(27 October 1782–27 May 1840)
His single greatest composition is also his most inventive: 24 Caprices for Solo Violin (1801–09?). Their theme is demonstrating the musical and acoustic possibilities available in playing a single small four-stringed instrument, on which Paganini was widely known as a virtuoso. More than Johann Sebastian Bach in his monumental compositions for the same instrument, Paganini discovered extreme articulations wholly for their sounds, in sum no less austere than Bach, utterly devoid of schmaltz typical, say, of Italian operas popular in his culture at that time. As these Caprices, to support his reputation as a legendary performer, are famously difficult, only the most accomplished violinists have recorded them; fewer have dared perform all of them live. From the recordings known to me I recommend those by Paul Zukofsky (1943–2017), who incidentally favored a longer, purportedly more authentic score.
As his Caprices represent the innovative summa of his talents, other Paganini compositions are less impressive. Later composers, such as Johannes Brahms (1833–97) and Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) made whole works based upon bits of them.
No major strain of American PERFORMANCE is more original, and yet critically neglected, than the populous outdoor performance with elaborate costumes and spectacular stagecraft. Many, especially those scripted by the playwright PAUL GREEN, celebrate the places where they are performed. None perhaps is as spectacular as the venerable Hill Cumorah Pageant produced annually for nearly a century by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly called Mormons, in upper western New York State. Reenacting the religion’s avatar’s reception and translation of the Book of Mormon, and a portrayal of the events related therein, it casts several hundred performers on a ten-level stage for seventy minutes. Customarily, for only seven days in late July, no tickets are required, no donations are accepted, and no seats can be reserved. Supremely elegant, the Hill Cumorah Pageant has no connection with “beauty pageants,” which are vulgar, or the more raucous Book of Mormon (2011) musical that ran for years on Broadway in lower, much lower New York City.
(1974)
As both an artist and a writer, he has made his subjects global state surveillance and drone warfare. As the former, he mounted on a Wilshire Avenue (Hollywood, CA) boulevard “Selected CIA Aircraft Routs and Rendition Flights 2001–2006.” One reporter suspected “that millions have driven right by the installation, thinking it’s an ad for a new airline.” As a writer, Paglen has published articles and books including Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (2006) and Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (2009), whose title tells all. Commercially published, the former includes his long-distance blurry photographs of places that don’t officially exist. Other Paglen photographs appeared in Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes (2010) before more were exhibited in art museums in Frankfurt, Germany, and Washington, DC. A true triple threat, to recall an honorific from American football, Paglen as a filmmaker received credit as a co-cinematographer for Laura Portras’s Citizen Four (2014), a documentary about the anti-surveillance whistle-blower Edward Snowden (1983). One laudable, recurring Paglen theme holds that in the 21st-century secrets can’t be kept.
(20 July 1932–29 January 2006)
Born in Korea, educated in music in Japan and then in Germany, where his work earned support from both KARLHEINZ S TOCKHAUSEN and JOHN C AGE, neither of them pushovers, Paik came to America in 1964 as a celebrated young international artist. His initial forte was ELECTRONIC M USIC, thanks to three years of work at a Cologne studio. On the side, so to speak, Paik did other things that assumed more importance in his career. After several outrageous PERFORMANCE pieces in Europe, many of them in FLUXUS festivals, some of them involving genuine danger (e.g., leaving a stage on which a motorcycle engine was left running, thus filling a small space with increasing amounts of carbon monoxide), Paik, in 1963, installed the historically first exhibition of his video work in a gallery in Wuppertal, Germany – thirteen used television sets whose imagery he altered by manipulating the signal through the use of magnets, among other techniques.
Paik incidentally realized a lesson since lost – that training in high-tech music might be a better preparation for video-art than education in film and visual art, and thus that video programs belong in music schools rather than art schools. (R EYNOLD WEIDENAAR is another major VIDEO ARTIST who began in Electronic Music, initially exploiting a competence required there – the ability to decipher daunting technical manuals.)
Though Paik continued producing audacious live performance, his video activities had greater impact. Late in 1965, he showed a videotape made with a portable video camera he had purchased earlier that day, and soon afterward held an exhibition that depended upon a videotape player. He was among the first artists-in-residence at the Boston Public Television station WGBH, where Paik also codeveloped a video SYNTHESIZER that, extending his original video-art principle, could radically transform an image fed into it. Another oft-repeated move involved incorporating television monitors into unexpected places, such as on a bra worn by the cellist CHARLOTTE M OORMAN, amid live plants, or in a robot. That is to say that he exhibited not video, as such, but television sets. Indeed, the abundance of screens became a SIGNATURE move that others dared not imitate. Into the 1980s, if any museum exhibition included some video-art, the token representative was usually Paik.
Precisely because the most sophisticated American television stations and private foundations concentrated so much of their resources on Paik’s video career, there was reason for both jealousy and disappointment. From the beginning, his art had remarkably few strategies, most of them used repeatedly: performances that are audacious and yet fundamentally silly; tapes that depend upon juxtapositions of initially unrelated images, which is to say COLLAGE, which has become old-fashioned in other arts; installations depending upon accumulations of monitors that show either the same image or related images; and unexpected placements of monitors (such as in a bra). Much of his originality depended upon a goofy humor that many famously missed, beginning with certain institutional curators sponsoring his work.
His American base notwithstanding, not to mention his owning several properties in ARTISTS’ SOHO, Paik’s work was recognized around the world. In 1979, he was awarded a professorship at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf; in 1987, he was elected to the Akademie der Kunste in BERLIN. In 1988, he was commissioned to erect a tower with 1,003 monitors for the Olympic Games in his native Seoul. Because of an incapacitating stroke in 1996, Paik spent his last decade living mostly in Miami Beach. I heard his surname as “pike” as in turnpike.
Paik’s wife/widow Shigeko Kubota (1937 in Japan), has likewise produced distinguished video, particularly with agglomerations of monitors varying in imagery (“multichannel”) and other objects in a genre called “video sculpture.” In addition, from 1974 to 1983, she curated the video program at New York’s most important venue for screening alternative film, the Anthology Film Archives.
(1937)
The term pandiatonicism was coined by NICOLAS S LONIMSKY and was initially used in the first edition of his book Music since 1900, published in 1937. It is a technique in which all seven degrees of the dia-tonic scale are used freely in democratic equality. The functional importance of the primary triads, however, remains undiminished in pandiatonic harmony. Pandiatonicism possesses both tonal and modal aspects, with a distinct preference for major keys. The earliest pandiatonic extension was the added major sixth over the tonic major triad. A cadential chord of the tonic major seventh is also of frequent occurrence. Independently from the development of pandiatonicism in serious music, American jazz players adopted it as a practical device. Concluding chords in piano improvisations in JAZZ are usually pandiatonic, containing the tonic, dominant, mediant, submediant, and supersonic, with the triad in open harmony in the bass, topped by a series of perfect fourths. In C major, such chords would be, from the bass up, C, G, E, A, D, G. It is significant that all the components of this pandia-tonic complex are members of the natural harmonic series, with C as the fundamental generator, G is the third partial, E the fifth partial, D the ninth, B the fifteenth, and A the twenty-seventh. The perfect fourth is excluded both theoretically and practically, for it is not a member of the harmonic series – an interesting concordance of actual practice and acoustical considerations. With the dominant in the bass, a complete succession of fourths, one of them an augmented fourth, can be built: G, C, F, B, E, A, D, G, producing a satisfying pandiatonic complex. When the subdominant is in the bass, the most euphonious result is obtained by a major triad in open harmony, F, C, A, in the low register, and E, B, D, G in the upper register. Polytriadic combinations are natural resources of Pandiatonicism, with the dominant combined with the tonic, e.g., C, G, E, D, G, B, making allowance for a common tone; dominant over the subdominant, as in the complex, F, C, A, D, G, B, etc. True polytonality cannot be used in Pandiatonicism, since all the notes are in the same mode. Pedal points are particularly congenial to the spirit of Pandiatonicism, always following the natural spacing of the component notes, using large intervals in the bass register and smaller intervals in the treble. The esthetic function of Pandiatonicism is to enhance the resources of triadic harmony; that is the reason why the superposition of triads, including those in minor keys, are always productive of a resonant dia-tonic bitonality. Although Pandiatonicism has evolved from tertian foundations; it lends itself to quartal and quintal constructions with satisfactory results. Pandiatonicism is a logical medium for the techniques of neoclassicism. Many sonorous usages of pandiatonicism can be found in the works of Debussy, Ravel, IGOR S TRAVINSKY, Casella, Malipiero, Vaughan Williams, AARON C OPLAND and Roy Harris. The key of C major is particularly favored in piano music, thanks to the “white” quality of the keyboard. Indeed, pandiatonic piano music developed empirically from free improvisation on the white keys. Small children promenading their little fingers over the piano keyboard at the head level produce pandiatonic melodies and pandiatonic harmonies of excellent quality and quite at random.
—Nicolas Slonimsky
(7 March 1924–22 April 2005)
The most inventive member of the first generation of British sculptors sufficiently young to avoid the dominating influence of HENRY M OORE, the Edinburgh-born Paolozzi introduced the metaphor of the machine into his art form. Unlike John Chamberlain and RICHARD S TANKIEWICZ, who arranged and welded together the debris of the industrial environment, Paolozzi in the 1950s began embossing his bronze sculptures with intricate patterns cast from cog wheels and small machine parts. His large works, covered with the hieroglyphics of the machine age, loom like monumental totemic spirits, idols representing the logic of technology that holds the modern world in its grip like the wisdom of the gods, and which Paolozzi said he found “as fascinating as the fetishes of a Congo witch doctor.”
He continued his machine-inspired works into the mid-1960s, at which time he turned to producing simpler biomorphic sculptures, strongly reminiscent of JEAN A RP, as well as collages, painted ceramics, and even films. In the 1950s, Paolozzi had been touted as the leading sculptor of his generation by such people as the art historian HERBERT R EAD. However, none of the work from after his “machine sculpture” period has had much impact. Although he survived physically into 21st century, his name is now largely relegated to art history books.
—Mark Daniel Cohen
(1962)
This phrase comes from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), a book written by Thomas Kuhn (1922–96), a physicist turned an historian of science with scarce ostensible interest in art. Its argument held that a true scientific departure did not build upon recognized previous achievements but created something so differently new that it represented another way of thinking, thus insuring that the new paradigm was, for one measure of departure, scarcely acknowledged by practitioners of “normal science,” if they understood the new ways at all.
Attracting gaggles of cultural explorers soon after the book’s appearance, Kuhn’s sophisticated theme inadvertently validated ABSTRACTION in visual art at the beginning of the 20th century and then CONCEPTUAL ART soon after the book’s appearance. Likewise SERIAL MUSIC and MERCE CUNNINGHAM’s dance, among other radical practices. Despite later quibbles with details in Kuhn’s seminal book, its central theme remains valid.
Indicatively perhaps, his text began not as a book for a university press, whose vetting procedures usually block such innovative thought, but as a long article for the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (1955). Once it was acclaimed there, a university press could publish it alone. By 1987, Scientific Revolutions was ranked first among 20th-century books most frequently cited between 1976 and 1983 in the arts and humanities. By its 50th anniversary, it had gone through three revised editions and been translated into many languages, selling in sum over one million copies.
