay about size and number, before he became a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and an editor at, successively, The New Republic and The New Yorker. (And, wonders of wonders, One Million was reprinted two decades later to even less acclaim the second time around, the author’s greater presence notwithstanding, perhaps to no surprise.)
(23 November 1883–7 September 1949)
A one-armed painter who identified passionately with the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Orozco developed a highly stylized representational art that rendered at once simply and heroically Mexican people, especially rural working people, campesinos, who were the Revolution’s heroes. A principal Mexican influence on him and the other muralists was the engraver JOSÉ GUADALUPE POSADA, whose last great subject was the Mexican Revolution.
Though Orozco made paintings, his most effective surface was the extended mural. Most of these survive not in art museums but in public buildings throughout Mexico. Among the most successful, dating from the late 1930s, are those in the former chapel of the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara, the capital of the Jalisco state. The Mexican art historian Justino Fernandez (1904–72) wrote in 1961 that the Orozco murals at Dartmouth College from the early 1930s are “the most important contemporary mural paintings in the United States,” incidentally marking “a beginning of a new and splendid period in Orozco’s work.” Since he refused to join the Communist party, which had captured his muralist colleague DIEGO R IVERA, Orozco was in his own lifetime often dismissed as a “bourgeois skeptic.” Nonetheless, about the Mexican Revolution he reportedly wrote, “To me the Revolution was the gayest and most diverting of carnivals.”
Orozco’s work had far more presence and influence in the States in the 1930s than later, especially upon those coming of age at the time, such as JACKSON P OLLOCK. In Orozco’s style of representing people and the world I find an esthetic precursor for the “magic realism” commonly associated with a later generation of Latin American writers, beginning with Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), a Colombian Nobelist who, incidentally, lived mostly not in his native country but in Mexico.
(25 June 1903–21 January 1950; b. Eric Blair)
Born in India and thus in the colonies of the country whose literature he embraced (Britain), he was the second (after Rudyard Kipling [1865–1936]) to bring the critical distance of colonial intelligence to its mainstream, preceding in this respect other British writers such as V. S. Naipaul (1931–2018, born in Trinidad), Doris Lessing (1919–2013, born in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe), Edgar Mittelholzer (1919–65, born in Guyana), AMOS TUTUOLA, and Edward Lucie-Smith (1933, born in Jamaica), all of whom wrote differently from native-born Brits. The last four also produced formally innovative work.
This post-colonial sensibility informs Orwell’s fiction, some of which takes place in British colonies, and his essays, which are written from an Olympian distance more typical of an outsider. Comparably colonial later French writers would include Albert Camus (1913–60) and JACQUES DERRIDA, both of whom were born in North Africa. Orwell and these writers also created preconditions for the acceptance of yet other writers who did not descend from the country of their mother-language. (Oddly, such figures scarcely exist in American literature.)
Among Orwell’s other virtues not necessarily avant-garde are a clear intelligence, not only in his expository writing whose best essays have survived (e.g., “Politics and the English Language”) but as a fabulist with a persuasively insightful portrayal of a totalitarian society he did not know firsthand. (I can recall being told by people in Communist Poland in 1985 that the more accurate book about their society was Orwell’s 1984 !) Consider his best works to be persuasive evidence for the argument that Olympian distance might be a prerequisite for cultural survival.
(2 August 1916–5 December 1990; b. A. Angel Yangco O.)
Of the several artists wealthy enough to become a patron of their avant-garde colleagues (e.g., F. T. MARINETTI and William Copley [1919–96]), few equaled Ossorio, who incidentally made some lucrative investments on his own. When he was back home in the Philippines in 1962 his friend JACKSON POL-LOCK cabled him about a spacious property in Easthampton. Once purchased, it became a private museum for artists of his generation, many of them neighbors on Eastern Long Island, as he exhibited ABSTACT EXPRESSIONIST paintings that he personally purchased, often before his contemporaries found dealers. The sculptures filling his garden were also memorably impressive. For his own paintings Ossorio densely filled small objects in a non-centered field reminiscent of his friend Pollock.
