A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (3rd Edition) [3 ed.] 9781351267120, 9781351267113, 9781351267106, 9781351267090, 9781138577305

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A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes Twenty-five years after the publication of A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, the distinguished critic and arts historian Richard Kostelanetz returns to his favorite subject for a third edition. Rewriting earlier entries, adding hundreds of new ones, Kostelanetz provides intelligence and information unavailable anywhere else, no less in print than online, about a wealth of subjects and individuals. Focused upon what is truly innovative and excellent, he ranges widely with insight and surprise, including appreciations of artistic athletes such as Muhammad Ali, Johan Cruyff, the Harlem Globetrotters, and such collective creations as Las Vegas and his native New York City. Continuing the traditions of cheeky high-style Dictionarysts, honoring Samuel Johnson and Nicolas Slonimsky (both with individual entries), Kostelanetz offers a “reference book” to be enjoyed not only in bits and chunks, but continuously as one of the dozen books someone would take if they planned to be stranded on a desert isle. Richard Kostelanetz is a prominent author, critic, and arts historian. Individual entries on Kostelanetz’s work appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction,Webster’s Dictionary of American Writers, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Directory of American Scholars, Who’s Who in America, NNDB. com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other distinguished directories. He lives in New York, where he was born.

A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes THIRD EDITION

Richard Kostelanetz With contributions by H. R. Brittain, Richard Carlin, Mark Daniel Cohen, John Robert Colombo, Tony Coulter, Charles Doria, Michal Ulrike Dorda, Nona Eleanor Ellis, Bob Grumman, Robert Haller, Geof Huth, Gerald Janecek, Carter Kaplan, Katy Matheson, Gloria S. and Fred W. McDarrah, Michael Peters, Douglas Puchowski, John Rocco, Igor Satanovsky, Nicolas Slonimsky, Fred Truck.

Third edition published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Richard Kostelanetz The right of Richard Kostelanetz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Schirmer Books, an imprint of the Gale Group 1993 Second edition published by Routledge 2001 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kostelanetz, Richard, author. Title: A dictionary of the avant-gardes / Richard Kostelanetz. Description: Third edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018027789 (print) | LCCN 2018029413 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351267120 (Master) | ISBN 9781351267113 (Adobe Reader) | ISBN 9781351267106 (ePub3) | ISBN 9781351267090 (Mobipocket Unencrypted) | ISBN 9781138577305 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351267120 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Arts, Modern—20th century—Dictionaries. | Arts, Modern—21st century—Dictionaries. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—History—20th century—Dictionaries. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—History—21st century—Dictionaries. Classification: LCC NX456 (ebook) | LCC NX456 .K67 2019 (print) | DDC 700/.411—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027789 ISBN: 978-1-138-57730-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-26712-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times Ten and Futura Std by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Nicolas Slonimsky (1894–1995)

Cher maître

Contents

Preface

Introduction The dictionary Biographical notes

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xiii 1 461

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Preface It takes approximately twenty years to make an artistic curiosity out of a modernistic monstrosity, and another twenty to elevate it to a masterpiece. Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective (1953)

My principal reason for having done, later redoing, and now redoing again a quarter-century after, a book of this title would be to defend the continuing relevance of the epithet avant-garde, which has frequently appeared in my own critical writing. A second reason is that I enjoy reading cultural dictionaries myself and own a goodly number of them; but as my library has lacked any volume resembling a dictionary of avantgardes, the first reader for any book emblazoned with that title would be myself. A third reason is that I’ve come to think there is only one art, called Art, and thus that dance, literature, etc., are merely categorical conveniences, designed to make the history and the material of Art more accessible to students and other specialized beginners. My basic measures of avant-garde work are first esthetic innovation and then initial unacceptability. Add to this my own taste for art that is extreme, unique, distinct, coherent, witty, technological, and esthetically resonant. (An artist’s courage in the choice of subject, such as scatology, say, or child abuse, is not avant-garde if the artist’s esthetic is traditional. Nor is the first painting by a three-handed dwarf avant-garde by virtue of the peculiarities of its author.) It follows that the most consequential artists, in any medium, are those who make genuine discoveries about the possibilities of art. Nonetheless, the best avant-garde art offers, much like the best traditional art, enlightened intelligence and heightened experience. Though one often hears about “the death of the avant-garde” or “the crisis of the avant-garde,” usually from cultural conservatives or publicists with cemeteries to defend, it is not the purpose of this book to engage in an argument I take to be irrelevant at best. Though most entries here feature modern avant-garde

activities, major historical precursors, some of whom worked centuries ago, are acknowledged as well. While the epithet avant-garde is applicable to other cultural domains, this book focuses upon the arts, broadly considered. My first editor, a dance aficionado, proposed including the basketball player Daryl Dawkins for epitomizing “the slam dunk,” which is measurably a monumental choreographic innovation, though not commonly regarded as such. My more recent editor made his unique contribution as well, and I now included the man whose alternative choreography changed competitive high-jumping. One recurring theme is that avant-garde art doesn’t always come pretentiously dressed. Proclaiming the avant-garde’s death is no more acceptable than the claim, from another corner, of one or another group to represent “the avant-garde” to the exclusion of all others. The plural avant-gardes in the title is appropriate, as this book contains entries on individuals or developments representing opposed positions, if not contrary esthetics, both clearly innovative and initially unacceptable. As I warn in the entry on Pluralism, beware of anyone or any group declaring itself the sole avant-garde, especially if they exclude or ignore people doing work that is roughly similar or closely related. Be even more wary if they try to sell you anything, intellectual as well as physical. Suspect it to be a road map directing all traffic to a dead end. This book is inevitably critical, not only in judgments but in the intelligence behind my selections, because it is impossible to write selectively about the avant-gardes, with any integrity and excellence, without seeming opinionated. (If you don’t like opinions, well, you’re welcome to read a bus schedule or any country’s tax code.) Given how much information is now

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x • PREFACE commonly available on the Internet, I’ve tried here to offer guidance and secrets, along with insight and wit, not available anywhere else. Given the increasing amount of information available in the 21st century, this new edition wouldn’t be worth anyone’s reading or purchasing otherwise. One concern of any writer wanting to tell truths is how much truth he or she can tell (or, conversely, fearing how much cannot be told). The best reason for writing a book, rather than, say, magazine articles, is that the critic fortunately need not worry about his publishers’ constraints and biases that are customarily (if not necessarily) hidden. If this book didn’t surprise or offend, I would surmise that a putative reader had barely looked at its pages. Oh, yes, if any reader likes something in this book especially, please consider telling someone else. That’s how books of mine have survived years after their initial publication. Because this Dictionary was written not just to be consulted but to be read from beginning to end, it eschews abbreviations that interrupt attention and minimizes dependency on cross-references. My literary ambition encourages stylistic variety over uniformity, even risking stylistic affectations here and there. I also cultivate the avant-garde value of SURPRISE, not only in my selections but in my prose. If only because I assume some readers might read only an entry or two, certain choice remarks are repeated in various places, often because they are worth repeating. Some of the stronger circumlocutions are collected in an ON DEMAND book titled Artful Entries (2019). I would have liked to have produced more entries on avant-garde artists new to the 21st century, who are true heroes at a time when the idea of an esthetic vanguard has been subjected to all sorts of Philistine attack, and apologize now particularly to those individuals, whoever you are, whose names will be featured in, yes, yet future editions. May I discourage any reader from thinking that the length of an individual entry measures importance, supposedly with more words devoted to major artists than to minor. ‘Taint so, as length measures only centimeters. Just as most of the first edition of this book was written in several months, so it was rewritten in 1999 and then again recently within a comparatively short time. Both then and now I have typically drawn largely upon my capacious memory and sometimes upon my earlier reviews and notes that were generally made when I first experienced something important. In writing critically about art (or in editing anthologies or even, say, in returning to restaurants), I have learned to trust my memory to separate the strongest work from everything else. One reason for my faith in memory is that it does not lie to me, which is to say that no matter

my personal feelings toward an artist, no matter what reviewers might have said about his or her work, no matter what other factors might try to influence me, one working principle remains: If I cannot remember an artist’s work distinctly or I cannot from memory alone characterize it, it probably was not strong enough. It follows that only art already lodged in my head will appear in my critical writing. One of my favorite ways for my testing the true quality of any well-known artist’s work is to ask myself, as well as others, whether any specific work[s] can be identified from memory. (No peeking or cheating allowed.) Thanks mostly to their professional hustling or fortunate transitory publicity, many artists’ names are more familiar than their works. Quite simply, what my memory chose to remember for me became this Dictionary. In the back of my mind was the image of the great ERICH AUERBACH, a German scholar living in Istanbul during World War II, writing his grandly conceived Mimesis (1946) without footnotes, because useful libraries were far away.

II [Apollinaire] had an uncanny instinct for detecting genius and for seeing the revolutionary quality of a new idea or work of art. . . . He was frequently accurate and perceptive to an astounding degree; and in his choice of who or what was significant he seems in retrospect to have been nearly always right. Edward F. Fry, Cubism (1966) Another assumption is that what distinguishes major artists from minor is a vision of singular possibilities for their art and/or for themselves as creative people. Trained elaborately in intellectual history, which for me was mostly arts history, I necessarily focus upon the very best – what’s most likely to be selectively remembered. (“Cultural history,” by contrast, focuses upon what’s been popular, sometimes with only a certain group of people.) As an historian, I think I can discern the future from the past and thus identify likely direction in high cultural produce. Because I don’t often read newsprint, I can claim resistance to, if not an ignorance of, transient promotions and fashions of many kinds. I necessarily learned early to respect unique cultural excellence and now think that from the beginning of my critical career, more than fifty years ago, I’ve established a strong record of identifying new excellence that survives. By this measure, the French writer Guillaume Apollinaire has long been my hero, as I respect the fact that he, born Wilhelm Kostrowitzky, was commonly called Kostro, just as I’m called Kosti.

PREFACE •

Because I resist doing anything professional, even a dictionary entry, that anyone else can do better, I recruited colleagues to write as many entries as possible. These colleagues’ names appear after their entries (which are otherwise mine); it is not for nothing that their names also accompany mine on the title page. From the late Nicolas Slonimsky, I drew upon texts already published, thanks to our common publisher. Within the entries, small caps identify names and sometimes concepts that receive fuller treatment in an alphabetically placed entry. My model arts lexicographer, who deserves the dedication of this third edition as well as its predecessors, was the great Slonimsky, who, incidentally, preferred the epithet Lectionary to Dictionary because the former term refers to reading, the second to speaking. (The first edition of this book appeared before his centenary, 28 April 1994.) Another model for the writing of concise remarks is Ambrose Bierce, an American author too opinionated to be “great,” but whose best writing (see the entry on him) is nonetheless remembered. All of us who write dictionaries, whether authoritative or satirical, are, of course, indebted to the British writer Samuel Johnson, who also merits an individual entry. This Dictionary differs from others in the arts in emphasizing decisive esthetic characterization over, say, a recital of institutional positions held, teachers or students had, prominent influences acknowledged, friendships made, or awards won. My implicit rules for writing entries on individuals were that they should be at least one hundred words long and that each entry should portray a person or concept distinctive from all others. One self-test was whether I could nail a subject in a particular way – not simply frame her or him with common details but uniquely nail them. More than once I discarded a draft, including some about personal friends, because the results would look suspiciously deficient for failing either of these two requirements. (No one is done a favor if made to look less. I considered appending their names here, if only to honor them, but feared that such acknowledgment might have an opposite effect.) Obviously, a book with avant-garde in the title ignores those who have spent their lives trying to be acceptable to one or another orthodoxy (including some earlier avant-garde).

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As this book’s publisher contractually limited the number of words it would accept, I necessarily removed some previous entries; but rather than consign them to a dustbin, I decided to collect them into another book tentatively titled, Earlier Entries, available from Archae Editions at Amazon CreateSpace. I am grateful to Richard Carlin for commissioning the first two editions before reprinting the second in paperback, and now to Ben Piggott for contracting this latest revision for Routledge and Laura Soppelsa for expediting production. May I thank again Douglas Puchowski, now for finding illustrations. Because this book covers several arts, documentation is meant to be more useful than consistent or pseudo-definitive. For instance, following Slonimsky’s example, Douglas Puchowski and I tried to include complete birth dates and death dates, down to months and days whenever possible, acknowledging that sometimes so much detail was unavailable (particularly about individuals not yet customarily included in such compendia). To preserve an illusion of pristine research, we could have removed entries whose documentation was incomplete – by and large people whose loss would not be noticed – but instead decided that the inclusion of unfamiliar names was more important. Some people alive when this was drafted have no doubt since passed on. A book with so much detail about contemporary figures will surely contain misspellings and other minor errors of fact, as well as unintentional omissions. If only to prepare for the possibility of a fourth edition, the author welcomes corrections and suggestions, by email, please, if they are to go into a single repository, c/o his eponymous website. No kidding. Since the author is an American who spent a year studying at King’s College, London, and writing for London media, he freely mixes British orthography with American to a degree that partisans of one style or the other might find disagreeable. Consider, instead, appreciating his transatlantic catholicity. Because this book contains more proper nouns, including names, than can be successfully indexed, it also appears as an ebook whose search mechanism should be able to locate whatever lexical details the reader would like. —Richard Kostelanetz

Introduction The avant-garde consists of those who feel sufficiently at ease with the past not to have to compete with it or duplicate it. Dick Higgins, “Does Avant-Garde Mean Anything?” (1970) The avant-garde cannot easily become an academy, because avant-garde artists usually sustain the quality which made them avant-garde artists in the first place. The styles they develop will become academic in other hands. Darby Bannard, “Sensibility of the Sixties” (1967)

The term “avant-garde” refers to those out front forging a path previously unknown, a route that others will take. Initially coined to characterize the shock troops of an army, the epithet passed over into art. Used precisely, avant-garde should refer, first, to rare work that on its first appearance satisfies three discriminatory criteria: It transcends current esthetic conventions in crucial respects, establishing discernible distance between itself and the mass of recent practices; it will necessarily take considerable time to find its maximum audience; and it will probably inspire future, comparably advanced endeavors. Only a small minority working within any art can ever be avant-garde; for once the majority has caught up to something new, whether as creators or as an audience, those doing something genuinely innovative will, by definition, have established a beachhead someplace beyond. Problems notwithstanding, avant-garde remains a critically useful category. As a temporal term, avant-garde characterizes art that is “ahead of its time” – that is, beginning something – while “decadent” art, by contrast, stands at the end of a prosperous development. “Academic” refers to art that is conceived according to rules that are learned in a classroom; it is temporally post-decadent. Whereas

decadent art is created in expectation of an immediate sale, academic artists expect approval from their social superiors, whether they be teachers or higher-ranking colleagues. Both academic art and decadent art are essentially opportunistic, created to realize immediate success, even at the cost of surely disappearing from that corpus of art that survives merely by being remembered. Both decadent art and academic art realize their maximal audience upon initial publication. One secondary characteristic of avant-garde art is that, in the course of entering new terrain, it violates entrenched rules – it seems to descend from “false premises” or “heretical assumptions”; it makes current “esthetics” seem irrelevant. For instance, Suzanne Langer’s theory of symbolism, so prominent in the 1940s and even the 1950s, hardly explains the new art of the past four decades. Relevant though Langer’s esthetics were to the arts of Aaron Copland and Martha Graham, among their contemporaries, theories of artful symbolism offered little insight into, say, the music of John Cage or Milton Babbitt, the choreography of Merce Cunningham, or the poetry of John Ashbery, where what you see or hear is generally most, if not all, of what there is. This sense of irrelevance is less a criticism of Langer’s theories, which seventy years ago seemed so persuasively encompassing, than a measure of drastic artistic difference between work prominent then and what followed.

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xiv • INTRODUCTION One reason why avant-garde works should be initially hard to comprehend is not that they are intrinsically inscrutable or hermetic but that they defy, or challenge as they defy, the perceptual procedures of artistically educated people. They forbid easy access or easy acceptance, as an audience perceives them as inexplicably different, if not forbiddingly revolutionary. In order to begin to comprehend such art, people must work and think in unfamiliar ways. Nonetheless, if an audience learns to accept innovative work, this will stretch its perceptual capabilities, affording kinds of esthetic experience previously unknown. Edgard Varèse’s revolutionary lonisation (1931), for instance, taught a generation of listeners about the possible coherence and beauty in what they had previously perceived as noise. It follows that avant-garde art usually offends people, especially serious artists, before it persuades, and offends them not in terms of content, but as Art. They assert that Varèse’s noise (or Cage’s, or Babbitt’s) is unacceptable as music. That explains why avant-garde art strikes most of us as esthetically “wrong” before we acknowledge it as possibly “right”; it “fails” before we recognize that it works. (Art that offends by its content challenges only as journalism or gossip, rather than as Art, and is thus likely to disappear as quickly as other journalism or gossip.) Those most antagonized by the avant-garde are not the general populace, which does not care, but the guardians of culture, who do, whether they be cultural bureaucrats, established artists, or their epigones, because they feel, as they sometimes admit, “threatened.” Though vanguard activity may dominate discussion among sophisticated professionals, it never dominates the general making of art. Most work created in any time, in every art, honors long-passed models. Even today, in the United States, most of the fiction written and published and reviewed has, in form, scarcely progressed beyond mid-20th-century standards; most poetry today is similarly decadent. The “past” that the avant-garde aims to surpass is not the tradition of art but the currently decadent fashions, for in Harold Rosenberg’s words, “Avant-garde art is haunted by fashion.” Because avant-gardes in art are customarily portrayed as succeeding one another, the art world is equated with the world of fashion, in which styles also succeed one another. However, in both origins and function, the two are quite different. Fashion relates to the sociology of lucrative taste; avant-garde, to the history of art. In practice, avant-garde activity has a dialectical relationship with

fashion, for the emerging remunerative fashions can usually be characterized as a synthesis of advanced art (whose purposes are antithetical to those of fashion) with more familiar stuff. Whenever fashion appears to echo advanced art, a closer look reveals the governing model as art from a period recently past. The term “avant-garde” can also refer to individuals creating such path-forging art; but even by this criterion, the work itself, rather than the artist’s intentions, is the ultimate measure of the epithet’s applicability to an individual. Thus, an artist or writer is avant-garde only at certain crucial points in his or her creative career, and only those few works that were innovative at their debut comprise the history of modern avantgarde art. The term “avant-garde” may also refer to artistic groups, if and only if most of their members are (or were) crucially contributing to authentically exploratory activity. The term is sometimes equated with cultural antagonism, for it is assumed that the “avant-garde” leads artists in their perennial war against the Philistines. However, this Philistine antagonism is a secondary characteristic, as artists’ social position and attitudes descend from the fate of their creative efforts, rather than the reverse. Any artist who sets out just to mock the Philistines is wearing an old hat and thus not likely to do anything original. Esthetic conservatives are forever asserting that “the avant-garde no longer exists,” because, as they see it, either academia or the general public laps up all new art. However, it is critically both false and ignorant to use a secondary characteristic in lieu of a primary definition. Avant-garde is an art-historical term, not a sociological category. The conservative charge is factually wrong as well, as nearly all avant-gardes in art are ignored by the public (and its agents in the culture industries), precisely because innovative work is commonly perceived as “peculiar,” if not “unacceptable,” not only by the masses but by those who make a business of disseminating culture in large quantities. Indeed, the pervasiveness of those perceptions of oddity is, of course, a patent measure of a work’s being art-historically ahead of its time. Those who deny the persistence of the avant-garde are comparable to those who deny the existence of poverty, each by its fakery implicitly rationalizing retrograde attitudes and perhaps the retention of tenuous privileges. Because the avant-garde claims to be prophetic, the ultimate judge of current claims can only be a future cultural public. For now, future-sensitive critics should proceed under the assumption that in their enthusiasms they might, just might, be askew.

A

ABISH, WALTER

ABRAHAMSEN, HANS

(24 December 1931)

(23 December 1952)

Though he was born in Vienna, raised in Shanghai’s Jewish community during World War II, and lived in Israel before emigrating to the United States, Abish has published only in English. The distinguishing mark of his novel Alphabetical Africa (1974) is its severe compositional discipline. The first chapter has only words beginning with the letter A (“Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes,” etc.). For the second chapter, he additionally uses words beginning with the letter B. Only by the Z chapter, which is in the middle of the book, does the full alphabet become available, then to contract again to a conclusion composed exclusively of words beginning with the letter A. The next two Abish books are collections of stories, some of them more experimental than others. Each pair of paragraphs in “In So Many Words” is preceded by a numeral announcing how many words are in the following paragraph; while the second paragraph in each pair, set in roman type, tells a dry story, the first paragraph contains all of its successor’s words set in italics in alphabetical order. In short, Abish displays a fascination with numbers reminiscent of RAYMOND QUENEAU, though lacking the latter’s extravagant wit and audacity. It was Abish’s good fortune, or misfortune, to write How German Is It (1980), a far more accessible novel that won him a Guggenheim fellowship, a CAPS grant, and later a lush MacArthur fellowship, in addition to a contract from a slick publisher not otherwise known for publishing avant-garde writers. The result was Eclipse Fever (1993), a fiction far more conventional than its predecessors, and Double Vision: A SelfPortrait (2004), a modestly unusual autobiography. If his writing fell into the capacious hole of the literaryindustrial complex, too bad.

A prominent Danish composer, he had explored quietude – more specifically, how quiet music can be and still be music. His masterpiece is Schnee (2006–08, Snow), which opens with string players barely scratching their instruments in their upper registers before proceeding to louder sound. Because it starts so quietly, Schnee is better seen live to be heard. Early in his career Abrahamsen was praised for representing a New Simplicity in a false competition with serial music, as they came in time to co-exist. At a time when amplification of music is so easy and widespread, his effort becomes ever more laudable.

ABRAMOVIC, MARINA (30 November 1946) Born in Belgrade just after World War II, she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade before beginning a career mostly of stunning PERFORMANCE and installations. Initially she explored themes of pain and duration, especially on herself. In Rhythm 0 (1974, in Naples), she invited spectators to use on her a range of instruments including knives. Moving to Amsterdam in 1975, she met Uwe Laysiepen (1943), a German known as Ulay. In their thirteen years together they did many prominent performances, including Relation in Space (1976), where they crashed their naked bodies into each other for an hour. In Night Crossing (1981), they abjured talking and eating for more than two weeks, repeating this performance in various venues, mostly notably in Australia, where it was also called Gold Found by the Artists (1981). They concluded their collaboration with The Lovers: Walk on the Great Wall (1988), where they started at opposite ends of the

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2 • ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM Chinese landmark, one crossing the Gobi Desert and the other treacherous mountain tops, until meeting on a bridge in the Shaanxi Province. After the legendary couple split, Abramovic returned to solo performances, including Biography (1992–96), a theatrical retrospective of twenty-five years of previous performances. In Cleaning the Mirror (1995, New York), clad in a long white shift, in a dank and dark basement, she scrubbed obsessively at large cow bones, removing bloody refuse that soiled her dress, creating, in RoseLee Goldberg’s judgment, “a metaphor for ethnic cleansing in Bosnia [that was] an unforgettable image of grief for her times.” Seriously entrenched in her particular art, Abramovic in 2005 presented at New York’s Guggenheim Museum Seven Easy Pieces in which she redid wholly on her own classics initially performed by other artists mostly (e.g., VITO ACCONCI, Valie Export [1940]). In 2010 she became the first performance artist to merit a retrospective at New York’s MUSEUM OF MODERN ART.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM (c. 1948) If only because it emphasizes esthetic qualities, this term has come to be the most acceptable epithet for the innovative painting that became prominent in NEW YORK CITY in the late 1940s (and was thus sometimes called the NEW YORK SCHOOL). Drawing not only from SURREALISM but from JAZZ-based ideas of improvisatory gestural expression, certain artists laid paint on the canvas in ways that reflected physical attack, whether in the extended dripped lines of JACKSON POLLOCK or in the broad strokes of FRANZ KLINE. “Action painting,” another epithet once popular for this style of painting, was coined by the critic HAROLD ROSENBERG, who theorized that these abstractions represented the artist’s mental state at the moment(s) of composition. One esthetic common to such painting was “all-over” composition, which is to say that the activity could be just as strong near the edges of the canvas as in the center, purportedly in contrast to the more hierarchical focusing typical of traditional art. WILLEM DE KOONING’s work is customarily placed within this term, even though his best paintings acknowledge figuration and focusing; so are BARNETT NEWMAN and AD REINHARDT, perhaps because they were roughly the same age as the others (and resided mostly in NEW YORK CITY), even though their art proceeded from decidedly nonexpressionist premises. A European epithet for comparable painting was ART INFORMAL.

ABSTRACT FILM (1913) In Art of Our Time (1939), the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART’s self-retrospective of its first decade, is a two-page final chapter, much shorter than its predecessors, that seems an afterthought, as indeed “Designs for Abstract Film” probably was. It features Léopold Survage (1879–1968), a Russian then residing in Paris, who in 1913 produced a sequence of six paintings, Le Rhythme Coloré (Colored Rhythm), that he imagined would become an animated film not from filming them but copying his designs directly onto celluloid stock. In his classic polemic, Survage suggested radically that abstraction in art says little until “it sets in motion, when it is transformed and meets other forms, that it becomes capable of evoking a feeling.” He added, “It is in this way that visual rhythm becomes analogous to the sound-rhythm of music.” Though Survage’s proposal never advanced beyond a 1917 gallery exhibition prefaced by his friend GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE, his fertile cinematic vision was soon realized by VIKING EGGELING, HANS RICHTER, and WALTER RUTTMANN, among others. The apex was perhaps Ballet Méchanique (1924) made by FERNAND LÉGER and MAN RAY. Later in the 1920s came abstract films from OSKAR FISCHINGER; in the 1930s, from LEN LYE. One theme of their work is images unique to film. This quality became more obvious decades later with the development of abstract video with, for instance, fuzzy edges that could not be realized with film. Indeed, when the Cleveland art professor Bruce Checefsky (1957) animated all twelve Survage paintings in 2005, they look like less like film than video.

ABSTRACT GRAPHIC NARRATIVE (20th century) Where earlier examples existed, the epithet “graphic novel” wasn’t much heard until the century’s end. That latter category classified spine-bound books whose pages were mostly frames with words and images more typical of comic strips. Two turning points in gaining critical acceptability for this format came with the publication of Alan Moore and David Gibbons’s Watchmen (1987) in England and Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991) in America. While commercial publishers have since issued many graphic narratives, what became more scarce by comparison, still off the maps of both literature and art, were narratives whose visual content was simply shapes

ABSURD, THEATER OF THE •

and sometimes just verbal symbols that evolved a story over successive frames or turned pages. One historic precursor was EL LISSITZKY’s About Two Squares (1922), which curiously began as a children’s book, perhaps under the assumption that shapes are more comprehensible, surely more internationally understood, than words. (Should the reader take its images from the Internet, consider cutting them apart and reassembling to simulate the structure of a book with pages.) This form I discovered in the chapbook Artificiata (1969) by MANFRED MOHR, whose abstract vertical drawings weaved a narrative over successive pages, no matter if the book were read from its front or its back. The initial achievement of SOL LEWITT’s Arcs Circles Grids (1972) was a bigger book, clearly for adults, where the narrative develops wholly through the changing configuration of lines over successive pages, thus fusing abstract art, which LeWitt also practiced, with the linear form of narrative. This recognition is important to me, because in the mid-1970s I produced Constructivist Fictions of symmetrical line drawings metamorphosing in a systemic sequence. The theme behind the collective name was suggesting that the historic Constructivists would have made these abstract graphic fictions, had they thought about making narratives. In collaboration with the animator Peter Longauer (1949), I also produced from these drawings a short 16 mm ABSTRACT FILM (1978). Nonetheless, I find that whenever I try to explain AGN to others, as I’m doing here, I am continually surprised at how many people involved in both abstract art on one hand and narrative on the other can’t understand it until they see an example.

ABSTRACT MUSIC (1950s) Abstraction in music implies a separation of sonic structures from representational images, whether pictorial or psychological. Abstract music is the antonym of all musical styles that are concrete or naturalistic; abstract works are usually short, athematic, and rhythmically asymmetric. Intellectual fantasy, rather than sensual excitation, is the generating impulse of abstract music; its titles are derived from constructivistic and scientific concepts: structures, projections, extensions, frequencies, sound. The German composer Boris Blacher has developed a successful form of abstract opera in which concrete action takes place in a swarm of discrete sonic particles, disjected words in several languages, and isolated melodic fragments. ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, a term applied to nonobjective painting, is sometimes

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used to describe musical works of abstract quality with expressionistic connotations. A subsidiary genre of abstract music is ALEATORY MUSIC, in which the process of musical cerebration is replaced by a random interplay of sounds and rhythms. —Nicolas Slonimsky

ABSTRACTION (c. 5000 B.C.) This term generally defines artwork, whether visual, aural, or verbal, that neither represents nor symbolizes anything in the mundane world; but, because pure abstraction is primarily an ideal, the epithet also refers to work that at least approaches the absence of identifiable figurative representation. Although some commentators make a case for abstraction as a new development in the history of visual art, such a generalization necessarily depends upon ignorance of Islamic art that traditionally observes a proscription against graven images. (Those arguing for modern abstraction as a development dismiss such Islamic art as “decorative.”) Abstract art in the West became avant-garde in the 20th century, precisely because various styles of representation had been dominant for centuries before. Within modern abstract art are two divergent traditions, one emphasizing structure and the other favoring expression; examples of both of these traditions appear not only in painting and sculpture but also in music and dance. One reason behind the oft-heard piety that “painting is more advanced than poetry” is that abstraction became more acceptable among visual artists than among writers in our century.

ABSURD, THEATER OF THE (c. 1961) The epithet comes from Martin Esslin’s brilliant 1961 book of the same title. In the plays of SAMUEL BECKETT and EUGÈNE IONESCO, and to a lesser extent others, Esslin (1918–2002) identified nonsensical and ridiculous events that have sufficient metaphysical resonance to suggest the ultimate absurdity, or meaninglessness, of human existence. Reflecting philosophical existentialism, absurd writing represents an advance on the literature incidentally composed by the existentialist philosophers. If the latter sought a serious surface, the theatrical absurdists favored dark comedy in the tradition of ALFRED JARRY. The innovation was to demonstrate the theme of absurdity, in contrast to an earlier

4 • ACADEMIC CRITICS theater, identified with Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Albert Camus (1913–60), where characters debate it. By contrast, at the end of Ionesco’s The Chairs (1952), a particularly neat model of the convention, a hired lecturer addresses a nonexistent audience in an indecipherable tongue. This is the absurd surface. Because the lecturer’s message is supposed to represent the final wisdom of a 95-year-old couple, the meaningless message becomes an effective symbol for the metaphysical void. In a more familiar example from SAMUEL BECKETT, two men wait for a mysterious Godot, who obviously is not coming. On the strictly theatrical influence of absurd theater, the Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1988) says: The carrying of logic ad absurdum, the dissolution of language, the bizarre relationship of stage properties to dramatic situation, the diminution of sense by repetition or unexplained intensification, the rejection of narrative continuity, and the refusal to allow character or even scenery to be self-defining have become acceptable stage conventions. (Thanks for this summary.) Fifty years ago, I found a similar absurdist style in certain early 1960s American fiction by JOHN BARTH, Joseph Heller (1923–99), and THOMAS PYNCHON, among others. What seemed awesomely original and true in 1960s theater and fiction, now strikes most viewers as dated.

ACADEMIC CRITICS When professors discuss avant-garde art, particularly literature, they tend to focus upon the more conservative, more accessible dimensions of an artist’s work, in part to make their criticism more digestible to their students and colleagues, rather than pursuing radical implications to their critical extremes. Thus, it becomes opportune for even an advocate of the more experimental GERTRUDE STEIN to confine discussion to Three Lives (drafted around 1904) and/or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933); an academic discussion of MERCE CUNNINGHAM, say, will feature his connections to ballet rather than his departures from it; VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV is portrayed as the epitome of RUSSIAN FUTURISM over his more radical colleague ALEKSEI KRUCHONYKH. Academics tend as well to reveal incomplete familiarity with new developments (especially if these would be unknown to their fellow professors). The now-forgotten books that Wallace Fowlie published decades ago epitomize such deficiencies; J. H. Matthews wrote comparable books later; Marjorie

Perloff (1930), Henry Sayre (1949), Johanna Drucker (1952), and Tyrus Miller (1963), among others, have published similar volumes more recently. One fault evident in these books is simply: When a professor writes three words about an avant-garde subject, one of them is likely to be superficial and a second to reveal ignorance, even if the writing comes accompanied, as it usually is, by encomia from other academics. (If you think about the time and effort spent to get these blurbs, you begin to understand why such books disappoint.) Among the full-time academics who have written intelligent books on avant-garde art at one time or another, count Sally Banes (1950) on dance, GERALD JANECEK in two books on Russian literature, MICHAEL KIRBY in The Art of Time (1969), Mark Ensign Cory (1942) on German radio, John Tytell (1939) in Naked Angels (1976), Jack Burnham (1931) on sculpture, HUGH KENNER on BUCKMINSTER FULLER, L. MOHOLY-NAGY (though he actually worked as an art-college administrator while writing Vision in Motion), Jo Anna Isaak (1952) in The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts (1986), the British professor John J. White (1940–2015) on Literary Futurism (1990), and the classicist Donald Sutherland (1915–78) writing in 1951 on GERTRUDE STEIN. (One curious case was Roger Shattuck [1923–2005], who wrote his great book on the French avant-garde, The Banquet Years [1958], before he became a professor and then, with false authority, wrote garbage about avant-garde arts afterwards.) It is lamentable, alas, that this selective list is so short, professors remaining academic, while genuinely innovative art measures itself as avant-garde by maintaining a healthy distance from any academies.