(29 August 1920–12 March 1955; b. Charles Christopher P., aka Yardbird, Bird)
Essentially self-taught on the alto saxophone, Parker became the premier jazzman of his generation, beginning his professional life in Kansas City at 15, coming to New York while still a teenager, and first recording when he was 21, in an initially precocious career. As one of the progenitors of the new style of the 1940s called B EBOP, he excelled, in NICOLAS SLONIMSKY’s summary, at “virtuosic speed, intense tone, complex harmonies, and florid melodies having irregular rhythmic patterns and asymmetric phrase lengths.”
Rejecting the big bands favored by the preceding generation of jazzmen, Parker and his closest colleagues favored smaller “combos,” as they are called, in a kind of chamber art that was precious to some and path-breaking to others. Parker turned JAZZ into a modernist art of a quality distinctly different from its slicker predecessor. Knowing where he had gone, he once asked EDGARD V ARÈSE for lessons in composing. It is hard to imagine subsequent departures in jazz without Parker’s foundation. Troubled in everyday life he died young, essentially of self-abuse. One of the more interesting extended appreciations of him appears in a thick scholarly history of modern music by the Cornell musicologist William Austin (1920–2000). Stanley Crouch (1945) authored the strongest biography, Kansas City Lightning (2013).
(11 September 1935)
Initially a tonal composer and then one of the few SERIAL composers in his native Estonia, Pärt developed in the mid-1970s his “tintinnabuli style,” derived from tintinnabulation, or the sound of ringing bells. These pieces are tonal, with gradual scalar shifts and resounding rhythms in the tradition of plainsong and Russian liturgical music; they also incorporate repetition and extended structures that are totally absent from serial music. Like ringing bells, they are filled with overtones and undertones. Pärt’s best works are profoundly sacred: Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1976), where the repeated sound of bells comes to epitomize his tintinnabuli style; and Stabat Mater (1985), which echoes his earlier Passio (1982), which is probably his strongest single work. Fully entitled Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem, the latter opens with a choral chord reminiscent of Bach. With gorgeous writing for voices alone, especially in the highest and lowest registers, this seventy-minute oratorio fully intends to stand beside Bach’s work. Pärt is among the few composers featured in this book to benefit from the ideal arrangement of loyal continued support from a single recording company.
(24 June 1901–3 September 1974)
An eccentric western American, Partch was a self-taught musician who repudiated his earliest compositions and then, in the 1930s, developed a forty-three tone scale. Patiently building his own instruments, mostly percussive, customarily striking in appearance, on which to play his microtones, Partch christened his inventions with such appropriately outlandish names as zymoxyl, chromalodeon, kithara, and cloud-chamber bowls. Based on an ancient Greek instrument of the same name, the kithara, for instance, is a tall harp with seventy-two strings grouped in twelve vertical rows of six apiece. The cloud-chamber bowls come from 12-gallon Pyrex glass bottles that have been sawed down; they are played with a mallet. Partch’s micro-tonal scales produced interesting relationships and his instruments fresh timbres; yet the forms of Partch’s music seem archaic, and his rhythms are too regular, while his arrangements are perhaps too reminiscent of the Indonesian gamelan. In short, radical innovations in tonality did not induce comparable revolutions in other musical dimensions. The texts that Partch customarily wrote for his spoken compositions likewise seem old-fashioned today. The words in U.S. Highball (1943), for instance, reflect to excess 1930s writing by John Dos Passos (1896–1970), among others.
Not unlike other indigent musicians during the 1930s, Partch lived as a hobo for several years; and since he is remembered, while others are forgotten, his life becomes the epitome of the heroic American composer who survived in spite of institutional neglect. Partch’s forceful expository writings have perhaps had more influence than his music; that befits an aphorist who can write: “Originality cannot be a goal. It is simply inevitable.” Kyle Gann in his American Music in the Twentieth Century provides an accessible introduction to Partchian scales, incidentally testifying that Partch’s mammoth book, Genesis of a New Music (1949), “its delightful vernacular tone notwithstanding, remains the best, most insightful one-volume history of tuning available.”
Partch’s instruments later belonged to Dean Drummond (1949–2013), a composer/performer whose Newband ensemble played them, in addition to commissioning other composers to write for them. After his death, the unique collection was moved back to the West Coast – not in California but at the University of Washington.
(20 October 1927–4 October 2006)
This major German experimental poet was born in German-speaking Romania (aka Transylvania) and thus, along with others similarly mislocated, spent five years after World War II in a Soviet labor camp. After working for Bucharest radio, he came to BERLIN in 1969, where he became a prominent independent writer. Much like the Austrian experimental poet ERNST JANDL, his near contemporary, Pastior sampled an impressive variety of experimental forms – in the succinct summary of his sometime translator Ros-marie Waldrop (1935): “puns, lists, strings, heaps, fields, dictionaries, alphabets, collage, montage, potpourris – all in orgiastic expansion.”
Unfortunately, much of Pastior’s work cannot be translated into other languages, though it can inspire playful poets to write similar texts acknowledging him, such as this sestina on six loaded words by the American poet John Yau (1950):
Sex thought really all there was
Was sex thought really all there
Really all these was sex thought
There was sex though really all
All thought was there sex really
Thought really all these was sex
Whereas string poems by RICHARD KOSTELANETZ contain words with two or more overlapping letters, Pastior uses syllables in his continuous poetic form:
Dominotaurusbekistandrogynecologistigmamastodonauberginereidentaluminum…
Other Pastior texts resembling prose depend upon far-reaching connections more typical of poetic SURREALISM:
Clemnitz and memphis laminate pneumatically – a sailor’s tick, gymnasium cause misgivings to one one. Nimbus diminishes enigma. Nimbus diminishes enigma. Amnesty clear mines. Anomaly is elementary.
—trans. Rosmarie Waldrop
Another gem, titled “Crimean-Gothic Marching Song,” begins:
Marimal milliman
Assymetrix
Minimal marimum
Which works as well in English as German.
Recalling that Pastior prospered by living in BERLIN, where he arrived a dozen years before me as a guest of the same DAAD program hosting me, I sometimes think the principal mistake in my poetry’s life was returning home to the USA, even though I never learned to speak or read German.
(c. 1900; 1948–75)
In May 1960, Evergreen Review published an issue headlined “What Is ‘Pataphysics’?” Co-edited and introduced by Roger Shattuck (1923–2005), when the literature professor was still predisposed to avant-gardes, it included contributions from ALFRED J ARRY (purportedly ‘Pataphysics’s proto-founder); RAYMOND Q UENEAU; and EUGENE I ONESCO, among other less familiar but comparably wayward writers, all of them identified as “Satraps” of the Collège de ‘pataphysique. In his introduction, Shattuck defines “Pataphysics” as “the science of imaginary solutions. ‘Pataphysics’ is the science of the realm beyond metaphysics; or, ‘Pataphysics’ lies as far beyond metaphysics as metaphysics lies beyond physics – in one direction or another.”
From this assertion follow these corollaries, which Shattuck states without reservation: “Life is, of course, absurd, and it is ludicrous to take it seriously. Only the comic is serious.” As an extension of D ADA, officially inaugurated at the end of 1948, ‘Pataphysics suggested the kind of ludicrous paradox-loving intelligence informing absurd literature. ‘Pataphysics did not die so much as move underground, way underground, until it later surfaced in Australia, in a magazine of that title, indicating that Australia is perhaps becoming the Western world’s cultural frontier, much as America was through most of the 20th century.
(13 December 1911–8 January 1972)
Patchen was an inspired EXPRESSIONIST writer with attractive anarchist sympathies, as well as a more original VISUAL POET who, in the tradition of WILLIAM B LAKE, combined pictures with his own handwritten words in works that are more idiosyncratic than formally innovative. There are reasons to regard his greatest achievement as three books of extended prose, The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941), Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (1945), and Sleepers Awake (1946), which, though they have always been in print, are, shame of shame, rarely mentioned in histories of American literature. (Indeed, any purportedly comprehensive survey of American literature that omits Patchen’s name should be discarded unread, as one offender to come my way is Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury’s From Puritanism to Post-modernism [1991].) Given that his works were insufficiently understood, they offer a rich lode to future scholar-critics. Among the best so far has been Richard L. Blevins (1950), a professor in Pennsylvania.
Patchen was also among the first poets to read publicly along with JAZZ accompaniments, making several recordings combining poetry and jazz, and thus inspiring other poets to perform in venues with improvising musicians. The masterpiece of his visual poetry is “the sun was” that appears on page 213 of Sleepers, otherwise a book mostly of prose. Because Patchen produced significant poems, prose, and pictures, he exemplified the modern writer whose works in sum transcends genre. Given personal misfortune, as well as a crippling accident, his achievements measure personal heroism.
(c. 325 B.C.)
This term is most appropriate in defining poems, usually conventional in syntax, whose typography represents a shape that may be figurative or abstract. The term thus defines horizontal lines of poems whose ends aligned suggest, say, the shape of a horse; the epithet defines as well the classic geometric shape poems of the 17th-century British poet George Herbert (1593–1633). Pattern poetry differs from VISUAL POETRY where language, generally nonsyntactical, is enhanced through design. In his definitive scholarly book DICK H IG-GINS identified a tradition that, going back to classical times in the West, appears in all Western literatures from time to time, including similar works that were produced in China, India, and the Middle East – all of which is to say that Pattern Poetry has been a recurring alternative stream in the history of literary writing.
(9 October 1948)
With his videotape Tompkins Square Park Police Riot (1988), Patterson revealed how video as a documentary medium could differ from film. On a hot summer Saturday night, after five weeks of 90 degree days, the City of New York decided to close Tompkins Square Park in the East Village at one o’clock in the morning. The implicit purpose was to evacuate the squatters who had been sleeping in the park, after parks elsewhere in the city were closed to them. Well before the 1:00 A.M. curfew, protesters opposed to the park’s closing began to gather on Avenue A, and plenty of police came as well, as did Patterson, a Canadian who lived nearby, carrying the battery-powered lightweight video camera that he made an extension of his body. When walking among people, he carried his camera on his hip, which enabled the camera (and thus the viewer later) to participate in the events to the same degree that Patterson participates. For example, when others ran from the rampaging police, his camera ran as well. Since Patterson’s camera had no light and made slight noise, people were generally not aware that they were being intimately recorded. Patterson learned from experience how to refocus distance without actually looking through the lens, capturing as well the peculiar light of NEW YORK CITY at night.
Patterson’s tape, more than anything else I’ve seen from that time, showed how video is far more effective than film at realizing the informal “cinema verite” ideal of a quarter-century before.
As a photographer and anthologist, Patterson has also extensively and elaborately documented Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for instance self-publishing in three rich volumes Jews: A People’s History of the Lower East Side (2012).