(22 February 1896–18 March 1928)
Though born in Belgium proper, van Ostaijen was by common consent the most advanced Dutch-language writer of his time. Residing in BERLIN for a few years in the early twenties, he assimilated DADA and wrote satires he called “grotesques” that often depended upon ironically contrasting the present with the past and the sublime with the disgusting. Back in Belgium, he started an art gallery that failed and worked as a journalist before succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of 32. One English-language collection of his work contains a richly envisioned film script, “De Bankroet Jazz” (1920–21) that survives brilliantly, to some as “the only known Dadaistic film script,” even though the film was never made. Van Ostaijen also wrote VISUAL POEMS that are mostly unavailable in English.
(2006)
By the second decade of the 21st century, this became principal English-language poetry journal for innovative poetries, not by specializing in them but by generously including them alongside more conventional writings in populous productions. Edited and produced electronically in Queensland, Australia, by Mark Young (b. 1941, New Zealand), it cleverly is also printed ON DEMAND in America without its publisher ever needing to set foot in the United States (and later wherever around the world that the company called Lulu could print it). After 2010 new Otoliths appeared initially in outer space, so to speak, with printed reprints, so to speak, available on demand. With several dozen contributors in every new issue, Otoliths calls itself “a magazine of many E-things.”
(21 June 1952)
In making art for public places few have been as inventive and visually witty. Born in Kansas, he received most of his art education in the New York art world of the 1970s, participating in popup exhibitions organized late in that decade by a group calling itself Colab (for Collaborative Projects). Otterness began with small plaster figures that he sold cheaply. For the 1980 Colab Times Square show he made plaster “proto monuments.” His earliest public art commission came in 1987 from the General Services Administration for the Los Angeles Federal Center for which he made a baby holding a globe in the middle of a fountain and a frieze. So far okay.
His masterpiece for me is Life Underground (2001), which he installed throughout the Manhattan subway station at 14th Street and Eighth Avenue where four different trains converge. Rather than the single edifice customary in sculpture, his Life consists of over one hundred cast-bronze miniature sculptures that are distributed all over the platforms and stairways of two subway stations and their intersections. While most portray amiable subway people with various functions and from different social classes, the greatest joke is the head of a tiny alligator apparently emerging from the depths. Nearly two decades after Life Underground was first installed, even after I’ve experienced it hundreds of times, this masterpiece of public sculpture continues to amuse, enriching the subway transfer experience for me among thousands every day at this station. On the other hand, since nearly all the figures are placed well below eye level, they can be missed, especially by anxious people looking upwards for directional signs. Indeed, few sculptors succeed as well with short small figures placed low on a floor. Another Otterness masterpiece is his figures in the great caverns in Camuy, Puerto Rico (2004), in the hills south of Arecibo. Outside the entrance is a huge bronze replica of the Puerto Rican national animal, El Coqui, a noisy toad that is actually the size of a fingernail. Inside the caves are several smaller sculptures of various figures along with a single plaque identifying their creator. Seek them out; for, unlike his giant coqui, they can be missed, much like his figures in Life Underground.
(1960–)
Founded by RAYMOND Q UENEAU and François Le Lionnais (1901–84), this Parisian-based group began with the intention of basing experimental writing on mathematics. Its name is an acronym for Ouvroir de Litérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature). Once others came aboard, the group’s theme became the use, at times the invention, of highly restrictive literary structures. According to HARRY M ATHEWS, its principal American participant, “The difference between constrictive and ordinary forms (such as rhyme and meter) is essentially one of degree.” Jean Lescure (1912–2005) took texts written by someone else and by rigorous methods substituted, say, each noun with the seventh noun to appear after it in a common dictionary. Others wrote “recurrent literature,” as they called it, which was defined as “any text that contains, explicitly or implicitly, generative rules that invite the reader (or the teller, or the singer) to pursue the production of the text to infinity (or until the exhaustion of interest or attention).” One associate, by trade a professor of mathematics, wrote a sober analysis of “Mathematics in the Method of Raymond Queneau.”