ACCONCI, VITO (24 January 1940–27 April 2017) He began as a poet and translator; and though Acconci subsequently had a distinguished career as a visual artist, mounting exhibitions and producing videotapes as well as presenting live PERFORMANCE and INSTALLATIONS, his poetry remains his most innovative work. One 350-line poem was distributed one line per page over 350 separate sheets of paper, which were then bound into 350 copies of Acconci’s otherwise uniform magazine, 0 to 9. His definitive work is Book Four (1968), which he self-published in photocopies. As literature on the cusp of CONCEPTUAL ART, it contains a series of self-reflexive texts, beginning with a page that reads at its upper left: “(It stopped back.),” and then at its lower right: “(This page is not part/of the four books/and is at the top),” with the page entirely blank

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in between. Book Four concludes with a Gertrude Steinian text in which separate sentences, in sum suggesting a narrative, are each preceded by the numeral “1.” Of Acconci’s performance pieces, I remember best one in which he invited you into a kind of confessional booth and told you an authentic secret; another in which he sat at the bottom of a stairwell, blindfolded, with a metal pipe in his hand, defending the space in front of him with a genuine violence; a third, Seedbed (1972), in which he purportedly masturbated under a sloping wood floor, letting spectators hear the sound of his effort. Recalling that Acconci attended New York City’s most rigorous Jesuit high school, I think he made a Catholic art concerned with abnegation and spiritual athleticism. Besides performance pieces and writings, Acconci also made a series of films and videotapes. In the late 1980s, he turned to architecture and landscape design, producing proposals then works whose humor, if not silliness, are striking, though different in quality from his previous work in other forms. A rich career as various as Acconci’s merits a long biography.

ACKER, KATHY (18 April 1947–30 November 1997; b. Karen Alexander) She was a prolific, brilliant writer who had two subjects: previous literature that she would exploit for her own novels, sometimes appropriating whole chunks without acknowledgment, and unfettered female erotic experience. C. Carr in the Village Voice speaks of “female narrators who seem interchangeable from book to book, different names tagged to the sound of one voice raging – obscene, cynical, bewildered, and demanding to fuck.” I’ve noticed that women tend to be more enthusiastic about her books than men, placing her perhaps as a principal successor to Anaïs Nin (1903–77), who pioneered the representation of female eroticism. Perhaps because her prose was more accessible than distinguished – and called more postmodern than modern – Acker was one of the few SMALL PRESS writers to be received by commercial publishers without significantly compromising her radical sensibility. A prominent DOWNTOWN New York arts/literary prize was named after her (with me among its many recipients).

ACOHERENCE The literary equivalent of ATONALITY, not quite abstract, acoherence describes writing that makes sense, that organizes itself, not with an ostensible subject or an

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identifiable theme but around consistent diction, certain literary forms, style, and upon other qualities unique to language. Its masters were GERTRUDE STEIN and, reflecting her influence, JOHN ASHBERY. Once the latter became a professor at an American university, acoherence began to appear in the works of writing programs’ alumni, nearly all born after 1960, their names too numerous to mention, few (if any) of whom could do it as well, though their books, as often “prose” as “poetry,” often appeared with encomia from each other.

ACTION PAINTING See ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM; ROSENBERG, Harold.

ADORNO, THEODOR (11 September 1903–6 August 1969; b. T. Ludwig Wiesengrund) Essentially a philosopher, sometimes classified as a social theorist, he also wrote books about music that are admired by some and loathed by many. They are filled with sentences that are hard to decipher and thoughts that, even if understood, seem to go nowhere. Often Adorno is simply wrong, as when he opens a paragraph with the declaration that “Stravinsky also asserts his right to an extreme position in the modern music movement,” because IGOR STRAVINSKY spent most of his career separating his work from esthetic extremism. Plentiful Adorno references to both Karl Marx and SIGMUND FREUD contribute to an illusion of critical weight. As Adorno writes in pretentious, jargonious [sic] language that is meant to impress with its cumbersome sentences and highfalutin diction, rather than communicate from one person to another, his books on music in particular are valued by people who don’t know much about the subject. It could be said that their principal implicit theme is the intimidating power of Teutonic language and perhaps the intellectual privileges (aka indulgences) available to those who wield it. Some people have a taste for this kind of criticism, just as others have a taste for S&M. So be it. Adorno reportedly advised the German author Thomas Mann (1875–1955), likewise an exile in America during World War II, on the musical intelligence in the latter’s novel Doctor Faustus (1947), which may or may not account for that book’s musical irrelevance. The music that Adorno composed, which is sometimes mentioned to enhance his authority, is tonal and thus closer to Alban Berg (1885–1935) than to ARNOLD SCHOENBERG. (In truth, I wrote this entry only because

6 • AFFIRMATIVE ACTION my initial publisher insisted that this Dictionary should acknowledge Adorno. If only because his name is still remembered, it appears in this third edition.)

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION This is the principle that certain “minorities” disadvantaged in the past should be accorded preference, literally positive discrimination, in future competitions. While perhaps valid in hiring for positions, it’s counterproductive in art, especially in group exhibitions where weaker work from members of certain “disadvantaged” group(s) inadvertently makes everyone similarly tagged look inferior. If then, superior artists supposedly benefitting from AA are discredited. By contrast, consider that the measure of a strong competitor is a refusal to accept the leverages of AA. Were it offered to the boxer Mike Tyson, he would have knocked out his smug benefactor, perhaps to the latter’s surprise. Sometimes I suspect that the sponsor of this sort of discrediting procedure really wants to undermine the claims of the minority. While rewriting this third edition, I received an unsigned letter postmarked Albany, NY, insisting upon “Conditions: (1) Your included artist list should be comprised of at least 50% women.” Didn’t this come from some subvert ultimately wanting to see inferior women diminish superior artists? That I’d rather not do. One odd development has been that pure prejudice, which was once thought discreditable, is waved proudly without shame. That’s a shame.

AFRICAN ART From the first decade of the 20th century, African art attracted avant-garde visual artists for its alternative ways of portraying the human body, particularly by elongating features. Some of the FAUVES collected it, as did HENRI MATISSE who by 1908 owned more than one dozen African sculptures. African representational restructuring later influenced CUBISM, one of whose practitioners particularly appreciated its incorporating “twenty forms into one.” More than others, PABLO PICASSO exploited African esthetics so profoundly and prolifically. The summa of its influence came when the German critic CARL EINSTEIN published Negerplatik (1915), which analyzed its formal qualities. As early as 1935, New York’s MUSEUM OF MODERN ART mounted an exhibition mostly of sculpture, as well as publishing a catalog, African Negro Art. Oddly, neither African music nor African literature had a fraction as much influence upon Western avant-garde practice.

AFTERIMAGE This is an honorific developed in the visual arts that is applicable to other arts. In the former, the term identifies what stays in the viewer’s mind after the work containing it is no longer visible. Such surviving presence measures the strength of that image. I once heard the American painter Ben Shahn (1898–1969), near the end of his life, say that he wished he’d made films instead of paintings because of their greater leverage at implanting afterimages. The musical analogies are melodies and even arrangements that stay in listeners’ heads. In literature, consider the value of lines or characters so strong they are remembered. Conversely, whatever lacks such surviving presence, what’s not remembered, was ipso facto probably not worth remembering.

AGAM, YAACOV (11 May 1928; b. Jacob Gipstein) An Israeli, the son of a rabbi, Agam studied with JOHANNES ITTEN in Switzerland before moving to Paris as a very young man, creating the epitome of Jewish rationalist art that, thanks to his artistry, realizes irrational ends. Respecting the biblical commandment proscribing graven images, Agam works with simple geometric illusions, such as a LENTICULAR surface whose imagery changes as the viewer moves from side to side. Even though nothing physical changes, this spectator shifting creates the illusion of kinetic art. Essentially, Agam made lenticulars bigger, much bigger, such as one 30 feet square, Complex Vision (1969), in Birmingham, Alabama; or very tall, such as the Aenaitral Tower that at 48 feet became the interior centerpiece of his retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1980. Thinking yet bigger, Agam later painted the walls of tall hotels. One departure came from casting a lenticular circularly, as in a multi-level spinning fountain in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv, Israel. Agam has also made transformable sculptures composed of modular elements that can be variously manipulated by spectators – that exist, indeed, only through audience interaction. The French arts historian Frank Popper (1918) speaks of inventions, ranging from a single print to the holograph [sic] by way of multigraphs, polymorph graphics, interspaceographs, environmental graphics, primographics, and video graphics. Agam’s other achievements include constructions with artificial light, water-fire sculptures,

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and monumental mixed media works such as the fountain at the La Défence complex near Paris. Books about his work also document radical alternatives to a focused proscenium theater and vertical walls that respond with sounds to spectators’ movements. Agam is also known for a type of graphic known as an Agamograph, which uses lenticular printing, for illusory kineticism. Especially in public spaces, Agam’s sculptures, at once very Jewish and very Parisian, appear both brilliant and tacky, or brilliantly tacky, or uniquely impressively tacky, to a high degree. Much like MARC CHAGALL, likewise a Jewish immigrant to France, Agam earned enough sponsors (and survived long enough) to take his initial original ideas, even if intrinsically limited, through a rich variety of imaginative variations.

ALBERS, ANNI

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rectangles within rectangles, which he considered scrupulously neutral shapes, Albers created paintings and drawings based primarily upon the relationships of shapes and of colors. His series “Homage to the Square” reportedly includes hundreds of paintings that are not only distinctly his, but they also suggest alternative directions, as only the best teacher’s art can. That his book Interaction of Color (1963) has gone through several editions, one posthumously revised by the art historian Nicholas Fox Weber (1947), testifies to its value. Perhaps because Josef’s art was so unique, while he held an academic position bestowing professional power, his work was included, ‘Tis claimed, in several hundred group exhibitions. The fact that little need be said about his art should not diminish any estimate of his achievement.

ALBERT-BIROT, PIERRE (22 April 1876–25 July 1967)

(12 June 1899–9 May 1994; b. Annelise Fleischmann) By common consent, the most distinguished modern textile designer, she began in the weaving workshop at the Weimar BAUHAUS, where she met and married JOSEF ALBERS. Likewise she favored geometric imagery in her art. When the school moved to Dessau, it developed a new focus on production over craft. This prompted Anni A. to develop designs for manufacture that considered such factors as light reflection, sound absorption, durability, and materials that would minimize wrinkling and warping. Once both Albers came to America, they taught at BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE before Josef moved to Yale University. In addition to designing fabric patterns for manufacture by others, she wove bedspreads, curtains, and wall hangings, also publishing a book On Weaving (1965). Though Anni A.’s art was influential and thus easily imitated, her best works still look uniquely hers, especially for their striking color relationships. In 1949, she became the first designer honored with an exhibition at MoMA that then toured.

ALBERS, JOSEF

An inventive writer, frequently acknowledging GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE (though the latter was four years younger), Albert-Birot produced texts that were experimental in all sorts of ways. He edited the magazine SIC (1916–19), its title an acronym for Sons Idées Couleurs (Sounds Ideas Colors). In its pages appeared figures associated with ITALIAN FUTURISM, SURREALISM, and DADA, along with chapters of his novel Grabinoulor (1919). Barbara Wright (1915–2009), who specialized in translating avant-garde French texts into English, succinctly describes Albert-Birot’s principal activities as “poems of every conceivable kind: sound poems, typographical poems, simultaneous poems, poster-poems, square, rectangular, chess-board poems. And even straightforward poems. Plays. Novels.” AlbertBirot should be remembered, if for nothing else, for this classic aphorism: “If anything can be said in prose, then poetry should be saved for saying nothing.” That’s such a gloriously liberating principle that I wonder why nobody known to me had thought of it before and, too bad, few have observed it since. His tondo, circular abstract painting, of Nude Woman in the Bath (1916) is special.

ALBRIGHT, IVAN

(19 March 1888–25 March 1976) First a student and then an instructor at the BAUHAUS, Albers emigrated to America soon after that legendary German school was closed by the Nazi authorities, teaching first in North Carolina at BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE until 1949, and then at Yale University until his retirement. Intentionally restricting his imagery to

(20 February 1897–18 November 1983) A highly original American painter, he made portraits so extravagantly meticulous, with thin lines emerging from other thin lines, that they attain a high originality. So detailed is his work that he completed remarkably few paintings in sixty years of nearly full-time art

8 • ALEATORY MUSIC activity. With a wealth of nuance, he frequently portrayed the theme of human vulnerability and decay. The critical question is which came first – the technique or the vision? One curiosity of his life is that Ivan Albright had an identical twin brother, Malvin (also 1897–1983), who sculpted, with less success. How that happened – how two artists supposedly with similar genes produced such different qualitative results – is a mystery warranting penetrating analysis.

ALEATORY MUSIC (1950s) The word aleatory is derived from the Latin “alea,” that is, a die. (Julius Caesar exclaimed after crossing the Rubicon, “Alea jacta est.”) Aleatory music in the literal sense is not a new invention. “Dice music” was a popular parlor game in the 18th century. A celebrated example is Musikaisches Warfespiel, attributed to Mozart. In the second half of the 20th century, composers of the avant-garde introduced true aleatory methods. A pioneer work was Music of Changes by JOHN CAGE, derived from chance operations found in the ancient Chinese book of oracles, the I Ching, in which random numbers are obtained by throwing sticks. By drawing an arbitrary table of correspondences between numbers and musical parameters (pitch, note-value, rests) it is possible to derive a number of desirable melorhythmic curves. Human or animal phenomena may also serve as primary data. Configurations of fly specks on paper, pigeon droppings on a park bench, the parabolic curve of an expectoration directed towards a spittoon, dissection of birds as practiced in ancient Rome, etc. are all excellent materials for aleatory music. At a HAPPENING in an American midwestern university, the anal discharge of a pig, which was administered a clyster, was used as an aleatory datum. MAURICIO KAGEL has made use of partially exposed photographic film for aleatory composition. The composerengineer IANNIS XENAKIS organizes aleatory music in stochastic terms, which possess the teleological quality absent in pure aleatory pursuits. —Nicolas Slonimsky

ALI, MUHAMMAD (17 January 1942–3 June 2016; b. Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.) Defensive boxing wasn’t his invention, but he took its choreography to a higher level. He was among the few star boxers flexible enough to bend backwards to

escape a punch and among the few heavyweights to “dance,” which is a boxing honorific for being light on his feet. Among Ali’s defensive strategies, after setting up in a familiar offense stance, was stepping backward with his left foot, thus moving out of his opponent’s normal punching range. When the other guy necessarily moved forward to reset himself, Ali punched without risking return punishment. As a defensive fighter whose skin rarely cut, he could also “take punches,” as it’s said, until, as in his classic “Rumble in the Jungle” with mighty George Foreman (1949), his opponents punched themselves into exhaustion, becoming easy prey for Ali’s knock out. Watching him perform was a theatrical pleasure rarely duplicated in his sport. (Those coming close include Jorge Páez [1965], whose mother reportedly owned a circus in border Mexicali; and “Prince” Naseem Hamed [1974], whose fortes were striking costumes and grand entrances.) Early in his storied career, Ali displayed voluble wit. By its end, however, he was mute in public, probably as the result of taking too many strong punches.

ALLEN, WOODY (1 December 1935; b. Allan Stewart Konigsberg) His single most inventive film was his first as a director, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), which must be seen to be believed. Taking Japanese action footage, made only a few years before, Allen made a fresh English soundtrack entirely about something else – Jews searching for the world’s best egg salad recipe. This unpretentious formula becomes the platform for rich gags, some of them exploiting Asian stereotypes (in a move probably less acceptable now); others, incongruous juxtaposition. Though Allen was only 30 when it appeared, Tiger Lily came in the wake of a rich precocious career in comedy that began when he was 17 – scriptwriting for network television shows, providing captions to New Yorker cartoons, taking the stage as a stand-up comedian where he successfully developed the persona of a neurotic, nervous, intellectual, Jewish nebbish. (This varied in crucial respects from his actual self-confident personality.) By any measure, no American had a better education in comedy to prepare him for yet greater comedy. Two qualities special about Tiger Lily are that it doesn’t depend upon his persona and it realizes mediumistic invention to a degree that Allen never tried again. Tiger Lily is screamingly, continuous funny, at the level of the best MARX BROTHERS, who were Allen’s initial heroes. Only where the producers insert songs

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by the Lovin’ Spoonful, a fair folk-rock group popular at the time, does this film fall down. Perhaps that last unfortunate experience prompted Allen to retain final creative control of his later films. Perhaps because he felt more responsible for earning enough money to make yet more films, his later films were less courageously innovative. He got serious; and though Allen didn’t get far in college, he made movies for those who did. No doubt over-(or under-) educated, I fell asleep in too many later Allen films; though, if prompted, I recall some inspired comedy in his Bananas (1971), which was long ago. Nobody else once worthy of an entry here has made the desire to make yet more (and more) films the principal focus of his career. Of his writings, the most original are “ballets” that he has published here and there over the years. In his personal life, Allen successfully challenged the POLITICALLY CORRECT proscription against intergenerational marriage with his sometime partner’s adopted daughter. Surviving negative publicity, they have remained tight for over two decades. Time tells its own truth.

ALTERNATIVE SPACES (1970s) This has been the preferred American epithet for galleries that exhibit art and sponsor performances without the expectation of a profit. Many were founded in the wake of largesse made available by the National Endowment for the Arts and its imitators in many states, initially to serve artists who found commercial channels closed. In 1977, the NEA funded fifty-nine of over one hundred that had applied. Perhaps the largest and most famous, PS 1 in Astoria, New York, took over a vacated public school (thus the “PS”) that was among the largest in NEW YORK CITY. While its former auditoriums and gymnasiums were used for exhibitions and performances, the sometime classrooms housed smaller shows or became studios mostly for artists from abroad. (I had in 1979 an exhibition of my BOOK-ART in a ground floor corner space that must have been a principal’s office, because it housed a machine for making bells ring throughout the building.) In one of its top-floor classrooms, PS 1 permanently houses JAMES TURRELL’s Meeting (1986), a masterpiece whose roof can be opened to exhibit the changing late afternoon sky. Thousands of artists from around the world, avant-garde and otherwise, have benefited from the existence of such alternative spaces.

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AMBIENT MUSIC (c. 1920) Ambient or background music was first suggested as a possible art form by ERIK SATIE. He described his concept of “furniture music” (musique d’ameublement) as “new music [to be] played during intermission at theatrical events or at a concert, designed to create a certain ambience.” In the 1930s, the Muzak Company was founded to transmit, by radio, soothing background music that would be appropriate for offices and factories. These selections were psychologically tested either to encourage more productivity or to ease stressful situations (e.g., the ever-present Muzak heard while sitting in the dentist’s chair). A common nickname for this type of overly pleasant background music is Elevator Music. In the postwar years, American composer JOHN CAGE reintroduced Satie’s notion of music to be played as a background accompaniment to other activities. This idea has been most actively espoused by composer/producer BRIAN ENO who took the term “ambient music” from Cage. Eno’s background music is supposed to be both “interesting as well as ignorable,” in the words of critic Stuart Isacoff (1949). The most famous example of Eno’s ambient work is Music for Airports, which, ironically, has been used as Muzak in several major airports. Another development in background music briefly flourished in the late ’50s and early ’60s, mostly in the hands of eccentric sound composer Esquivel. His creations, now known as “space-age bachelor pad music,” combined electronic sounds with futuristic background music. This music was designed to be played in the homes of forward-looking young men, anticipating the advances of the space-age. As pure kitsch, this music was briefly revived in the late 1990s. —Richard Carlin

AMERICAN ABSTRACT ARTISTS (1936) Founded in NEW YORK CITY at a time when representational “American Scene” painting was dominant, AAA held weekly meetings, staged gallery exhibitions, and published print portfolios that initially received a hostile reception, especially from those wanting to dismiss it as “European” and thus un-American. In 1940, AAA, representing a disparaged minority, printed a broadside titled “How Modern Is the Museum of Modern Art,” which became the occasion for a visible protest outside the newly venerable institution. Another pamphlet entitled “The Art Critics” savaged

10 • AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND LETTERS the newspaper reviewers prominent at the time. Over the next two decades AAA forged preconditions for the acceptance of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, at least in New York. Though subsequently less combative, AAA survived into the 21st century, often with populous annual exhibitions. When I applied with my visual art nearly always with numerals and words, some gatekeepers at AAA replied that, as presentations of external entities, those were not truly abstract. Esthetically tough and tight AAA still is.

AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND LETTERS (1904; 1898–1993) These are self-replicating clubs, chartered by acts of Congress no less, of living artists, composers, and writers that, notwithstanding their monikers, include among their members remarkably few of the Americans featured in this book. (The former AAAL was until 1993 an inner circle of fifty drawn from the latter NIAL.) The AAAL’s literature department can be characterized as less advanced than its music division, while that devoted to visual arts is, by common consent, the most backward of all. When I first observed its membership, around 1965, I thought that every major writer born before 1910 (and thus 55 at the time) belonged; in 1999, over three decades later, that qualitative generalization covers only authors born before 1911 (Norman Corwin being the oldest flagrant omission at that time). Consider this other comparative measure: It would now be very easy to make a list of visual artists not belonging, who are collectively better than current members – a shadow academy, to use a British epithet; fairly easy to make a stronger list of writers (but harder, if not impossible, to make a competitive list of composers). In 1961, the painter AD REINHARDT, who had a sure instinct for puncturing professional pretense, noted that in the Manhattan telephone directory that year were seven “National Institutes,” consecutively: National Institute for Architectural Education National Institute for Disaster Mobilization National Institute for Straight Thinking National Institute for the Blind National Institute of Arts and Letters National Institute of Credit National Institute of Diaper Services Anybody want to make anything of that? Yes, the NIAL, wholly on its own volition, situated the putative top drawer of American arts between

credit advisors and the blind and just a step away from diaper providers. One of the more unwittingly embarrassing books owned by me is Portraits from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1987), as a reader looking only at the pictures would judge a 19th-century European art gallery. No less than seeing firsthand is believing. What AAAL represents culturally is a European model for collecting RETROGRADE (and thus fundamentally un-American) kinds of talents. What it displays provincially is a weakness for middling writers appearing frequently in slick commercial magazines such as The New Yorker, thus reflecting a general and continuing decline of standards within the self-appointed guardians. (Only a few decades ago, it was generally assumed that no writer could do optimal work contributing to such a periodical, with all its constraints on subject, length, and style.) The distinguished Harvard professor Harry Levin (1912–1994), himself a member of the NIAL, called it, in a memorable phrase, “one of those professional societies which exist primarily for mutual admiration.” Because this is the United States, rather than Europe, the retrograde Academy’s influence on the development and even the direction of native culture is, thankfully, negligible. That last fact perhaps accounts for why no book-length history of it exists.

AMERICAN RELIGIOUS ART One uniquely American contribution to the world’s spiritual life has been new religions, many of which originated in the early mid-19th century in a western New York state area commonly called “The BurnedOver District.” Some of these new faiths invented forms of devout respect and religious art unknown anywhere else in the world. I can recall my teacher, the great historian William G. McLoughlin (1922–92), demonstrating around 1960 the extreme physical movements of religious conversion common at the time among various sects 130 years before. Advocates of Spiritualism toured America sponsoring séances, truly heightened PERFORMANCE, promising communication with the dead. With perhaps two hundred women, often still teenagers, working as full-time trance speakers, Spiritualism came and went, perhaps because its avatars were avowedly celebate women at a time when few religious leaders were female. The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, commonly known as the Shakers, also developed innovative styles of domestic furniture that are treasured to this day. While several of these faiths survived into the 21st century, among those prospering more were Christian Science and, especially, the Mormon Church. Whereas a

ANGER, KENNETH •

favorite theme of the former’s art is heaven on earth (e.g., portrayed often in JOSEPH CORNELL, himself faithful), the latter dramatizes its claims for unique revelations in theatrical forms such as performances by the huge Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the annual Hill Cumorah PAGEANT. Certain radical religions persecuted in Europe, such as the Rosicrucians, found in America freedom not only to practice but to invent new arts. Centered in the early 18th century in Ephrata, PA, they developed unique design and a singing style, since lost, that was compared to listening to choirs of angels. To the degree that African-American churches have represented a new religion, their NEGRO SPIRITUALS epitomize new uniquely American sacred art.

ANARCHIST ART (1960s) Anarchists have made art, often portraying other anarchists. A classic example is John Henry Mackay’s The Anarchists (1872), which was written in German by an author born in Scotland who was then residing in London. Anarchists also appear in Henry James’s The Princess Casamasima (1886). However, as anarchism presumes an open, nonhierarchical society, so a truly anarchist art should have an open, nonhierarchical form or portray open, nonhierarchical activities. In my experience, the epitome was JOHN CAGE’s HPSCHD (1969), which gets its own entry here. Other examples include CLAYTON PETERSON’s Tomkins Square Riot (1988), THE LIVING THEATRE’s Paradise Now (1968), and Lee Baxandall’s Potsy (1963). Indicatively, an academic book on Film and the Anarchist Imagination (1999) scarcely understands this concept.

ANDERSON, LAURIE (5 June 1947) Anderson has been sporadically popular since the early 1980s, following the surprise hit of her eightminute audio montage “O Superman.” Working in New York since 1973, Anderson had been exposed to the musical experiments of BRIAN ENO and PHILIP GLASS in evolving her stage shows that included spoken word (often electronically distorted), tape loops, synthesized sounds, mime, film, and light shows. Her best-known work in this mode was the seven-hour production The United States (1984), the audio portion of which was released as a five-volume set by rock label

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Warner Brothers in the wake of her pop hit. By the mid-90s, however, Anderson had disappeared from the pop scene as well as from more progressive venues. Her work has failed too often to meet the claims made for it, whether as visual art, music, writing, or performance, for it has from its beginnings been invariably more slick than avant-garde and more acceptable than challenging.

ANDRE, CARL (16 September 1935) Andre, more than anyone else, persuasively established the idea of a situational sculpture in which materials, sometimes purchased or found (rather than fabricated), are imported into a particular space (usually where “art” is the currency of admission). Because these sculptures exist only in that situation, only for the duration of their display there, the parts can be separated and retrieved at the exhibition’s end, if not later organized into a totally different work – what Andre calls “clastic” art. As these works may be taken apart (or gathered up) and recomposed, they look intentionally unfinished and impermanent (thus denying the classic piety that “sculptural art” must necessarily be a finished product); they also look as though someone else could easily duplicate them with commonly available materials. Therefore, Andre’s sculpture Lever (1966) assumes an untraditional horizontal form, consisting of 137 pieces of separate but visibly identical (and thus interchangeable) firebricks laid side to side in a single line 30 feet across the floor. An adept aphorist (“Art is what we do; culture is what is done to us”), Andre has also written comparably innovative, nonsyntactical literary texts. Although they are exhibited from time to time (and even reprinted in the catalogs accompanying exhibitions), he has resisted collecting them into books.

ANGER, KENNETH (3 February 1927; b. Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer) A child of the Los Angeles film world, Anger began precociously with a trilogy of SURREALIST and disjointed films that were juvenile in both content and, seemingly, inspiration, yet nonetheless regarded as an antithesis to slick Hollywood films: Fireworks (1947), Eaux d’Artifice (1953), and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954, recut 1966). Perhaps the best of them is the first, which portrays a young man’s homoerotic dreams. (It reportedly earned Anger a

12 • ANIMATED FILM letter from Jean Cocteau, inviting him to come to Europe, where he lived for most of the 1950s. Returning to New York in 1962, he lived initially near Coney Island, where he reportedly learned about socially marginal America.) Only with Scorpio Rising (1964) did Anger emerge as a mature innovative filmmaker. The subject is motorcyclists, and this film emphasizes their insane love of their machines, their attempts to imitate film heroes such as James Dean, and their rowdy, implicitly homoerotic parties. In the third section of the film, against the motorcyclists are juxtaposed some blue-tinted scenes from a black-and-white version of the Christ story. This last contrast is reinforced by the shrewd use on the soundtrack of rock-n-roll music that has the distinct virtue of being at once both resonant and ironic. As Anger’s cutting from one kind of scene to another becomes quicker, Scorpio Rising becomes hysterically funny. The film somewhat resembles Pop painting in its use of very familiar quotations, as well as its author’s ambivalent attitude toward popular materials – in the artful mixing of high culture with low. Also an author, Anger published the classic exposes of individual turpitude (as distinct from corporate sin) in Hollywood, Hollywood Babylon (1965) and Hollywood Babylon II (1984).

ANIMATED FILM (c. 1900) It is my considered idiosyncratic opinion that animation in film has always constituted an avant-garde. Since film extended from photography, where anything resembling animation has always been scarce, animation has from its beginnings necessarily reflected discoveries about properties that made film different from photography. Whereas representational films were shot scene by scene, most animation was produced frame by frame. Movement on screen comes not from moving the camera or the actors but from changes made on a drawing board by hand. Throughout the history of film production, animation has always been a sorry sister. It is said that the producer in charge of cartoons at WARNER BROTHERS, where some of the best animation was achieved, arrived at screenings with the epithet “Roll the trash.” And the censors at the time didn’t examine animated shorts as closely as feature films, allowing, say, the eroticism of the Fleischers’ Betty Boop to go into movie houses, where such sensuous moves by human beings in feature-length films would have been forbidden. Few critics at the time acknowledged

the WARNER toons, which didn’t earn much critical writing until the 1970s. Only in 1985 did the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART mount a retrospective of Warner work. The only animated film ever to command much critical respect at its premiere was Walt Disney’s feature-length FANTASIA (1941), which is indeed a masterpiece. Curiously, the development of animated film created a precondition for video, which at its truest is not a representational medium, like most film, but something else, containing as it does the potential to generate its own imagery and to process electronically (and thus easily) prerecorded pictures. Though I’ve read many histories of animated film, I don’t consider any of them to be critically smart. Nonetheless, I recommend the thick Giannalberto Bendazzi’s Cartoons (1995) for its international information. The anthology Frames (1978), assembled by George Griffin, himself a distinguished animator, presents a page or two of credible sample images from American animators. I reprint all their names, not because they are familiar but because, decades later, they aren’t, though many probably should be: Jane Aaron, Martin Abrahams, Karen Aqua, Mary Beams, Lisze Bechtold, Adam Beckett, Gary Beydler, David Blum, Lowell Bodger, Barbara Bottner, Robert Breer, Ken Brown, Carter Burwell, John Canemaker, Vincent Collins, Lisa Crafts, Sally Cruikshank, Larry Cuba, Jody Culkin, Howard Danelowitz, Carmen D’Avino, Loring Doyle, Irra Duga, Eric Durst, Tony Eastman, David Ehrlich, Jules Engel, Victor Faccinto, Roberta Friedman, Paul Glabicki, Andrea Romez, James Gore, Linda Heller, Louis Hock, Al Jarnow, Flip Johnson, Linda Klosky, Ken Kobland, Candy Kugel, Maria Lassing, Kathleen Laughlin, Carolina Leaf, Francis Lee, Jerry Lieberman, Anthony McCall, Frank & Carolina Mouris, Eli Noyes, Pat O’Neill, Sara Petty, Dennis Pies, Suzan Pitt, Richard Protovin, Kathy Rose, Peter Rose, Susan Rubin, Robert Russett, Steve Segal, Maureen Selwood, Janet Shapero, Jim Shook, Jody Silver, Lillian & J. P. Somersaulter, Robert Swarthe, Mary Dzilagyi, Anita Thacher, STAN VANDERBEEK, Peter Wallach, and JAMES WHITNEY. Consider this invisibility to be an indication of how avant-garde nearly all film animation must be, even in America.