(21 January 1939)
Previously a member of the MERCE C UNNINGHAM Dance Company from 1961 to 1964, Paxton also participated in the JUDSON D ANCE THEATER and, later, in the Grand Union improvisational ensemble. A skilled performer, improviser, and polemicist, Paxton developed a form of dance that by 1972 he called “contact improvisation.” Drawing on a movement vocabulary that evolved from martial arts, social dances, sports, and child’s play, Paxton’s contact improvisation has a relaxed, easy-going quality. Although some training in this form is necessary for safety (when, say, one dancer’s body becomes the “floor” or support for another’s in a free-flowing exchange), participation has been open to people of all backgrounds. Because it has become both a theatrical and a social dance form, there is now an international network of contact improvisers.
—Katy Matheson
(12 September 1947)
A various, reclusive, and peripatetic writer/artist, he published a series of Doktor Bey collage books with a mass paperbacker and, by contrast, more experimental visual-verbal texts with smaller presses. Under the witty pseudonym Norman Conquest he initiated yet more radical acts such as applying first-class postage to a dollar bill, rubber-stamping it, and mailing it to a friend. This got him in trouble with the FBI for “defacing U.S. currency,” which might rank among the few avant-garde artistic acts to generate interest in the otherwise artistically disinterested American superpolice.
Pell’s single most extraordinary text is Assassination Rhapsody, which is a refined commentary on the great modern mystery of John F. Kennedy’s death. Its pages include in both visual and verbal forms lots of pseudo-information that is superficially credible but finally ridiculous. To quote LARRY McCAFFERY: “This blend of aesthetic anarchy, black humor, social commentary, and irreverence establishes Pell as currently the most wickedly funny writer in America.”
Pell has also practiced and written about digital photography, editing the periodical Zoom Street. As an ON-DEMAND book publisher in the 21st century, Pell issues under his Black Scat imprint invaluable avant-garde texts that wouldn’t otherwise be available.
(23 November 1933)
An idiosyncratic Polish composer, Penderecki has appropriated a variety of avant-garde ideas in ways that may or may not be original. His String Quartet (1960) had old instruments resonating in new ways, while his genuinely moving Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) has fifty-two strings realizing micro-tonally smoothly modulated frequency bands, mostly at their highest possible pitches, superficially resembling GYORGY L IGETI’s stunning Atmospheres (1961) and Lux Aeterna (1966).
As Penderecki gained recognition, his music became slickly pretentious, if not simplistic and derivative; his Passion and Death of Our Lord According to St. Luke (1965) is highly congenial to listeners who don’t much like most modern music (much as Carl Orff’s [1895–1982] Carmina Burana was, a few decades before). NICOLAS S LONIMSKY credits Penderecki with inventing “an optical notation, with symbolic ideograms indicating the desired sound; thus a black isosceles triangle denotes the highest possible pitch; an inverted isosceles triangle, the lowest possible pitch; a black rectangle represents a sonic complex of white noise within a given interval”; etc. It is unfortunate that such innovative intentions do not always produce comparably innovative results.
(5 March 1955, b. P. Fraser Jillette; 14 February 1948, b. Raymond Joseph T.)
Such an unlikely pair of PERFORMANCE masters they are: Penn being tall and bulky, Teller being shorter and slighter; Penn irrepressibly voluble and Teller nearly always silent; Teller as an Amherst College alumnus who taught high school Latin and Penn as a graduate of a clown school. Nonetheless, they have been ranked since the 1970s among the most original performers in the tradition of stage magicians, making several significant departures. First, they are funnier than HOUDINI, if not every other illusionist who ever performed. Second, they like to “explain” their illusions, though their accounts are customarily insufficient. Third, they frequently pretend that their trick has gone wrong before recovering their thread. Fourth, many routines are truly original (in a genre in which practitioners steal from each other or their predecessors). Though the duo has worked in a wide variety of venues, they return to their home base in LAS VEGAS. Audaciously opinionated, they are unreservedly teetotalers, atheists, and libertarians.
(7 March 1936–3 March 1982)
Surely the most variously ambitious experimental French writer of his generation, Perec began as an author of crossword puzzles, which perhaps accounts for why few writers, ever, could match his dexterity with innovative linguistic structures. As a major contributor to O ULIPO, he wrote many books, including La Disparition (1969), a novel totally devoid of the most popular letter in both English and French – the E – only to discover that the stunt had been done years before, albeit with less literary distinction, by the American Ernest Vincent Wright in Gadsby, 1939. “By the end of La Disparition,” writes his sometime collaborator HARRY M ATHEWS,
e has become whatever is unspoken or cannot be spoken – the unconscious, the reality outside the written work that determines it and that it can neither escape nor master. E becomes whatever animates the writing of fiction; it is the fiction of fiction.
Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi (1978, A User’s Manual) records in several hundred pages detailed life in a Parisian apartment building, while his poems observe a variety of inventive constraints. The departure in his W ou le sourvenir d’/enfance (1975, W or The Memory of Childhood) is mixing genuine autobiography with fiction. His principal American translator has been David Bellos (1945), Perec’s biographer, who has also put into English other more advanced European fictioners.
(5 August 1902–11 January 1971; b. Irene R. P.)
Pereira’s work was perhaps too avant-garde to be incorporated into the recent feminist revival in the visual arts. During her time at the Arts Students League in the 1920s, her fellow students included both DAVID SMITH and BURGOYNE DILLER. After beginning with paintings of machines, she favored abstract shapes on transparent materials that were customarily hung without a frame. In the 1940s, she used layers of glass to explore resonating light sources, which she regarded as extending painting. A geometric mystic in the tradition of PIET M ONDRIAN, Pereira thought her trapezoidal shapes subsumed spiritual presences. During the 1950s, her textures became thicker, featuring floating rectilinear forms. This work was so different from what others were doing that it remains memorable.
Pereira also wrote books whose titles tell all: Light and the New Reality (1951), The Transformation of “Nothing” and the Paradox of Space (1955), The Nature of Space (1956, 1968), The Lapis (1957), and The Crystal of the Rose (1959). Ever philosophical in her thinking, she claimed that she painted “what the eye perceives when it looks inward and feels a firmament set with the jewelled constellations of the time that is man.” Karen A. Bearor’s monograph (1993) investigates not only her art but its continuing unjustified neglect, even among those predisposed toward women’s art.
(c. 1975 –)
This became a superior epithet for a presentational genre that had previously been called HAPPENINGS or MIXED-MEANS THEATER, which is to say a live presentations incoporating dance, music, drama, and sometimes motion pictures. Performance art shares two elements. The various parts function disharmoniously, in the tradition of COLLAGE, which is based upon the principle of assembling elements not normally found together; aliveness, because a recorded piece, whether on video or audiotape, lacks spontaneity. Performance art may also involve members of the audience, voluntarily or involuntarily. ALLAN KAPROW developed his coinage Happenings to describe a one-time event, generally held outdoors, in which people come together unrehearsed, to execute instructions they have not seen before. In JOHN C AGE’s untitled forty-five-minute piece staged at BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE in 1952, one person read a text, another performed choreography, and a third produced sounds, all with minimal preparation. The art depends upon discovery and surprise.
While performance art extends this tradition of alternative theater, the term came to identify more modest theatrical events, often involving one performer who was customarily also her or his own director. Much depended upon a certain paradoxical treatment of materials. If the performer was trained in theater, words, if used at all, play a secondary role to the articulation of image and movement. If, however, the performer was trained in dance, language might predominate over movement. Such later performance art differs esthetically from the masterpieces of 1960s mixed-means theater in reflecting the later influence of MINIMALISM and CONCEPTUAL A RT.
(1967–198?)
Organized by Richard Schechner (1934), a drama professor at New York University, this began as the resident company for a DOWNTOWN New York alternative space called the Performing Garage (because it previously housed large trucks) that was renovated with wooden platforms and rafters that allowed everyone to sit where he or she wished. The group’s best production, Dionysus in ’69 (1968), followed the academic tradition of adapting classic dramatic texts, in this case Euripides’s The Bacchae, rather than creating theater wholecloth. It opens with company members performing various exercises in the middle of a carpeted floor. After an exchange of words between one performer and the woman tending the door, the actors began to “perform,” moving in and out of Euripides’s lines and characters. Now and then they shifted into contemporary speech and use their real names. They moved at times among the audience, occasionally challenging individual spectators. Early in the play, a Dionysian dance was performed, which members of the audience were invited to join, and also a stunning birth ritual, in which Dionysus’s body, clad in a minimum of clothing (sometimes none), was passed through five pairs of female legs and over a carpet of similarly semi-clothed male bodies. In a concluding Dionysian frenzy, the audience was again invited into a melee of stroking figures. The title referred to a line in the election-year play – a vote for the lead male actor would “bring Dionysus in ’69.”
Out of the Performance Group came the Wooster Group (1976), cofounded by Elizabeth LeCompte (1944) and Spalding Gray (1941–2004), who later became a gifted monologist. Initially utilizing many of the same performers, the Wooster Group took over the Performance Garage. When one group became the other seems unclear.
(1970s)
This began as the academic study of PERFORMANCE art at its best, only to be expanded or degraded to overlap with another new academic “discipline” called Cultural Studies, which was in turn an offshoot from sociology that focused less upon behavior than upon artifacts of cultural performance, often less than the best if coming from a circumscribed social group. Certain PS’s early advocates even acknowledged my The Theatre of Mixed Means (1967), sometimes crediting my thesis that performance not drama constitutes the greater American tradition, one even identifying me as its “father,” even though no other children were ever credited to me; but by the 1990s acknowledgments of my pioneering writings were scarcer. The question of who was the first “professor of performance studies” seems unclear, though it certainly wasn’t me.
(13 June 1888–30 November 1935)
The most distinguished modern user of multiple literary pseudonyms – “heteronyms” was his name for them – this Portuguese poet descended from Marranos, or Jews who were forcibly converted to Christianity after the Spanish Inquisition. After his father died and his mother remarried, Pessoa grew up in Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was the Portuguese consul. Isolated and impoverished once back in his native country, he reportedly filled his life with imaginary figures, who became literary characters and then creators. Fernando Pessoa coined, in addition to his own name, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvero de Campos, each for a different sort of poetry. (As an adept linguistic ventriloquist, Pessoa also wrote poems in 17th-century English.) As Pessoa explained, “I put into Caeiro all my power of dramatic depersonalization, into Ricardo Reis all my intellectual discipline, dressed in the music that is proper to him, into Álvero de Campos, all the emotion that I do not allow myself in my living.” Less pseudonyms than discrete literary creations, each moniker apparently encouraged Pessoa to write what could not be written under his own name.
(1929-?)
As the first major critic of American comic strips, he wrote extended appreciations with quotations, allusions, and complex sentences more typical of literary magazines than, say, newspapers. From his earlier forays into criticism of fiction, film, and poetry, Phelps learned to do what no American critic had done before. Around 1960 certain new literary magazines, impressed by his critical courage, invited him to be a contributing editor. Though Phelps’s work initially appeared in modestly circulated periodicals, he scored a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978, when such certification was still prestigious; yet never did he teach comics in any academy. (That didn’t happen until the 21st century.)