No other literary gang, in any language known to me, has produced quite so many extreme innovations; and perhaps because Oulipo does not distinguish among members living and dead, its influence continues to grow. Among the contributors to its first major self-anthology, Oulipo, la littérature potentielle (1973), were Queneau, GEORGES P EREC, Jean Queval (1913–90), Marcel Bénabou (1939), Jacques Roubaud (1932), and Noël Arnaud (1919–2003), all of whom are, by any measure, consequential experimental authors. MARCEL D UCHAMP joined Oulipo in 1962, while OSKAR PASTIOR, a German-speaking Rumanian long resident in BERLIN, wasn’t inducted until 1995. In the American translation of much of this initial anthology is a new name: ITALO CALVINO, whose celebrity made his association untypical and finally marginal. The Oulipo Compendium (1998) is a witty and masterful guide both to the entire movement and its constituents. I wanted to spell it OuLiPo, acknowledging the component words, but Mathews himself, first met in 1965, insisted that I do otherwise.
(18th century?)
The epithet customarily refers to exceptional visual art produced by individuals who didn’t go to art school or socialize with other artists. Some suffered from more serious physical or psychological handicaps. Some of the European exemplars were actually institutionalized. Customarily praised for a lack of sophistication, such work is at its best only incidentally (or accidentally) avant-garde, reflecting not conscious intention but the lack of it.
Perhaps the most famous Outsider Artist in America was Grandma Moses (1860–1961, b. Anna Mary Robertson), who didn’t start serious painting until her early eighties, with work that seems commercially prosaic. Other American outsiders producing more avant-garde work include SIMON RODIA, JAMES CASTLE, C.A.A. DELLSCHAU, and Henry Darger (1892–1973). My own sense is that the greatest outsider visual art appears not in painting but in sculpture sometimes composed of agglomerations produced, like Rodia’s Watts Towers, within the artist’s homestead. The outsider epithet is less applicable in literature and extended music composition, both of which require more training and apprenticeship.
(1960)
Somewhere in the 20th century, enthusiasts for avant-garde art became more and yet more overwhelmed than earlier generations by the sheer amount of first-rate art offered to them, even as they cast aside produce they judged inferior and RETROGRADE. And as more work became available deserving great appreciation, individual memory banks needed to expand as they risked being swamped.
This development has defined my experience over my adult years and thus this ever more populous editions of this Dictionary.
Whatever contributions Britain’s two most august universities, more specifically the University of Oxford (1096, perhaps) and Cambridge University (1209, maybe, maybe), both of them collection of colleges, have made to the making (or even the understanding) of avant-garde art, ever, will need to be written by someone else, ever. Remarkable is the fact that few of the most advanced art minds in the English-speaking world (say, recognized here) ever passed through either institution. None are teaching there now.
(15 April 1886–4 May 1966)
Among the prominent modern painters who wrote much better than they painted, he was probably the most advanced as a writer and thus also the most developed as an editor. Beginning with magazines, he cofounded L’Elan (1915–17), along with GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE. After meeting the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (1887–1965), later known as LE CORBUSIER, they founded L’Esprit Nouveau (1920–25), its title echoing an influential Apollinaire polemic; it quickly established a reputation for publishing the most radical ideas. Ozenfant’s major book, Art (1928), translated into English as The Foundations of Modern Art (1931), was long treasured by visual artists especially for its intelligence about color. Additionally a popular teacher, Ozenfant founded in New York an eponymous School of Fine Arts that survived from 1939 to 1955 before his return to France. About his own paintings, may I quote another: “strictly constructed, precisely drawn compositions with flat, muted colors.”