ANT FARM (1968–78) A West Coast artists’ collective, similar to USCO but with more participants, they produced at least one classic, a row of old Cadillac cars with their front

ANTHOLOGIES (OF THE AVANT-GARDE) •

grills buried into the earth, that has been so widely reproduced it has become their SIGNATURE image obscuring for some a wealth of provocative activities, including publications, some of which are reproduced in the catalog of a 2004 retrospective at the University of California Museum of Art in Berkeley. The Cadillac Ranch, as it was officially called, epitomized the Art Farm’s radical goals of sexualizing architecture. Their esthetics descended from Pop Art that seemed more persuasive in the 1960s than later. Oddly, the principal mover, Chip Lord (1944), became a professor of film/digital media at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

ANTHEIL, GEORGE (8 July 1900–12 February 1959) Residing in Europe in the middle 1920s, Antheil became the epitome of the outrageous avant-garde American composer, producing raucous piano pieces with such aggressive titles as Sonata Sauvage, Mechanisms, and Airplane Sonata. Returning to America for a one-person Carnegie Hall concert in 1927, he composed a Ballet mécanique (having already produced a score for a Ferdinand Léger film of the same title) with airplane propellers, several pianos, and many drums. (In a 1989 complete recreation of this historic concert, I thought it by far the strongest work on the program.) His Transatlantic (1928–29) was the first American opera to receive its premiere in Europe, in Frankfurt in 1930. However, not until 1998 was it produced in his native country, with five performances by the Minnesota Opera, where the critic K. Robert Schwarz (1957–99) saw it, producing an appreciation of its “delirious intricacy . . . in text, staging, and music” for Opera News. Lionized by some literati, Antheil helped EZRA POUND to complete his opera Le Testament de Villon (1926), and in return became the subject of Ezra Pound’s booklet Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (1927). Back in America in the early 1930s, Antheil produced less distinctive music before moving to Hollywood, where he wrote undistinguished film scores and a stylistically journalistic syndicated newspaper column titled “Boy Meets Girl” offering advice to the romantically distraught. He collaborated with the film actress Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000) in inventing (and even legally patenting) a guidance system for radio-directed torpedoes. Though no longer an avant-garde composer by his forties, he published a memoir with the audacious title Bad Boy of Music (1945).

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ANTHOLOGIES (OF THE AVANT-GARDE) (1896–) The great printed collections of emerging avant-garde materials draw from disparate sources to establish persuasively the existence of a body of works previous not seen together. As literally a choice gathering of flowers, anthologies initially introduce, if not publicize; eventually, they canonize. The exemplar for proto-EXPRESSIONISM was Der Blaue Reiter Almanach (1912, The Blue Rider) and DADA was RICHARD HUELSENBECK’s Dada Almanach (1920; English, 1966 & 1994). Historically, SURREALIST literature benefitted from Andre Breton’s Anthologie de l’humour noir (1940, The Anthology of Black Humor). For earlier French vanguard writing, the classic was Remy de Gourmont’s two-volume Le Livre des Masques (1896, 1898) that was brilliantly reworked and later translated as The Book of Masks (1994). Among the other classic anthologies of emerging avant-gardes was Poètes à l’Écart (1946, Offside Poetry), edited by CAROLA GIEDION-WECKLER; ROBERT MOTHERWELL’s The Dada Painters and Poets (1951; second ed., 1989); EUGEN GOMRINGER’s konkrete poesie (1960, 1996); FRANZ MON’s Movens (1960); LA MONTE YOUNG and JACKSON MAC LOW’s An Anthology of Chance Operations (1963, 1971), which features early FLUXUS along with JOHN CAGE’s early influence; Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Realisme Eine Dokumentation Herausgegeben (1965), edited by Jürgen Becker (1932) and Wolf Vostell (1932–98), who also brilliantly designed its pages; Mary Ellen Solt’s Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), which became most valuable for its international scope; JEAN-FRANÇOIS BORY’s Once Again (1968) for visual narrative; Peter Weibel and Valie Export’s Wien: Bildkompendium Wiener Aktionismus und (1970) for VIENNA ACTIONISM; Eugene Wildman’s Experiments in Prose (1969), whose only competition for representing radically innovative fiction is an anthology of mine; ALAN SONDHEIM’s Individuals (1977), which features a brilliant introduction often typical of such avant-garde selections; Gerhard Rühm’s Die Wiener Gruppe (1985) for certain Austrian poets; GEOF HUTH’s modest pwoermds (2004) for linguistic inventions. There are other consequential anthologies of new avant-garde work, including a few edited by me. (Having composed anthologies, I like to read those that are thoughtfully edited, rather than compiled where, for two negative red flags, selections appear in alphabetical order by author or chronological order by birthdate.)

14 • ANTONAKOS, STEPHEN By contrast, a weak anthology purportedly presenting a certain strain of new work can kill it, especially if the book is the first on its theme. May I doubt if another An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011) will ever appear. Earlier, Germano Celant’s Art Povera (1969) was the last on its subject (until a 2011 catalog for a museum exhibition). No one (re)does what nobody wants to do.

ANTONAKOS, STEPHEN (1 November 1926–17 August 2013) Born in Greece, he came to the United States as a child and later studied visual art. Around 1960, he discovered NEON, which became his principal medium for art since. Whereas DAN FLAVIN used the other medium of fluorescent light for its peculiar kind of glow, what Antonakos loved in neon was its colors. First he added neon tubes to his assemblages; then he let the lamps stand by themselves. Later he had them fill an entire room, realizing an ENVIRONMENT wholly with light. In 1973, he made the radical move of placing ten large neon works outdoors around the architecture of the Ft. Worth Museum, making the entire building into a prop for his giant light sculpture. Though neon had always been popular in commercial signage, Antonakos appropriated it for modern art by using it abstractly, typically for curved lines apparently suspended in space. Most of his later works he set in public spaces, where they customarily appear without his name attached: on the south side of West 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues in Manhattan; in the Exchange Place PATH station in Jersey City; in the Pershing Square station in Los Angeles; and the Providence Convention Center in Rhode Island. Typically, they are visible from greater distances than most public art. In the 1980s, Antonakos began producing sacred reliefs that benefit from placing neon lamps behind a rectangular, mostly monotonal painting.

ANTROBUS, JOHN (2 July 1933) During my year in London, in the mid-1960s, I thought the two most original playwrights were N. F. SIMPSON, already familiar and still remembered, and Antrobus. The latter’s You’ll Come To Love Your Sperm Test (1964) invited audience participation with the playwright himself as his own protagonist declaring near the end: “If you want a third act, you’ll have to improvise it yourself.” The night I was there no one

emerged, as perhaps a theme was Antrobus’s testing the famed reserve of British theatrical (not radio or literary) audiences who either failed or confirmed him. (Or?) Though Sperm Test was also published in a distinguished series of British playbooks, Antrobus didn’t offer London another play, instead collaborating with SPIKE MILLIGAN, among other miscellaneous projects. Why not more plays, I don’t know.

APOLLINAIRE, GUILLAUME (26 August 1880–9 November 1918; b. Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky) Born of a Polish mother who brought her fatherless sons to Monaco, where they received a French education, Kostrowitzky, known even into his adult years as “Kostro,” took a French pseudonym for a mercurial literary career that included art criticism, plays, fiction, pornography, and poetry. An early avant-garde text was the poème simultané, “Zone” (in Alcools, 1913), in which events in several places are portrayed in adjacent lines, as though the writer were a bird rapidly moving from place to place. To foster perceptions that are not linear but spatial, Kostro simply eschewed punctuation. His second innovation, presaging literary MINIMALISM was the one-line poem, “Chantre” (or “Singer”), which William Meredith (1919–2007) translates as “And the single string of the trumpets marine.” Kostro’s third major innovation was visual poems that he called “calligrammes,” in which words are handwritten or typeset to make expressive shapes, which he dubbed “visual lyricism.” For “Il pleut” (or “It rains”), the letters stream down the page, in appropriately uneven lines; “The Little Car” has several shapes reflective of automotive travel; “Mandolin Carnation and Bamboo” incorporates three roughly representational forms on the same page. Some of these handwritten poems have lines extending at various angles, words with letters in various sizes, musical staves, or diagonal typesetting, all to the end of enhancing language. Not only do such poems display a freedom in the use of materials, but Kostro apparently made it a point of principle not to repeat any image. Another, perhaps lesser, innovation he called “conversation poems” (“Les Fenêtres” and “Lundi Rue Christine”), because they were assembled from morsels overheard (and in their spatial leaping resemble “Zone”). Kostro’s best-remembered play, Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias, 1918, but written many years before), is a satire on sex and genius that Martin Esslin (1918–2002) identifies as a distinguished precursor to the THEATER OF THE ABSURD. Kostro’s

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strongest book of art criticism, Les Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques (1913, The Cubist Painters, Esthetic Meditations), identified a new development as it was maturing. A single essay, “L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes” (“The New Spirit and the Poets,” 1918), is no less valid today than it was when written, because of its emphasis upon surprise as an avant-garde esthetic value. As an arts critic, Kostro coined “Surnatural” that was later shortened to surréal, which stuck, and he championed PABLO PICASSO above all other painters. It should not be forgotten that, in the cultural milieus of Paris at the beginning of the century, Kostro performed invaluable service in bringing together advanced artists and writers and helping them understand one another. As Roger Shattuck (1923–2005) elegantly put it, “He wrote on all subjects, in all forms, and for all purposes. For him there was no separation of art and action; they were identical.” Since I was first called Kosti in a summer camp that had too many boys named Richard, I respect his love of accident and coincidence as I assimilate him, regarding this Dictionary as a book that Kostro would have written had he lived long enough, say to my age, and resettled in NEW YORK CITY.

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finally Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Prometheus in Basel in 1924–25. Ahead of his times, Appia scarcely imagined a century ago subsequent developments not only in illumination but theatrical projection.

APPROPRIATION (1970s) The filching of bits from earlier art, often without attribution, has become so popular a modernist procedure in literature, music, and visual art that it’s often unnoticed. In music, it’s called SAMPLING. What was new, especially in the 1970s, was reproducing whole works, nearly intact, especially of photographs and then paintings, as well as sometimes literary texts, with the claim that the reproduction belonged to the younger artist. Simple to do, easy to write about, such works generated considerable chatter less among practicing artists than in art magazines and their principal audience of art students. In my judgment, the most profound appropriator was also among the earliest and a most meticulous painter (or repainter), rather than a (re) photographer – ELAINE STURTEVANT. Everyone after was after.

APPIA, ADOLPHE (1 September 1862–29 February 1928) A Swiss theater designer who in 1891 had published a pamphlet about Staging the Wagnerian Ring, Appia a few years later wrote Die Musik und die Inzenierung, in which he advocated a theater of atmosphere succeeding a theater based on appearances, which is to say 19th-century realism. “We need not try to represent a forest,” he wrote. “What we must give the spectator is man in the atmosphere of a forest.” In James RooseEvans’s summary: It was Appia who first demonstrated the necessity of visualizing the mood and the atmosphere of a play; the importance of suggestion completed in the imagination of the spectator; the effectiveness of an actor stabbed by a spotlight in a great dim space; the significance of a “spacestage”; and the more abstract forms of scenic art. He foresaw not only the possibility of spotlighting but also of projected scenery. Dismissed at first, Appia persisted, staging scenes from Carmen and Manfred privately in Paris in 1903 and then complete texts: Orpheus and Euridice in 1903, Tristan und Isolde at La Scala in Milan in 1923, and

ARAKAWA (6 July 1936–18 May 2010; b. Shusaku A.) It is easier to describe Arakawa’s paintings than to say what they mean. His paintings tend to be large, usually containing sketchily rendered images, eschewing colors other than black, gray, and white. Often they have letters produced with large stencils, as well as handwriting with roman letters. The simple names for these paintings are customarily free of symbolic suggestion. The parts are sufficiently distant from one another, as well as from the painting’s title, to suggest mysteries that are not easily penetrated, and indeed they aren’t. ARTHUR DANTO, a sometime Columbia University philosophy professor, reportedly identified Arakawa as “the most philosophical of living artists.” Arakawa also collaborated with his wife, MADELINE GINS, in producing a visual-verbal book, The Mechanism of Meaning, that went through three radically different editions (1971, 1979, 1988) and is sometimes identified as the epitome of CONCEPTUAL ART. This is no less penetrable than Arakawa’s visual art, finally posing the question, rarely raised, of how much unintelligibility is acceptable in contemporary art. It is not for nothing that few articles about Arakawa’s work are long and that even shorter appreciations come to drastically

16 • ARCHIGRAM different conclusions. The voluminous catalog of a 1997 retrospective that reveals that he ceased painting at the end of the 1980s to concentrate on architecture (mostly conceptual).

ARCHIGRAM (1961–74) “Archigram” was the name of the architectural newsletter documenting the designs and theories of Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb. These British architectural visionaries of the 1960s are remembered for reshaping architecture with outlandish designs influenced by consumer culture and entertainment. Synthesizing science fiction, futuristic comic books, and amusement park esthetic, Archigram challenged architecture’s rigidity with bravado, effectively epitomizing CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE. Although the group’s fantastically innovative forms were never realized, the designs and titles for Archigram constructs such as “A Walking City,” “Plug-In City,” and “Instant City” are in themselves examples of the group’s inventiveness and social concerns. “A Walking City” is a take on NEW YORK CITY’s future, wherein the city consists of several colossal, insect-like structures with retractable legs that dwarf the background of New York City’s skyline, gently mocking what some consider the ultimate architectural achievement of the 20th century: the skyscraper. With sufficient illustrations that may one day rival the prescience of LEONARDO’s proposed inventions, Archigram was able to illuminate and even liberate architecture’s potential with Utopian optimism, however naïve. And despite the demands of an architecture with material limits, Archigram avoided compromise, promoted liberation, and protested all limitations with a bold advertising cum marketing campaign that is still applicable to the ongoing hyper-urbanization of modern cities and American cities in particular. —Michael Peters

ARCHIPENKO, ALEXANDER (30 May, 1887–25 February, 1964) Archipenko can be credited with being the first artist who worked principally in sculpture to absorb successfully the lessons of Analytic CUBISM from painting and introduce them into his three-dimensional work. Although PABLO PICASSO’s own Head of a Woman (1909–10) is an earlier execution of sculptural Cubism, it

was a group of sculptors, including Archipenko, Jacques Lipchitz, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Henri Laurens, who consistently worked out the formal problems of applying Cubism to their art. Archipenko’s Seated Mother (1911) probably predates the efforts of the rest. It was a modest and tentative attempt compared to later works: a female figure, who seems totemic in her passive and stiffly upright posture, sits with her legs folded, her figure cut across and divided up by curving planes that slip around and under each other. The basic purpose of Cubism, the simultaneous presentation of multiple perspectives, was not and could not be physically achieved in sculpture. But the efforts of Archipenko and the rest did contribute to the expansion of sculptural form. Though Archipenko extended his influence through the schools he ran in France, Germany, and eventually, the United States, the sculptures he created throughout the rest of his long career were largely unimpressive. —Mark Daniel Cohen

ARDITTI QUARTET (1974) In nearly every instrumental genre there are individuals who make a specialty of performing avant-garde works as no one else can. What DAVID TUDOR was to the traditional piano, Paul Zukofsky (1943–2017) was to the solo violin; SUN RA, to electric keyboards; Stuart Dempster (1936), to trombones; FRANCESMARIE UITTI, to her cellos; Bertram Turetzky, to the double bass; Skip La Plante (1951), to homemade instruments, and Margaret Leng Tan (1945), to the toy piano, Irvine Arditti’s string quartet has become to its literature. His group’s typical feat is to perform the complete string quartets of ELLIOTT CARTER, MAURICIO KAGEL, or GYÖRGY LIGETI in a single evening or on a single set of disks. They did so well with JOHN CAGE’s early quartets that he wrote some new ones especially for them. In their taste for high modernist music, the London-based Ardittis, as they are commonly called, contrast with the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet (1973), who have made a specialty of adapting pop songs to their instruments and of playing flashier, more accessible musics.

ARENSBERG, WALTER & LOUISE (4 April 1878–29 January 1954; 1879–1953) Husband and wife, married forever, they conducted for several years around World War I the most

ARMANDO •

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the bridge incorporates words from American writers as various as HERMAN MELVILLE and JOHN ASHBERY and then colors reflective of American intellectual history. (“The yellow is from Monticello,” Armajani once told an interviewer. “Jefferson called it the colour of wheat, of the harvest.”) These marvelous structures rank as architecture to some, but not to others. His darker skin and origins elsewhere notwithstanding, Armajani became a major Minneapolis artist implicitly defining it among America’s more enlightened cities, accounting as well for why superior selections from his work are featured in the Walker Art Center’s thick book (1990) about its own collection.

distinguished artists’ salon ever in NEW YORK CITY, where many other hostesses and hosts have tried earnestly to charm a current avant-garde elite. In their twolevel apartment on West 67th Street, the Arensbergs offered hospitality to the most distinguished New York Dadaists, some born here, most recent immigrants. The Arensbergs incidentally became MARCEL DUCHAMP’s most generous patron, amassing the largest early collection of his scarce work. Their salon ended in 1921 when the Arensbergs relocated to California. Especially for avant-garde artists in New York City, nowhere has been as hospitable since. No dope, Walter published critical volumes about William Shakespeare, in addition to books of poetry. A rich appreciation of the Arensbergs concludes Robert Crunden’s American Salons (1993).

ARMAN

ARIAS-MISSON, ALAIN

(17 November 1928–22 October 2005; b. Armand Fernandez)

(11 December 1936) A truly “mid-Atlantic” literary artist, a Harvard-educated classicist who works sometimes as a dexterous simultaneous interpreter, Arias-Misson has published literature and produced performances in both America and Europe. His first novel, Confessions of a Murderer, Rapist, Fascist, Bomber, Thief (1974), engages contemporary history in an imaginative way, as a series of fictionalized glosses on reproduced newspaper clippings, becoming, in sum, a coherent portrait of the gratuitous violence in our time. What is stylistically special about the novel is the exploitation of both the language and photographs of journalism. Arias-Misson has also produced, more in Europe than here, “public poems,” which are languagebased provocative performances, the words customarily appearing as signs rather than speech.

ARMAJANI, SIAH (10 July 1939) An Iranian who immigrated to America in the 1960s, Armajani moved from creating calligraphic paintings and then eccentric sculpture to building elegant and highly original pedestrian bridges. Beginning with models that were included in museum sculptural exhibitions, he was eventually invited to execute commissions. Perhaps the most successful, typically begun with an exhibited model, the 375-foot Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge (1988), arches over several lanes of highway, connecting the sculpture garden of the Walker Art Center to central Minneapolis. A slim structure with a curved arc that becomes inverted in the middle,

As one of the self-proclaimed “New Realists” in Paris at the beginning of the 1960s, Arman used authentic objects, generally in abundance – overwhelming abundance. Simple though the idea of making a sculpture of only one kind of thing was, he produced, with audacity and witty style, accumulations of, for example, dollar bills, bullets, musical instruments, old cameras, watch parts, and kitchen utensils. For a 1960 exhibition he filled the Iris Clert Gallery from floor to ceiling with garbage. The invitation was not the customary card but a sardine can filled with trash. Sometimes Arman’s accumulations were welded together; other times they lay free in a glass case. If metacollage brings together elements with something in common, these would be meta-ASSEMBLAGES. “He is always bending the object to his entirely personal and purely arbitrary will,” writes the AmericanItalian critic Henry Martin (1942), “as though to tell us that will is what we are most truly made of.” Though the process of making his assemblages reflects mad and messy inspiration, Arman’s results are usually neat and picturesque.

ARMANDO (18 September 1929; b. Herman Dirk van Dedeweerd) Of the many stipendiats from around the world whom I met in the 1980s as a guest of the DAAD BERLINER KUNSTLERPROGRAMM, he particularly impressed me, initially for sharing a classic joke, no doubt translated from the Dutch: “Germans are wonderful. They take everything seriously except humor.” He also told me that on the wall next to his telephone

18 • ARMITAGE, MERLE he wrote, out of concern for otherwise offending, the names of people who had a sense of humor. Curious about him, I later learned that as a teenager during World War II Armando lived near a Dutch “transition camp” for Nazi prisoners destined for concentration camps. Starting late, he had an adventurous career as an artist and writer, belonging to Group Nul, which was perceived to be the most radical (at least in Holland) in the early 1960s, also aligning himself with French Situationists, who expelled him. He later published fairy tales for both children and adults, coproduced a Dutch television program, and made both paintings and sculptures often monumental in size and grim in their abstracted imagery. Two recurring themes are faltering memory and passing time. Fortunate Armando was that his hometown in Holland, Amersfoort, hosted a museum devoted to his work, only to become unfortunate when a fire struck it and his paintings. Especially if an adventurous artist does work as disparate and noncommercial as Armando’s, valorize any city that honors its own.

ARMITAGE, MERLE (12 February 1893–15 March 1975) By most measures the most distinctive book designer of his generation, Armitage used, in a summary by his admirer DICK HIGGINS: color and printed end leaves in most books, few rules or ‘spinich’ (characteristic of Bauhaus and Art Deco design), large page folios, minimalist title spreads with very large type size, unusual mixtures of typefaces, and, in his later books, recurring visual motifs, such as a Navaho rug in a book on Stravinsky. Armitage also authored and edited many volumes about modern art and modern dance, in addition to working as a promoter, publicist, and presenter of concerts, for which he customarily designed memorable brochures. Typically he worked with smaller American publishers and often self-published. Among his numerous books were anthologies of criticism about IGOR STRAVINSKY, MARTHA GRAHAM, ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, and GEORGE GERSHWIN. Though many of these volumes were reissued in their times, few are in print now. He worked briefly as an art director of slick magazines and in titling design for Hollywood studios. Armitage reportedly declared, “I write in order to have something to design.” Accent on Life (1965) is Armitage’s autobiography that is stylish both verbally and visually.

ARMORY SHOW (17 February–15 March 1913) Officially called “The International Exhibition of Modern Art” and installed at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, this was the single most influential exhibition of avant-garde painting ever in America. With over 1,600 objects, it was really two exhibitions within a single space. The American section, which contained roughly three-quarters of the items, was an unbiased comprehensive survey of current American activity. In the European section, however, were canvases by Impressionists, Georges Seurat, the Symbolists Odilon Redon and Puvis de Chavannes, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh (eighteen items), Pierre Gauguin, HENRI MATISSE (forty items), while PABLO PICASSO and Georges Braque, for two, were slighted. The edge of new European art was represented by FRANCIS PICABIA and MARCEL DUCHAMP whose NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE, NO. 2 (1913) inspired outraged reviews in the press (a newspaper critic dubbed it “Explosion in a Shingle Factory”). Of the 174 works sold, the preponderance of 123 were made by European artists. The general un-sophistication of the American public notwithstanding, nearly a half million people saw the Armory Show in New York, ten thousand visitors arriving on the final day, and at its later venues in Chicago and Boston – many of them remembering it for decades afterwards.

ARMSTRONG, LOUIS (4 August 1901–6 July 1971) A precocious horn player from an indigent family, he was gigging in black bands around his native New Orleans as a teenager. By 1922 he went to Chicago to play in Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, a prominent group, making his first recordings with them in 1923. Quick to exploit the possibilities of records for disseminating his music, initially to black audiences, eventually to a larger multicultural public, he made countless recordings with innumerable assortments of other musicians. By 1925, still in Chicago, he organized his own groups – initially the Hot Five, later the Hot Seven, etc. Armstrong’s first musical innovations were rhythmic. As the cultural critic Albert L. Murray (1916– 2013) put it, Armstrong became: the intimate beneficiary of ragtime and stride, the shift from the popularity of the 3/4 waltz beat of the operetta to the 4/4 of the fox trot, the one-step, the two-step, the drag, the stomp, the

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Afro-U.S. emphasis on percussion and on syncopation, the break, stop time, and so on. On a different sense of time, initially learned in black New Orleans, Armstrong founded an AfricanAmerican modern music, incidentally becoming more influential than BIX BEIDERBECKE, an Iowa-born German–American cornetist, who epitomized a more Caucasian style of horn-based jazz. (Whereas Beiderbecke died from disease exacerbated by excessive alcohol, and certain later jazz stars succumbed early to heroin, Armstrong’s principal daily recreation/distraction was reportedly marijuana.) On the strength of his art, coupled with his persistence, Armstrong successfully imported African-American street culture into all of America’s living rooms. Given the strength of racial prejudice, not to mention the practice of segregation, during the first half of the 20th century, this was no easy feat – forging a cultural path that other AfricanAmerican musicians have since successfully pursued. Once Armstrong’s reputation as a trumpeter was securely established, he became a successful vocalist, in a gravelly innovative style uniquely his, as his facility to syncopation influenced later singers. One successor, Tony Bennett (1926), often credits Armstrong with inventing uniquely American solo vocalizing. Armstrong even released best-selling disks in which his famous trumpet took a back seat to his voice. One credible hypothesis holds that he always wanted to be a singer, indeed always sang, and regarded his trumpeting as extending his singing voice. Well-managed and generous with his time, Armstrong played in the largest and most prestigious venues around the world and appeared regularly in films and on radio and then television, working steadily until his death.

ARNESON, ROBERT (4 September 1930–2 November 1992) Arneson is the only innovative artist other than PETER VOULKOS to make ceramics his chosen medium. Unlike Voulkos, who took his inspiration from the ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST ferment that surrounded him and sought to enter the rarefied realm of high artistic aspiration, Arneson was more down to earth, so to speak, in his work with clay. He aimed satirical barbs at pomposity and self-importance, particularly his own. Arneson’s many ceramic self-portraits combine references to art history, such as Chinese bowls and Roman columns, with comic renditions of his face, genitalia, hands, and feet. He portrays himself as a very ordinary human being trying to poke his head, and

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other parts, out of the great tradition. An idiosyncratic artist who mocked artistic ambition, Arneson managed through his self-deprecating humor to stand alone. —Mark Daniel Cohen

ARP, JEAN/HANS (16 September 1887–7 June 1966; aka Hans A.) Born a German citizen in Strasbourg, Arp moved easily between France and Germany (and thus between two first names), between the French and German languages, and between visual art and poetry. In the first respect, he made abstract reliefs dependent upon cutouts and highly distinctive sculptures utilizing curvilinear shapes. He worked with automatic composition, chance, and collaborations. He appropriated the epithet “concrete art,” even though his biomorphic forms were quite different from the geometries of THEO VAN DOESBURG, who originated the term, and MAX BILL, who popularized it. Arp spoke of wanting “to attain the transcendent, the eternal which lies above and beyond the human.” Papiers déchirés he composed by tearing up paper whose pieces fell randomly onto the floor in an analog to the “automatic writing” of SURREALISM. He wrote: I continued the development of glued works by structuring them spontaneously, automatically. I called this working “according to the law of chance.” The “law of chance,” which incorporates all laws and is as inscrutable to us as is the abyss from which all life comes, can only be experienced by surrendering completely to the unconscious. So profoundly did Arp believe in the implications of his method, he added, “I claimed that, whoever follows this law, will create pure life.” One quality common to his visual art and his poetry is simplicity of shape and color. Integrating contraries, his art seems to belong to Surrealism as well as to DADA, to CONSTRUCTIVISM as well as to Expressionism. With two first names, speaking two languages, he became the master of the pun. To the British art critic David Sylvester 1926–2001), Arp mastered “the visual pun made by a shape that means two or three different and incongruous things at once and hints, moreover, at referring to further things that can’t quite be identified.” Bingo. Arp also published criticism that included Die Kunstismen (Isms of Art, 1925), written in collaboration with EL LISSITZKY, in which the two participants persuasively identified all the avant-garde movements dating back to 1914. Oddly, this percipient text is not reprinted

20 • ARS ELECTRONICA in the standard English-language anthology of Arp’s writings. Not unlike other Dadaists, he evaded conscription into World War I with a certain theatrical style. As the American writer Matthew Josephson (1899–1978) tells it, the German consul in Zurich gave Arp: a form to fill in, listing about thirty questions starting with his birth. He wrote down the day, month, and year – 1889 [sic] – on the first line, repeated this for all the rest of the questions, then drew a line at the bottom of the page, and added it all up to the grand total of something like 56,610! Did his reputation gain or lose from his having a surname that sounded like the English word for Art and thus prompted such deprecating epithets as Arp’s Art?

ARS ELECTRONICA (1979) What began as an annual festival of arts exploring new technologies became the foundation for a museum that probably ranks among the largest and most advanced of its kind. Always located in Linz, Austria, the biannual gathering became annual in 1986 and then a limited company in 1995. The Arts Electronica Center opened in 1996 in a big building on the Danube River, the operation subsequently growing alongside increasing interest in these new arts. Since remodeled in 2009, this “Museum of the Future” has interactive exhibits, VIRTUAL REALITY simulators, 3-D videos, robots, and much else unimaginable only a few decades ago. Beside it is a FutureLab with both staff and guest researchers. Nonetheless, AEC’s sponsors have issued several books, how 16th century, with a German publisher experienced with printing visual art with rich colors.

ART POVERA, L’ART CONTEMPORAIN, ART INFORMEL, ART BRUT, ART AUTRE, SUPERREALISM, NEW ESTHETIC, ART OF THE REAL, TRANSAVANTGARDE, NEO-GEO, UNEXPRESSIONISM, ETC. These terms are grouped together because they were used at one time or another to merchandise a new group of artists. Although some of the individual artists promoted under these banners might have survived, the terms did not, mostly because they (and others

with a similarly short life span) were coined with the intelligence of advertising and promotion rather than art criticism and art history. (What is surprising is that most of the “critics” adopting such opportunistic epithets survived their decline and disappearance, perhaps illustrating how the business of criticism differs from the life of art.)

ART RESEARCH CENTER (A.R.C.) (1964) Founded in Kansas City by T. Michael Stephens (1941) as a Midwestern outpost of international CONSTRUCTIVISM, this heroically modest “nonprofit” has presented exhibitions and sponsored presentations ever since, occasionally venturing elsewhere, always true to its esthetic. In their home city, lacking a solid headquarters, A.R.C. ingeniously utilized public spaces and temporarily vacant storefronts and offices, often with artists from elsewhere in the world. Respecting the tradition of the BAUHAUS and DE STIJL, its logo consists, illustratively, of a yellow triangle, a red square, and a blue circle, but in (highly American?) fluorescent colors. Among the other Constructivist art collectives were Anonima in Cleveland, OH, during 1960 to 1971, and GRAV, an acronym for Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, in Paris from 1960 to 1968, both of whom incidentally portrayed themselves as scientific optical researchers. Comparable alternative groups struggle elsewhere around the USA; few survive as long as A.R.C.

ART WORLD (1960?) Much understanding of significance in recent art depends upon this concept that circumscribes people seriously involved in artistic MODERNISM, whether as creators, critics, or sponsors. Thus, what might appear to be a meaningless gesture in the outside world, such as sitting silently at a piano, becomes significant within an art world, more specifically in its contribution to the history of modernist music. To those familiar with the earlier music of the composer JOHN CAGE, the performance in 1951 of absence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds (then the maximum time available on a 12-inch 78 rpm recording disk) was initially recognized as extending his earlier well-established interest in incorporating into his music those sounds produced without musical instruments. This absence of intentional

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music-making gains further resonance from, first, the frame of a concert including other music, within a venue where modernist music was previously presented, and then the presence of a pianist (DAVID TUDOR) already renowned for playing advanced music. Thus, by such resonant FRAMING, a move meaningless to laypeople gains meaning within an acknowledged art world. By the same enhancing process did, say, ANDY WARHOL’s paintings of common objects gain significance. Similarly, only to followers of architects can a proposal for a building unbuilt have meaning. Such effort extends the art-world’s traditional magic of establishing value, sometimes great value, upon objects that common people judge trivial. Contemporary music’s Art World slightly overlaps with that in the visual arts, which scarcely in turn interacts with that in literature where, say, semblances of chopped-up prose have long been accepted as “free verse.” Not unlike other sophisticated modernist monikers this one got vulgarized to identify people who visit galleries and museums.