While working as a file clerk at a New York City agency, living with his mother in FarEast Brooklyn, Phelps also self-published a magazine For Now (1962–69) in a squarish format that was really legal-size paper folded perpendicularly. (This format influenced the initial issues of Arlene Croce’s likewise pioneering Ballet Review [1965–].) Though modestly circulated, For Now was read appreciatively, not only by me. Phelps’s own strongest essays appear in Covering Ground (1969) and Reading the Funnies: Looking at the Great Cartoonists throughout the First half of the 20th Century (2001). To later serious critics of American comics, Phelps’s efforts rank as heroic. In 2018, no one seemed to know if he were still alive.
(25 May 1937)
Educated in English literature at Oxford, also trained as a composer, Phillips became a visual artist, not only as a gallery painter but as the author of a BOOK-ART masterpiece, A Humument (1980). What Phillips did was take a Victorian novel, W. H. Mallock’s A Human Document, and paint or draw over most of its pages so that only certain words from the original text were visible, in effect composing his own visual-verbal poems from another man’s text. (The new book’s title comes from removing the middle letters from Mallock’s original.)
Over the missing words Phillips put an endless wealth of designs, made in a wide variety of ways. The results have appeared in several forms, beginning with publication of sample pages in literary magazines in the late 1960s, then as suites from a graphics publisher who was a neighbor in South London, later in a book of black-and-white reproductions (Trailer, 1971), and finally as a full-color book (1981) that seven years later, then eleven years later, and again decades later reappeared in revised forms. Phillips meanwhile recorded a musical version of pages from A Humument and made another visual-verbal creation with Blakean echoes, an illustrated edition of his own translation of Dante’s Inferno, in addition to curating and introducing a traveling exhibit of African art.
Several more recent Phillips books draw upon his immense, under-curated collections of postcards and photographs from a century ago.
The initial measure of avant-garde photography is doing what common photographers don’t (and probably can’t) make. Among the many options have been overexposure, underexposure, multiple exposure (COBURN), superimposition, photograms made without a camera (MAN RAY, MOHOLY-NAGY), millisecond exposure (EDGERTON), reworking a Polaroid while it is developing (SAMARAS), PHOTOMONTAGE, handwriting directly on the picture (ALLEN GINSBERG), using kaleidoscopes (WEEGEE), and, more recently, digital adding and editing, etc., etc.
Needless to say perhaps, some artists have made each of these alternative moves better than others. One early classic photograph deserving canonization is MARCEL DUCHAMP’s of himself quintupled (1917), which also ranks among the few original mug shots (e.g., facial portraits). View the self-portrait here: https://juliamargaretcameronsecession.wordpress.com/2014/06/13/marcel-duchamp-5-wat-self-portrait-1917/
(late 1910s)
Literally, a photomontage is made by using splicing techniques to assemble photographic images. Technically, photomontage should really be called photocollage, as collage means gluing in French and montage implies sequence, as in film. (True photomontage would thus exhibit two images from different times, as in superimpositions.)
For me at least, the epitome of photomontage is PAUL CITROEN’s (1896–1983) Metropolis, which is the name not for one image but several that the Dutchman composed around 1923. Taking bits of distinctly metropolitan images, particularly buildings whose height exceeds their width, Citroen filled a vertical rectangle, from top to bottom, from side to side, making a persuasive image of an all-encompassing urban world (that has no relation to primary nature). Though this image has frequently been reprinted, there is no book in English about Citroen.
To other critics, the great photomontagist is JOHN H EARTFIELD, a German who took an English name for publishing images that resemble political cartoons, really, by customarily mixing the faces of politicians, particularly Adolf Hitler, with critical imagery, such as coins replacing Hitler’s spinal structure, and captions that became part of the picture as the image was rephotographed, so to speak. As RICHARD H UELSEN-BECK wrote of Heartfield’s photomontage: “It has an everyday character, it wants to teach and instruct, its rearrangement of parts indicates ideological and practical principles.” The defining mark of Russian images by Solomon Telingator (1903–1969) was montaging photographs with expressive typography.
(22 January 1879–30 November 1953; b. Francis-Marie Martinez de P.)
Born in Paris of a Cuban father and a French mother, Picabia began as a writer, mostly of art criticism, before becoming a French artist, beginning as an Impressionist, becoming a C UBIST, and by 1912 following ROBERT DELAUNAY’s Orphism. Traveling to New York in 1913, Picabia collaborated with his compatriot MARCEL D UCHAMP, who was by 1915 also in New York, in establishing American DADA. Having contributed to ALFRED S TIEGLITZ’s periodical 291 in 1916, Picabia published in 1917 the first number of his Dada review 391 in Barcelona, participating in under-organized Dada both there and in New York, creating “mechanothropomorphic” fantasies, such as La Parade Amoureuse (1917).
Returning to Paris in the 1920s, Picabia denounced Dada and joined the S URREALISTS, collaborating with ERIK S ATIE on the ballet Relâche (1924) and with RENÉ CLAIR on the film Entr’acte (1925). Departing to Provence in 1925, Picabia produced lyrical COLLAGES made from cellophane, which he called Transparencies, before returning to Paris two decades later. Throughout his life, forever literary, he also wrote poetry and prose.
(25 October 1881–8 April 1973)
After beginning his career in his native Spain as an exceptionally talented realistic painter, Picasso moved to France where he participated in initiating CUBISM in the first decade of the 20th century. Over the years, until World War II, he passed through a succession of artistic styles, mirroring many “isms” of the rapidly galloping art world (Analytic Cubism, Synthetic Cubism, Neoclassicism, S URREALISM, and so forth).
Some of Picasso’s many innovative additions to world art include assimilating AFRICAN ART into Western painting, incorporating several vantage points into a single portrait, and introducing into his still-life paintings such found objects as newspaper headlines, wallpaper fragments, and ticket stubs. His constant stylistic changing is considered avant-garde, because it reflected a restlessness and dissatisfaction with the status quo, even when much of that status quo was his own creation. Reflecting modernist possibility, as well as reflecting his fortunate innate facility and a long life, his unique historical achievement was contributing significantly to so many distinct paintingly “periods.”
Some historians identify Picasso as initiating Cubist sculpture, as his subsequent three-dimensional art took a variety of forms. A whimsical sculpture of a gorilla whose face was sculpted around one of his children’s toy cars predicted later POP A RT. His many Cubist constructions of guitars brought the intersecting planes of Cubist painting into three dimensions; they also incorporated scrap metal, wire, and scrap wood, among other materials not often found in fine art sculpture at the time.
Picasso worked for a brief period as a stage designer for SERGEI D IAGHILEV’s Ballets Russes, contributing Cubist back-drops and costumes to others’ innovative productions, most notably Parade (1917). As an aspiring POLYARTIST, Picasso spent two years mostly writing poetry and plays that, though moderately experimental, are now forgotten. Not everything touched by him became gold.
One question of how much of his abundant production will survive. In contrast, say, to MARCEL DUCHAMP, whose score approaches 100 percent and thus becomes Picasso’s de facto “conscience,” the figure for the latter is arguable. To me it’s less than 50 percent, which is still pretty good, especially for an artist so adventurous and productive; others will no doubt offer a different figure, all surely much less than perfect. One common opinion holds that his very best years for work were 1907–14 and 1925–37.
Since one measure of a discriminating critic is identifying in a major artist certain work that is less known, I nominate two black-white etching and aquatints with nine panels apiece accompanied by his prose text titled Sueño y mentira de Franco (1937, The Dream and Lie of Franco) once in the collection of Peggy Guggenheim, now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. As his first overly political work, it presages the larger and more familiar WHITE & BLACK Guernica done later in the same year. Otherwise, consider that a major autobiographical theme implicit in Picasso’s entire work, enhancing it for some while diminishing it for others, is his changing erotic experience.
(21 March 1944–3 March 2004)
To the pioneering anthology of The Puerto Rican Poets/Los Poetas Puertorriqueños (1972) Pietri contributed “The Broken English Dream,” which consists entirely of punctuation marks (that are different in Spanish en face, of course). The “last edition” of Invisible Poetry (n.d.) is twenty-eight blank pages; in my copy Pietri inscribed on the opening page, “Read this and pass on the message to others… and others.” He once sent me I Never Promised You a Cheeseburger, which is a box with unbound but numbered pages, all cut into the shape of an ellipse, each with discrete writing in various styles. Pietri’s stand-up poetry readings ranked among the more inspired, incorporating theatrics that, while they have little to do with poetry, reflect his unfettered imagination. Pietri also wrote plays that, while eccentric in parts, are comparatively more conventional.
(17 December 1893–20 March 1966; b. E. Friedrich Max P.)
An actor and director in pre-Nazi BERLIN, he is credited with introducing PHOTOMONTAGE, slides, and film into his stagecraft. Becoming Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator in Epic Theater, Piscator published an significant book, Das politische Theater (1929) in which “political” was a euphemism for Communist. Among epic characteristics his widow Maria Ley-Piscator (1898–1999) identified “a theatre for vast audiences, a theatre of action, whose objective is to bring out the stirring questions of our time and to bring about a total re-education of both men of the theatre and the audience.” Emigrating to America in 1938, after stops in Russia and Paris, Piscator became an influential teacher, counting among his prominent pupils the founders of the LIVING T HEATRE. Returning to (West) Germany in 1951, he struggled for a decade until he became artistic director of the Berlin Volksbuhne in 1962.
(23 June 1933)
Through much of the 1960s and 1970s, the Italian artist Pistoletto mounted a series of installations, works of “sculpture,” and other personal artistic inventions that, taken together, provide a case study of faint thinking and a shift of the burden of ingenuity from the artist to the interpreting audience. His early efforts involved the use of vertical mirrored surfaces with life-sized figure drawings attached, behind which viewers saw themselves reflected, thereby making some vague point about the relationship between art and life. Pistoletto moved on to work with piles of rags. In Golden Venus of Rags (1967–71), a statue of the goddess painted gold stands before a heap of multicolored rags. In Orchestra of Rags (1968), clothing is piled around a boiling kettle beneath a sheet of glass. The viewer is left to guess the symbolic meaning of the rags. With no clue given, perhaps they mean nothing at all. Pistoletto was a leading figure in ARTE P OVERA. The lack of clear thinking in his works gives a new meaning to the name of the group, and the only mystery in his art is why he never used smoke in his mirrored projects.
—Mark Daniel Cohen
(timeless)
Consider this T.S. ELIOT statement in 1920 as an early indication of the importance of plagiarism in art and writing: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Think of MARCEL DUCHAMP’s “L.H.O.O.Q.” from 1919: The Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee added to it along with a flourish that is Duchamp’s SIGNATURE in the lower right corner. Found art, but particularly found poetry, continues the thought. Sometimes, poets find texts and assert those unmodified texts as their own. At other times, the appropriation and manipulation of bits of text, usually without a single word of one’s own making, leads to a new work.
But beginning at least by the 1980s and possibly earlier, Western avant-garde artists working in the reprographic arts (xerography and audio recording) began to promote the idea that plagiarism (occasionally called “plagiartism”) was a valid form of artistic expression. Despite the rhetoric promulgated by the Monty Cantsins, the Karen Eliots, mailartists, and others, the goal of this artistic urge was never pure plagiarism, which requires an attempt to fool the audience. With plagiartism, the audience understands the source of the work, either implicitly or explicitly, and the plagiarism is merely the manipulation of the appropriated source material. Even the sampling of rap music is part of this urge towards plagiarism. The impetus for this type of work was a reaction to the hyper-onymity of the modern, post-industrial world where, rather than being lost in an anonymous mass of humanity billions strong, we discovered ourselves singled out: our actions, purchases, and connections recorded and tracked by networks of computers, both governmental and corporate. In such a world, a retreat to group pseudonymity (in the form of Monty Cantsin) and a reliance on plagiarism as an esthetic helps to tie people together into a single structure (we, the people of the world, now, then, and forever).
—Geof Huth
(1970s)
One assumption behind the individual selections in this book, not to mention its title, holds that, particularly since the 1960s, there is not one and only one avant-garde in any art, but several; and, because monopoly is impossible in open societies, where culture develops mostly apart from state dominance, these avant-gardes move in different, if comparably original, directions. For instance, the field of painting has in the past sixty years witnessed POP A RT, OP A RT, shaped canvases, monochromic fields, nonhierarchical pastiche, conundrum art (associated with JASPER J OHNS), CONCEPTUAL A RT as well as ASSEMBLAGE, space-encasing ENVIRONMENTS, and works that resemble paintings but are not, such as the light pieces of JAMES T URRELL
Whereas only the followers of ARNOLD S CHOENBERG on one side and JOHN C AGE on the other were identified with avant-garde music three decades ago, now we can speak of A LEATORY, M ODULAR, M ICROTONAL, and MULTITRACK and sampling tape developments as each generating new art.
Indeed, it seems that a period of pluralism in all the arts has succeeded an era of dichotomies. Although avant-garde remains a useful general measure for distinguishing originality from familiarity, thus one work can be more avant-garde than another (even if created by the same artist); but beware of anyone who says that one or another decidedly innovative direction is necessarily “more” avant-garde than others. Likewise, beware of anyone or any group declaring itself the sole avant-garde, especially if s/he excludes or ignores people doing work that is roughly similar or closely related. Be even more wary if such monopolists try to sell you anything, intellectual as well as physical. Suspect this to be a road map directing all traffic to a dead end.
Into the 21st century the pluralism of avant-gardes parallels comparable pluralism in all the arts, where competing styles peacefully coexist, so to speak. Anyone who wants to be king or queen of the hill, any hill in the arts, will find the earth sinking under his or her feet.
One fundamental difference among the recent avant-gardes is that some would isolate the processes, capabilities, and materials of the established medium – say, the application of paint to a plane of canvas – while the other would mix painting with concerns and procedures from the other arts, such as working in three dimensions or using light. Similarly, the new music descending from Schoenberg would isolate phenomena particular to music – pitch, amplitude, timbre, dynamics, and duration – and then subject each of these musical dimensions to an articulate ordering, creating pieces of exceptionally rich musical interactivity. Another new music, traditionally credited to JOHN C AGE, would combine sound with theatrical materials in original ways, creating an experience not just for the ear but for the other senses too. In dance, one avant-garde would explore the possibilities of movement alone, while the other favors theatrical conceptions, mixing in unusual ways such means as music, props, lights, setting, and costumes. Paradoxically, MERCE C UNNINGHAM, who was in his beginnings avant-garde in the first sense, switched his emphasis in the early 1960s to become an innovating figure in MIXED-MEANS dance, only to return after 1967 to pieces predominantly about movement.
The avant-garde is thus not a single step built upon an old house but a diversity of radical and discontinuous alternatives to previously established paradigms. The result is not worldwide stylistic uniformity but numerous pockets of exponents of one or another innovative style. It has been the bias of art historians to portray one style as succeeding another (thus fresh artists gain reputations by climbing over their predecessors’ backs), whereas the contemporary truth holds that several new styles can develop and thrive simultaneously. While “progress” in art cannot be measured, the expansion of possibilities is indisputably palpable.
(late 1960s–80)
In the wake of the rise of VISUAL POETRY in the late 1960s came sub-developments customarily marked by a compromising of its mediumistic integrity, particularly with the inclusion of images, mostly recognizable images, often political images, along with words. The most prominent practitioners of this miscegenated art were Italians who called their work Poesia Vivisa, the shift in ordering the two words suggesting some urgency. Their assumption was that words alone would not suffice, especially in public spaces or in demonstrative performances. Its principal publicist was an Italian who called himself Sarenco (1945–2017; b. Isaia Mabel-lini); his magazine (which published me) was Lotta Poetica (1971–75).
One of the risks of using popular images and slogans is that they become less familiar, if not totally unfamiliar, over time. So that what seems fresh in the 1970s became stale by the following decade. Because such work did not survive to 1990, it was not acknowledged in my first Dictionary or the second. It appears here because the principle of word + image was revived in the 21st century, particularly in North America, sometimes under the honorific banner of “Visual Poetry.”
(1924)
This nifty epithet was coined in Czechoslovakia by the poet Vitezslav Nezval (1900–58) and KAREL TEIGE to define their conviction that art and life are not separate but indistinguishable. From this position followed a predisposition to find esthetic value in the everyday activities of average people. Thus, collaborators in this movement produced poetry incorporating design and photographs, in addition to producing films and mixed-means artistic performances into the 1930s (until the Nazi invasion of their homeland).
They explored not only the new media of photography, film, and radio but produced popular cabaret. In the mid-1920s, Tiege wrote:
A work of art that fails to make us happy and to entertain is dead, even if its author was Homer himself. Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Burian, a director of fireworks, a champion boxer, an inventive and skillful cook, a record-breaking mountain climber – are they not even greater poets?
Nezval had published as early as 1922 Abeceda whose subject is the letters of the alphabet. Each of them is depicted in a short stanza. By 1926, he staged a PERFORMANCE with the same title in which a dancer performs the letters. (This was reconstructed for a 1999 traveling exhibition that began in Florida. A tape of the dance was included at later venues.) Along with a dancer and a photographer Teige and Nezval conceived of a Poetist project that incorporated literature, dance, theater, graphic design, typography, and photography within a single rubric.
(forever)
The measures of excellence and innovation are not intention, no matter how laudable (and thus interviewable), than the creation of a work with new political intelligence that sticks in recipients’ minds. The classics are, of course, the anti-war paintings of Goya, especially after they were reproduced, as they were widely for decades since. Among modern classics of Political Art would be JOHN HEARTFIELD’s montaged images of Nazi perfidy, GEORGE ORWELL’s portrayals of totalitarian society in Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) and, in a different way, ROBERT INDIANA’s infinitely reproduced Love (1965). As a libertarian anarchist, I particularly treasure the images of very free anti-authoritarian societies that are portrayed in the LIVING THEATRE’s Paradise Now (1968) and certain MAXIMAL performance pieces by JOHN CAGE, both of which epitomize ANARCHIST ART.
(c. 1985; aka “PC”)
Beginning as a reaction against the ethnocentricism and male-dominated language of the West, PC has spawned a noisy decades-long debate about what should be taught in American colleges. Initially this was an argument over linguistic propriety, especially on isolated college campuses; so that it is not “PC” to call a young woman a “babe” or “chick,” for example.
Later in the 1980s arose a cultural disagreement, as self-conscious old fogeys, such as the late University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, dismissed current popular culture as trash, while compulsive list-makers, such as University of Virginia professor E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (1928), itemized “What Every American Needs to Know,” to cite the subtitle of his best-selling book.
On the other side were “radical,” “feminist,” and “third-world” critics insisting that anyone who reads Charles Dickens must be hopelessly Western-culture-centric retrograde. The PC controversy has inspired collegiate humor, such as “PC dictionaries” that attack cultural awareness by mocking it, in addition to a popular television symposium proudly calling itself Politically Incorrect.
Sadly, PC issues have become both sides’ sledgehammer, with conservative academics bashing more liberal ones, and vice versa. A valid question is whether either group has emerged from this fake “culture war” with greater cultural intelligence or sensitivity.
—with Richard Carlin
(3 March 1945)
Among the strongest of the new VISUAL POETS to emerge in the 1980s, Polkinhorn also wrote traditional verse, having produced a highly original antiwar epic, Anaesthesia (1985), which is composed of phrases, rather than poetic “lines,” and is marked by unobvious turns. Bridges of Skin Money (1986) collects his early visual poetry. Mount Soledad (1997) is a textually rich recollection of a disappointing love affair with passages like this:
march of history to a grand finale with trap doors and retreating women at work in beehives and industrial parks conscious abdication and abduction I’ve observed as if from up close or a distance indistinguishable war lords, another generation sets out on a juggernaut to deceive and lie as if time and circumstance the dripping lard of abuse that only a general famine could interrupt her full-blown consumption of steel plastic energy foodstuffs paper and water because they told her to take now on credit if necessary which some even admire.
Polkinhorn has also exhibited paintings, drawings, and photographs. Formerly a professor at the Imperial Valley campus of San Diego State University (and later the director of the SDSU press), he translated an invaluable anthology of statements by Spanish and Portuguese-language experimental poets, Corrosive Signs (1990). His critical essays on avant-garde literature rank among the best. Unable to find a publisher for his collected criticism of literature and art, Seeing Power, Polkinhorn was in 1997 among the first to distribute his texts on the Internet.
(28 January 1912–11 August 1956)
Following his oldest brother’s ambition for a fine art life, Jackson Pollock studied in high school with FREDERICK SCHWANKOVSKY, who also taught other teenagers who later had visible careers as artists. As a young man, Pollock went to New York, studying with the prominent Americanist painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), among others, who taught realisms that Pollock quickly outgrew. Lacking conventional facility, Pollock was not a good student. Befriending the Russian-American painter John Graham, Pollock learned not only about modern European painting but primitive art that purportedly reflected unconscious dimensions of human experience. Whereas DE K OONING, his contemporary, radically extended C UBISM, Pol-lock initially developed another major innovation of early 20th-century European art – E XPRESSIONISM.
Pollock’s radical departure depended upon innovative methods of applying paint to canvas. As early as 1947, he laid canvas on the floor and then, in a series of rapid movements with sticks and stiffened brushes, literally poured and splattered paint all over the surface. He worked on his canvases from all sides, dripping paint at various angles, mixing enamels with oil pigments squeezed directly from its tubes, varying the rhythms of his movements. Some of the brilliance of Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952 (1952), perhaps Pollock’s last great painting, comes from adding aluminum paint. Though Pollock rejected many of the canvases produced by these impulsive and purposeful actions, certain pictures attained an overwhelming density of visual activity. Sometimes appearing to depict pure energy, his work epitomized what the critic HAROLD ROSENBERG called ACTION PAINTING.
One innovative departure resulting from such Expressionist methods is an intensity that is visible all over the nonhierarchical, nonfocused canvas, thereby not only realizing the principle that any part epitomizes the whole but creating the sense that the imagery could have extended itself well beyond the painting’s actual edges, if not forever.