ARTAUD, ANTONIN (4 September 1896–4 March 1948) Artaud is the author of a hypothetical book so extraordinary, Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and Its Double, 1958), that it bestowed authority on everything else he ever did: books of plays, his poems, his movie appearances, his notebooks, even his persistent madness. (A more familiar example of this syndrome would be the authority that the theory of relativity bestowed upon Albert Einstein, albeit in different ballparks.) Influenced particularly by Balinese dancers he saw in Paris in the early 1930s, Artaud imagined a Western theater that would neglect realism and narrative for kinetic images, rituals, and even magic. Such theater could surround the audience, even enticing it to participate. Thus, under the banner of “theatre of cruelty,” he forecast not only Peter Brook’s (1925) more radical productions and the LIVING THEATER, but also HAPPENINGS and subsequent PERFORMANCE art. Though Artaud aspired to create consequential avant-garde art and sometimes did inspired performances of his own texts, it is as a theorist and an artistic “personality” that he is mostly remembered. Curiously, he is among the few major artists to have the epithet “art” embedded within his surname.

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ARTFORUM (1962) By common consent, the heaviest of the regularly published art magazines, this has developed an implicit function that is not immediately obvious. By printing extended, mostly appreciative articles about exhibitions that have closed or work that isn’t commonly available, Artforum is less about reviewing (and thus implicitly selling) new work, say, than about shaping art chatter less among professional artists than in the art schools. Thus can Artforum establish reputations of professors as well as artists. One theme of the selfanthology from its pages, Looking Critically (1984), is that the second word refers less to evaluation, as negative notices are rare, than efforts at clarifying mysteries, customarily with ideas drawn from philosophy. Much like other things learned in universities, Artforum can be initially intimidating unless it is mastered.

ARTISTS’ BOOKS This term arose in the 1970s to encapsulate anything bookish made by individuals established in the visual arts world or, sometimes, who had just gone to art school. Like most art terms based on biography, rather than the intrinsic properties of the art, it was a marketing device, designed to sell works to an audience respectful of “artists”; because of the biographical base, the term forbade qualitative distinctions, “better” artists not necessarily producing superior books. Artistically considered, alternative book forms should be called BOOK-ART the produce, book-art books (to further distinguish them from “art books,” which are illustrated books, customarily in a large format, about visual art). Some of us have favored this esthetic definition over the autobiographical, without success so far.

ARTISTS’ COLONIES (1898) Throughout the 20th century, artists have gathered together, usually in some rustic setting, to create a residential community in which they could live and work apart from bourgeois pressures. Other benefits included close support of each other’s efforts and the sharing of critical intelligence. Among the earliest were Ogunquit in Maine and Worpswede in North Germany. Whereas the first centered upon an art school opened in 1898 by the painter Charles Woodbury (1864–1940), the latter counted among its more eminent members the painter

22 • ARTISTS’ SOHO Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907). Around the turn of the 20th century a certain building within DOWNTOWN Manhattan, 51 West Tenth Street, became a mini artists’ colony with a gallery and the studios of several prominent artists. Around World War I MAN RAY participated in a short-lived colony in Ridgefield, NJ, across the Hudson River from Manhattan. A later example in America was THE LAND, which for decades housed several major avant-garde figures. None of these bucolic retreats ever had more than a few dozen people. In the late 1960s, by contrast, the former Bell Labs in Manhattan’s far west Greenwich Village was renovated to become Westbeth whose many spaces with uncommonly tall ceilings were offered to certified artists at rents far below the market levels. More prominently, ARTISTS’ SOHO, by further contrast, was an industrial slum that became an art town, sort of a de facto campus, further downtown within NYC, with several hundred working artists, if not more, many of them avant-garde, some not. The concentration of so many painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, et al. within a square mile created a large esthetic hot house.

ARTISTS’ SOHO See SOHO.

ARTMANN, H. C. (12 June 1921–4 December 2000; b. Hans Carl A.) I wanted to write an appreciative entry on this legendary linguistically sophisticated and adventurous Viennese poet who in (West) BERLIN around 1983 spoke to me in English he first learned during World War II in a POW camp in Wales (!). Artmann was the principal older figure in the Wiener Gruppe (Vienna School) of writers who were decidedly more avant-garde than those residing in the smaller Austrian city of Graz. So innocently I purchased over the Internet a book titled The Best of H. C. Artmann (1975), edited by Klaus Reichert, a Frankfurt professor of English, who also once spoke to me in my native tongue. However, all this framing notwithstanding, this paperback book’s contents were entirely in German without any translations or any glosses in English. Joke’s on me and, alas, them.

ASHBERY, JOHN (28 July 1927–3 September 2017) Because Ashbery had by the 1990s become the epitome of the “Major American Poet,” it is easy to forget

that he began as a fairly experimental writer. His long poem “Europe” (1960) is a classic of acoherent diffuseness, which is to say that it connects words from a variety of sources, barely connecting them. When this poem appeared in Ashbery’s second book, The Tennis Court Oath (1962), the critic John Simon (1925), a sure barometer of conservative prejudices, wrote, “It never deviates into – nothing so square as sense! – sensibility, sensuality, or sentences.” None of Ashbery’s many later poems equal “Europe” for esthetic deviance in my opinion (acknowledging that others might disagree with me). Ashbery also coedited two moderately avantgarde English-language literary journals published in France, Locus Solus (1960–62), named after a book by RAYMOND ROUSSEL, the eccentric earlier French writer on whom Ashbery wrote his M.A. thesis, and Art and Literature (1964–68). No one else has successfully explored, in the bulk of his writing, such a great number of forms indigenous to Poetry. After he received three prominent literary prizes for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), Ashbery’s professional life changed precipitately. He received university positions and praise from academic critics, becoming the principal example in two arguments: First, nothing, but nothing, will elevate the reputation of a sometime experimental writer as successfully as a “major prize.” Second, once an independent writer becomes a professor, the quality of his or her work declines. Ashbery became, enviably perhaps, the only American poet whose books appear nearly biannually from commercial houses, establishing a bibliography nearly as long as that of, say, Hugh Fox (1932–2011) or Lyn Lifshin (1938), two American poets much loved only by smaller publishers. Perhaps because Ashbery’s effects are so subtle and he is uniquely skilled, those acknowledging his influence rarely write as well. He also published art criticism that, in contrast to the sophistication of his poetry, seems amateur.

ASHER, MICHAEL (15 July 1943–15 October 2012) Asher’s field of concern has been the exposure of the institutional environments and social power structures that determine the nature of what is accepted as art. His method is to rearrange the elements in existing exhibition spaces to emphasize the conventions under which they are displayed. His two Chicago projects in 1979 are the most effective examples of his method. At the Art Institute of Chicago, he moved a statue of George Washington by Jean-Antoine Houdon from

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the top of a staircase to the room below, suggesting the transformation of a 1917 sculpture into a contemporary installation by the merest gesture. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, Asher removed aluminum panels from the exterior of the building and installed them inside, implying their alteration into artworks. More critiques of art than works of art, his efforts have an advantage over BRUCE NAUMAN’s critical inversions of the circumstances by which art is viewed. Nauman’s assaults on the viewer amount to nothing more than assaults on the viewer. Asher’s projects suggest a coherent idea: that we struggle to see and interpret a work of art wherever the exhibiting institution tells us it is to be found; and without such institutional aegis, we might not see art at all. —Mark Daniel Cohen (1991) Billing himself as a “sculptor,” Asher was most ephemeral. The London art reviewer Richard Cork (1946) wrote in 1973 about entering a London gallery basement that seemed empty. I had to ask the gallery owners to show me where the art was! The answer, it transpired, lay in the point at which the wall of the room touched the floor. All the way around, a thin but palpable incision had been made in the base of the walls so that they appeared slightly detached from the floor. In 2010, the Whitney Museum gave Asher a prize for proposing to open its premises around the clock, purportedly making it permanently accessible to the outside world. (Rewarded with a week, Asher got only three days.) In between Asher was at CAL ARTS an influential professor whose legendary “Post-Studio Crit” class is memorialized in Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World (2009).

ASPEN (1965–71) Incidentally the name of a renowned Colorado ski resort, as well as some other institutions elsewhere, this five-letter word had more presence in the 1960s as the name of a uniquely distinguished polyart periodical. Its publisher was Phyllis Johnson, a former editor at Advertising Age and Women’s Wear Daily, who claimed her Aspen to be “the first three-dimensional magazine.” The customary epithet “periodical” would be insufficient, as it appeared irregularly. While late issues were collections with loose-leaf sheets, an earlier one

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came in a box, customarily undated. For instance, issue # 8, guest edited by DAN GRAHAM and designed by GEORGE MACIUNAS, had a characteristic cover by JO BAER, a one-page score by PHILIP GLASS, texts by ROBERT MORRIS, YVONNE RAINER, LA MONTE YOUNG, JACKSON MAC LOW, EDWARD RUSCHA, creating an avant-garde museum in progress. This Aspen’s apex, issue “5+6,” likewise undated, was both edited and designed by BRIAN O’DOHERTY and dedicated to STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ. Inside this box are cardboards with which the reader could build a sculpture by TONY SMITH; a booklet with poems by MICHEL BUTOR and Dan Graham; another booklet with texts by SOL LEWITT, T. Smith, MORTON FELDMAN, and O’Doherty; and five plastic 7-inch “flexidiscs,” as the thin plastic records were then called. One disk contains a SAMUEL BECKETT text read by the actor Jack MacGowran, and WILLIAM BURROUGHS and Alain Robbe-Grillet texts read by their authors. A second disk had the percussionist Max Neuhaus’s realizations of scores by JOHN CAGE and Feldman. A third contained manifestoes by MERCE CUNNINGHAM and NAUM GABO read by their authors. A fourth had creative texts by MARCEL DUCHAMP and RICHARD HUELSENBECK read by their authors. The fifth record was an interview with Merce Cunningham. Were that not enough, the box also included a reel of 8 mm films by HANS RICHTER, L. MOHOLY-NAGY, STAN VANDERBEEK, and ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, along with a hand-held viewer. If anyone published anything polyartisticly comparable elsewhere or since, I don’t know about it. Needless to say perhaps, none of the publishers of periodical reprints for libraries have ever duplicated Aspen. The most comparable literary magazine was Tom Bridwell’s Soma-Haoma whose fourth issue (1974) came in film can 7 inches high and 5 inches in diameter; its seventh issue (1976), in a wood box.

ASSEMBLAGE (1950s–’70s) This term was purportedly coined in the early 1950s by the French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–85) initially for lithographs made from paper COLLAGES and then, more influentially, for small sculptures made from papier-mache, scraps of wood, sponge, and other debris. The word was popularized by a 1961 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, whose catalog spoke of works that “are predominantly assembled rather

24 • ASSEMBLING than painted, drawn, modeled, or carved.” On display were by-then classic collages along with sculptures by LOUISE NEVELSON, RICHARD STANKIEWICZ, JOSEPH CORNELL, and EDWARD KIENHOLZ, whose contribution was really a tableau (which differs from sculpture in having a theatrical frontside, forbidding close access). Eventually the epithet “assemblage” functioned best as a definition for three-dimensional collage.

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in terms of groups, not individuals.) In my judgment, the Atlas apex is the witty and intricate Oulipo Compendium (1998), assembled by Brotchie and HARRY MATHEWS. This masterpiece of its kind, at once introductory and definitive, went into a larger augmented edition (2005), much like this Dictionary, incidentally. At translating into English certain strains of advanced European writing, Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s Burning Deck Press (1961) works similarly, if more modestly, mostly with poetry.

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(1968) This has become the generic name for a book/periodical in which contributors submit copies of whatever they want to include and their paper(s) is collated and bound into finished books. Meant to service alternative work, such collaborative media made the contributors responsible for design and typesetting, eliminating “editorial” objections and interference. The name is taken from Assembling (1970–83), which was founded by Henry James Korn (1945), later an arts administrator, and RICHARD KOSTELANETZ, who also prepared a retrospective catalog, Assembling Assembling (1978), for an exhibition in an alternative space, an artschool gallery. Scarcely the first, though consistently the thickest, serving the largest constituency of writer/ artist self-printers, Assembling had a long life, second only to Art/Life, published monthly from 1981 to 2006 by Joe Cardella (1945–2018). Assemblings continue to appear around the world. Appreciative of true freedom of publication, Géza Perneczky (1936) has become the principal historian of this radical movement with his book Assembling Magazines 1969–2000 (2007) that was published in Germany doubled-columned with his native Hungarian adjacent to an English translation. It could be said that the sum of self-prepared artists’ home pages on the INTERNET represents an unmediated Assembling.

ATLAS PRESS (1982) Founded in England by Alastair Brotchie (1952) and Malcolm Green (1952), it has, in the tradition of the THEMERSONs’ Gaberbocchus Press (1948–79), translated into English certain extreme European avant-garde literature connected to such combines as DADA, SURREALISM, OULIPO, ‘PATAPHYSICS, VIENNA ACTIONISM, and much else that would otherwise be unavailable. (How European to think

(1908) This term became current in the 1910s among Viennese musicians who felt they were avoiding the traditional bases that defined both major and minor scales. The technique of atonal writing depended upon the unconstrained use of all notes, as though they had equal weight, regardless of previous “harmonious” relationships, thereby creating music that seems to float above any foundation. ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, for instance, refused to use a key signature in his work from the 1910s, preferring, in NICOLAS SLONIMSKY’s phrases, to let “the melody flow freely unconstrained by the rigid laws of modulation, cadence, sequence, and other time-honored devices of tonal writing.” (Slonimsky adds that Schoenberg himself, predisposed to Viennese precision in language, preferred the term “atonicality,” because his music lacked not tones but tonics and dominants, which had been the traditional touchstones of Western harmony.) Once the principle of atonality was understood, the question arose whether there hadn’t been precursors. PAUL GRIFFITHS, among the more sophisticated music critics ever writing in English, says that atonal means of order MAY be distinguished as far back as Mozart: one locus classicus is the Commendatore’s grim statement in the penultimate scene of Don Giovanni (1787), where in seven bars he touches eleven of the twelve notes. Still more striking is the opening of Liszt’s Faust Symphony (1853–57), where the unharmonized theme strikes the twelve different notes within the first thirteen. Griffith continues, “One may say there is here the threat of atonality, but the threat does not begin to be carried out until dissonant harmonies are sustained over a longer period, as they are in several of Liszt’s late piano pieces (1880–86).” My own opinion is that those predecessors’ practices were too slight to

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represent a radical position (that would, say, warrant an entry in a book like this). In a dialectical interpretation of modern musical tonality, atonality becomes the antithesis that is resolved with the discovery of SERIAL MUSIC as a new, alternative structure for the strict ordering of pitches. In fact, after 1923, neither Arnold Schoenberg nor ANTON WEBERN returned to nonserial atonality, having previously completed their dialectical synthesis. (I coined the epithet ACOHERENCE as a literary analog, initially to characterize the early poetry of JOHN ASHBERY, who is musically sophisticated, but now as a definition for all writing that eschews traditional grammatical and semantic structures.) Though much recent music could be defined as atonal, the term is no longer used, or useful.

ATTIE, DOTTY (20 March 1938) Taking the comic-book form of sequential panels, Attie has made an unusually allusive art that echoes classical painting, particularly Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), and Victorian literature, particularly Anthony Trollope (1815–82), in addition to comic books. Her square, bordered panels tend to have either picture or text, in either case with propelling a narrative; and beneath the innocuous surface are hints of menace and nightmare. The pictures are usually drawn from details in masterpiece paintings (thus making her work comparable to music compositions that draw phrases from the classics). “Often as not,” writes the curator Howard Fox, “her stories involve the nobility of another century, usually in polite company at formal social occasions. This innocent facade seems to mask an underlying corruption.”

AUDACITY Perhaps this quality was always appreciated in art, but only in the 20th century has audacity become such a positive attribute. The measure is simply an audience’s mouth-dropping awe before something that is so beyond their notions of acceptability, if not understanding. The historical exemplar was, of course, MARCEL DUCHAMP’s Fountain (1917), which was a store-bought urinal that an established artist offered to a juried art exhibition (which rejected it). Whereas this epitomizes content-audacity, as I’ll call it, formal audacity is something else, perhaps epitomized by CUBISM in its many forms both painterly

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and sculptural, later geometric paintings, monochrome canvases, and extreme atonality in music. More artistically questionable perhaps has been the introduction of materials commonly judged uncouth, such as cow dung or pickled carcasses, all respecting (or exploiting) Duchamp’s urinal from decades before; but once the dirty works of Damien Hurst (1965) and Chris Ofili (1968), among others, were purchased by established art collectors and then appreciated favorably in public print – once the audacity emblazioned in their exhibition was accepted – their status as Art was assured.

AUDEN, W. H. (21 February 1907–29 September 1973) The more that an adventurous writer writes, the more likely it is that some of his publishing might be really good. Similarly, the more an adventurous wellsupported modern writer publishes, the more possible it is that some will be avant-garde. What was true for EDMUND WILSON was also applicable to W. H. Auden whose more avant-garde work appears not in his fluent portentous verse, which influenced at least two generations of lesser English-language poets, but in some of his ancillary writing forgotten by even his more fervent admirers and, alas, misrepresented even by his most loyal publisher. Letters from Iceland (1937), written in collaboration with his fellow British poet Louis MacNeice, is not a continuous travelogue but a marvelous, multifaceted pastiche of two kinds of verse (one to each author), reportage, spirited personal letters (apparently addressed to real people), and some verbatim documents about their exploration of a North Atlantic island, itself a unique work of art on the fringe of Western Europe. After comments on Icelandic politics, society, and literature (though oddly omitting the inviting outdoor steam pools, perhaps because these young men didn’t swim) comes their most stunning conceit of a joint “Last Will and Testament,” whose well-turned lines incidentally shows that these aspiring writers knew familiarly many of their most prominent contemporaries. One additional element here, unusual in any poet’s book, is the poet’s own photographs, in this case Auden’s, reflecting his recent prior experience writing unusually poetic soundtracks for British documentary films. Not only are Auden’s pictures distinguished in sum, but they make an invaluable contribution to the whole that incidentally precedes the American classic of photographs + texts – James Agee and Walker Evans’ LET US PRAISE FAMOUS MEN (1939).

26 • AUDIO ART It is unfortunate that Auden’s photographs weren’t included in the 1967 Faber reprint of Letters from Iceland that was reissued again in 1985. In the latter edition, indeed, nothing is said about the Auden photographs other than to credit him with the image of a horse’s back half on the book’s cover. Whereas a reprint of Letters with only words is commonly available, the superior complete original was scarce until posthumously reprinted in the initial volume of Auden’s Prose and Travel Books in Verse (1996). To no surprise perhaps, Letters isn’t mentioned in some Auden bibliographies, beginning with the one on Wikipedia in 2011. Another favorite innovative Auden text for me is his brilliant chart of literary romanticism (c. 1942), which I rescued from his executor, the Columbia English professor Edward Mendelsohn (1946) for my anthology Essaying Essays (1975, 2012). Oddly, Auden dropped his more avant-garde esthetic interests (as well as earlier tastes for pop music and new architecture) soon after immigrating to America in the late 1930s, whereas other Europeans often discovered in the USA kinds of alternative culture unavailable back home. How come? My sense is that Auden became in America a favorite of a class of people, lumpen academics, whose British peers had already rejected him as too avant-garde. Insecure in his personal life by turns Christian and gay, Auden perhaps accepted too much direction from his enthusiasts.

AUDIO ART (1980s) This term arose to define esthetic experience based on sound, as distinct from music on one side and language on the other. It can exist in live performance, whether on radio or on stage, as well as on audiotape. Typical pieces of audio art are about the sound of something – say, the sound of seduction, the sound of the language of prayer, the sound of particular cities, or sounds of nature. Among the major practitioners are JOHN CAGE (particularly in his early Williams Mix [1953]), SORREL HAYS (especially in her Southern Voices, [1981]), JACKSON MAC LOW, Makoto Shinohara (1931, especially in City Visit [1971]), Frits Wieland (especially in Orient Express), and NOAH CRESHEVSKY.

AUDIO-VIDEO TAPES

the soundtrack is composed before the image and/or the video artist also works in audio art or music composition. The master here is REYNOLD WEIDENAAR, who indeed took degrees in music composition before turning to video, whose best videotapes incorporate his own music compositions. This procedure of sound preceding image is scarcely new. Some classic cartoons were produced this way – it’s hard to imagine how WALT DISNEY’s FANTASIA could have been made otherwise. Likewise the excerpts that comprise Opera Imaginaire, an anthology of imaginative French television programs, mostly based on familiar recorded arias, which were subsequently released on commercial videotape. ORSON WELLES, who made classic radio programs before he produced films, reportedly recorded the soundtrack of his films before he shot any footage, finding in sound a surer guide to visual-verbal narrative art.

AUDUBON, JOHN JAMES (26 April 1785–27 January 1851; b. Jean Rabin) So familiar have his images of birds become that it’s hard for us now to imagine how original they and their artist were in their own time. Whereas the principal American painters did portraits of people, he did birds as though they were people. No one before him painted animals in such close detail and then not just a few but hundreds, his theme becoming American uniqueness. Rather than merely exhibiting his drawings, Audubon courageously self-produced books (1827–39) that he made available initially to subscribers, who became his patrons. While these drawings have often been reproduced with varying degrees of quality, his original printings have sold for millions of dollars. Among the many books about Audubon, the most profound was published in 1936 by Constance Rourke (1885–1941), who is better known for her masterful American Humor (1931), whose theme is also American uniqueness. (P.S. I publish this here because the theme is attractive to me and the summary superficially credible, though I’ve been reliably informed that it’s repeatedly erroneous, beginning with the omission of ALEXANDER WILSON. May I hope that no other entry here is so askew.)

AUERBACH, ERICH (9 November 1892–13 October 1957)

(c. 1980) This is my coinage for video art in which the image accompanies highly articulate sound, usually because

As a literary scholar awesomely adept at seeing large in small bits, he wrote, while a German Jew exiled in Turkey during World War II, an extraordinary book,

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES •

Mimesis (1946; English, 1953), most of whose chapters begin with long quotations from literary works from Homer and the Old Testament through St. Augustine, Boccacio, and Honore de Balzac, among others, to Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), courageously, as she had died only a few years earlier. In a series of extended analyses, Auerbach locates different “representation[s] of reality,” which is to say each writer’s unique view of the world. Given his genius for especially close reading, one theme is that intentionally innocent sentences can unintentionally bear considerable literary and historical weight. After World War II, his masterpieces translated into English, Auerbach came to America before dying too young. Easy to adapt and praise, his achievement in such sensitive close reading can’t be topped; the closest analogue is LEO STEINBERG on visual art.

AURA An invisible halo bestowed upon the greatest works of art that places them above serious criticism, even if they are commonly disparaged and/or the possibility of an aura initially denied. Precisely because such works were often dismissed upon first appearance, the aura gains virtual presence from having been earned through the appreciation of audiences, rather than bestowed from a single higher authority like, say, a British knighthood or a Presidential Medal. For readers of this dictionary, certain entries here have acquired such veneration; others, no doubt not.

AUSTIN, LARRY (12 September 1930) A professor who founded the extravagantly produced periodical Source: Music of the Avant-Garde (1967– 74), which printed variously alternative scores and interviews, as well as including 10-inch records of previously suppressed music, Austin has worked adventurously with ELECTRONIC MUSIC, live electronic performance, and theatrical conceptions. I remember best The Magicians (1968), which was performed on Halloween on a stage bathed in black light, with two screens that apparently swiveled with the breeze. The performers included several children performing elementary tasks, singing songs that resounded through an amplification system that treated soft, high notes gently. Austin spoke of this piece as a “time object. I wanted to take music out of the context of a dramatic flow of consequential events and to lose, as much as possible, the sense of time.” More recently, Austin has

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used computers not only to make music but to create interactive situations for live ensembles.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (forever) Odd it is that there are so few by genuinely avant-garde figures mostly because, may I suppose, the best were rarely celebrated enough for commercial publishers to contract them. Even then, publishers typically prefer from celebrities conventionally limited narratives with an abundance of gossip over intelligence about their art(s). An example would be Kenneth Rexroth’s An Autobiographical Novel (1966), which initially appeared from Doubleday. Curious it is as well that so few avant-garde artists’ autobiographies are formally unusual. To the degree that HENRY MILLER’s greater books are factual rather than fictional, they constitute a monumental autobiography. BUCKMINSTER FULLER’s printed “Chronofile” is, by contrast, a succinct chronological self-presentation reportedly drawn from a “Dymaxion Chronofile” that, by contrast again, contains copies of everything copyable, so to speak, that Fuller assembled daily in his long professional life (1920–83). The gathering of the latter/larger at the Stanford University Library is reportedly 270 feet long and thus would best be reproduced not in print but as digitized files, which would represent a significant departure in autobiographical publishing. One of the more unusual avant-garde book autobiographies is James Laughlin’s Literchoor Is My Beat (2014), which was composed not by the author but posthumously by his successors, gathering materials both verbal and visual from various sources to document an unusual life in an unusual form. Since its publisher was NEW DIRECTIONS, which Laughlin (1914–97) had founded, consider that this book has the further distinction of being, so to speak, posthumously self-published. From a New Directions author comes the precursor for this – WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS’s I Wanted to Write a Poem (1958), which was likewise composed by another person and, curiously, initially published by another firm before being reprinted by New Directions. At roughly the same time that Gertrude Stein was writing her ironically straight Alice B. Toklas (1933), she was drafting “Lifting Belly,” her most ambitious lesbian text that can be read as implicitly autobiographical. (While the former was a best-seller, the latter appeared, to no surprise, posthumously.) So is WILLIAM FAULKNER’s “1699–1945 The Compsons” (1946) implicitly autobiographical.

28 • AUTOGRAPH Starting at the age of 40, I’ve produced five autobiographies, one for each decade since, that are not continuous narratives but collections of shorter selfrevelatory texts. LYN HEJINIAN, by contrast, has developed her My Life (1980, 1987, 2003, 2013) as an incremental text. One special literary move was MARTIN GARDNER’s review under the pseudonym of George Groth of his own The Ways of a Philosophical Scrivener (1983), which should be remembered among the few avant-garde moves ever made in the otherwise RETROGRADE The New York Review of Books. Much of LUCAS SAMARAS’s work, especially with words, is audaciously autobiographical. ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG’s three-panel Autobiography (1968) is a masterpiece of visual and verbal summary in mid-career (at 43, as he lived to be 82). MERCE CUNNINGHAM’s great BOOK-ART, Changes (1969, with Frances Starr), is as much an autobiography as descriptions of the choreographer’s unique purposes. This wrongly forgotten book was published by DICK HIGGINS’s SOMETHING ELSE PRESS. His own Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface (1964) and Foew&ombwhnw (1969) weave together several precociously autobiographical strands in exemplary BOOK-ART. Marcel Jean’s The Autobiography of Surrealism (1980) is actually a highly selective chronological anthology of the participants’ writings, all audaciously titled. Marcel Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise (1935–41; Box in a Suitcase) is a boxed self-retrospective that is implicitly autobiographical. SOL LEWITT’s Autobiography (1980) is wholly pictorial. While the sum of CHUCK CLOSE’s numerous self-portraits constitute a visual autobiography, BRIAN O’DOHERTY’s Name Change (1972) documents an important development in his own life both visually and verbally over ten panels 5 feet wide. For a strictly visual autobiography in a single image few can top EL LISSITZKY’s The Constructor (1924), a PHOTOMONTAGE that acknowledges his earlier work. A case can be made for ON KAWARA’s documentation for decades of his daily activities as nothing but autobiography scrupulously devoid of “opinion, mimetic duplication, self-analysis, sensual responses, feelings, attitude, ego, sentiments, memories, joys, terrors, dreams, and fantasies.” By contrast, both NICOLAS SLONIMSKY’s and ARAM SAROYAN’s memoirs are more conventional. So under-noticed have formally inventive autobiographies been that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that others exist. P.S. My colleague Malcolm Green (1952), a very helpful British artist residing in BERLIN, recommends

DIETER ROTH’s Diaries (1987; posthumously 2012, which the artist/author translated into English himself), in addition to H.C. ARTMANN’s Das Suchen nach dem gestrigen (1964) and Tag oder Schnee auf einem heißen Brotwecken (1978), Günter Brus’s irrwisch (2000), Otto Muhl’s Weg aus dem Sumpf (1977), none of which have yet appeared in English translation. I wish I knew enough Spanish to read RAMÓN GÓMEZ DE LA SERNA’s seductively titled Automoribundia (1948) and enough French to read untranslated autobiographies by GEORGES PEREC.

AUTOGRAPH What increases value in art, whether in a book or on a painting, almost magically, are scratches reflecting literally a golden touch ascribed to certain hands. Dare not underestimate the crucial value of this minor detail. On my walls are four silkscreened prints made by AD REINHARDT just before his death and thus unsigned, though they would be worth much more had he lived long enough to add merely his initials. Proof poof.

AVERY, TEX (26 February 1908–27 August 1980; b. Frederick B. A.) After directing some “Oswald the Rabbit” cartoons for Walter Lantz (1899–1994) at Universal in the mid1930s, he became a principal creator of Bugs Bunny (1940, in A Wild Hare), a truly iconic figure who subsequently appeared in over 150 films as an anarchistic protagonist who survives all adversity (as, needless to say, a descendant of preternaturally wise rabbits in American folklore and literature). What distinguished the best Avery cartoons from WALT DISNEY’s, say, are such qualities as quicker pace, a sharper edge, continuous detailed movement, greater violence (though no injury is permanent), unsupervised activities (typically without, say, both cops and parents), improbable situations (rather than realism), and a nightmare from which a protagonist cannot escape. One of my very favorites, Billy Boy (1953), portrays an insatiably voracious goat that eats up everything around him until he is rocketed to the moon, which he devours as well. As a linear narrative wholly eschewing digression, epiphany, or climax, this comes to a gruesome conclusion. Among Avery’s other creations were Chilly Willy the Penguin, Lucky Ducky, and Droopy the sorrowful-looking Dog. Among the masterpieces starring the last is Droopy’s Double Trouble (1951), in

AYLER, ALBERT •

which Droopy has an identical twin, Drippy, who terrorizes a canine lummox named Spike who can’t distinguish between the two. Avery’s Bugs Bunny cartoons are widely available on videotape. He also nurtured the talents of CHUCK JONES, I. M. Freleng (1906–95; aka Friz F.), and other WARNER BROTHERS animators prior to his quitting them in 1940.

AYGI, GENNADY

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into the countenance of this wind the bright light of unpeopledness 1967 (Translated from Russian by Alex Cigale) Igor Satanovsky

AYLER, ALBERT (13 July 1936–25 November 1970)

(21 August 1934–21 February 2006) Considered by many to be one of the most original poets writing in Russian in his lifetime, he had also published in his first Chuvash language, which is indigenous to the Chuvash Republic in Russia. (Chuvashi are a Turkic ethnic group, native to an area stretching from the Volga Region to Siberia, and their language is the most divergent variant of Turkish.) Aygi mostly wrote in Russian after 1960, encouraged by Boris Pasternak (1890–1960). Paying special attention to the visual structure, he was much influenced by KASIMIR MALEVICH’s views on both poetry and painting. By combining motifs of Chuvashi folklore with ideas of Russian, French, and German avantgardes, Aygi wrote poetry which was at once distinctly pastoral and neo-modernist, and sounded strange to the Russian ear. He claimed that his poetry is neither rhymed nor free verse, but rather rhythm-oriented. As his longtime translator Peter France notes in the essay “Translating a Chuvash poet,” Aygi’s poems often sound like incantations, “perhaps like the chanted prayers which Aygi inherits from his grandfather, the last pagan priest of his village.” Returning to Baudelaire a smouldering (from the paper into the world) – the master as though somewhere of apparentness: a face like God’s – in the ashes – grasped: of the not-“I” of the mind crackling – with a flame! . . . –

Figure 1 Albert Ayler, saxophone; Donald Ayler, trumpet. Photo by Frank Kofsky. Courtesy Special Collections, University Library, University of California Santa Cruz. Frank Kofsky Audio and Photo collection.

More than any other, Ayler realized the highly abrasive, EXPRESSIONISTIC music that became the avant-garde edge for the younger jazz cognoscenti in the 1960s. He performed on the tenor saxophone, often in collaboration with his brother Donald (1942–2007), a trumpeter. Among the records that epitomize his style is Bells (ESP, 1965), which captures a live concert at New York’s Town Hall on 1 May 1965. He discovered in the saxophone acoustic qualities unheard before and unavailable to anyone else. (One story has the older saxophonist John Coltrane, upon first meeting Ayler, simply asking him, what kind of reeds are you using?) I have played this single-sided record for people who think themselves enthusiasts for everything “way out,” only to watch them wince. Ayler’s body was found in New York’s East River; the cause of his death has never been explained.