Wishing to overwhelm, Pollock’s best paintings, like de Kooning’s, suggest different levels of illusionistic space, but Pollock’s decisively differed from de Kooning’s by finally eschewing any reference to figures outside of painting. Such a complete meshing of image and field, content and canvas, even stasis and movement, creates a completely integrated, autonomous, and self-referential work that differs radically from the fragmented, allusive, and structured field of post-Cubist painting. Since he had undergone Jungian psychoanalysis, it was said that the only experience represented in Pollock’s art was his mind at the time(s) of actually painting.
Whereas some of these expressionist canvases were big – often 9 feet by 18, recalling Pollock’s earlier interest in murals, others were small. He eschewed using the same size twice. Among the masterpieces in the former vein is a favorite of mine, Full Fathom Five (1947), 50 7/8 inches by 30 1/8 inches, whose dark, closely articulated surface includes not only paint thickly applied, but buttons, nails, tacks, coins, cigarettes, matches, etc. I also especially like his extended Summertime: Number 9A (1948), which is over 18 feet wide while less than 3 feet high; and such black/white paintings as Portrait and a Dream (1953) and Deep 1953). Whereas early Pollock paintings had poetic titles, some of which came from solicitous friends, by 1948 he followed the precedent established by MOHOLY -N AGY, among others, of simply numbering his works within each year, sometimes adding poetic prefixes or suffixes as subtitles.
Once Pollock’s innovations earned sudden international acclaim in the mid-1950s (along with the inevitable negative notices from dissenters), the self-destructive painter stopped producing, regrettably succumbing to the alcoholism that had earlier contributed more than once to his emotional unraveling. JOHN CAGE, among other sometime friends, spoke of how they would avoid contact with him in social situations. Pollock’s premature death in an auto accident seems, in retrospect, almost a narrative convenience.
A 1998 traveling retrospective, initiated at the MoMA, belongs among the greatest exhibitions, including not only a wealth of works from Pollock’s entire career but also demonstrating how certain familiar images, often reproduced, look not only so different, but so much more impressive, on walls, in their original sizes. Another virtue of this exhibition was including the classic Hans Namuth and PAUL FALKENBERG film about Pollock at work, some of it shot from a glass below, which ranks among the classic documentaries of artistic process (so superior to the more familiar form of an earnest head jabbering about his or her work).
Pollock’s work was so well understood soon after its first appearance that commentary on it has hardly developed or changed in the decades since; and in this respect, Pollock criticism differs from that accumulating around other comparably original artists.
(1969)
This is my honorific, coined back in 1969 and occasionally used by others, for the individual who excels at more than one nonadjacent art or, more precisely, is a master of several unrelated arts. The principal qualifier in my definition is “nonadjacent.” In my understanding (sometimes missed by others using the term), painting and sculpture are adjacent, as are both film and photography and both poetry and fiction (as many individuals excel at each pair). However, poetry and music are not adjacent. Nor are painting and fiction.
Thus, JOHN CAGE was a polyartist for excelling at music and poetry. So, in different ways were WYNDHAM L EWIS, MOHOLY -N AGY, THEO VAN DOESBUR G, KURT S CHWITTERS, JEAN (H ANS) A RP, JEAN C OCTEAU, and WILLIAM B LAKE. Among contemporaries after Cage I would rank YVONNE R AINER, DICK H IGGINS, and KENNETH K ING.
I distinguish the polyartist from the individual who excels at one art but not in another, such as PABLO P ICASSO, who quit painting for eighteen months in order to write modest poetry and plays, from the artist who incorporates several media into a single performance, in the tradition of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk (literally, “total artwork”); and from the dilettante who, as I understand that epithet, excels at nothing. “No one capable of genuine polyartistry,” I once wrote, “should want to be merely an ‘artist’ anymore.” One critical advantage of the term is forbidding the interpretation of work in one art with the terms of another (such as “poet’s paintings”).
Consider too that the great movements of classic modernism – D ADA, S URREALISM, F UTURISM, the BAUHAUS – were all essentially polyartistic enterprises. True polyartistic criticism attempts to identify the core esthetic ideas that are reflected in categorically various works.
(c. 1960)
It was quite stunning at the beginning – the first post-World War II representational reaction to ABSTRACT A RT that was not primarily conservative (or antimodernist) in spirit. As the creation of painters conscious of art history, who had assimilated and revealed the influence of ABSTRACTION, these paintings and sculptures of popular icons are primarily about “Art” (in contrast to commercial art, which is thoroughly worldly). One Pop style, exemplified by James Rosenquist (1933–2017), used both the scale and flat color, as well as the sentimentally realistic style and visible panel-separating lines, of billboard art to create large, glossy paintings that, like his classic 10-foot by 88-foot F-111 (1965), are full of incongruous images. As the critic HAROLD R OSENBERG once cracked, “This was advertising art advertising itself as art that hates advertising.”
To Barbara Rose (1938), at that time as sharp a critic as any, “These artists are linked only through subject matter, not through stylistic similarities.” Another Pop artist, ROY L ICHTENSTEIN, painted enlarged comic-strip images, which are so refined in their realism that they even reproduce the dots characteristic of comic-book coloring. This theme of ironic displacement – the incongruous relation between the identifiable image and its model – informs not only Lichtenstein’s highly comic paintings but also the Pop sculpture of CLAES O LDENBURG and certain paintings of ANDY W ARHOL. In retrospect, LUCY R. LIPPARD, who wrote the pioneering book on the subject, identified only five true Pop artists: Oldenburg, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and Tom Wesselman (1931–2004). From historical distance, their work curiously extends American Still-Life Painting.
(24 April 1889–25 May 1924)
One of the major participants in Russian Constructivism, she returned from a 1912 visit to Paris, where she assimilated cubism to produce precociously distinctive Constructivist paintings with overlapping abstract planes pitched at various angles. Not content with her success, she became a “utilitarian Constructivist,” consciously moving out of easel painting to make stage sets and textile designs that to this day rank among the most innovative. The myth behind her name is that she was trying for a more distinguished career in abstract visual art, having authored this classic statement of high aspiration:
I don’t think that nonobjective form is the final form: it is the revolutionary condition of form. We must reject objectiveness and the old conditions of representation connected with it altogether, we must feel absolutely free from all that was created before in order to listen closely to burgeoning necessity and then start to look differently on the objective form, which will emerge from this work not only transformed but totally different in general.
Such ambition gave to the whole of her work an AURA that transcended its parts. Popova also taught the “color discipline” course at VKHUTEMAS. She died prematurely of scarlet fever that a few years before had killed her son. Given the devolution of Soviet art, it is scarcely surprising that her paintings were rarely seen in her home country until the late 20th century.
(14 February 1911–7 June 2004; b. Bernard Harden P.)
Think of Porter as a 20th-century Walt Whitman (1819–92), a sometime printer and courageous publisher, a longtime servant of both US letters and his own very American muse. Brighter than most, he began as a professional physicist, only to become disillusioned with science during World War II. By its end, he published the first critical anthology on HENRY M ILLER.
His first book of visual poetry, The Waste Maker (1972), represented Porter’s assiduous discovery of America writ large in the smallest “found” details that are formally similar to that of his contemporary CHARLES H ENRI F ORD. Collecting native waste into artlessly designed pages, Porter reflected not only his love and bitterness, but exposes cultural insights and perspectives. In my judgment, The Waste Maker ranks with MICHEL B UTOR’s Mobile (1963) as an encompassing pastiche of modern America. A yet bigger book, Found Poems (1972), measuring (in its original hardback edition) 8½” by 11 inches, with several hundred pages, collected all sorts of witty and incisive word-based poetic images.
Though recognitions of Porter’s greatness surface now and then, customarily in independent literary journals based in New England, his name does not appear in Contemporary Poets or, shamefully, in most purportedly comprehensive histories of American literature. Curious it is that the two most significant poets ever to earn graduate degrees from Brown University (Providence, RI, incidentally my alma mater), which proclaims its writing program, earned them not in literature but in science, both before 1945 – not only Bern Porter but the Chilean Nicanor Parra (1914–2018).
(21 April 1870–30 April 1941)
Treasure his film The Great Train Robbery (1903) as the first not to portray a continuous action but to edit credibly a sequence of images shot at different times and different places, thus enabling Porter to make a film more than ten minutes long that represented a cinematic advance, much as the long-playing record offered greater possibilities than the few minutes available on a 78 rpm. To tell a story familiar to pulp fiction, literally “A Western,” Porter introduced cameras mounted on moving trains, special effects optically generated, hand-colored images of gunshots and explosions, and trick photography. He worked for THOMAS EDISON in various capacities: the design and building of cameras, later a cameraman and director of the Edison Studio in New York City.
(1970–79)
It was such an obvious ludicrous idea that I’m surprised it didn’t happen before. Serious composers enlisted untrained musicians, mostly students at British arts schools, to play classical war horses. The operational rules were that everyone was required to attend all rehearsals and to play as best they could, no matter how ineptly. Once a 45 rpm of their recording of Rossini’s William Tell Overture sold well, the Portsmouth Sinfonia was launched, later recording other familiar classics, as the strictly musical humor depended simply upon preconditions for producing chaotic and highly original comic semblances of familiar originals and thus creating a difference between the listeners’ memory of competent performances and theirs. A young art schooler named BRIAN ENO produced their first two albums before launching his more prominent career. The joke so rich survived nearly a decade. The Portsmouth Sinfonia was more successful that the Scratch Orchestra, begun a year earlier by the British composer CORNELIUS CARDEW, among others, at London’s Morley College, a workingman’s night school (where I had studied music composition only a few years before). Here amateur musicians were given graphic scores for improvisation. Its pretentions are memorialized less in recordings than in the anthology Scratch Music (1974) edited by Cardew.
(2 February 1852–20 January 1913)
Very much the godfather of what became uniquely Mexican about advanced Mexican art, he was not a painter but a printmaker and engraver who introduced skulls and bones to make political critiques, thereby influencing the next generation of Mexican muralists, who often honored him by incorporating some of his SIGNATURE imagery into their own works. Posada reportedly produced over 15,000 prints and lithographs mostly for newspapers in pre-revolutionary Mexico. His taste for morbid skulls also infected not just fellow Mexican muralists such as David Alfaro Sequeiros (1896–1974) and European Surrealists but also SERGEI EISENSTEIN who planned to incorporate them into the epilogue of his never-finished film about Mexico. Though Posada died poor, his engravings were posthumously publicized by the French-American artist Jean Charlot (1898–1979), who discovered Posada prints being sold on Mexican streets in 1922 and later found his printing blocks (woodcuts, leadcuts, zinccuts, etc.) for reproductions in posthumous catalogues.
(1948)
With just a single issue this large-format perfectbound New York Arts magazine initially fulfilled the promise announced in its title, for just after the end of World War II it brought together between a single set of covers some surviving avant-gardes both American and European. Its editors were HAROLD ROSENBERG, JOHN CAGE, ROBERT MOTHERWELL, and the French architect and furniture designer Pierre Chareau (1883–1950), an immigrant who stayed In New York. Its publisher was GEORGE WITTENBORN. Among Possibilities’ contributors were VIRGIL THOMSON, EDGARD VARÈSE, MARK ROTHKO, DAVID SMITH, JEAN [HANS] ARP, and JACKSON POL-LOCK with his statement “My Painting.”
Decades later, Tod Lippy’s lavishly produced semi-annual Esopus (2003) published in its twenty-first issue (Spring 2014) manuscripts collected for a second Possibilities that didn’t appear. More than most other magazines with only a single issue Possibilities suggests a major periodical that, even if an annual, might have been.
Odd it seems that such a rich name for an avant-garde magazine wasn’t used again, at least not in English.
(c. 1949)
This term is included here not because it belongs but because too many people think it might belong. It is commonly used to characterize work that is not avant-garde at all but still purportedly contemporary, usually because of its journalistic subject matter (the erroneous assumption being that modernism has died, to be replaced by something else). My personal opinion holds that anything characterized as “postmodern,” whether by its author or its advocates, is beneath critical consideration, no matter how immediately publicized or acceptable it might be.
The assumption of this book is that the revolutions implicit in MODERNISM continue, and thus that current avant-garde art simply extends modernism, which is dead only to dodos. Charles Jencks (1939) has proposed the useful term “late modern” as separate from early modern and postmodern. While I accept Jencks’s moniker as a useful antidote, I wish it were not necessary.
Just as the second edition was going to press, I looked into Mark C. Taylor’s Hiding (1997), which is marvelously designed, with typography running both vertically and horizontally on the same pages, printing in various colors, paper differing in quality from section to section, faded photos of tattooed people, various colors, etc. After noticing on a copyright page that its author and/or his publisher wished the book to be classified under “postmodernism,” my crap-detector, as Ernest Hemingway called it, turned itself on. Thinking to test my resistance to that red flag against the text itself, I found on page 95 the following:
European modernism invents itself by inventing primitivism. The modern is what the primitive is not, and the primitive is what the modern is not. Far from preceding the modern temporally and historically, primitivism and modernism are mutually constitutive and, therefore, emerge together.
Aside from approaching double-talk in the folding back of the concluding sentence, this is simply wrong historically. Modernism arose in response to prior developments in art and culture. Only later did some (and only some) modernists come to identify certain primitivistic elements.
As the first paragraph here was written for the initial edition nearly three decades ago and the entry’s second paragraph a decade later, may I advise again, perhaps unnecessarily well into the 21st century: Beware of anything billed as “postmodernist.” And also hope that some other entries here that might seem debatable now will survive intact two or three decades from now. Q.E.D.?
(10 April 1900–19 July 1933)
One of the first film critics in America, Potamkin had only a brief life in the field. Initially a literary man, he founded and edited an obscure magazine titled The Guardian (1924). From 1927 to his sudden death (from a botched operation), a period that witnessed the end of silent film and the birth of sound movies, Potamkin wrote extended, literate, thoughtful essays on American cinema, more frequently on French and Soviet films, yet on Charlie Chaplin among the earliest American avant-garde filmmakers and on the creative use of the movie-camera. He would have seen all the films available, at the latest time that comprehensive literacy in the new medium was still feasible. A posthumous collection of Potamkin’s texts is The Compound Cinema (1977), edited by Lewis Jacobs (1904–97), who would in turn fulfill Potamkin’s unfulfilled objective of writing the first important history of American film (1939).
Potamkin stressed the internal analysis of films, not their social or historical context – a position that set him apart from his peers, Marxist, and otherwise. And he had a vision of cinema evolving: “Years hence, a Joyce will not think of attempting his compounds with words. He will go into cinema which unifies the verbal and aural with the visual and ultimately the spatial.” In The Compound Cinema is an elaborate “Proposal for a School of the Motion Picture” (1932–33) decades before one actually existed. It was appropriate that the most sophisticated British film journal of the period, Closeup (1927–33) chose Potamkin in 1929 to be its American correspondent. W.E.B. DuBois wrote at his death, “Potamkin upheld the Communist views on film and literature. He was the first non-party member to be given a Red Funeral.” Potamkin also published poems that the commendable Canadian filmmaker/ publisher Stephen Broomer (1984) belatedly collected into a book, In the Embryo of All Things (2018).
Potamkin’s nephew MILTON B ABBITT, later a distinguished composer, often recalled for me staying as a teenager from Mississippi with his uncle Harry in the Strunsky apartments on the south side of Washington Square in Greenwich Village.
—with Robert Haller
(30 October 1885–1 November 1972)
Pound’s innovation was poetic COLLAGE, in which an abundance and variety of both experiential and linguistic materials are pulled together into a poetically integral mosaic – so that, even where striking images are evoked, the effect of their structural principle is unfamiliar, perhaps pointed juxtapositions. The achievement of the final edition of his The Cantos (1970), which were begun over fifty years before, is a wealth of reference and language, both historic and contemporary, incorporated into a single sustained pastiche. The paradox of the poem’s long history is that the collage form that seemed so innovative when the poem was begun had become familiar, if not old-fashioned, by the time it was complete. Back in 1970, I was compelled to moan, “More bad poetry in America today is indebted to Pound than anyone else.” Certainly was true then, but perhaps no longer.
Pound’s translations of Chinese and classic Latin and Greek poetry were innovative in that he did not attempt literally to translate these works. Though he often “translated” poems from languages he could not read, his unliteral versions were often thought better at capturing the essence of the originals than more “accurate” translations.
Pound was also a strong literary publicist who identified early in their careers the best writers of his generation, such as T. S. ELIOT and JAMES J OYCE, and even visual artists such as HENRI GAUDIER-BRZESKA. Pound’s classic literary essay, ABC of Reading (1935), is no less provocative today. HUGH KENNER, who wrote the first influential introduction to Pound in 1951, produced in The Pound Era a rich interpretation of Pound’s centrality to literary MODERNISM. New appreciations of his work continue to appear in the 21st century.
(30 September 1905–19 February 1990) and Emeric Pressburger (5 December 1902–5 February 1988)
Powell, born in England, began as a slick director, reportedly producing twenty-three films between 1931 and 1936. His sometime partner Pressburger, born in Hungary, had worked as a scriptwriter in Germany, Austria, and France before arriving in England in 1936. The London producer Alexander Korda (1893–1956) brought them together, initially for The Spy in Black (1939), a thriller about espionage that had success in America as U-Boat 29. Calling their production company The Archers, Powell and Pressburger collaborated for seventeen years, sharing credits for writing, directing, and producing.
Their masterpiece is The Tales of Hoffman (1951), a lushly beautiful feature-length film that has been described as either the most eccentric film adaptation of an opera or as the classiest musical film ever made. (It makes most Hollywood “musicals” look tawdry.) Even in excerpts, which are often seen on American cable television on the “Classical Arts Showcase” (where I discovered it), the film is continuously bizarre and impressive.
Later working on his own, Powell directed Peeping Tom (1960), which portrays a psychopathic killer who records on film the dying moments of his female victims. Reviled at the time and thus terminating Powell’s career prematurely, this film is frequently revived, often with apologies from critics who remember dismissing it before. Nowadays it is praised, in Ephraim Katz’s phrases, as “a complex film-within-film essay on voyeurism and the psychology of motion-picture viewing.”
The example of Powell and Pressburger survives in the musical films of Peter Greenway (1942), an Englishman who also produces paintings, novels, illustrated books, and gallery exhibitions, in addition to staged operas – Rosa: A Horse Drama (1994) with music by the Dutchman Louis Andriessen (1939) and in 100 Objects to Represent the World – a Prop Opera (1997) with Jean-Baptiste Barriere’s music. Powell’s widow, Thelma Schoonmaker (1940), is a major American film editor renowned particularly for her work with the director Martin Scorsese (1942).
(12 October 1881–1 August 1943; b. John Joseph Wardell P.)
Commonly considered the first modernist artist born in Australia, he began the 20th century as a London doctor, indeed licensed by the Royal College of Physicians in London, before becoming an artist after World War I. Inheriting wealth, he moved easily in cultural circles in both London and Paris, studying with FERNAND LEGÉR (who else?). Influenced initially by CUBISM, Power exhibited annually with Abstraction-Creation with works more playful (or less severe) than most around them, also self-publishing Elément s de la Construction Picturale (Paris, 1932). That book in particular made him the most prominent Australian in Paris art, where Aussies were scarcer than, say, Americans surely and perhaps Canadians. Though Power died in the Channel Islands, then occupied by the Germans, he left most of his estate and his mostly unsold work (totaling more than a thousand pieces) to the University of Sydney, which established the Power Institute of Fine Arts. Rarely do comparable academic institutions bear the name of a vanguard artist.
(timeless, formless, motionless, beingless)
This term doesn’t appear in any dictionary; even the Oxford English Dictionary specifically excludes Renaissance rhetorical terms such as praecisio (pronounced “pray-KEY-see-oh”). Praecisio is the figure of speech in which, instead of speaking, one makes one’s point by holding one’s tongue. It is silence intended as message. This silence, or the suggestion of silence, is often a strong statement, one that avant-gardists have used for years. Examples of avant-garde praecisio include the pataphysical “Passage de la Mer Rouge par les Hebreux,” a “drawing” from 1965; John Byrum’s “Batesville, Indiana” (a visual poem consisting of four empty rectangles); various non-performances of G. X. Jupitter-Larsen & The Haters, where their performance was not showing up at a scheduled performance; many poems that consist of nothing but titles; and the international Art Strike (1990–93). Even JEAN ARP’s famous line (“a knifeless blade which is missing its handle”) is a deft little conceptual praecisio, surprising us with its presence and absence simultaneously. The trick of praecisio is that it is about nothing but not literally nothing. We understand the work is referring to nothing because the praecisio creates a frame to show where the nothing should be. The frame may be a literal picture frame, a title followed by blankness, a call for a moment of silence, or an attorney saying “I rest my case” without ever calling a witness.
—Geof Huth
(c. 1938)
JOHN CAGE coined this term to describe his internal modifications to the standard piano in order to change the sounds it produces. Typically, he inserted pieces of metal, paperclips, erasers, rubber bands, wooden spoons, and other objects between the strings. He played both the keys and the strings, sometimes depressing the keyboard in order to free the strings from the dampers. These modifications transformed the piano from primarily a melodic instrument into a percussive one.
Among the other American composers to use variations on this contemporary instrument are Lou Harrison (1917–2003 – who merits an entry in this book, did he not personally tell me that his work wasn’t avant-garde), August M. Wegner (1941), Stephen Scott (1944), Samuel Pellman (1953), Alan Stout (1932), and Richard Bunger (1942), who recorded an album wholly of compositions for prepared piano before his departure from the music profession.
(6 August 1949)
As the epitome of the bibliophilic artist, even more than R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007), Prince lets books inspire him – not only their texts but their covers, particularly from mass-marketed paperbacks for his paintings. Among his strongest writings is “Bringing It All Back Home” (1988) in which he recalls in loving detail certain antiquarian bookshops and his favorite purchases.
Among his several BOOK-ART books are American English (2003, from a German art bookstore) where he pairs American first editions (from his personal collection) with their British counterparts. His most audacious book appropriation was printing in 2011 some 500 copies of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951) exactly duplicating the first edition down to its cover design, but differing only with his own name as the author on both the dust jacket and the interior title page. He personally sold his Catcher in the Rye for $40 apiece one day from a blanket in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He earlier “compiled,” so says the title page, a taste-striving anthology of recent texts by others, titled Wild History (1985).