B

BABBITT, MILTON (10 May 1916–29 January 2011) Credit ARNOLD SCHOENBERG with inventing an entirely new language for music – a revolutionary reordering of tonal possibilities – but credit Milton Babbitt with extending the SERIAL idea to musical dimensions other than pitch – duration (including rhythm), register, dynamics (attack), and timbre. The result of this logical extension of Schoenberg’s ideas was a twelve-tone music of unprecedented structural complexity, in which every note contributed to several kinds of serial relationships. From this principle of simultaneous development, Babbitt developed a revolutionary esthetic that equated excellence with “the multiplicity of function of every event” (the variety of serial relationships each note developed). “I want a piece of music to be literally as much as possible,” he once said, and his favorite words of praise are “profoundly organized” and “structurally intricate.” Recorded examples from this phase of Babbitt’s career include Du (1951), a song cycle, and Composition for Four Instruments (1948). Because his music was too difficult for nearly all performers, he began in the mid-1950s to use an early music SYNTHESIZER that was constructed, with Babbitt as a consultant, by RCA. It offered the twofold possibility of achieving precisely all of the complicated effects he desired and of fixing on audiotape a “performance” for all time. From this encounter came such serial compositions as Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964) and Philomel (1964), in which even the listener unfamiliar with serial music theory can hear a complexity of articulation and an absence of repetition. It is fair to say that success came to Babbitt in the 1960s, in his late forties, when he became a chaired professor of music at Princeton University. Of the numerous commissions he has subsequently received, I would particularly recommend Phonemena (1974, from “phonemes,” not “phenomena”), which typically

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exists in two versions – one for soprano and tape, the second for soprano and piano. He is probably one of few individuals mentioned in this book to receive a MacArthur “genius” grant. Perhaps this social success reflects his talents as a standup speaker who is at once witty and provocative, intimidating and engaging.

BACH, JOHANN SEBASTIAN (31 March 1685–28 July 1750) Since I’ve long regarded J. S. Bach as the greatest artist who ever lived, at least in any medium I understand, I’d like to include him here. His work was avant-garde by the measure of greater recognition coming to it decades after his death. Otherwise, his first innovation resulted from taking fugal polyphony and harmony to higher levels, especially in his Cantatas and the longer choral pieces collectively called Passions. More consequentially, consider that no one before J. S. Bach wrote so well or variously for solo instruments other than keyboards. In this respect his masterpieces are the six suites for solo cello, whose notes can incidentally be played brilliantly by other instruments capable of sounding only one note at a time, including a double bass, guitars, and a flute; and his equally legendary Sonatas & Partitas for solo violin. Typically then, of all his compositions for flute, the most awesome for me is BWV #1013, the only one for the instrument solo. Within this basket belong his masterpieces for solo keyboards, including The Goldberg Variations and the Well-Tempered Clavier. Need I add that for other instrumental groups this Bach wrote many other compositions that have survived; so have those by several of his sons.

BACH, P.D.Q. (1959)

BALANCHINE, GEORGE •

This entry belongs under P. D. Q. Bach “(1807–1742),” because a “dummy” by this name produces far more innovative music than his ventriloquist, Peter Schickele (July 17, 1935). Perhaps the greatest and most fertile comic composer in the history of classical music, P. D. Q. Bach excels at mixing cultural periods, beginning with his titles: Concerto for Horn and Hardart (referring to a chain of restaurants once plentiful in New York City), Iphigenia in Brooklyn, Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice, and The Safe Sextette. “P. D. Q.” does not quote classical compositions as much as write melodies of similar structure and texture but with a contemporary sense of harmony and musical literacy. The innovation is pseudoclassical music that reflects the influence of modernists such as IGOR STRAVINSKY and incidentally resembles conceptually certain fictions by JORGE LUIS BORGES. Especially in concert tours, P. D. Q. Bach’s work is customarily introduced by a disheveled figure called “Professor Peter Schickele” who claims scholarly expertise on “P. D. Q.” Because “P. D. Q.”’s subjects-fordisruption have included not only the Bach family but Mozart, AARON COPLAND, and Schickele’s Juilliard classmate PHILIP GLASS, it could be said that “P. D. Q.” has produced a kind of DADA music profoundly funnier than that of, say, SATIE and SLONIMSKY.

BAER, JO (7 August 1929; b. Josephine Gail Kleinberg) The classic Baer paintings from the 1960s are canvases nearly entirely white.The only violations are thin borders mostly in black. Inside of it is another rectangle of even lesser width in another color, such as green, blue, lavender, red, and orange. This addition of a color between the black and the white became the SIGNATURE of Bear’s paintings. If the eye concentrates upon the dominant white of the painting, as one customarily looks, the frame colors begin to shimmer not only with respect to the dominant field but to each other. The British art critic D. C. Barrett, S. J. (1925–2004) identified the influence of the literary minimalism, scarcely appreciated by visual artists, of SAMUEL BECKETT. “It might be said that Baer did for painting what Beckett did for drama, that is, pare everything down to an absolute minimum, so exiguous that with one more stroke there would be nothing left.” When grouped together, these canvases become even more impressive. One development in her work in the late 1960s was wrapping the black edges of the canvas around the stretcher bars. Barrett adds that by the end of the 1970s the curve had become dominant and Jo Baer’s painting underwent a

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radical change. From being starkly and geometrically abstract, it become figurative, sensual and, at times, erotic; from being ordered and closely knit, it became fragmented: drawings of anatomical parts, predominantly, human and animal buttocks, studies of seated nudes, etc. A legendarily handsome woman in her prime, Baer never had the career that was forecast for her for reasons still unclear. Don’t be surprised if sometime in the future she is portrayed as a kind of art world tragedy – too beautiful to be feminist, too scrupulous in her esthetics to be popular and then too deviant in her later work to gain respect, too predisposed to messy personal entanglements, etc. Her son Josh B. (1955) has been an art dealer and art advisor in New York.

BALANCHINE, GEORGE (22 January 1904–30 April 1983; b. Giorgi Melitonovich Balanchivadze) Though customarily regarded as the American master of classical ballet, he did certain more eccentric work earlier in his illustrious American career. In 1942, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus commissioned him and Igor Stravinsky to do The Ballet of the Elephants (1942) for fifty pachyderms and fifty dancing girls. In her critical reconstruction, “Elephant in Tutus” (2007), the dance historian Sally Banes (1950) judges that Balanchine’s avant-gardism . . . consisted of his negotiating a pact between those two apparently antithetical systems, high and low cultures. He appropriated in his serious ballets popular culture, both old and new, American and European – jazz tap dancing and square dancing, Western movies, and the bodily habitus [sic] of fashion models and Rockettes. Thus here the elephants were outfitted with the short pink ballet skirts called tutus and jeweled headbands for their foreheads. Banes quotes an anonymous New York Times reviewer: They came into the ring in artificial, blue-lighted dusk, first the little pink dancers, then the great beasts. The little dancers pirouetted into the three rings and the elephant herds gravely swayed and nodded rhythmically. The arc of sway widened and the stomping picked up with the music. In the central ring, Modoc the Elephant danced with amazing

32 • BALDESSARI, JOHN grace, and in time to the tune, closing in perfect cadenced with the crashing [Stravinsky] finale. Only a few years after WALT DISNEY’s FANTASIA, The Ballet of the Elephants likewise discovered grace in animals, but the difference was that Balanchine used real animals. At once spectacle and parody, the Stravinsky score concludes with a distorted quote from Franz Schubert’s Marche Militaire. Though no pictures or footage of this are known to exist, it is vividly recalled in two memoirs by participating dancers – Connie Clausen’s I Love You, Honey, But the Season’s Over Now (1961) and Vera Zorina’s Zorina (1986). Unfortunate it was that Balanchine never again crossed over as far.

BALDESSARI, JOHN (17 June 1931) In addition to being an influential teacher of several CAL ARTS students who had visible careers, he ranks among the greatest comedians of CONCEPTUAL ART. One measure of the sophistication of his humor is that many people miss it, notwithstanding his producing whatevers for several decades. Some of his canvases from the 1960s had just words painted in large caps, supposedly to give them a pseudo weight that undercut the statement: “A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE” (1967). Likewise: “I will not make any more boring art.” Later Baldessari works included photographs whose accompanying texts mocked their image. Additionally he has produced audacious films, prints, PERFORMANCE, and BOOK-ART. He ranks among the few Los Angeles artists visible into his eighties.

BALL, HUGO (22 February 1886–14 September 1927) A cofounder of DADA who ended his short life as a Catholic writer, the mercurial Ball, born in Germany, began by rejecting German EXPRESSIONISM as fundamentally violent. He reportedly coined the term “Dada,” which he picked randomly from the dictionary, meaning “hobby horse,” among other definitions. Ball is best remembered for early sound poetry, which he called “Klanggedicht (1916),” that made equal sense in every language. One poem begins: “gadji beri bimba/ glandridi laula lonni cadori/ gadjama him geri glassala,” which sounds just as fresh today as it did then. “Introduce symmetries and rhythms instead of

principles. Contradict the existing world orders,” he wrote in his diary in 1916. “What we are celebrating is at once a buffoonery and a requiem mass,” acknowledging a sacred dimension that distinguished him from his Dada colleagues.

BALLA, GIACOMO (18 July 1871–1 March 1958) Commonly regarded as the most important painter associated with ITALIAN FUTURISM, he contributed to the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (1910, Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting) before producing, especially between 1913 and 1916, images of speedy movement. In particular, his Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) and his Walking Dog on a Balcony (1912) both portray a succession of movements within a single image. His classic Velocità d’automobile (1913) does likewise visually to a moving car. Otherwise, rather than depicting machines and violence, his favoring planes of color marked him among the more abstract Futurist painters. So disparaged at the time these didn’t become acceptable for decades. Continuing to paint not only past World War I but after World War II, Balla was included in the initial Documenta in 1955 in Kassel, Germany.

BANKSY (1990) This is the nom-de-art of a freehand graffiti artist(s?) whose birth name was, at last report, still unknown. Its specialty has been provocative messages in public spaces, very much like the painter René Moncada (1943) who graced the walls of Manhattan’s SOHO with his “I am the best artist.” However, unlike Moncada, who customarily sought permissions from owners’ walls for his mellow egotism, Banksy functions as an urban guerilla, sometimes defacing walls already containing signage. In 1997, over the advertising in Bristol (England), it painted a teddy bear launching a Molotov cocktail at riot police. Banksy typically includes simple slogans that are anti-war and anti-capitalist. In 2004, the subversive artist produced 10-pound notes substituting Princess Diana for Queen Elizabeth and wittily changing “Bank of England” to “Banksy of England.” Producing a limited edition of 50 signed posters, he monetized his reputation. Reportedly one of these that initially sold for 100 pounds was remonetized at auction for 24,000 pounds. When Banksy came to NEW YORK CITY, which has a tougher graffiti community than London, some of his public art was redefaced, so to speak.

BARNETT, PETER H. •

By the 2010s, he(s?) or she(s?) was working around the world, always inventive and audacious. One speculation holds that, given how prolific this Banksy is, it might be the taken name of a collective.

BARLOW, CLARENCE (27 December 1945; aka Klarenz B.) Though born and educated in Calcutta, where he took his first degrees in science, Barlow resided for many years in Cologne, becoming one of the major avant-garde composers in the German-speaking world. His initial strengths are the use of computers in composition (since 1971), tonality and metricism based on number theory, pastiches that draw upon his musical literacy, and language creations that depend upon his awesome personal fluency in various tongues. The cofounder of GIMIK (Initiative Music and Informatics Cologne), he produced an acoustic portrait of his birthplace for the “Metropolis” series of Westdeutscher Rundfunk. Once the artistic director of the Institut voor Sonologie (1967) in The Hague, The Netherlands, he became in the 21st century a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

BARNES, DJUNA (12 June 1892–18 June 1982) Though she did other things in her long life, including journalism, illustration, short fiction, poetry, and a play, Barnes is best remembered for Nightwood (1936), an extraordinary novel that T.S. ELIOT testified, in his preface to the first edition, had “a quality of doom and horror very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” Barnes’s style combines Elizabethan English with turn-of-the-century avant-garde prose, giving Nightwood the quality of elegant nightmare. Its formal departures made this novel the center of Joseph Frank’s classic 1945 critical essay on SPATIAL FORM in modern literature. Since one theme of Nightwood is the passion of someone good for someone not so good, perhaps of the same sex, certain admirers characterize this work as “lesbian,” though Barnes seemed to have had in her own life few homoerotic passions. For another example of her heightened English prose, consider this from her Ryder (1928): “The black calf breathed against his side, and the dark cows breathed among themselves, and the horses, with no earth beneath their feet, trembled, as they slept and lay.” Common such writing isn’t.

BARNETT, PETER H. (27 July 1945–3 September 2018)

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A long-retired CUNY philosophy professor married to an art curator, Barnett produced conceptually original and profound BOOK-ART. His interest was visually portraying philosophical questions. As he wrote uniquely: The Artists Book genre has provided this philosopher with a means of extending his formal vocabulary beyond the article, the monograph and even the dialogue. The integration of structure and text in these bookworks, merging the actions of reading and physical manipulation beyond the turning of pages, invites a reorientation akin to that induced by Socratic questioning. This reorientation extends beyond both discourse and dialogue: we are engaged to expose and thus disarm the temporal dispositions implicit in objective discourse and ordinary reading. The first and most accessible of his books consists of unanswerable questions, all handwritten in capital letters: “Can critical activity take place where there is not yet theory?” Four statements of this sort appear in the four quadrants of square pages; but to complicate the reading experience, Barnett has by hand cut away outside quadrants from many pages, so that a question in the lower right-hand corner becomes a continuous counterpoint to the questions on previous pages from which the lower right-hand corner has been cut away. The structure of Time Trap (1980) depends upon a string that runs through the middle of all the book’s pages, its ends tied to make a loose circle. I own a handmade dummy copy of his third book, Reciprocal Encoding-Decoding Construction (1981–83), which measures 14 inches square, bound on both sides, with hand-cut pages that must be turned if the book is to be understood (which means, as one measure of its mediumistic integrity, that it cannot be conveniently exhibited in an art gallery). Unlike Barnett’s two previous books, this work can be duplicated only by hand. Because each of these three books is far more complicated than its predecessor (much in the tradition of JAMES JOYCE), it is not surprising that the fourth, Thinking without Surfaces (1987), was done on and for a computer disk. Continuing his exploration of radical structures and thus of physical manipulation, Barnett’s books for the 21st century included more handmade editions necessarily limited in number: Undoing (2004) depends upon unfolding drawings printed on paper that can be refolded variously. “The title page,” he writes, “printed on a transparency, redefines ‘undoing’ as a participle, as a noun, and as a folded drawing.” Rock Break Scissors (2012) and Now Ends Now (2017) likewise have printed sheets that must be alternatively handled to be “read.”

34 • BAROWITZ, ELLIOTT BAROWITZ, ELLIOTT (22 August 1936) Essentially a political artist, Barowitz frequently incorporates not reproductions but reproductions of reproductions (and sometimes later-generation copies) along with texts often drawn from newspapers. His estheitc discovey is that, as overly copied images lose their slickness, they become more painterly. One result is the exploitation of visual technologies unavailable before, now at the service of truly contemporary commentary. In work drawing imagery from the New York Times along with its familiar logo, he added his pointed handwritten remarks. In the late 1990s, Barowitz was copying his favorite modern masters with gouache on canvas, appropriating imagery without simulating texture, in increasingly more populous visual fields. One work from 1996 to 1997, for instance, includes its title on the edges of the rectangular canvas: “MODERNIST FORMALISM/AND THE WORK OF/CLEMENT GREENBERG/THE ART CRITIC.” Within this verbal frame Barowitz paints rough copies of works by JACKSON POLLOCK and FRANZ KLINE, in addition to inserting into the center a photocopy of a photograph of Greenberg himself. Elsewhere in the field are copies and photocopies of other painters admired by Greenberg. A companion panel deals with Harold Rosenberg. Given Barowitz’s commitments, it is scarcely surprising that he was also for several years the editor of an important newsprint journal called successively Art & Artists and Art-workers News.

BARRON, SUSAN (15 May 1947) After premedical studies, Barron began working as a photographer, realizing supremely fine-textured smallscale prints, mostly of fields, trees, and lakes. Selecting from a decade of this work, she produced Another Song (1981) in an edition of only fifty-three copies, each with thirty-nine original prints. Extending her art into other materials, she created a true magnum opus, Labyrinth of Time (1987), a one-of-a-kind eleven-volume “book,” 152 feet when laid out, that spectacularly updates the tradition of the unique illuminated manuscript. In its large pages are photographs, drawings, etchings, collages (many of which involve words in several languages, some of which are music). Nicolas Barker, the Keeper of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the British Library, finds it a true labyrinth, a passage that leads you on . . . something to wander through, astounded by an illusion here, captivated by a message there, like

one of the dioramas that so delighted our forefathers. The change from one medium to another, the differences in scale (large to small letters, vast, and minute pictures) all engage and lure mind and eye into the maze. Its immensity notwithstanding, Labyrinth of Time traveled from the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1995 to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1996 and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 1997. Barron has also produced more modest book-art.

BARRY, IRIS (28 March 1895–22 December 1969) The first consequential curator of serious cinema, she began in her native England in the early 1920s as a film reviewer for magazines and newspapers. After cofounding in 1925 in London The Film Society, which was the first of its kind, she immigrated to America, initiating in 1932 the film department at the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, which had opened only a few years before. Soliciting rare reels from both producers and stars and then archiving and exhibiting them, in addition to establishing a library of books about film, she and MoMA gave the new medium the possibility of an artistic status unknown before. On her own, Barry wrote the first major book on D. W. GRIFFITH (1940). A comparable German film maven was Gerhard Lamprecht (1897–1974), who started to collect films and related material already as a teenager. As he sold his collection in 1914, it was lost. He soon afterwards started another one, which became in 1963 the foundation of Deutsche Kinemathek, whose first director he was. As a prodigious archivist, Lamprecht also compiled Katalogisierung der deutschen Stummfilme aus den Jahren 1903–1931 (ten volumes, 1970).

BARSAMIAN, GREGORY (18 April 1953) Once a student of 19th-century European philosophy and later a devotee of the dream analysis popularized by Carl Jung, Barsamian is additionally skilled with machines. Discovering the 19th-century zoetrope, which was a wide rotating cylinder whose insides had a succession of images verging on film animation, he decided to produce a similar effect with contemporary technology. In Putti (1991), cherubs suspended overhead become helicopters. In Leafing on a Leach (1991), hands turning the pages of a book are complimented

BARTÓK, BÉLA •

by a two-dimensional animation of a text questioning self-knowledge and a figure of a man beating his head against a wall, all in an endless cycle. Not unlike other technological sculptors, he spends most of his time making works for places never seen by his colleagues and critics. Since no catalog of his work exists, he wisely produced successively a videotape and then an eponymous website that are far more effective at representing kineticism.

BARTH, JOHN (27 May 1930) Through the late 1960s, in his own late thirties, John Barth was testing the extremes of literature. “Frame Tale,” the opening story in his 1968 collection Lost in the Funhouse, appears in the form of a Möbius strip that, to be read appropriately, must be cut out of the book and its ends pasted together with a single twist, so that it will forever read: “. . . once upon a time there was a story that began. . . .” Another story reprinted in this book, “Menelaiad,” adds interior quotations until several sets appear around every new quotation. My anthology Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973) includes a marvelous visual fiction, subtitled “A stereophonic narrative for authorial voice,” which he didn’t reprint for decades. Around this time I saw Barth give a “reading” in which, standing between two loudspeakers, he spoke live in a trio between two prerecorded tapes of his own voice, his PERFORMANCE invigorating the otherwise decadent art of the literary recital. In both practice and later theorizing, Professor Barth retreated, alas, from advanced positions for more opportune and acceptable kinds of fiction and literary performance.

BARTHELME, DONALD (7 April 1931–23 July 1989) His principal under-recognized achievement was publishing in The New Yorker, a magazine favored by advertisers of big-ticket merchandise, moderately deviant fictions often severely critical of life dependent upon such high-worldly goods. “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” for instance, portrays the historical exemplar marooned in suburbia, confronting temptations familiar to The New Yorker readers. In their original context, besides glossy ads for the likes of Rolls-Royces and Rolexes, these Barthelme satires were subversive and delightful, not only enhancing his work but making the venerable magazine seem self-confidently benevolent. However, once collected in books to appear on their own, Barthelme’s

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stories seem less radical, if not prosaic, readers fresh to them later often wondering what any fuss was about. Whereas regular appearance in the slick pages of The New Yorker makes some writers seem weaker than they are, the mass-magazine context gave to Barthelme an edge that later evaporated. While the best experience of his fiction was formerly available only to those few who didn’t throw their copies of the weekly away, the magazine in the 21st century made available, fortunately for Barthelme’s reputation, its complete pages from February 1925 to April 2008 on a portable hard drive.

BARTHES, ROLAND (12 November 1915–25 March 1980) A various and mercurial writer, he published pioneering essays defining radical developments in advanced writers, especially Alain Robbe-Grillet, and in popular culture. The best of these were collected in Mythologies (1975). He wrote an inventive autobiography, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) in part to acknowledge and mock at once his various literary selves. Regarding his philosophical development, may I quote The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought (1999): In the successive phases of his career [R.B.] appears before us as the Marxist literary critic, elegantly slowing the bourgeois dragon; as a semiologist, carefully revealing the meanings latent in the artifacts of popular culture; as a structuralist, intent on a “scientific” analysis of human society; and as a playful post-structuralist, celebrating the quasi-sexual pleasures of the text. Whether he touched so many fashionable bases out of evolution or opportunism is a good question that cannot be answered here. My own sense is that his writing is more accessible and thus more sympathetic than the verbiage customarily grouped under those initially French rubrics.

BARTÓK, BÉLA (25 March 1881–26 September 1945; b. Bartók Béla Viktor János) A kind of Hungarian CHARLES IVES, he studied music only in his own country before drawing upon its folk music for a modern style uniquely identifiable, mostly through highly developed modal harmonies, irregular meters, and percussive qualities. More specifically, in 1904 he began transcribing obscure Hungarian

36 • BARTLEBY & CO folk songs that became a crucial influence upon his later compositions, beginning with the first of his String Quartets, that remain among the most successful sequences in modern music for that instrumental grouping. Later assimilating the continental influences of his contemporaries IGOR STRAVINSKY and ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, Bartók produced in the early 1920s two violin sonatas reflecting their ambitions for dissonance and complexity. Among his more frequently performed works are Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936) and Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937). Indicatively, few classical composers ever wrote so well for the xylophone. Initially renowned as a precocious pianist, he wrote virtuoso pieces for himself. Indeed, Slonimsky credits Bartók with revolutionizing the art of piano performance: “Instead of emulating the refined nuances of the French masters of Impressionistic techniques or contributing to the emasculation of the piano by epicene neoBaroque practices, Bartók restored the primary function of the keyboard as a medium of percussive sonorities.” Recordings of his performances have survived. To my mind, perhaps the most extraordinary single piece is his Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin (1944), twenty minutes in length, incidentally demonstrating, much like J.S BACH’s compositions for solo strings, that some of the greatest solo instrumental music has come from writers skilled at counterpoint. This Sonata was written in New York to which Bartók has immigrated in 1940, just before his 60th birthday. Though he received an honorary doctorate from Columbia University, the only employment he could find in America was classifying a collection of SerboCroatian folk songs for the Columbia music department at a modest annual salary until special funds ran dry. Even after a newspaper published “The Strange Case of Béla Bartók,” which exposed a failure of support that happens, alas, too frequently in a prosperous Western country, the refugee’s health deteriorated, his weight sinking well below one hundred pounds as he succumbed to leukemia. Though the American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) paid for his funeral expenses, not for several years was there enough money for a tombstone.

BARTLEBY & CO (1995) Of the many one-person publishers of fine limited editions, which are commonly more expensive than BOOK-ART printed in unlimited editions, this ranks among the best, especially for its inventive formats for

printed, mostly literary, materials usually in containers various in size and shape. Founded by Thorsten Baensch (1964), a German residing in Belgium, it has often reproduced original typography of a classic (e.g., John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s Divine Comedy, HERMAN MELVILLE’s Bartleby, the Scrivener) along with contemporary texts in more current designs. Most copies are purchased by sophisticated libraries that fortunately make them available for public viewing, handling, and appreciation. Among the other comparable European publishers working innovatively with bookish editions of avant-garde writers were Hundertmark (1970), initially in BERLIN, later in Cologne and then in the Canary Islands, which specialized in FLUXUS, CONCRETE POETRY, and VIENNA ACTIONISM; Rainer Verlag (1966–95), also in Berlin with a more eclectic avant-garde list; and Michèle Didier (1987), with a narrower focus, long in Brussels and Paris.

BARTLETT, JENNIFER (14 March 1941, b. Jennifer Losch) Her great innovation, perhaps broached by others before, was making a single large work of visual art from a great number of small panels that could be viably arranged. Customarily working with steel plates coated with enamel, initially mounting them on walls in illusory girds with their edges scarcely one inch apart, Bartlett could fill mammoth spaces with a large number of related images, sometimes hundreds on the same theme. Incidentally also a writer of published prose, Bartlett created a kind of visual narrative whose parts were all simultaneously visible, encouraging viewers’ eyes to move in various directions. Thanks to commissions, she expanded her signature principle into public spaces, such as buildings and a park. The poet J.B. (1969) is another woman.

BARZUN, HENRI-MARTIN (28 September 1881–September 1972) In an essay on “The Aesthetics of Dramatic Poetry” (1912–14), published in his own periodical Poème et Drame, Barzun presented his theory of simultanéisme which the historian MARC DACHY describes as a program for adapting the musical technique of polyphony to literary creation. He composed odes that later took the form of ‘dramas’ consisting of poems (dramatism) and songs alternating three groups of four voices each. As the attempt

BAUHAUS •

to express reality under all its aspects, not in succession but simultaneously, it can be seen as an extension of the Cubist rendering of objects and figures from several angles at once. The idea was not Barzun’s alone, as Dachy reprints a collaborative simultaneous poem (“The Admiral’s in Search of a House to Rent,” [1916] composed by “R. HUELSENBECK, Tr. TZARA, M. JANCO”). In 1967, Barzun, by then long a resident of America, sent me an inscribed copy of Orpheus: Choric Education, which was subtitled “A Record of Labors and Achievements 1920–1945” and filled with reminiscences and encomia, as well as manifestos and sample texts. The most informative article on him in English was written for a NEW DIRECTIONS annual by his son Jacques B. (1907–2012), a noted American intellectual historian.

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artists particularly in France. The poems collected in Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857) include “Correspondences” in which Baudelaire expresses the theory, basic to Symbolism, that the different sensations of sound, color, and perfume become synesthetically associated with one another. Their imagery, instead of being descriptive, is evocative and suggestive, thereby enabling the poet to portray deeper levels of sensual experience. As a major person of letters, Baudelaire also produced translations of Edgar Allan Poe (giving the American decadent more presence in France than his writing had at the time at home) and brilliant art criticism.

BAUDRILLARD, JEAN (27 July 1929–6 March 2007)

What a remarkable artistic move it was to print pictures of prominent athletes not on portrait-sized paper (or larger) but on cardboard customarily no more than a few inches by several inches in size. On the cards’ backs was relevant information unique to each athlete’s career and/or an advertisement for a sponsor who was giving them away gratis. Much like HALDEMAN-JULIUS books, say, these cards could be printed cheaply, distributed widely, and carried in their owner’s pockets. Boys of various ages traded them with each other. Beginning in America in the late 19th century, the format quickly influenced semblances in Japan, Latin America, and even Australia. What started with baseball players eventually included star athletes – secular icons, if you will – in other sports, such as basketball and boxing, so that the first level for success for an aspiring athlete would be his or her appearance of a card featuring his face. Treasured by collectors of all ages (including this author and his current publisher), such cards in bulk became, especially after the acceptance of POP ART, the stuff of curated museum exhibitions. In his Artball (1971), the art professor Donald Celendar (1931–2005) put the faces of ART WORLD stars into the familiar format.

This confession no doubt reflects serious defects in my otherwise elaborate education and literacy, but my Anglo-American head has difficulty wrapping itself around (or getting into) “FROGTHINK,” which is my epithet for English written like an inadequate translation from the French that supposedly gains profundity from the inadequacy of the translation and/or the text’s initial opacity. So I find Baudrillard no more edifying than Louis Althusser (1918–90), Luce Irigary (1930), and JACQUES DERRIDA, among other French thinkers customarily characterized (and merchandised) as progressive, even though their rhetorical manners stink of old-fashioned, class-aggrandizing elitism. What can be understood in Baudrillard seems no more than familiar radical platitudes about evil capitalism – the sort of remarks that can be profound only to people who have not encountered them before, which is to say undergraduates and undereducated postgraduates. My skepticism of adult English-speakers who revere these guys equals that reserved for those who claim they “understand” the tax-collector’s guidelines. If you don’t believe me, read (or try to read) them yourselves, and don’t be surprised if your mind wanders or you fall asleep. Incidentally, Baudrillard’s writings about simulacrum, or likenesses, had some heavyweight influence upon critical discussion of esthetic appropriation/imitation/duplication during the 1980s, as he argued that copies had a certain validity apart from originals.

BAUDELAIRE, CHARLES

BAUHAUS

(9 April 1821–31 August 1867)

(1919–33)

As a French poet and critic, commonly credited with initiating literary MODERNISM, he influenced visual

In its short lifetime, the Bauhaus became the most advanced school for architecture and applied arts. Not

BASEBALL CARDS (1890s)

38 • BAUSCH, PINA surprisingly, it became more influential after its premature death by Nazi decree. Its teachers included Walter Gropius (1883–1969), LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE, OSKAR SCHLEMMER, Herbert Bayer (1900–85), and L. MOHOLY-NAGY, who disseminated its ideas in their subsequent teaching and writings. Among the central Bauhaus principles were the adaptation of technology to artistic uses, the refusal to distinguish between fine and applied art, and the teaching of all the arts collectively on the persuasive assumption that literacy in only one form or only one communications medium signifies functional illiteracy before the diversity of contemporary information. The Bauhaus’s so-called foundation course became a general introduction to materials, from which the individual student could then ideally concentrate on the medium of his or her choice. This last purpose accounts for why the original Bauhaus in Weimar (1919–25) had no course officially in architecture; that was added, purportedly for practical reasons, after its move to Dessau (1925). The Bauhaus books, edited and designed by Moholy-Nagy, became the first series of extended illustrated essays on architectural high modernism. Though Bauhaus ideas encouraged solid and economical construction over esthetic excellence, the result of Bauhaus influence has been new kinds of austere formalism: in design, artificial streamlining; and in architecture, the slick, glass-walled boxes that have become depressingly abundant on the American urban landscape. Similarly, an initially anti-academic educational program, emphasizing individual enthusiasm and choice over particular results, generated its own academic pieties of stylistic correctness (geometric patterns in textiles, say, rather than representational images). In both architecture and design education, then, a limited interpretation of the Bauhaus esthetic placed an emphasis upon certain end products, rather than upon educational processes that might produce entirely different results.

BAUSCH, PINA (27 July 1940–30 June 2009, b. Philippine B.) Born in Germany, Bausch trained at the (Kurt Jooss [1901–79]) Folkwang School in Essen before studying at the Juilliard School of Dance in New York, where she worked with, among others, the British ballet choreographer Anthony Tudor (1908–87). Becoming director of the city-subsidized Wuppertal Dance Theater company in 1973, Bausch evolved a Tanz Theater (“dance theater”) that is a rich and complex amalgam of movement, text, music, and stunning visual effects.

In Nelken (Carnations, 1982), the stage is filled with flowers; for Arien (Arias, 1979), it is a pool of water. Although most of Bausch’s performers are trained dancers, their movements rarely display virtuosic skills, instead reflecting dance techniques in their stylized interactions, mimed incidents, and gestural repetitions. In her Teutonic productions, one recurring theme was the bad things that men do to women. Her work also became the subject of a 3-D Wim Wenders (1945) documentary, Pina (2011), that is perhaps the best of its technical kind. She benefitted from the generous support of a smaller but prosperous German City, Wupperthal, from 1973 to her death. Just as some art happens only in America or only in France, hers was indigenous to Germany. —with Katy Matheson

THE BEATLES (1962–69) The story of this immensely popular singing group of the 1960s need not be retold; their avant-garde innovations as revolutionaries in popular song were many. They took the basic elements of ’50s rock-n-roll and R&B and recast them, including varied influences from such unrelated styles as country, pre-rock pop, and classical and avant-garde music. They stretched the limits of both the subject matter and length of the standard 45-rpm single, creating miniature soundscapes that were self-contained musical units (for example, consider the matched pair of memoir-recordings, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”). They renounced touring at a time when most groups made their livings on the road. They experimented with multitracking, tape looping, backwards recording, and other “effects” that had previously only been heard in the realm of MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE. They created the “concept album” with their 1967 release, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, forever after elevating the album from a mere collection of hit singles to a coherent “artwork.” As fashion revolutionaries, they introduced long hair for men, and also popularized various styles of dress through their careers. They were also among the first pop groups to mold a specific image – the four adorable mop tops – and then, half-way through their careers, seriously challenge it by radically altering their appearances (remember the shock when the first pictures of the bearded Beatles were shown?). In their native England, where lower-class accents such as their native Liverpudlian speech were considered déclassé, they insisted on maintaining their natural speech,

BECKETT, SAMUEL •

introducing local slang expressions (from song lyrics such as “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” to off-the-cuff slang such as “gear” and “fab”) into the international language. And, they influenced countless others to switch from folk and other musical forms to electrified rock, including, but not limited to Bob Dylan, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Rolling Stones (at least changing them from a blues-oriented cover band to creators of original songs), and many, many more. —Richard Carlin

BEBOP (c. 1945) Perhaps the first musical form named after its characteristic sound (an onomatopoeia), Bebop was the brainchild of a group of second-generation JAZZ musicians who disliked the brash commercialism and easy accessibility of big-band jazz. Saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917–93) evolved a technique for improvising over standard chord progressions to create entirely new and unexpected melodies. By this procedure they produced “new” compositions out of old standards while allowing the rhythm instruments (piano, bass, and drums) to play their old parts. Working in smaller ensembles, these Bebop musicians invented a new kind of “chamber jazz” that became popular around the world in the 1950s. They demonstrated a freer interplay among ensemble members, with a generally lighter and more subtle approach to rhythm than was previously heard in big-band or raucous Dixieland groups, the Beboppers typically emphasizing staccato and legato, especially when played together. Finally, Bebop musicians displayed a greater intellectualism than their jazz predecessors, believing that jazz was a true art form and not merely a popular fad. —with Richard Carlin

BECK, STEPHEN (1950) In 1976, I saw extraordinary video works that were so unfashionable that I did not see, or even hear of, them again for fifteen years. One Beck piece Video Weavings (1974), has hypnotic, metamorphosing geometric shapes that change color rapidly. The syntax of change consisted mostly of pulsations, in and out, but the speeds of change are quick and the colors are ethereal. Beck had synthesized imagery directly onto videotape, in live time (rather than distorting images previously

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recorded with a camera), thanks to a Direct (i.e., cameraless) Video Synthesizer that he, as a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), had invented in 1969. “I had developed various styles – geometrics, metamorphosis, soft edge, etc.,” he wrote in the mid-1970s. “It was very much an invention spawned by inner necessity, as Kandinsky put it.” (Beck was also early in putting color bars at the beginning of the tape, asking viewers to “tune” their monitors before playing the tape, much as musicians tune their instruments before performing a score.) In 1972, for Illuminated Music, Beck also synthesized imagery in live time over a San Francisco TV station – a feat rarely, if ever, repeated in this age of pretaped transmission. In addition to making live concerts with his video synthesizer, Beck collaborated with the filmmaker Jordan Belson (1926) on one of the first film/video collaborations, Cycles (1974), which was available in both media. If only because Beck’s videotapes were made without a camera (and all the nuisances that accompany the shooting of live activities for videotape, not to mention film), they suggest the possibility of producing video much as one writes books – mostly by oneself. Beck was involved in creating and designing electronic toys and games, as well as varieties of computer-assisted “virtual reality,” which he thinks (as do I) may or may not be an artistic medium. To no surprise his eponymous website (http://www.stevebeck.tv) ranks among the richest.

BECKETT, SAMUEL (13 April 1906–22 December 1989) Working against the grain of his upbringing, Beckett was an Irishman whose first successful works were written in French. A disciple of JAMES JOYCE, whose succession of books increasingly came to epitomize esthetic abundance, Beckett instead explored lessness or, to be precise, lessness as moreness, or, to be more precise, the possibilities of moreness with lessness; for Beckett’s fundamental effort has been language so spare his words would render the surrounding silence resonant. Typically, at the end of one play, a character declares, “Yes, let’s go,” only to stand still silently. While the quietude marking such early plays as Waiting for Godot is by now universally familiar, Beckett’s later plays are yet more spare, often consisting of monologs punctuated by literary silences so uniquely resonant we call them Beckettian. There has been a parallel, if less familiar, evolution in his fiction – away from the repetitious, limited

40 • BEIDERBECKE, BIX vocabulary (which now curiously seems less indebted to Joyce than to GERTRUDE STEIN) through L’Innommable (1955, translated as The Unnamable [1958]), which many regard as his greatest novel, to such nonsyntactic flows as this from Comment c’est (1961): “in me that were without when the panting stops scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine.” With images of pointless activities, personal alienation, and historical meaninglessness, this passage illustrates the Beckettian knacks of being at once abstract and very concrete, at once lightly comic and deadly serious. Beckett transcended being a one-note author by using various forms to realize his themes – extended prose, short prose, live theater, radio plays, and ballets – appearing with sufficient time between them to make each work a cultural event. It should not be forgotten that Beckett’s 1929 essay about FINNEGANS WAKE ranks among the classics of genuinely avant-garde criticism. Not unlike later Joyce, Beckett is perhaps best read in parts, rather than as a whole. He has translated all his writings into his native English, at times with collaborators.

BEIDERBECKE, BIX (10 March 1903–6 August 1931; b. Leon Bismarck B.) The son of Iowa German immigrants who were amateur musicians, he began to play music as a small child and developed an interest in ragtime and JAZZ that were beginning to receive national dissemination through records and radio, not to mention from traveling musicians who came to his Davenport, IA, on Mississippi riverboats. Playing his cornet (a kind of trumpet) in improvising bands composed mostly of white people (the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, The Wolverines), Beiderbecke gravitated to New York where, collaborating with saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer (1901–56), he created the epitome of white jazz – a happy peppy, propulsive, energetic improvisation utterly lacking in “soul” but still musically impressive, if not contagious. At his most innovative, Beiderbecke pioneered individuality in ensemble playing and mixed classical influences with improvisation, establishing a “third stream” long before that epithet was coined. Every year on his birthday, a university radio station in New York plays Beiderbecke around the clock, annually recovering a kind of music that got lost, if not buried, in America’s competitive music marketplace. As one older black musician explained during one of those programs, the horn style represented by LOUIS ARMSTRONG “defeated” Beiderbecke’s, partly because the latter died young from alcohol-induced pneumonia. As a precocious burnout,

he was an American Mozart. Had not the technologies of music recording developed during his lifetime, the example of his music might have died with him. So powerful was this image of the jazzman’s short, self-destructive life in the decade following his death that novels based on it appeared, most notably Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn (1938). The musician Richard Sudhalter (1938–2008), who coauthored a biography of Bix, also published a thick book, Lost Chords (1998), obviously featuring Bix, about great American jazz produced by white people.

BELL LABS (c. 1887) Odd it seems at times that so much advanced technological art originated in the huge research laboratory of a major American corporation. Created in the late 19th century as the Volta Laboratory and Bureau by Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) himself, it later became a division of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (aka AT&T). Still later called Bell Telephone Laboratories, its scientists are commonly credited with developing information theory, the laser, the transistor, radio astronomy, communications satellites, UNIX, UUCP, and much else. Buried in its huge populous facilities were several people developing technologies for art. ‘Tis said that an early method for shooting motion pictures with synchronous sound was invented in one Bell lab in 1926 and that the first digital art appeared in another in 1962. Later in that decade Ken C. Knowlton (1931) developed BEFLIX (1963), the first language enabling computer animation, while Max Mathews (1926–2011) developed a program for composing wholly electronic music. I can recall visiting in 1968 the main campus of Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where I entered a room that resembled any other pristine office until out of file drawers my hosts pulled tape machines on which they played for me their own wholly computer-assisted compositions for me. (Some of these later appeared on a commercially released long-playing record.) Bell Labs also hosted fruitful collaborative production residencies by visual artists and composers. Another Bell staffer, J. Wilhelm (Billy) Kluver (1927–2004), initially a laser researcher, established a foundation to assist prominent artists in their ambitions – Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT). Once AT&T was dissolved, its staff dispersed; only Google, among the world’s great corporations, has tried to create a comparable advanced research facility since.

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BENCHLEY, ROBERT (15 September 1889–21 November 1945) Beginning as a Harvard boy who worked for slick magazines and newspapers, Benchley became the epitome of the cultivated humorous essayist, first as the drama editor of the original LIFE and then as a theater critic for The New Yorker. Improbable though it seems now, he was invited to make several cheaply produced short films in which, standing before a camera that he addresses as he would a friend, he ineptly lectures on banal subjects he obviously knows nothing about: The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928), The Trouble with Husbands (1940), How to Take a Vacation (1941), and How to Sleep (1935, which won an Academy Award for best short comedy, wonder of wonders). The result is subtle irony, camp of a sort not often seen today in mass media. His example, along with those of The Three Stooges (1934–59) films and Bugs Bunny cartoons, reminds us that, after the advent of sound, much of the most advanced Hollywood-produced work appeared in low-budget short films that are rarely acknowledged by film historians. Consider this unfamiliar truth: that once Hollywood ceased producing shorts, independent filmmakers gained a near total monopoly on innovative cinema in America.

BENJAMIN, WALTER (15 July 1892–25 September 1940) A brilliantly insightful German philosopher and arts critic, Benjamin became, well after his premature death, a hero to radical intellectuals around the world. He figures in this book initially for authoring “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), which remains one of the most insightful essays ever on the modernist difference. “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence upon ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility,” he wrote. “But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.” Most commentators on high MODERNISM, including me, would give their eyeteeth to have written sentences like these. Leaving his native BERLIN for Paris in 1933, Benjamin befriended the Surrealists and began a comprehensive study of CHARLES BAUDELAIRE in 19th-century Paris that was published posthumously. To others his single greatest book is The Arcades Project

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(English, 1999), which is a monumental compilation of fragments (information and quotation) about Paris in the 19th century. When the Nazis invaded France, Benjamin fled to the Spanish frontier. Denied entry because of his Marxist past, he committed suicide.

BENNETT, JOHN M. (12 October 1942) While working as a university librarian initially specializing in Latin Americana, Bennett has produced a variety of experimental poems some of which are sophisticated. Many of these reflect the arbitrariness of SURREALISM; some are done in absentee collaboration with others. Most of these have been scattered in many chapbooks that, while each may have its point, diffuse Bennett’s presence. Among their titles, in sum perhaps reflective of his particular imagination, are Lice, Jerks, Burning Dog, Parts, Nose Death, Nips Poems, Milk, Fenestration, Meat Watch, Meat Dip, and Tempid. Several alternative directions are included in Rolling Cumbers (2001). Under the banner of Luna Bisonte (Moon Bison) Prods, Bennett has also issued printed labels and audiotapes of his own authorship, in addition to publishing Lost and Found Times (1975– 2005), which was probably the most persistently experimental literary magazine to survive for more than a decade ever in America. This longevity reflects, along with his collaborations with many colleagues, Bennett’s genuine professional generosity, which becomes the principal theme of Loose Watch (1998), the anthology compiled from its pages. Johnee’s Box (1991) is a cased retrospective of his “visual and sound-text poetry.” Do not confuse him with another John Bennett (1938), no middle initial, who is a provocative small-press writer living in the state of Washington, or John M.’s son John Also Bennett (1988), a synthesist/musician.

BERBERIAN, CATHY (4 July 1925–6 March 1983; b. Catherine Anahid B.) During her short life, she was the great soprano, more specifically, a mezzo-soprano, of contemporary music, as she was able to perform the most challenging scores with an unequaled virtuosity and imagination. Among the many major composers writing music initially for her to perform were her first husband LUCIANO BERIO, JOHN CAGE, IGOR STRAVINSKY, and, curiously, ANTHONY BURGESS. Some of these compositions were never performed as well by anyone else again. For her own

42 • BERIO, LUCIANO performance Berberian composed Stripsody (1966). She made many records that were rereleased as compact disks. Though by birth an Armenian-American who went through high school in New York, Berberian lived mostly in Italy as a nouveau American-Italian (just as a Greek-American soprano roughly her age and born in New York, Maria Callas [1923–77], was based mostly in Paris). Literate and literary, Berberian also co-translated English texts into Italian.

BERIO, LUCIANO (24 October 1925–27 May 2003) An Italian composer who worked in various media with various materials, Berio often combined spoken texts, sung texts, acoustic, and electronic instruments, taped sounds, lighting effects, and theatrical movements, including dance. He regarded all types of sound – from speech to noise to so-called musical sound – as forming a single continuum and thus himself as not so much a “composer” of works as an assembler, putting together different elements to create a total esthetic experience. The division between musical concert, spoken word, and theatrical event is an artificial one, he believed, and in his compositions he worked toward synthesizing these elements, citing as his principal predecessor not a musician but the author JAMES JOYCE, who also tried to combine language and music. Berio explored graphic notation, producing scores that resemble expressionist drawings, and for various reasons probably received more nasty reviews than most of his comparably deviant contemporaries. Some of his strongest early pieces, such as In Circles (1960), to a text by E. E. CUMMINGS, were composed for his wife at that time, CATHY BERBERIAN. Berio’s best-known work is his Sinfonia, composed for the New York Philharmonic’s 125th anniversary in 1968 and revised in 1969, typically incorporating recognizable quotations from Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), RICHARD STRAUSS (1864–1949), and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) as the musical analogy of FOUND ART made before the arrival of computer-aided SAMPLING.

BERKELEY, BUSBY (29 November 1895–14 March 1976; b. Berkeley William Enos) Certainly among the most original Hollywood filmmakers during the 1930s, he utilized dozens of dancers to produce masterpieces of kinetic geometry, often complimenting a muted female eroticism, in a succession

of films from 42nd Street (1933) through The Gang’s All Here (1943), which opens with “one of cinema’s most breathtaking traveling shots” (David Thomson). Most unusually among distinguished choreographers, Berkeley never featured soloists either male or female. Never performing as a dancer, he didn’t study choreography either. Perhaps a greater influence on his taste for populous formations was, curiously, his years in a military school. My favorite testimonial to Berkeley’s highest style comes from Cecile Starr (1921), herself an avant-garde filmmaker and historian: Circling displays of faces, one after another, in extreme close-up, circling around us; well-shaped bodies posed or parading in skin-tight costumes, moving in precise formations filmed from the front, side, and back angles and then miraculously seen from above, bodies and heads seeming to dissolve into out-of-this-world configurations. For masterpieces of abstract art created with human performers, consider the section in Footlight Parade (1933) commonly called “By a Waterfall,” in which one hundred women dancers in rubber swimsuits perform on five levels on revolving circular platforms, and “Dames” section of the 1934 film with the same name. Unlike other filmmakers who cut and spliced raw footage from several cameras, Berkeley tended to shoot his well-rehearsed scenes continuously. (This integrity particularly impresses me, who dislikes recent commercial films and even television programs where frequent editing often suggests that the performers were never in the same place at the same time.) Doubts though I have about Hollywood films in general, Berkeley demonstrated what was possible not if its bosses wanted to produce excellence, which cannot be initiated by executives above, but if they let inspired directors create what had not been done before. Berkeley’s influence persists less in film or in modern dance but in the extravagant PERFORMANCE of the “historic black” American colleges’ MARCHING BANDs (e.g., Grambling, Florida A&M, and Southern, among others).

BERLIN Perhaps more than Paris or London, say, this became, after NEW YORK, the second city for avant-garde art in the past century. Thanks initially to the activities of HERWARTH WALDEN whose exhibition space and magazine welcomed advanced artists from around the world, and then to the rich café culture, all newer new

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arts prospered in Berlin, until the Nazis took power in the mid-1930s. After they were deposed in 1945 and the depleted city divided among the occupying powers, the western sectors of Berlin slowly became a cultural magnet again, thanks in part to generous subsidies for cultural activities from West Germany, as it was then commonly called. The city’s annual Internationale Bauausstellung (1957), the DAAD KUNSTLERPROGRAMM (1964), and the local Akademie der Kunst (1696; frequently reorganized) were instructed to recognize the most substantial avant-garde art elsewhere, the last typically mounting in 1976 the first exhibition and first book anywhere devoted to SoHo: Downtown Manhattan. Among the consequential English-speakers long resident in Berlin have been EMMETT WILLIAMS, DAVID MOSS, DOROTHY IANNONE, Arnold Dreyblatt (1953), Liv Mette Larsen (1952), Ann Noel (1944), Stephen Wilks (1964), and Malcolm Green (1952). Once the BERLIN WALL went down, East German cultural institutions enriched the offerings of a united metropolis, while cheaper apartments in the former East Berlin attracted younger artists from around the world.

BERLIN WALL/DIE MAUER (13 August 1961–9 November 1989) Erected initially to keep East Germans from relocating into West Germany, this long and tall barrier encasing a western city legally within East Germany, unintentionally became the largest and most unique “canvas” for the richest collection of graffiti the world has ever seen. Usually 15 feet high and nearly 100 miles long, its Western side was receptive to whatever volunteer artists and sometime writers (in several languages) wanted to put there. Over its thirty-eight years graffiti images changed, as some were painted over by later artists, while others succumbed to whitewash by DDR apparatchiks. Even if understandably offensive to resident West Berliners, visitors judged this Wall a marvelous unique sight. Curiously, though graffiti was officially illegal in West Berlin, it was acceptable on the Die Mauer, as the locals called it, because the structure was physically just over the boundary line in East Berlin. Since the DDR owned it, so to speak, its government sometimes sent its employees amusingly through openings in the wall to obliterate the accumulated images, inadvertently establishing a fresh surface for newer images. Even if the product of a mob, rather than an individual, Die Mauer was surely the richest work of art ever created within the DDR.

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With the demise of East Germany, only parts of this wall survived, some of its decorated on its eastern (DDR) side, perhaps unfortunately, because, solely for its artistic value, more could have been “landmarked” and thus preserved intact. After all, nothing anywhere in the world ever offered such a rich wallscape for off(or non-) gallery visual art. Nothing. Nonetheless, so appreciative were many people of the Berlin Wall itself that, after it was pulverized, supposedly authentic shards were sold in small boxes, two of which I happen to own. Shards being shards, these thus become lesser artistic mementos of a greater work of art that is no more.

BERNERS, LORD (18 September 1883–19 April 1950; b. Sir Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Baronet) A minor POLYARTIST, he was a self-taught composer who wrote ballet music for DIAGHILEV and an opera with GERTRUDE STEIN. In his compositions, which are rarely played, Nicolas Slonimsky finds “humor and originality, . . . a subtle gift for parody.” Berners wrote a number of memorably witty short poems of three quatrains accounting for why he preferred “red noses” to red roses. Berners also published six fairly conventional short novels, including Far from the Madding War, in which he portrayed himself as Lord Fitzcricket, in addition to stylistically British autobiographies that were reprinted long after his death. Unashamedly eccentric and financially secure, Berners also exhibited oil paintings in 1931 and 1936.

BERRA, YOGI (12 May 1925–22 September 2015; Lawrence Peter B.) An American baseball hero whose education ended at high school, whose favorite reading was said to be comic books, he’ll be forever remembered as the master of a certain kind of original spoken aphorism that combines simplicity with truth: It gets late early out here. When you come to a fork in the road, take it. You can observe a lot by just watching. If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them. You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you. It was impossible to get a conversation going; everybody was talking too much.

44 • BERRY, JAKE If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer. Berra’s ultimate classic because it so succinctly describes possibilities unique to a game where a team far behind near the end can still win: “It ain’t over till it’s over.” Curiously, the only other person known to me to do as well with this sort of aphorism is the great Dutch fussball (soccer) player and coach Johan Cruyff (1947–2016), whose formal education ended during high school. Like Berra, Cruyff speaks, rather than writes, with a Dutch voice as uniquely his as Berra’s: Before I make a mistake, I don’t make that mistake. There is only one ball, so you need to have it. Every disadvantage has its advantage. Playing football is very simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is. If I wanted you to understand it, I would have explained it better. Why can’t you beat a richer club? I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal. I’m ex-player, ex-technical director, ex-coach, ex-manager, ex-honorary president. A nice list that once again shows that everything comes to an end.

This is abstract art, where the trick is to let your mind experience what it cannot fathom: the abstract image, that idea that can be written or spoken but not quite read or thought, but still it exists. The mind always forces us to conceive of something, even in the face of confusion. But the abstractness of Unnon Theories pales in the shadow of Brambu Drezi, a ritualistic work full of verbal transense (beyond sense, but not mere entertaining nonsense), chants, word, and image that produce text that looks and sounds sometimes like this: “mahseetah/in bombay’s riotous/dagon countenanced/king leer’s foolhearty/roundtable screw plotting.” Stepping beyond FINNEGANS WAKE and ABRAHAM LINCOLN GILLESPIE, Jake Berry writes a thought that he cannot quite catch, to disturb and enthrall that reader, viewer, and listener patient enough to sit still. —Geof Huth

More educated literary aphorists couldn’t have written these if they tried.

BERRY, JAKE (16 June 1959) Berry is a poet of the unhampered subconscious, moving (as many avant-gardists have) from the distorted reality of the surrealists to a distorted means of communication. Working in COLLAGE, sound, and especially the written word, Jake Berry veers between two worlds of discourse: a faux bureaucratese or academese (seen in works like Unnon Theories) to a full-bore, allout verbal (and sometimes verbo-visual) assault upon the senses in works like Brambu Drezi. A snippet from the first begins innocently enough: “At first one denies the gradual opposition because it emulates a hypnotic simulation in the obverse. Affluent constraint in conjunction with the idea can cripple resilience before temporal immunity can be applied.” Is this a medical text? an oration on economics? The stance is right but the words don’t quite make it. We are thrown back and forth between ways of seeing, never resting on a thought long enough to finish it.

Figure 2 Harry Bertoia’s Sounding Sculpture at the Aon Center, Chicago. Photo by Minja Kim.

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BERTOIA, HARRY (10 March 1915–6 November 1978) His initial specialty was nonobjective accumulations of bronze, beryllium, and nickel objects. When left to hang, they would resound distinctly metallic tones and display vibrations, at their best realizing the ideal of artistic synesthesia, or simultaneous perception in two or more sensory systems. At times he reportedly had as many as one hundred of his “Sonambient” objects collected in his studio, which became a modern orchestral pit. Bertoia also designed wire chairs that were commercially manufactured. Financial success with furniture underwrote his independent sculptural career. About this radical work Bertoia made this classic declaration: “If you look at these chairs, they are mainly made of air, like sculpture. Space passes right through them.”

BEUYS, JOSEPH (12 May 1921–23 January 1986) Beuys was a German artist and art college professor who made his sculptures out of found material, such as bricks or bits of felt. Often, his “sculptures” were assembled and disassembled on the spot by the viewers, the process becoming part of the work itself, giving the exhibition of his art some qualities of PERFORMANCE. He hit ARTISTS’ SOHO in 1974 with a gallery show in which he lived in a cage with a coyote for several days. Beuys also exhibited his drawings, which, the Oxford Companion to 20th Century Art succinctly says, “do not for the most part invite assessment by current or traditional standards.” As both a practitioner and a teacher, he tried to develop the myth of art as action and thus the artist as a provocateur on a socialpolitical stage, even if for a small sympathetic audience. While such portentious ideas had some presence within his lifetime, particularly in ART WORLD press, they died along with him. By a more strictly esthetic measure, the most extraordinary innovation of Beuys’s career was getting his image, usually wearing a broad-brimmed hat in a frontal photo, to register far more memorably than his works. “Dressed like an old-fashioned rural worker, his gaze beaming intently from under the brim of his fedora,” the American art critic Carter Ratcliff (1941) wrote, “Beuys personified a Europe that advances optimistically while maintaining contact with a myth of its pastoral origins.” Beuys became much like a car salesman or some other huckster who puts his face in his promotions in lieu of any ostensible product – in

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Beuys’s case art of dubious worth (or else the seductive face wouldn’t have been necessary, natch). Some people were impressed by this radical transvaluation of esthetic merchandising; others, including me, were not. Nonetheless, Beuys got a lot of publicity for his claims of experiencing a miracle in World War II, as though that would bestow a saintly authority upon his subsequent work; but all that was affected, as far as any larger public was concerned, was distribution of pictures of his face. (A younger artist best-known for his publicized face is Francesco Clemente [1952].)

BIDLO, MIKE (20 October 1953) Whereas ELAINE STURTEVANT produced unique clean and clear replicas of select master paintings, Bidlo in the 1980s made glibly executed productions of many modern masterpieces, usually at original scale, but with deficient visual quality. Especially in his oneperson exhibitions, which were stronger than any individual works, Bidlo realized irony and humor through an abundance of crummy replicas of Picasso, Brancusi, Man Ray, Morandi, Kandinsky, Leger, and even his near-contemporary Julian Schnabel, among others. Verbally witty as well, Bidlo retitled his replica of Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon as “She Works Hard for the Money,” which is the title of an American pop song from the early 1980s. Sometimes Bidlo gives his imitations generic names such as “not-Léger” or “notXYZ.” In a 1982 installation at PS 1 Gallery, Bidlo redid Jackson Pollock’s monumentally obnoxious move of pissing into Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace. No less committed to his subject of high modern art a decade later, Bidlo in 1993 filled a SoHo gallery with five thousand drawings, most of them decidedly amateur in draftsmanship, of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, or at least a pissoir that his title, The Fountain Drawings, alluded to Duchamp.

BIENNIALS Populous exhibitions of current art inevitably disappoint, no matter if they are sponsored by galleries or museums or ambitious municipalities (e.g., Kassel, Germany), simply because they include too much junk that, the further away from the exhibition anyone gets, whether in space or time, inevitably looks junkier. In this respect, biennials resemble newspaper reviews, which are likewise short-sighted and thus an unreliable guide to ultimate excellence and, it follows, arts history.

46 • BIERCE, AMBROSE For evidence, if not proof, of this last truth, examine now the thick illustrative catalog customarily issued in the past for quintennial Documenta, say, and the more frequent Whitney Museum Biennials. The further back into the past are such books, the reader recognizes few memorable works and fewer familiar names, and the more embarrassing does the populous and yet pretentious format look, inevitably. Additionally, the better publicized a perennial exhibition is, the more likely it becomes that some artists will mount a protest show to take place roughly simultaneously, finally to the benefit of both outsiders and insiders.

BIERCE, AMBROSE (24 June 1842–? 1914) A courageous independent author, endowed with an adventurous character perhaps more possible in the United States than in Europe, Bierce belongs to the avant-garde tradition less for his fiction, which was no less conventional when it was written than it is today, than for his aphorisms, which are distinctly original precisely for their dictionary-like form and their sharp critical intelligence. Indeed, precisely in such a tart inversion of both the lexicographical and aphoristic traditions is a distinctly modernist signature for his concise paragraphs. Only a 20th-century aphorist could have written: “Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel” or “Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” Begun in a weekly newspaper in 1881, his “The Cynic’s Word Book,” as it was originally called, finally appeared under a less appropriate, if more fanciful, name. To sense how unacceptable Bierce the American aphorist has been, consider that the W. H. Auden-Louis Kronenberger edited Book of Aphorisms (1962) has only one line from Bierce, compared to over thirty-five from Sir Francis Bacon and forty-nine from George Santayana; and that there is nothing, zilch, by Bierce in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1964). As an overage war correspondent, he disappeared in Mexico in 1913.

BILL, MAX (22 December 1908–9 December 1994) As one of the few native-born Swiss artists with an international avant-garde reputation, Bill was a severe geometricist predisposed to mathematical formulas, in

his words, “arisen by virtue of their original means and laws – without external support from natural appearances.” For his pure art, devoid of ostensible relation to the natural world, he adopted in 1936 the term “Concrete Art,” which had been coined by THEO VAN DOESBURG only a few years before, as superior to Abstract Art. This epithet was subsequently adopted by other Swiss artists such as Richard Lohse (1902– 88) and Karl Gerstner (1930–2017). As a painter, Max Bill favored complicated geometries, and as a sculptor, austere materials with smooth surfaces, which are sometimes large enough to become monuments. Bill also organized major exhibitions of Abstract Art, beginning with one for his hero GEORGES VANTONGERLOO. Long a teacher, in the early 1950s Bill was appointed chief of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, which became the European center for his kind of CONSTRUCTIVISM.

BILLINGS, WILLIAM (7 October 1746–26 September 1800) A tanner by trade, Billings compensated for a lack of formal education by closely studying the music manuals popular in his time until he could create compositions scarcely less eccentric now than they were then. His song “Jargon,” which is filled with dissonances perhaps humorous, is prefaced by a “manifesto” to the Goddess of Discord. He invented a “fuguing piece” composed of independent vocal lines that enter one after another and sometimes echo one another. His humorous pieces sometimes ended in a different key from that used at the beginning. Even today, it is hard to believe that such music was composed in 18th-century America. It is scarcely surprising Billings’s few prose statements forecast avant-garde manifestos: I don’t think myself confin’d to any Rules for composition, laid down by any that went before me, neither should I think (were I to pretend to lay down Rules) that any who came after me were any ways obliged to adhere to them. . . . I think it is best for every Composer to be his own Carver. Though some of his hymns became popular (“Chester,” “The Rose of Sharon”), Billings died poor, America being even less supportive of its avant-garde then than now; yet his music is continually being “rediscovered.” I include Billings here partly to deflect the false academic question of “When did the avantgarde start?” If an 18th-century composer of such

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initially unacceptable originality is denied the honorific “avant-garde,” then consider for him the silly epithet “proto-avant-garde.”

BIOGRAPHIES Great biographies of major avant-garde figures are scarce, in part because book publishers are reluctant to commission, let alone contract, big books about figures who are scarcely known. Among the masterpieces are Alastair Brotchie’s Alfred Jarry (2015), Albert Glinsky’s Theremin (2000), and John Szwed’s Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (1997), all of which benefit from discovering about their often misrepresented subjects many truths that were previously unknown. The unique achievement of Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle’s The Art of Harvey Kurtzman (2009) is, by contrast, a shrewdly selected sequence of pictures, both published and unpublished, that, apart from words, portray the great cartoonist’s career. The initial big biographies are often disastrous, even if they assume the conventional form of several hundred pages with a signature of pictures. In Anthony Tommasini’s VIRGIL THOMSON (1998), his subject’s legendary witticisms blow by the woefully thick, even if appreciative, biographer. Kenneth Silverman’s JOHN CAGE (2012) suffers from missing too much. In part because nearly all biographies are written to order, they are rarely distinguished in style or form. To demonstrate this point, consider photocopying sample pages from several of them, blot out any identifying names within the texts, put them aside for a week, and then, taking out the sample pages, try to identify which biographer wrote what. Also note that most book reviews of biographies tend to discuss the subject rather than evaluate particularities of the biography. The four progressively more informative long biographies of GLENN GOULD are interesting for demonstrating that the principle that each new one reveals details and sometimes sometime secrets that its predecessors didn’t discover or didn’t acknowledge. Rarely does a biography become so “definitive” that it discourages later efforts; but once Richard Ellmann’s mammoth James Joyce appeared in 1959, it couldn’t be topped, not even sixty years later. None of those about GETRUDE STEIN’s life are satisfactory, at least to me, though Donald Sutherland’s Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work (1951) remains unsurpassed, even if eccentric. One interesting deviance, rarely pursued, is the double biography of related figures, such as Brenda Wineapple’s fine Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (1996). I once wanted to write one about MERCE

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CUNNINGHAM and JOHN CAGE, a monumentally ideal artistic couple, but put the project aside when I realized that someone else could do it better. (No one has yet.) Another subset would be a biography of an avantgarde institution, such as John Tytell’s The Living Theater: Art, Exile, and Outrage (1997) and Dougald McMillan’s Transition: The History of a Literary Era, 1927–1938 (1975). Perhaps my own The Rise and Fall of Artists’ SoHo (2003) is a biography of a neighborhood. Odd, it seems to me, that I can’t identify a formally radical biography of an avant-garde figure, though perhaps one exists unknown to me. About individuals featured in this book, I remember liking, without judging (or particularly recommending), Jeffrey Meyers’s The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (1982), Modigliani: A Life (2006) and his Edmund Wilson (1995); Barry Miles’s Beats trilogy – Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats (1998), Call Me Burroughs: A Life (2015), and Ginsberg: A Biography (1990); David Bourdon’s Warhol (1995); David Bellos’s George Perec: A Life in Words (1993), Christopher Finch’s Chuck Close: Life (2012), Arnold T. Schwab’s James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts (1963), Masayo and Peter Duus’s The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders (2006), Paul Mariani’s William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1980), John Geier’s Nothing Is True – Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin (2005), Ian MacGiven’s “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions (2014), B. H. Friedman’s Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (1972) and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1978), Mark Scoggins’s The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (2007), Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde (1988), and, of course, James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791). Whew.