As a facile visual artist, Prince has redrawn cartoons as well as copying familiar images, often from photographs, sometimes from advertisements. Some of these (re)paintings reportedly sell for huge amounts in auction. For me, however, his more thoughtful bookworking(s) stand(s) above.
Rarely do avant-garde artists or writers win them, initially because nearly all prizes favor acceptability over excellence, especially in competitions requiring applicants’ money. Eccentrics so disadvantaged should avoid them. A more general problem with competitions with only one winner is that the ultimate selection usually reflects “a story” that has little to do with quality. In explaining why the single winner should have been rewarded over others of possibly equal quality, if not surer excellence, such stories may identify personal favor or friendship, some currently acceptable minority tag, the judges’ desire for newspaper publicity, etc. This unfortunate principle, endemic in all rewards with a single recipient, accounts for why the listed names of past winners for all prizes, including those purportedly most prestigious, look so peculiar, if not embarrassing; and why as well, for all their journalistic prominence (and usefulness in short biographies of mediocrities), prizes are rarely mentioned in history books (needless to say?) such as this.
(post-World War II)
He has been the epitome of the teacher who was successful without becoming influential, because no matter how much money he was paid, how many VIP guests came to his home institution, how much traveling he did, how many entitling positions he assumed, how much he published, nothing written by him was ever treasured by strangers. Either he (or she) didn’t know how to exploit the leverages bestowed on him, or these advantages destroyed him. Among those writing at times about avant-garde arts count Stanley Cavell (1926, Harvard), Ihab Hassan (1925–2015, Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Wayne Anderson (1924–2014, MIT), Norman Cantor (1929–2004, NYU), W. J. T. Mitchell (1942, Chicago), Jed Rasula (1952, Georgia), Sander Gilman (1944, Emory), Rosalind E. Krauss (1941, CUNY, Columbia), Johanna Drucker (1952, Virginia, UCLA), and Marjarine Rice Pilaff (1930, Stanford). Others march beside them, albeit from disparate locations.
(c. 1967)
It was at a Janis Joplin concert in the late 1960s that I first saw a face projected live onto a large television screen, and this has since become a common sight at rock concerts. In the mid-1970s, a projection TV with a distant screen was common particularly in educational institutions, on airplanes, and in bars featuring sporting events. A three-lens, three-color system situated several feet away from a screen projected the image.
The next development came in the early 1990s, when Sharp offered a projection system that differs from the earlier versions in several respects. Whereas the heavy old two-piece systems had to be kept permanently in place, SharpVision (at thirty-one pounds) could be moved about easily; whereas the old system required the installation of a fixed screen especially designed for it, SharpVision could be projected onto any flat surface, such as a clean wall. Thanks to liquid crystal display (LCD) panels (similar technologically to those in digital watches), the picture emerges from a single source.
All of these two-piece projection systems differ from the single-piece rear-projection boxes with screens measuring from 40 inches, diagonally, to 70; because they weigh upwards of 200 pounds, rear-projection systems were nearly always mounted on the floor. What they gained in scale for the viewer they lost in detail. In my own experience of a large separate screen, which I placed directly above a normal monitor, I found my eye preferring the smaller monitor for most television programs, but the screen for movies, especially if made before 1960, and for sports, where television directors have less control over the scale of the images on the screen. Once projection systems outnumber monitors, as I expect they will, you can assume that television directors will shoot live images to a scale more familiar to motion pictures. I wrote in the first edition of this Dictionary that a good book on this subject has yet to be written; it still hasn’t appeared, to my knowledge.
(10 July 1871–18 November 1922; b. Valentin Louis Georges Eugène M. P.)
In his multivolume fiction, A la Recherche du temps perdu (1913–27 (Remembrance of Things Past), this French author transcended earlier conventions of novel-writing. Drawing upon Henri Bergson’s theories of time – chiefly the difference between historical or chronological time and interior or psychological time – Proust weaves a story that is as much about the processes of memory (voluntary, involuntary, rational, and especially sensate) as it is about its main characters (Charles Swann and the wealthy Guermantes family). The novel amplifies late 19th-century realism with rich and abundant detail, for example using many pages to describe lying in bed or taking a piece of cake with a cup of tea. At the same time, “real” objects and events assume “symbolic” and mythic import in Proust’s poetic evocation.
Although dealing with issues of morality and decadence in its depiction of French culture at the turn of the 20th century, Proust’s work consciously displays the power of art to fix permanently what in life, time, and memory are always in flux. Originally published in sixteen French volumes, Proust’s masterpiece was available in English first in C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation (1927–32) and later in Terence Kilmartin’s revision of Scott Moncrieff’s text. More recently, the American fictioner Lydia Davis translated only Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time (2003). Proust’s influence on subsequent writers such as WILLIAM F AULKNER and JACK K EROUAC is immeasurable.
—Katy Matheson
(forever)
Though human beings have forever been taking other names for professional purposes, the most familiar literary precedents being 19th-century women who assumed male names to make their writing publicly acceptable (e.g., George Eliot and George Sand), only in modern times, as far as I can tell, have pseudonyms functioned to identify alternative artistic identities. If the name Vernon Duke identified the light music of Vladimir Dukelsky (1903–69), so the names Patrick Ireland and FLANN O’B RIEN grace certain produce by civil servants named BRIAN O’D OHERTY and Brian O’Nolan, respectively, in each case their pseudonym signing work that probably could not have been done as well under their own names. HUGH M ac- DAIRMID’s name became a more aggressive Scottish presence than Christopher Murray Grieve’s. The Portuguese poet FERNANDO P ESSOA likewise used several pseudonyms for various compartments of his multiple creative personality. (Pseudonyms have also functioned to hide the identities of writers who were politically blacklisted, as during the McCarthyite 1950s in Hollywood, when an Academy Award was offered to someone who could not show up to collect it.)
For vanguard artists adopting names other than those they received at birth, the most common motive is acceptance in their host countries. Thus did Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowitzky publish as GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE, though his closest friends, respecting his natal name, continued to call him Kostro. Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, born British, became ARTHUR CRAVAN to honor the French town from which his lover came and, implicitly, the language he preferred to speak. Helmut Herzfeld became JOHN HEARTFELD to protest anti-British fervor in his native BERLIN during World War I, though he never wrote in English. So early in his career did Emmanuel Radnitzky become MAN RAY that his birth name was unknown for most of his life. For his career as a distinguished designer, Peretz Rosenbaum took PAUL RAND. L. MOHOLY-NAGY was László Weisz; MORRIS LOUIS, M. L. Bernstein. To hide the surname of her wealthy father, Winifred Ellerman became BRYHER.
More curiously, the adoptive moniker of P.D.Q. BACH enabled the American composer Peter Schickele (1936) to produce legendarily comic music different from what Schickele composed under his natal name. The surprise was that audiences as well as critics, generally preferred P.D.Q.’s music to Schickele’s, try through the latter often tried to diminish, if not retire, the former.
(1960s)
This epithet arose in the 1960s, in the wake of increasing recreational use of lysergic acid, commonly called LSD, along with related “psychedelics” that produced colorful hallucinations in the user’s mind and had an obvious attraction to those predisposed to otherworldly experience. Psychedelic art purported to represent such heightened mental states, customarily on canvas, sometimes with lights. One critical claim made for this work was that it represented deeper unconscious states than could be reached without such stimulants. Most psychedelic art in retrospect looks either like a highly stylized Expressionism or colorful updated religious art that didn’t survive into the 1970s. For all the work’s innovative strength when it first appeared, the principal contemporaneous book about the style features names that are now forgotten, some of them perhaps lost to drug excesses that had deleterious effects upon those coming of age in the 1960s comparable to that caused by alcohol for earlier generations.
(c. 1975)
Punk developed in England as a reaction of those musicians born in the 1950s and 1960s to the increasingly slick, commercial popular music associated with the first generation of rock stars born in the 1940s. (It is awesome to recall that the Rolling Stones, so raucously offensive in 1965, especially to older people, could be perceived only a decade later as slick.)
One assumption of punk was that anybody could play or write music – indeed, that school-certified musical talent might even be a liability. Punk clubs made little distinction between performer and audience. While the performers often held their audiences in contempt, the audience responded by ignoring the performance on stage, all in reaction to the mutual seductiveness of earlier popular music. British punk also had a political dimension as a reaction to increasingly conservative British politics.
When punk came to lower Manhattan in the mid-1970s, it had more impact on fashion than music, as new kinds of hairstyles, clothing, makeup, and demeanor seemed stronger than any musical message. Griel Marcus (1945), among the more literate of the American rock critics, once wrote a fat, pretentious, but ultimately unpersuasive book that regarded punk as the legitimate heir of avant-garde radicalism.
—with Richard Carlin
(c. 1963–)
A pwoermd is simply a single word, invented or already existing, sans title, and presented as a poem. The concept of the pwoermd – the hyper-attention to the word as object – likely grew out of concrete poetry’s focus on the materiality of the language, even though the earliest known pwoermd (“tundra”) was written by a haiku poet, Cor van den Heuvel (1931). The best known early pwoermds (including “eyeye” and “lighght”) were the work of ARAM SAROYAN, a minimalist poet tangentially operating within the milieu of CONCRETE POETRY. Since 1989, the year of the coinage of the term “pwoermd” (created by interleaving “poem” with “word”), the practice of writing pwoermds has become much more common. Multiple books of pwoermds have appeared, including one in Finnish, and every year International Pwoermd Writing Month is celebrated in April. Although the form can degenerate into nearly pointless paronomasia, the pwoermd unhinges the lid to the Pandora’s box of language, demonstrating how messy, meaningless, and yet still enchanting words are. The brevity of the pwoermd, which almost always comes in under twenty letters in length, makes it perfect for distribution in the abbreviated world of social media, Twitter being the most likely place to find such tiny poems.
—Geof Huth
(8 May 1937)
I would love to write an entry that portrays Pynchon’s spectacular development from precociously sophisticated short stories about scientific concepts, such as “Entropy” (1960), through the absurdist vision of history portrayed in his first novel V. (1963), which I featured in a 1965 essay on “The American Absurd Novel,” to Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which parades many signs of an avant-garde masterpiece. The problem is that, though purportedly “a good reader,” I have never been able to finish that last 600-plus-page book (having taken it on airplanes, to the beach, even to Europe!) and would not, on my own authority, begin to introduce it. I am told its subject is conspiracies, which is certainly unfashionable intellectually. I hear that Vineland (1990) represents a falling away from its predecessor, much as Pynchon’s second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), is a much slighter book than V. Later Pynchon defeats me as well, notwithstanding generous packaging and publicity from a publisher that expects his books to sell. Even in mid-career Pynchon became one of those rare writers who has inspired a critical literature whose total wordage greatly exceeds the number of words in his own books. This inadvertent achievement should not be dismissed.
On further thought, consider his personal achievement, perhaps unique, of successfully denying his face to photographers, even though he has published for nearly sixty years and reportedly resides in NEW YORK CITY. The only photo ever appearing in print comes from a school yearbook. How he achieved such absence, or presence via absence, is an extraordinary story to be told.