BIRTHRIGHTS (1960s?) Forget about this fiction, as nobody by birth is better qualified to produce first-rank art. That’s nobody, whether because the child of an acceptable innovative artist, a graduate of a major teaching institution, or a member of one or another fashionable privileged group or. . . . That’s nobody. Getting to the top in the arts is too competitive, as in professional sports, say, where remarkably few sons and daughters of prominent athletes reach the top leagues, even with solicitous parental coaching. (Consider that athletes’ children tend to be superior

48 • BISSETT, BILL athletes in schools, just as teachers’ children tend to earn higher grades; but once on their own, all face greater competition.) Another theme of the myth of privileged birth holds, for untenable examples, that only a woman critic can make authoritative judgments about art made by women or only an African-American can sing blues. While the first contention has had limited currency, the best refutation of the last myth was the British woman singer Jo Ann Kelly (1944–90), who sounded like Louisiana men and, in fact, played concerts with them. The truth worth repeating is that all major avantgarde artists overcame debilitating DISADVANTAGES, as often personal as social, that would have knocked out nearly everyone else. Similarly, they wouldn’t have become avant-garde artists otherwise.

BISSETT, BILL (23 November 1939) A Canadian poet, Bissett resembles W. Bliem Kern and NORMAN HENRY PRITCHARD II in his eccentric orthography and in performing visually idiosyncratic texts that often depend upon repeating a single phrase, such as “Awake in the Red Desert,” which is also the title of a 1968 collection. However, whereas a repeated phrase becomes something else in Kern and Pritchard, in Bissett it remains audibly the same. In opening one of his chapbooks he accurately outlines his way of working: Spelling – mainly phonetic Syntax – mainly expressive or musical rather than grammatic Visual form – apprehension of th spirit shape of the pome rather than stanzaic nd rectangular Major theme – search fr harmony within th communal self thru sharing (dig Robin Hood), end to war thereby – good luck Characteristic stylistic device – elipse As another factor from the beginning was the influence of the more radical works of GERTRUDE STEIN. Regarding his orthography, the Canadian critic Caroline Bayard (1947–2014) has written: You invariably becomes yu; most terminal endings in le such as single, become ul (singul); ought is transcribed as at; thought and brought as that and brat. All past participles are contracted into d’s, such as sd for said or mood for moved. Long diphthongs such as the [ju:] of beautiful are

recorded as beeutiful. Phonetic representation is obviously what Bissett is striving for. Self-educated, self-propelled, extremely prolific and self-indulgent, Bissett has been an iconoclastic free spirit. Someday, someone other than himself will collect the gems from a mountain of distinctive work. Not unlike other visual poets, he has also exhibited paintings. The single most impressive Bissett work seen by me is Lunaria (2001) that comes in a box whose fine loose pages, roughly 8½” inches by 11 inches, have a printed handwritten text under abstract brightly colored shapes that seem individually added, in an edition numbering 42.

BITZER, BILLY (21 April 1872–29 April 1944; b. Gottfried Wilhelm B.) The first great cameraman of American film, Bitzer photographed news scenes around the turn of the century, joining a company that became known as Biograph. In 1908, he joined D. W. GRIFFITH, then the premier American director, to photograph all of his films until 1924, including not only shorts but the masterpieces The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Out of this collaboration came several technical innovations, commonly credited to Bitzer, of the closeup, the fade, soft focus, the iris shot (coupled with the elimination of sharp corners in the film frame), the use of a dolly for a tracking shot, and gauze to suggest a mist. His professional life collapsed in the 1920s, as did Griffith’s, as American filmmaking became a larger, corporate business devoted to sound films. In the 1930s, IRIS BARRY’s newly established film department at the Museum of Modern Art commissioned Bitzer to document his distinguished career – an achievement that might have otherwise been forgotten.

BJARNASON, INGIBJÖRG (1901–77) One of the forgotten figures in the early history of avant-garde painting, she was born in Germany of an Icelandic father whom, as her parents split, she visited in her summers away from Germany. In Paris in the 1920s, she befriended MICHEL SEUPHOR and produced several memorable CONSTRUCTIVIST canvases, some of which were included near the entrance in the legendary CERCLE ET CARRÉ show (1930). Reportedly losing her art’s patron’s love, she moved

BLAKE, WILLIAM •

to ICELAND where she became a chemist and then moved to the United States before ending in Argentina. As her original paintings were lost, Seuphor himself recreated them for an exhibition in the 1990s. Some of her images are printed on Iceland’s postage stamps with a middle name from a past husband, perhaps to distinguish the artist from a prominent Icelandic suffragette similarly named (IHB, 1867–1941), whose face graces other Icelandic stamps. Impressed all should be that Iceland, being Iceland (and thus more culturally classy), immortalizes the work of not just activists but even minor vanguard artists who only intermittently resided there.

BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (1933–57) Even though it never had more than a hundred students at any time in its regular sessions, it was, by the simple measure of producing avant-garde professionals, the most successful art school ever in America – an American Bauhaus, although, unlike the original Bauhaus, it did not produce any major styles identifiable with it. One way in which Black Mountain College transcended its predecessor was in incorporating both literature and music into the curriculum. Among its more distinguished alumni were the painters ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG and Kenneth Noland (1924–2010), the poets Robert Creeley (1926–2005) and Jonathan Williams (1929–2008), the filmmakers Arthur Penn (1922–2010) and STAN VANDERBEEK, and the sculptors JOHN CHAMBERLAIN and KENNETH SNELSON. The reasons for its success appear to have been that the teachers were active professionals (including at various times JOHN CAGE, MERCE CUNNINGHAM, BUCKMINSTER FULLER, JOSEF ALBERS, Paul Goodman [1911–72], FRANZ KLINE, and Alfred Kazin [1914–99]), BMC taught all the arts (rather than just visual art or just music), and the school was so small in size that the professors ate at the same tables as the students. It closed in 1957, the year after JACKSON POLLOCK crashed, both deaths ending an era. Though ambitious American arts educators often try and even claim to re-create Black Mountain, the mold must have been broken.

BLAINE, JULIEN (1942; b. Christian Poitevin) For several decades he has been the most adventurous and productive French avant-garde poet residing

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not in Paris, the traditional hothouse, but in the south of France, particularly around Marseilles. Originally known to me as the co-editor of Approches (1965– 68), the most advanced poetry journal of its period, Blaine has since published books and made PERFORMANCE often about the elements of language. In 1976, he founded Doc(k)s as an incomparably thick international avant-garde poetry magazine that he later handed off to Philippe Castellin and Jean Torregrosa, who had in 1984 founded the intermedial group Akenaton in Corsica. As a self-confident artist/writer, Blaine has produced an immense amount in modest venues. Under his birth name he briefly served as a cultural official in Marseilles.

BLAKE, WILLIAM (28 November 1757–12 August 1827) Blake was by many measures the most original British poet, who not only self-published his major illuminated books, but drew upon his training as an engraver to print and hand-color them. He had to self-publish, because no one else could have reproduced his mixtures of picture and script with any fidelity. The next time you hear some wise guy say that only “loser poets” self-publish or self-print (which becomes more possible after the development of photocopying), always cite the counterexample of Blake. It is hard for us to understand now how unacceptable Blake once was. S. FOSTER DAMON, who was my great teacher at college, told me that when he was a graduate student at Harvard after World War I, students typically responded to the mention of Blake’s name with “Oh, he was crazy,” swiftly terminating all discussion of his work. In response, Damon wrote the first major book on Blake’s work in America (in 1924), showing its ultimate consistencies by a systematic study of Blake’s idiosyncratic mythology. More than 150 years after his death (and nearly a century after Damon’s first Blake book), this British artist’s work remains incompletely observed. In his preface to The Illuminated Blake (1974), David V. Erdman (1911– 2001) writes that, even after years of lecturing on Blake’s “pictorial language,” he was shocked to make further discoveries: “that there were numerous animal and human forms of punctuation that I had not noticed at all! Nor was their presence or absence unimportant in the drama of the work, not to mention the choreography.” Precisely because Blake’s handwritten words and pictures were physically separate (and he neither found shape in words alone nor considered fragmenting language), he is not a progenitor of VISUAL POETRY,

50 • BLANC, MEL for 60 strings divided into 20 groups, 5 percussion groups, guitar, alto saxophone, 3 tape tracks derived from recitations of the Song of Solomon (1968); Contrapunto espacial IV, “Boomerang,” for 10 actors, 5 instrumental groups, tape (1970);

PATTERN POETRY, Or CONCRETE POETRY, as they are understood here. Rather, successors to his example include KENNETH PATCHEN and, curiously, photographers such as DUANE MICHALS, among many others, who handwrite highly personal captions to their work. Don’t be surprised by Blake’s influence on photographers, most of whom are, of necessity, likewise self-printers, at least in beginning the distribution of their work.

and so on. Blanco successfully developed electroacoustic music in a country where new technologies were not abundant but scarce,

BLANC, MEL

BLAST

(30 May 1908–10 July 1989; b. Melvin Jerome Blank)

(1914–15)

Beginning as a musician, Blanc became in the heyday of American radio comedy “the man of a thousand voices,” because he could do imitations, at once credible and ironic, of nearly anything that made a distinctive sound. He could imitate pets; he could reproduce innumerable national accents; for The Jack Benny Show he mimicked the sound of a sputtering car – a stunt for which I know no precedent. For cartoons such as TEX AVERY’s Bugs Bunny series, Blanc made animals speak English with nuances that reflected their animal nature. For many cartoons, he spoke all the voices, giving each character a sound unique to him, her, or it. Perhaps the surest measure of his extraordinary talents is that, even after his death, there has been no one quite like him, though many opportunities remain for anyone with such verbal dexterity to display his or her stuff.

Edited and published by WYNDHAM LEWIS, this was commonly regarded as the most advanced English-language magazine of its time. When its two issues were republished in America in 1981, Blast still looked advanced, if only for typographical deviance greater than that developed, say, at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. MARSHALL MCLUHAN paid homage to both the spirit and design of Blast with his Counterblast (1969, designed by Harley Parker [1915–92]), a manifesto for Canadian cultural independence. With its large page size (12 inches by 9½ inches), “bright puce colour” cover, crudely uneven large typefaces, and extra space between paragraphs and graphic “designs,” as they were called in the table of contents, Blast represented British VORTICISM in both form and content. Never before had so much abstract visual art been presented in a British magazine. Among the contributors to the second number were GAUDIER-BRZESKA, T. S. ELIOT (with his first British publication), EZRA POUND, Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939, under the name F. M. Hueffer), and the editor, Wyndham Lewis, who also contributed illustrations. The principal criticism made in retrospect is that Lewis’s contributions made everyone else’s seem less radical, as perhaps they were. Lewis later edited another magazine that had three issues, The Enemy (1927–29), while John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press, in the course of reissuing facsimiles of the two Blasts in the early 1980s, produced Blast 3 (1986), which contains, among other things, previously unpublished letters from Lewis to Pound and a oncesuppressed extended essay on Lewis by the British poet Roy Campbell (1902–57).

BLANCO, JUAN (29 June 1919–5 November 2008). By common consent, the most distinguished Cuban composer of his generation, Blanco is best respected for music that is channeled to many loudspeakers distributed over a space. Visiting Puerto Rico in 1990, I heard of a tape work designed to be played through speakers distributed throughout a hospital, among other radical departures in the presentation of contemporary music. John Vinton’s Dictionary of Contemporary Music (1974) describes these works by Blanco, often encouraging live performers to compliment his tapes: Contrapunto espacial I for organ with 3 wind groups, 4 percussion groups distributed throughout the space to make triangular and rhomboidal floor patterns (1965–1966); Poema especial No. 3, “Viet-Nam,” sound-light composition for 4 tape tracks distributed live to 37 loudspeakers (c. 1968–); Contrapunto especial II, “Erotofonías,”

BLOM, AUGUST (26 December 1869–10 January 1947) The British film critic Vernon Young (1912–86) suggests that before Griffith this Dane, who started

BODIN, LARS-GUNNAR •

filmmaking in 1906, discovered “the art of cutting to express simultaneity of action in an artistically sustained film sequence” in Atlantis (1913). He quotes James Card in Image (G. Eastman House, 1956) on Atlantis as: “a film in every technical respect superior to any other motion picture in the world that has been preserved for study from the year 1913.” A fictional account of a doomed ocean liner, produced a year after the sinking of the Titanic, told through a day in the life of its passengers. By the 1920s, after producing scores of silent shorts, Blom retired from film directing and later ran a movie house in his native Copenhagen.

BLUEPRINT FOR A COUNTER EDUCATION (1970, 2016) If the basic measure of an avant-garde classic is appreciation long after its initial appearance, then the Blueprint for a Counter Education scores. In 1970 this “book” came in a slipcased box, 8½ inches by 11 inches, that contained a single perfect bound book and three posters, each 37½ inches by 45 inches, that were folded into the open-ended package. As its subject was the radical thought new in the late 1960s, Counter Education became a guide to certain advanced ideas reflecting Herbert Marcuse, the post-Marxist immigrant philosopher on one side, and MARSHALL MCLUHAN, the Canadian Catholic media guru on the other. The implicit agenda was connecting admirers of the former, commonly called New Left, with the latter’s, remembered as Hippies. Nearly fifty years later, Blueprint for a Counter Education was reprinted, intact, likewise in an open-sided box, with the addition of second perfect bound paperback containing an interview with its original creators, both retired professors of sociology, the more prominent, Maurice Stein (1926), surviving past 90. Also reflected here was the radical curriculum of a new American higher institution, funded by the estate of WALT DISNEY, who had died only a few years before – California Institute of the Arts, commonly called not CIA, thankfully, but CAL ARTS. There Maurice Stein had been hired as the founding dean of “The School of Critical Studies,” to recall an epithet that would have been unimaginable only a few years before, but has become more common since. This origin accounts not just for its focus on the intersections of art, design, and sociology but also for its limitations, measured by disinterest in, say, music and literary avant-garde at the time.

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As a book in a box accompanied by posters, Blueprint would still rank as first-rate BOOK-ART that would, yes, come as a surprise from any publisher. When I reviewed this reissued in 2016, I wondered what (if any) current books might be so appreciatively reprinted nearly forty-six years (that’s 2062!) later?

BLUM, EBERHARD (14 February 1940–5 March 2013) An accomplished flutist specializing in contemporary music, raised in East Germany, long resident in (West) BERLIN, Blum also became the most adept performer at reciting certain infamously difficult modern texts, such as KURT SCHWITTERS’s The Ursonate, Erust Jandl’s German translation of JOHN CAGE’s 45’ for Speaker, and RICHARD KOSTELANETZ’s Stringsieben (1981), among others. It is not just a matter of other performers not approaching his level; few can even begin to recite these pieces. Many composers wrote pieces especially for him to declaim or flute. His visual art with words, letters, numbers, and geometrical forms, though not his music, earned him membership in Berlin’s highly selective Akademie der Kunst.

BOCCIONI, UMBERTO (19 October 1882–17 August 1916) More successfully than other painters associated with ITALIAN FUTURISM, most of whom contributed to the “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters” (1910), Boccioni tried to portray movement, realizing abstract fields that suggest the unprecedented busyness of modern life. Intentionally eschewing horizontals and vertical, he portrayed swirling shapes, sometimes with such specific titles as Dynamism of a Soccer Player (1913). His sculptures, while initially seeming more fixed, also represent increasing speed. Boccioni died at the beginning of World War I not from warfare or, say, the 20th-century accidents of a plane or car crash but from falling off a horse. (How 18th century!) As Boccioni was the most advanced of the Italian Futurist artists, speculating about what he might have accomplished, had he survived, is a fertile exercise.

BODIN, LARS-GUNNAR (15 July 1935) As a Swede attuned to the international avantgarde from his professional beginnings, Bodin wrote

52 • BODY ART experimental poetry, produced MIXED-MEANS THEATER, and interviewed JOHN CAGE at length before focusing upon electro-acoustic composition. His tapes have appeared on radio, disks, and in mixedmedia presentations that include song, dance, and even visual art. I find in some of his later works a narrative quality that suggests acoustic fiction, which is to say a story composed entirely of a sequence of sounds. For many years the chief of EMS, the Stockholm Institute of Electro-Acoustic Music, he received in the 1990s a state stipend that will keep him an independent artist, literally a Swedish treasure, for the rest of his life.

BODY ART See TATTOOING.

BÖHM, HARTMUT

lipogram excludes a single letter (usually a vowel) from the text, but in this book, each poem uses only one of the five vowels of English, along with all manner of consonants. Within this constraint, he writes five poems that also include the rules that each poem must refer to the act of writing and, as Bök says, “describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage.” A later Bök’s project is the Xenotext, in which he tries to encode poems as sequences of DNA into Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium that can survive even in deep space. The goal of this project is to store poems in a durable genetic repository that can outlast not only the poet but also the poet’s own life form. Bök is also an accomplished sound poet, his control of his voice and the sounds it makes being as rigid and rich as his control of words on the page and screen – or in the genome of a bacterium floating in the void of space. —Geof Huth

(19 April 1938) The principle of this German artist’s work is geometric images whose differences point to infinity. He works with systematic directionality in squares and lines, both in two dimensions and three. For instance, in the striped relief, Streifenrelief 10 (1972/76), the vertical bars become increasingly protuberant in a progression that, if extended beyond the frame, would go to infinity. In a series of floor sculptures, Progression gegen Unendlich (Progression toward Infinity) (1974), the opening figure resembles the letter L. In succeeding sculptures, the vertical line folds diagonally down and sideways until the ends barely touch, implicitly suggesting (but not realizing) the conclusion of infinite flatness. The Viennese critic Dieter Bogner (1942) attributes to Böhm “the desire to reveal the relations between the elements as carriers of content.” Since the theme of infinity is at once implicit and ephemeral, his work could be characterized as CONCEPTUAL.

BÖK, CHRISTIAN (10 August 1966) Born Christian Book, which he has said is the equivalent of being named “The Bible,” this poet modified the spelling of his surname to Bök, at least for the purposes of poetry. Bök has written a few volumes of intense poetry, all of which are created via the imposition of extreme constraints, in the fashion of a modernday Oulipian. His most famous book is Eunoia, which consists primarily of univocalic lipograms. A standard

BOLOTOWSKY, ILYA (1 July 1907–22 November 1981) From his native Russia he came to American as a teenager and attended the National Academy of Design. Influenced initially by the biomorphic abstraction of Joan Miro in the 1930s, he made in 1936 for the Williamsburg Housing Project in New York City one of the first abstract murals. (It was on loan in the 1990s to the Brooklyn Museum.) Meeting PIET MONDRIAN when the latter immigrated to New York in the early 1940s, Bolotowsky turned to geometric abstraction after World War II, favoring yet more rigorous horizontal/vertical fields typically limited to primary colors, sometimes in varying shades. By 1950 Bolotowsky introduced circular (aka tondo) and diamond-shaped canvases followed by ovals and other unusual geometries. In the 1960s, he began to make elegant sculptures that had straight sides and were painted with his SIGNATURE colors. The orderly progress of his career was ended prematurely with his unfortunate fatal fall down an elevator shaft. His son Andrew B. [1949] became a distinguished American flutist, accomplished with avant-garde as well as traditional musics (e.g., his exemplary solo flute performances of J. S. BACH’s six Cello Suites).

BONSET, I. K. See VAN DOESBURG, Theo.

BORGLUM, GUTZON •

BONTECOU, LEE (15 January 1931) In his richly insightful essay on “The Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde” (1969), MICHAEL KIRBY notes, It should not be surprising that even the artists who are involved with the avant-garde do not agree among themselves about the artistic worth of particular pieces. (I can think of only two artists whose work as a whole has achieved an even approximately unanimous acceptance, for however brief a time, among my many friends and acquaintances who are artists.) Though he did not identify them, it was clear to me, reading that essay at the time, that one example was CLAES OLDENBURG around 1966; the other, Kirby had to tell me, was Lee Bontecou around 1960. Bontecou had made fairly large wall-mounted sculptures, with cloth swatches leading from the bottom edges to a large dark hole in the middle. The image echoed jetengine exhausts, with an added hint of soft female sexuality; it was radically original for sculpture.The most familiar in my experience is mounted in the lobby of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, where, perhaps 20 feet long, it never ceases to impress me every time I have viewed it over the decades. She remains an example of an artist whose strongest work is remembered, even if avantgarde for only a brief moment in the time of modernist art, even though she continued to produce art.

BOOK-ART This is my preferred epithet for what is more commonly called ARTIST’s BOOKS because B-A describes the character of work, which is arts history, rather biographical origins, which belongs to journalistic merchandizing.

BORETZ, BENJAMIN See RANDALL, J. K.

BORGES, JORGE LUIS (24 August 1899–14 June 1986) A prolific Argentinian writer who was by turns both decidedly avant-garde and self-consciously

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conventional, Borges was educated in Europe (and buried in Geneva) and so always read English and French in the original. He is best treasured for a group of short stories that he called Ficciones (1944; rev. 1961). Written in forms typical of expositions (e.g., a critical article, a librarian’s report, a footnoted scholarly essay, a writer’s obituary), these fictions portray as they exemplify the primacy of the imagination. One is about a man who discovers in his edition of an encyclopedia an imaginary country previously unknown to him or anyone else. The classic Borges is “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” which appears to be a sober, straight-forward obituary of a writer whose “admirable ambition was to produce [out of his own head] pages which would coincide – word for word and line for line – with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” In one of the shrewdest passages, the narrator shows how the same words that might have been obscure in the 16th century become in the 20th century a meditation on William James. What begins as a complicated joke raises critical questions about authenticity, professional integrity, interpretation, and much else. Like another book that it resembles, Pale Fire (1962) by his exact contemporary Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1997), Ficciones broaches subtleties that many readers miss.

BORGLUM, GUTZON (25 March 1867–6 March 1941; b. John G. de la Mothe B.) Born in Idaho, he studied in Paris along with his brother Solon Hannibal B. (1868–1922), both becoming sculptors. Whereas the latter favored animals, Borglum made his name with outdoor civic memorials, stylistically importing Auguste Rodin (1871–1958) to America, beginning with The Wars of America (1925–25) in Newark, NJ, culminating with the colossal heads of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt for Mount Rushmore (1927–41), which is a monument in South Dakota on the scale of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers. Kitschiness notwithstanding, these heads are awesome, even in reproduction, and are remembered if only for grandiose distinction. A feisty colleague, Borglum resigned from the group that had organized the sculpture section of the Armory Show, before leaving New York. He worked with politicians, among other types customarily avoided by artists, and, to produce his monuments, overcame daunting obstacles that would have defeated a less determined colleague. His family must have loved him, as most of the early books about his career were written by his descendants.

54 • BORGMANN, DMITRI BORGMANN, DMITRI (22 October 1927–7 December 1985) Brilliant to a fault, he invented what came to be called recreational linguistics, which is to say the appreciation of peculiar qualities in words. His Language on Vacation (1967), which I read soon after its publication, introduced to me (and no doubt to others) to a whole new domain – “Orthographical Oddities,” to quote its subtitle – that I thought poetic and others regarded as just literate fun. Rather than merely reprinting puzzles, which was the stuff of earlier word-play books, Borgmann critically introduces palindromes, anagrams, transpositions, and much else indigenous to words. Indicatively, more favorable reviews appeared in Scientific American and the like than in literary journals. As the acknowledged “Father of Logology,” Borgmann also founded the journal Word Ways (1968) that still thrives a half-century later. More commercially minded then most, Borgmann was later hired to invent brand-names, such as Exxon for Standard Oil (for $10,000, reportedly), and developed a ghost-writing business in SE Washington State before dying young.

BORY, JEAN-FRANÇOIS (2 May 1938) By the late 1960s, Bory had established himself as the master of visual fiction, which is to say images – in his case customarily including words – that suggest narrative through the transitions from page to page. He made the rectangular page, rather than the sentence or the paragraph, the basic unit of fictional exposition. In “Spot” (1967), for instance, the same image of miscellaneous letters is progressively magnified over seven right-hand pages until the page is all but entirely blackened by just a portion of the middle letter. This inundating image becomes an ironic inversion of the otherwise progressive process of magnification (in a form similar to EUGÈNE IONESCO’s ironically linear The New Tenant, in which the room fills up with so many objects that the new occupant is smothered). “Spot,” like later Bory visual fictions, is neat and clean (and thus graphic) rather than handmade (or painterly). In his classic collection, Post-Scriptum (1970), is longer visual fiction, a novella if you will, “Saga,” in which the phrase On y Pa, or “One Gets By,” is superimposed over background photographs. Its twentyeight pages portray a descent into a mysterious realm, where images are forbidding and unclear, and vaguely perceptible letters are scrambled. The reader then encounters surreal maps, where places are renamed as

parts of speech, only to emerge at the conclusion with an image identical to that at the beginning. When I first read “Saga,” I wrote, “Within less than thirty pages, in sum, is all the material and linear experience of a silent movie or, perhaps a novel.” Decades later, I am no less impressed. Bory also coedited with JULIEN BLANE the seminal periodical Approches (1966–69). Later he has exhibited word-based objects.

BOULEZ, PIERRE (26 March 1925–5 January 2016) Why is he here? As a composer, Boulez incorporated avant-garde developments into more familiar structures, always rationalizing what might otherwise be perceived as steps backward with claims to independence and individuality, pretending that his conservative opportunism should be regarded as avant-garde. NICOLAS SLONIMSKY writes, “He specifically disassociated himself from any particular modern school of music.” As a musical director, beginning with Domaine Musical in Paris in 1953 and later with the New York Philharmonic (1971–78) and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Boulez tended to include avantgarde works without favoring them. That perhaps accounts for why his interpretations tend to be neither excellent nor eccentric. In 1974, the French government appointed him chief of the Institut de Recherche & Coordination Acoustique/Musique, called IRCAM (commonly pronounced “ear-com”), which purportedly does something incomparably futuristic, although those results publicly released seem less than expected or promised. As a conductor of more traditional musics, he was very enterprising with several orchestras, producing tapes of the modern orchestral repertoire along with Richard Wagner operas. The disks earned him over two dozen Grammy awards. Boulez’s unending assumption of seats of power forced dependent colleagues to be respectful; but now that he’s gone, don’t be surprised to see his reputation fall and his work be forgotten.

BOURGEOIS, LOUISE (25 December 1911–31 May 2010) Bourgeois had a remarkably long artistic career. Over the course of it, she practiced drawing, painting, and, finally, sculpture, to which she exclusively devoted her efforts since the late 1940s.A mercurial artist, Bourgeois was the very model of an independent creator. She was responsible for developing an impressive breadth of

BRAITHWAITE, W. S. •

new sculptural forms and styles devised to express her personal concerns. Her imagery ranged from the purely abstract to the overtly sexual; her materials from the traditional marble, bronze, and wood to rubber, fabric, and found objects; her themes from oblique and richly suggestive symbolism, the meaning of which is impossible to nail down, to politically blatant and doctrinaire statements. Her most influential and best-known work is the savage Destruction of the Father (1974), a large and cavernous environment filled with globules that line the floor and ceiling, suggesting either the absorption of the masculine into the womb-like image of the feminine, or the mastication of everything organic in the jaws of the masculine. Ultimately, her single and unchanging subject was psychological complexity, and the varied and contradictory interpretations many of her works permit serve only to heighten their effectiveness and impact. Bourgeois’s continually changing manner defied art historical analysis and testified to the indomitable nature of the individual imagination, free of the currents of stylistic innovation that surrounded her. She was an artist sui generis, entirely selfdetermined; to many, the woman herself may be her own most significant creation. —Mark Daniel Cohen

BRAAK, MENNO TER (26 January 1902–14 May 1940) Braak and EDGAR DU PERRON were the principal Dutch literary critics of their era, very much predisposed to the avant-garde developments introduced by PAUL VAN OSTAIJEN, among other immediate predecessors. They collaborated in starting the periodical Forum (1932–35), which made the radical move of renouncing the division between Dutch and Flemish (Belgian) literature, and thus acknowledged the importance of the Belgian-born van Ostaijen to Holland. They also introduced polemics into a smug cultural scene, beginning with a critique of pretentious and verbose language. The more artistic Du Perron influenced the more intellectual Ter Braak. “What Forum stood for, and what its creators practiced,” writes the American professor E. M. Beekman (1939–2008, also their translator), “left a lasting impression on Dutch literary and intellectual life. It prepared the Dutch artist for the rapid changes of the contemporary world and dispelled from Holland’s intellectual life a smothering nationalism.” On the day that the Nazis conquered Holland, 14 May 1940, Braak committed suicide and du Perron coincidentally died of a heart attack, perhaps within the same hour.

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BRADSHAW, DOVE (24 September 1949) An adventurous artist who has worked with various experimental processes, she is best remembered for an extraordinary conceptual move she made in 1976. In New York’s Metropolitan Museum, she claimed a fire hose as her own work simply by posting next to it a label with her name. Taking the next step, she then photographed the labeled fire hose and reproduced the image on a postcard that she then stealthily placed in the Met’s museum store. Later the Met purchased her photograph, naturally titled “Fire Extinguisher,” which was deposited in its permanent collection, implicitly collaborating with Bradshaw in elevating the esthetic status of her resonant gesture. Don’t try this yourself, may I warn, because you’ll be accused not of genius but plagiarism that will land your effort in some garbage can. The adventurous work of her husband William Anastasi (1933) isn’t so easily nailed.

BRAITHWAITE, W. S. (1878–8 June 1962; b. William Stanley B.) Book anthologies of the best literature published from the previous year are now so plentiful that it’s hard to imagine that someone invented the genre, certainly in America, perhaps everywhere. Back in 1913, Braithwaite, a self-educated Guianese-American typesetter residing in Boston, published solely under his own name an Anthology of Magazine Verse and Year Book of American Poetry, partially at his own expense. Ever thicker annuals continued to appear from various marginal publishers through World War I until 1929. By 1926 his Anthology opened with 187 pages of articles preceding nearly 500 pages of poetry, following by 156 pages of appendices and “A Biographical Dictionary of Poets in the United States” for 43 pages. (In 1958 came an anthology of Braithwaite’s selections from the earlier books. I treasure the complete run that I own.) One of Braithwaite’s ulterior motives was establishing an East Coast competitor to the periodical Poetry (1913) that was edited out of Chicago. I can recall my own teacher. S. FOSTER DAMON, telling me around 1960 how important inclusion in Braithwaite’s annuals was to him. Successors to Braithwaite include O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 whose anthologies have appeared annually into the 21st century. The annual The Best American Short Stories began in 1915. Not until 1988 did a Best American Poetry appear. By the 21st century, the superlative moniker prefaces

56 • BRAKHAGE, STAN annual anthologies of essays, travel writing, sports writing, “Nonrequired Reading,” Pushcart Prizes, etc., too much of which, alas, is not likely to appear between book covers ever again. Such a publishing flood did Braithwaite single-handedly spawn. One distinguishing mark of his pioneering anthologies is elaborate appendices listing by title other choice poems from the previous year, major magazine articles about poetry, the names with addresses of magazines publishing poetry, one-person collections, etc. These lists Braithwaite apparently compiled by himself without the assistance of graduate students, his seven children, or subsidies from outside benefactors, or computers. A generous literary saint he surely was.

BRAKHAGE, STAN (14 January 1933–9 March 2003) He ranked from the 1950s forward among the foremost American independent filmmakers, producing an abundance of films of various lengths and of differing qualify, all in a subjective style uniquely his. With perhaps as many as three hundred discrete titles, his work in sum represented the most profound personal oeuvre ever in the 20th-century medium and, more particularly, his efforts through highly enhanced realism to portray common experience as possible only in film. The best definition of this Brakhage SIGNATURE appears in a book by a Canadian filmmaker nearly a generation younger, R. Bruce Elder (1947). Rather than steal, I quote: His films typically employ intense, expressionistic camera movements, frequent use of extremely close camera positions, rapid cutting between shots having contrasting attributes, and complex rhythmic structures created by the conjoint effect of the cutting and the camera movement and the movement of shots’ object matter. The style forged from these devices tends to rivet the spectator’s attention to the screen. Brakhage’s works are so rapidly passed and have so much intensity that viewers must give their entire attention to the task of grasping what occurs in the very instant of its happening. True as this description is, Elder also identifies an implication for the audience: “Spectators of a Brakhage film are fascinated spectators, absorbed completely in the given moment; they occupy a realm without any temporal extension, for in it everything exists in a timeless present.” Typically he shot a film of his wife giving birth and in others often included his five children all

in their Rocky Mountain cabin. To the critic J. Hoberman (1948), “These were home movies raised to the zillionth power – silent and rhythmic, based on an invented language of percussive shifts in exposure or focus, multiple superimpositions, refracted light, and staccato camera moves.” Given the alternative nature of his work, Brakhage was particularly effective at the filmmaker’s version of a poetry reading, where he traveled to presentational venues with his films, presenting them as a legendarily brilliant talker to generally sympathetic audiences. Necessarily, the strong talker was also a strong writer.

BRANCUSI, CONSTANTIN (19 February 1876–16 March 1957) Apprenticed to a cabinetmaker, Brancusi studied art, first in Bucharest and then in Munich, finally reaching Paris in 1904. Though his initial work reflected first the influence of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), and he then created faces resembling those in AMADEO MODIGLIANI’s (1884–1920) work, Brancusi finally concentrated on abstract sculpture, which he thought captured the “essence” of things beneath surface characteristics. After 1910, Brancusi established the principles of carving everything himself, rather than employing craftsmen, and working without prior clay models. As a proto-MINIMALIST, Brancusi favored simple abstract shapes, one barely different from another, sometimes duplicating in polished bronze shapes that he had previously done in wood, or vice versa. He thought of his sculptures as beings – his thin verticals, for instance, as birds, thicker horizontals as fishes. “I live in a desert,” he once declared, “alone with my animals.” His most ambitious image was the Endless Column, whose first version, 23 feet high, was carved in wood in 1920; in Romania in 1937, he made a cast iron Endless Column nearly 100 feet tall. Brancusi struck his contemporaries as being in touch with spiritual currents not available to normal people. In spite of his penchant for replicating his work, his work and career have come to represent a higher standard of professional integrity. Sidney Geist’s monograph, subtitled “A Study of the Sculpture” (1967, 1983), is exemplary.

BRANDT, HENRY (15 September 1913–26 April 2008) Born in Montreal to American parents, Brandt went south with his family in 1929 and studied privately, as few did, with GEORGE ANTHEIL. Radical from his compositional beginnings, Brandt produced Angels and

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Devils (1933), still regarded as remarkable, because, true to its subtitle (“for a Merry Murmuration of Innumerable Flutes”), it sets a solo flute against an infinite number of background flutes. Another early piece, 5 & 10 Cent Store Music (1932), is explicitly scored for “Violin, Piano, and Kitchen Utensils,” just as his later Machinations (1970) requires “flageolet, double ocarina, ceramic flute, sell harp, and what have you.” In addition to discovering unusual timbres through massing a single instrument or including unconventional sound sources, Brandt, beginning with Rural Antiphonies (1953), also distributed musicians, often generous in number, over wide spaces both inside large halls and outdoors. Nonetheless, writing about him is surprisingly scarce.

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name from the dark homemade bread that its members shared with audiences after each performance and from the use of stick puppets. Their spectacle-styled pieces are usually narrated by someone who controls the sound, while the puppets, usually quite large, often require several people to manipulate them. I have seen them work in churches as well as outdoors, with and for both adults and children, often recruiting performers on the spot during tours. The theater historian Theodore Shank reports that by 1981 Schumann “had created well over a hundred productions.” Many of the works are political parables that incorporate mythical figures and biblical images. Typical titles include The Twelve Stations of the Cross (1972), Christmas Story (1967, 1974), and A Monument for Ishi – An Anti-Bicentennial Pageant (1975). Even the principals of CIRQUE DE SOLEIL have acknowledged its influence.

(4 June 1945) I’d love to do a coherent entry on this African-American whose music straddles both jazz and classical worlds, who studied philosophy as well as music, who has worked as both a touring musician and a tenured. professor; but, in truth, it (and he) has resisted my efforts at encapsulation. Bits and pieces of his work are impressive, beginning with his prose writings (until they fall into jargon, mysticism, or incomprehensibility) and his visually imaginative scores. Initially hailed as a brilliant alto saxophonist, he also performed on the other saxophones, along with the contrabass clarinet, and several percussion instruments, sometimes within a single concert. As far as I can tell, his music at various times includes not only improvisation (with Braxton himself a virtuoso) by himself or with musicians descending from both classical and jazz, but open forms in the tradition of EARLE BROWN, scored compositions (For Four Orchestras [1978]), minimalist music, and moves that defy description, all with an ambition (if not pretention) that resembles KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN’s. He was hailed at the beginning of his career, around 1970s, by critics who identified him as a likely successor to John Coltrane, only to drop him by 1980. Nearly three decades ago, I wrote: “By the time the next edition of this Dictionary is written, I’ll either understand his art better or not at all.” Nope, alas.

BREAD AND PUPPET THEATER (1962) Formed by Peter Schumann (1934), a German refugee then living in lower Manhattan, the company took its

BRECHT, GEORGE (27 August 1926–5 December 2008) Trained in science, he worked initially as a qualitycontrol supervisor and research chemist before becoming an artist. After studying with JOHN CAGE at the New School in 1958 and 1959, he participated in FLUXUS activities organized by GEORGE MACIUNAS. Brecht’s first innovation was a particular kind of minimal text, some of which were headlined “events.” The Book of the Tumbler in Fire (1978) is a self-retrospective of works from 1962. The critic Henry Martin (1942) writes: The internal logic of George Brecht’s work is entirely impossible to describe, since his problem as an artist is always and only to work towards an intuitive grasp of the problems of knowledge and awareness that are central to his own individual being in the universe. Brecht also coedited with the British artist Patrick Hughes (1939) an unprecedented anthology composed wholly of paradoxes. As an American living in Germany, this Brecht is more truly avant-garde than another writer with the same surname, more commercial in his orientation, a German who lived for a while in America.

BRECHT, STEFAN (3 November 1924–13 April 2009)

58 • BRETON, ANDRÉ Odd it is that the son of a Communist playwright stayed in the USA while his famous father and certain other siblings immigrated to that section of BERLIN later central to East Germany. Whereas his half-sister Barbara Brecht (1930–2015) inherited her father’s theatrical company (in a culture faithful not to God but to nepotism), Stefan B. took his undergraduate degree at UCLA and a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard University (1959) and, thanks portions of his father’s royalties, pursued an independent career in downtown Manhattan. Notwithstanding Stefan B.’s work in poetry and documentary photography, his most monumental work was awesomely meticulous documentation of PERFORMANCE theater, initially in his book The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (1972), but later in Queer Theatre (1987). Perhaps because these long detailed texts were too unprecedented for American publishers, they were issued in English by Suhrkamp, which happened to be his father’s German publisher.

BRETON, ANDRÉ (19 February 1896–28 September 1966) After initially participating in Paris DADA, Breton broke with TRISTAN TZARA and became the founder and self-styled “pope” of SURREALISM. Primarily a novelist and theoretical polemicist, he was a physically imposing figure whose manifestos formulated and reformulated the Surrealist esthetic. As a literary radical, Breton preached the virtues of “automatic writing” (purportedly without conscious control) and of the “exquisite corpse,” which was his term for collaboration, both of which he thought were psychologically enriching. He edited collections that are still useful, including Anthologie de l’humour noir (1940), which discovers Surrealist precursors in Jonathan Swift, G. C. Lichtenberg, Charles Fourier, Thomas de Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, and LEWIS CARROLL, among others, creating the attractive image of an underground, proto-Surrealist tradition dating back several centuries. Authoritarian in temper, Breton convened his followers daily at certain Parisian cafés. Exiled in the US during World War II, he refused to learn English and, after the war ended, returned to France. His claims to earlier Parisian authority were initially undermined by the new postwar fashion called existentialism. Breton’s negative example perhaps accounts for why the notion of a selfconscious artists’ group has never had much currency in the United States in general and in New York in particular. Breton’s creative writings, once so prominent, are now forgotten – his novels no less than his poetry.

BRITANNICA, ENCYCLOPEDIA (1768) Some decades ago, an individual entry here was thought to be the ultimate elite recognition that could be earned from strangers. (No one could butt-kiss judges whose identities were unknown.) It still might be, though more popular and inclusive compendia such as WIKIPEDIA have so undermined its biz that EB no longer publishes books that were treasured. This is unfortunate, because EB is still more discriminating, given that its selection criterion is, simply, what will last. (This measure I learned from a distinguished professor on its advisory board whom I first met more than a half-century before as a fellow counselor at a summer camp!) Even within entries on individuals, its writers are particularly sharp at identifying which of a subject’s many available works is most likely to survive. Because WIKIPEDIA is compiled by volunteers, who chose to write about certain subjects without remuneration, an individual entry there essentially reflects the measure that someone admired the subject enough to begin an entry and then that others might have contributed to the entry. At Britannica, by contrast, entries on individuals are written by staffers who until recently were anonymous. The measure appears to be that some staffer thought enough of the survival power of a certain subject to draft an entry approved by higher authorities at EB. Therefore, it is scarcely surprising that among the individuals recognized in this book with an individual entry also deserving individual recognition in EB include MILTON BABBITT, KENNETH BURKE, SAMUEL R. DELANY, MORTON FELDMAN, HUGH KENNER, KENNETH KOCH, THOMAS MERTON, MEREDITH MONK, THELONIUS MONK, NAM JUNE PAIK, KENNETH REXROTH, ROGER SESSIONS, CECIL TAYLOR, VIRGIL THOMSON, NATHANIEL WEST, and LOUIS ZUKOFSKY. All of them, in my judgment as well, have produced work that, though once avant-garde, will indeed last.

BROODTHAERS, MARCEL (28 January 1924–28 January 1976) He was such a unique artist that he belongs less for individual works than for his career. Deciding at the age of 39 that his well-respected experimental poetry was insufficient, this Belgian invaded the ART WORLD with a series of resonant GESTURES. He entombed fifty unsold copies of his last book of poems in plaster casts. For his gallerist he provided a statement: “The

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idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway.” He later assembled objects to which he added texts. As these earned a receptive audience, he began by the late 1960s to produce larger pieces that sharply challenge the concept of a museum. In the ground floor of his Brussels house he opened Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (1968), that had different images of birds in glass cases all accompanied by this sign: “This is not a work of art.” Thus did Broodthaers function as the artist, director, curator, resident critic, trustee, and landlord of his own museum, a one-man septuplet, so to speak. More audacious moves followed until Broodthaers died too young. His surname is pronounced brode-tears (as in ripping apart, not weeping).

BROOKLYN BRIDGE (1883) No one believed a river so wide could be spanned until a bridge was completed after over one dozen years of construction and reconstruction. With its massive stone towers and longest span of nearly 500 meters, thanks to the development of spidery spun steel-wire suspension, it exemplified stately beauty, incidentally inspiring major poems by the Russian VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY, the Spaniard Frederico GarciaLorca (1898–1936), and the Americans Walt Whitman (1819–92), Marianne Moore (1887–1972), Hart Crane (1899–1932), and Harvey Shapiro (1924–2013), among others; as well as classic paintings in 1915 by the Frenchman Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) and later several by the Italian American JOSEPH STELLA, and fewer by the American-Americans GEORGIA O’KEEFFE and ROBERT INDIANA; a 1953 film by the Swiss-American RUDY BURCKHARDT; a 1982 audio-video by REYNOLD WEIDENAAR, and memorable photographs particularly by Walker Evans (1903–75) in the initial book publication (1930) of the Hart Crane poem. The fact that no later bridge prompted so much strong writing and visual art becomes a sure measure of Brooklyn’s high esthetic value. Among 19th-century buildings inspiring artists, only the Eiffel Tower (1887–89) in Paris counts close. Within the less known tall vaults beneath the roadway on the Brooklyn side I first saw in the early 1990s the spectacular PERFORMANCE of ELIZABETH STREB. However, in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center (aka 9-11) they’ve been closed. Automobiles going over the bridge’s grated flooring also make a memorably unique sound incorporated by audio artists such as Bill Fontana (1947) and myself.

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BROWN, BOB (14 June 1886–7 August 1959; b. Robert Carlton B., II) Brown is another one of those early 20th-century avant-garde writers whose reputations were lost in the insufficient assimilation of extreme modernism. (Whenever you hear anyone say that “all avant-garde art has been accepted,” point to individuals like Brown, among too many others.) After a peripatetic career as a prolific contributor to popular magazines, a stockmarket speculator, a magazine publisher in South America, and the inventor of a proto-microfilm reader (according to Hugh Ford’s Four Lives in Paris [1987]), Brown became both a “straight” poet and a visual poet. Perhaps because his work in the former vein resembles the informal poetry popularized by the “New York School” in the late 1960s, I would think that anyone reading it today would find the later work fresher. In addition to publishing his own poetry, he edited Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (1931), an anthology that included the more experimental works of many of his contemporaries. Often short of money, Bob Brown also coauthored successful cookbooks with his mother, his sister, and his wife. A biography by Craig Saper, The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown (2016), reflects considerable sleuthing.

BROWN, CHARLES BROCKDEN (17 January 1771–22 February 1810) Consider American fictioneer Charles Brockden Brown’s essay from 1800: “The Difference Between History and Romance.” Whereas historians base narratives upon the certainties of appearances and what is known, “romancers” are interested in probabilities, recognizing patterns of causes and effects. In their curiosity to investigate historical narratives beyond appearances of chronology and fact, romancers are “prone to arrange them anew . . . to infer from the present state of things, their former or future condition” because both textual and social narratives are “indebted to the evidence of others.” To Brown, juxtaposition (cf. COLLAGE) was not only a literary tactic, but a social tool, a proto-psychological means to analyze social interactions, making the romancer’s ethical tactics comparable to 20th-century artistic acts of arrangement. But where 20th-century avant-gardists used collage to decongest consciousness to un-real realities, Brown saw the romancer’s task as teaching all citizen-romancers to create new social probabilities. At base, Brown is known for turning the formulaic historical/gothic romance novel settings of moonlit European

60 • BROWN, EARLE castles into real American geography, using mountains and forests as realistic settings for his fantastic novels. But the social ethic animating his writing (what he also called “moral painting”) concerns appearances created by causes and effects of sentiment, social dictates, morality, and human action. Distilling his Quaker childhood, the reciprocal influence of British Dissenter Culture, and the Friendly Club, a collective of NYC merchant-class social reformers and intellectuals, Brown reconciled didactic aims with invention. He rearranged literary form in the perversely preter-traditional Wieland and Edgar Huntly, interbreeding gothic, historical, and Euroromanticisms with science and precursing late 19thcentury naturalism with effects akin to nature writing and eco-lit. Celebrated by Euro-contemporaries Keats, Coleridge, and the Shelleys, CB Brown was overlooked in America. —Michael Peters

BROWN, EARLE (26 December 1926–2 July 2002) Respecting both JOHN CAGE and ALEXANDER CALDER, Earle Brown developed in the early 1950s graphic notation (eliminating traditional staves) that encouraged both ALEATORY and improvisatory techniques. Folio (1952–53) is actually six compositions in which the performer is instructed to vary the duration, pitch, and rhythm. The score of his December 1952 has black rectangles various in size irregularly arrayed on white pages. Brown’s 25 Pages (1953) is designed to be played by as many as twenty-five pianists, reading the music pages in any desired order and playing the notes upside down or right-side up. Brown’s Available Forms I (1961) and Available Forms II (1962), respectively for chamber ensemble and full orchestra, contain pages of eccentric (but fixed) notation, or “available forms,” which may be sounded in any order, repeated, and combined in varying tempi, all at the spontaneous discretion of the performers. NICOLAS SLONIMSKY finds Brown’s music represents “a mobile assembly of plastic elements in open-ended or closed forms. As a result, his usages range from astute asceticism and constrained constructivism to soaring sonorism and lush lyricism.” Perhaps because Brown favored conventional modernist musical instrumentation, his music sometimes sounds SERIAL, notwithstanding differences in compositional philosophies. As a recording engineer in the 1960s he produced for a label named (ironically?) Mainstream several lp disks influential in later decades.

BROWN, ROBERT DELFORD (25 October 1930–22 March 2009) Trained initially in visual art, imaginative beyond measure, he worked in several media, including performance and photography, prints, and book-art, sculptures and tapestries. Tall, slim, and handsome, he hooked up with a wealthy divorcee who supported his work generously, building for themselves from 1968 to 1970 a palatial studio within a former NEW YORK CITY public library. They rechristened this space on W. 13th Street, near 8th Avenue, probably their single greatest work of art, “The Great Building Crack-Up,” the birthplace of “The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc.,” aka “Funkapaganism,” which stood as a kind of conceptual art based upon the marvelous Yiddish epithet Farblundjet (here Frenchified as “Pharblongence”), which means confused, really confused. Not only was the façade alone sure to attract attention from passersby, but the expansive interior set an early example for ambitious downtown Manhattan artists wanting not only immense interior space but a private gallery with its own entrance to the street. In the mid-1960s, Delford Brown staged prophetic performances inconceivable to anyone else at the time, including one in 1964 in a refrigerated space with loads of meat in the meat-packing district west of Greenwich Village. Thanks to a press agent, the performance attracted not only publicity-responsive people but newspaper reviewers, one of whom wrote: “You could tell it was an [art-world] opening by the stylish clothes the wives of the meat market men were wearing. There was also that restrained, slightly formal tone that one associates with such events.” The reviewer Mary Perot Nichols (1926–1996) continued in The Village Voice: They put on white butcher coats provided by the management, paid their 75 cents contribution, and went inside, through several layers of striped and polka dotted material. The air was scented, according to the program, with one gallon of ‘Strange Moods perfume.’ Inside, the scene – or ‘environment,’ as it was known in art circles – was an eerie red on white. An extra 20 gallons of blood had been thrown in for good measure since, apparently, the arrangements of cows’ heads, kidneys, livers, and other parts did not drip to the artist’s satisfaction. Translucent white lingerie fabric – 660 yards of it – was draped so as to form little chambers within the cooler. The people in white coats stood in small groups around

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the various arrangements of bloody meat hung on meat hooks. Were that not audacious enough, he published in 1967 Hanging, an illustrated chapbook about the effects of hanging on a body; he made “Liver Prints” with actual blood of liver. He had a nurse draw his blood and a Chinese cook fry it before he ate it. Brown produced “Vulva Prints” made from his wife’s menstrual blood. He published a late modernist Ulysses in which his name replaces that of James Joyce in an anthology of reviews of the classic modernist Ulysses. And so on. “In the sixties,” he once told an interviewer, I had the idea of having a chain of shops called “Fake Girl,” which would cater to transvestites and sell hair remover, extreme make-up, high heels and dresses in large sizes, falsies, and wigs – a one-stop shop. I tried to trademark the name, but the U.S. Copyright Office turned me down. The extravagance with which he worked and imagined made him the American analogue of the wealthy Frenchman RAYMOND ROUSSEL. While his work was influential, initially upon the performance artists associated with VIENNA ACTIONISM in the late 1960s, and then upon later artists predisposed to “cutting edge” subject matter, Delford Brown fell between the cracks of art fashions, largely disappearing from art view, especially after his wife died.

BROWN, TRISHA (25 November 1936–18 March 2017) One of several distinguished young dancers associated with the JUDSON DANCE THEATER in the 1960s, Brown made the wit and intelligence of her inquiries the core of her esthetic. Her early works included “equipment pieces” that explored the possibilities of body movements with a variety of supports, such as ropes enabling dancers to “walk” up a vertical wall. For her “accumulation pieces,” Brown developed various strategies for gathering movement material. She frequently incorporated improvisational structures into her works. In later years, her work depended more upon virtuoso dance techniques, rather than ordinary movements. She collaborated with ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG and DONALD JUDD, among others. In the 1990s she choreographed to classical music, even in 1998 directing a production of Claudio

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Monteverdi’s Orfeo. May I (RK) admit to difficulties in distinctively characterizing her art. —with Katy Matheson

BRUCE, NEELY (21 January 1944; b. Frank N. B.) One of seven harpsichordists in the original performance of John Cage’s HPSCHD and the sole pianist on WILLIAM DUCKWORTH’s The Time Curved Preludes, he has also composed dozens of songs (some of them to texts of the more experimental American poets), a four-act opera about the American Revolution, and an eccentrically eclectic oratorio, The Plague (1983), which incorporates a variety of familiar musical styles, both high and low, classical and contemporary, in a way that might be classified as “postmodernist” were not the final result, at least in the British group Electric Phoenix’s recording, so unclassifiable. With typical wit, Bruce speaks of his “eclecticism which is occasionally so extreme as to be virtually incomprehensible.”

BRUCE, PATRICK HENRY (25 March 1881–12 November 1936) An American painter who went to Paris in 1904, he was among the first to enroll in a school founded by HENRI MATISSE. Befriending the DELAUNAYs, among others, he contributed to many Parisian painting exhibitions with his own colorful abstractions with indefinite shapes. His unique achievement was making continuous color attain visual volume. After destroying many of his paintings, leaving only a selection with his friend HENRI-PIERRE ROCHÉ, Bruce returned to the USA, after three decades away, in the mid-1930s. Suffering from profound personal contradictions, brilliantly delineated by the art critic Barbara Rose (1938) in a MoMA appreciation, Bruce committed suicide in New York a few years later. Approximately one hundred of his works survive.

BRUNO, GUIDO (1884–1942; b. Curt Kisch) Among genuine avant-garde artists often wander exploitative hangers-on who imagine that fortunes can thereby be made; they are invariably disappointed. An historical American example was Guido Bruno, a selfpromoter in Greenwich Village before World War I,

62 • BRYARS, GAVIN sometimes dubbed “The Barnum of Bohemia.” From a garret near Washington Square (and the lower Fifth Avenue bus terminal) he published magazines whose titles invariably included his first name: Bruno’s Bohemia, Bruno’s Review of Life, Love, and Literature; Bruno’s Monthly; Bruno’s Weekly; Bruno’s Scrapbook; Bruno’s Review of Two worlds; Greenwich Village Edited by Guido Bruno in His Garret on Washington Square. One of his publications got him arrested, in addition to earning him notoriety. “At the hearing,” writes Andrew Field (1938), “Guido Bruno triumphantly waved a letter of support from George Bernard Shaw before the judge.” Bruno staged a play that strongly advocated birth-control at a time when such sentiments could land one in jail. His motives notwithstanding, Bruno published the initial books of Hart Crane (1899–1932) and DJUNA BARNES, among others, and he became the model for Felix Volkbein in Barnes’s Nightwood.) There have been others like him around the world, invariably doing some valuable work amid their bluster. Though much of what they do is forgettable, they are not forgotten.

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The sole daughter of a British financier reputed at a past time to be the wealthiest Englishman outside the royal family, she took a single moniker (after the smallest of the Scilly islands off southwest Britain) to conceal her identity as an heiress. As a discriminating patron of the avant-garde, she supported many publications, including the pioneering British film journal Close-Up (1927–33) and Contact Editions, which published the more advanced books of GERTRUDE STEIN and Mina Loy, among others. One source credits her with also personally supporting for various times Dorothy Richardson (1873–1957), DJUNA BARNES, and H. D. (1886–1961, b. Hilda Doolittle), with whom Bryer had an extended intimate relationship. After publishing books of criticism of film and literature, she wrote, later in her life, likewise under her pseudonym, several historical novels and two volumes of autobiography. Her principal rival for enlightened British patronage was Nancy Cunard (1896–1965), whose father’s fortune was likewise based in shipping, whose Hours Press published early books by SAMUEL BECKETT and LAURA RIDING, among others. Perhaps one of the principal tragedies of avantgarde American literature has been an absence of comparably enlightened private patronage.

(16 January 1943) Initially known as a jazz bassist working in British improvisation, Bryars became a mysterious figure known only for a few compositions. Some early work depended upon the possibilities for repetition offered by audiotape. Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971) draws upon a London tramp’s a cappella singing of an old English hymn, which is looped to repeat itself and then gradually be accompanied by strings and other instruments. When the only recording of it was long out of print in the 1980s, it became a favorite of American radio stations that like to surprise their audiences, and of avant-garde music buffs who like to shock their friends. The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) repeats in slightly different ways, for well over an hour, tunes reportedly played by the ship’s drowning orchestra. Media (1982) is an opera produced in collaboration with the theater artist ROBERT WILSON. Bryars also founded the PORTSMOUTH SINFONIA of musicians with minimal skills whose sublimely anarchic comic recordings of orchestral warhorses were coproduced by BRIAN ENO.

BUÑUEL, LUIS (22 February 1900–29 July 1983) As a filmmaker who successfully translated SURREALISTIC imagery onto the screen. Buñuel worked originally in conjunction with the artist SALVADOR DALI to create the classic Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog, 1928). True to their faith, they incorporated FREUDian imagery such as the putting out of an eye (from the Oedipal myth) and ants crawling out of the center of a hand. In his later career, Buñuel achieved fame as a social critic in his biting satires of middle-class life, such as The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoise (1972) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974). In these later films, he continued to use dreamlike narratives, discontinuous story lines, and “shocking” imagery, making him the only practitioner of a Surrealist cinema later working on a larger scale.

BURCHFIELD, CHARLES BRYHER (2 September 1894–28 January 1983; b. Annie Winifred Ellerman)

(9 April 1893–10 January 1967) Burchfield’s place in the story of innovative American art is due not to any formal innovations he devised but

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to the distinctiveness of the temperament he infused into his watercolor paintings. A quality of romantic mysticism runs through the principal works of Burchfield. He viewed nature as a source of wonders, fears, and miracles. Beginning in the mid-teens of the century, after undergoing a psychological crisis, influenced by Japanese prints and story book illustrators, such as Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, he developed a style of rendering nature scenes that was flat, decorative, and calligraphic. In his early paintings, nature was a fairy land: fields, country roads, and lines of trees were distorted, such that flowers towered out of all proportion and the wind rode visibly through the night sky, looking like a phantom. Burchfield employed, somewhat crudely, techniques of abstraction, which were already being developed by WASSILY KANDINSKY and ARTHUR DOVE, to render optically the peals of church bells and the sounds of insects as roughly defined geometric forms inserted into his compositions. In the 1930s, Burchfield turned to regional realism, producing very little work of serious interest. But in 1943, he returned to his first preoccupation with nature as an animistic force and a source of religious experience. All in all, he produced intriguing works, but not a single major painting, and it may be wondered whether the depression and obsessive fears he suffered in his youth helped him to make art, or if he was practicing a form of self-therapy that merely resembled art. —Mark Daniel Cohen

BURCKHARDT, RUDY (6 April 1914–1 August 1999) A Swiss who in the mid-1930s immigrated to New York with the dance critic EDWIN DENBY, he quickly befriended many likewise young New York artists who became the subject of his photographs. Thanks to his foresight in saving negatives, he became a principal photographic chronicler of certain people in whom the larger world progressively took a greater interest – JACKSON POLLOCK, WILLEM DE KOONING, et al. – incidentally providing invaluable historical records, sometimes having documented their images that subsequently disappeared. Often on assignment from art magazines in the 1950s, he produced classic photographic portraits of artists at work, or at least thinking about their works. Adept with cameras, Burckhardt also made short films, sometimes in collaboration with more established figures, such as JOSEPH CORNELL. Perhaps because the sum of his activities exceeded individual works, the best introduction to Burckhardt is the book

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Talking Pictures (1994), a superficially casual largeformat volume, over two hundred pages long, that has Burckhardt’s images successively on right-hand pages and relevant passages from the poet Simon Pettet’s elaborate interview on left-hand pages. Few retrospectives are so masterful.

BURDEN, CHRIS (11 April 1946–10 May 2015; b. Christopher Lee B.) In the early 1970s, Burden commanded respectful attention for a series of one-person PERFORMANCE pieces that customarily involved genuine personal risk: He imprisoned himself in a university locker for five days; he crawled on broken glass; he stuck pins into his stomach; he asked a friend to shoot him in the arm; he lay under a tarpaulin on a Los Angeles street; he had himself chained to the floor between bare electrical wires and buckets of water that, if knocked over, might have electrocuted him; and so on. For Transfixed (1974), Burden had himself “crucified” on the back end of a Volkswagen with nails driven through his hands. He subsequently created fuel-efficient, one-person land transports and sculptural pieces with many parts, some of which incorporated political thrusts unpopular in the art world, such as The Reason for the Neutron Bomb (1979), in which 50,000 nickels, each with a match on top, symbolize the number of Soviet tanks on Eastern European borders. Thinking bigger, especially after marrying the sculptor Nancy Rubins (1952) who likewise builds bigger, Burden in 2008 installed in New York’s Rockefeller Center What My Dad Gave Me (2008), which was a pseudo-MAXIMAL skyscraper 65 feet high reportedly made from one million erector-set parts.

BURGESS, ANTHONY (25 February 1917–22 November, 1993; b. John A. B. Wilson) A prolific writer, he authored a large number of ordinary books in addition to a few extraordinary ones. Among the latter, A Clockwork Orange (1962) portrays a future in which unruly teenagers insert Russian words into basically English sentences, or more accurately meld new language with old idiom. On the opening page, the narrator Alex remembers, We sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip

64 • BURGESS, GELETT dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus besto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days. Through such original language Burgess envisioned a violent future. Abba Abba (1977) is a historical novel with the translation of a real historical text. A complete man of letters, he was also a prolific reviewer and even an editor. In this last category, his most remarkable achievement is A Shorter Finnegans Wake (1967), which manages to extract choice passages from Joyce’s essentially nonlinear novel (whose theme of familial conflict is continuously present) to make a shorter Joycean book that is considerably more accessible than the original. Modesty in crediting notwithstanding, this is an extraordinary feat that no one else could have done. Also a trained composer, Burgess produced songs to texts by Shakespeare and himself, in addition to works for conventional instruments, that are rarely played or recorded, either because of or in spite of his literary reputation.

BURGESS, GELETT (30 January 1866–18 September 1951) Burgess suffered from the most heinous effects of ANDY WARHOL’s fifteen minutes of fame, as he is remembered more for a single four-line verse, “The Purple Cow,” written in 1895 (“I never saw a purple cow”), than for anything else he ever did. However, Burgess left his mark permanently on the lexicon of English with such coinages as “blurb” and “bromide.” He even developed a little book of one hundred such coinages, and his use of them represents the next step after LEWIS CARROLL’s “Jabberwocky” toward a fully realized language for new creative expression: for example, “No more tintiddling slobs, like fidgelticks,/ Rizgidgeting your speech, shall lallify;/ But your jujasm, like vorgid gollohix,/ Shall all your waxy meem golobrify!” Early in his career, Burgess edited a few literary magazines, including Le Petit Journal des Refusées, printed on discontinued samples of wallpaper. Although primarily a writer, Burgess also enjoyed building things, including nonsense machines. When in 1910 he showed thirty of his watercolors under the title “Experiments in Symbolistic Psychology,” critics debated (to no apparent resolution) whether the works were serious art or satirical deflations. The truth of this matter should not be important to us. —Geof Huth

BURKE, KENNETH (5 May 1897–11 November 1993) A protean writer who worked steadily in several literary forms from his youth into his mid-nineties, Burke produced in the 1920s and 1930s theoretical treatises that were so “ahead of their time” that they remained continually in print, often from smaller presses whose publishers loved Burke’s work, to be sometimes rediscovered by ever later groups of American literary critics. He became as much a hero to Marxists as he was to the text-oriented “New Critics” so prominent in the 1940s and 1950s, and what Burke had to say is not lost on “Deconstructionists” either. The persistence of his influence has been amazing, given how thick and digressive, and often abstruse and abstract, his critical/theoretical books are. Burke was also a fiction writer and, not surprisingly, an experimental poet whose more unusual works include VISUAL POEMS, called “Flowerishes,” and a proto-CONCEPTUAL poem, “Project for a Poem on [F.D.] Roosevelt,” which is really a suggestive prose outline that succeeds, poetically, on its own terms. Consider the opening of the third section (stanza): New approach. Picture of democracy as it works in business structure. Many conflicts among business interests. Not only conflicts between the hirers, and internecine conflicts among the hired. How tariff may protect one hirer-hired group at the expense of another. How industrial centers as a whole can profit for a time at the expense of agrarian areas. How crooked promoters actually stimulate the speed-up of money (and hence the distribution of goods among all) until the false basis of their promises is disclosed. How wastage serves to promote the common good. Though I have read Burke many times and written on him more than once, I’m sure that a subsequent commentator on avant-garde literature will find departures I’ve missed.

BURLIUK, DAVID (9 July 1882–15 January 1967) As his father managed a Russian estate that became a meeting place for young artists and poets in the first decade of the last century, he had the advantage of growing up if not in, at least around, an ART WORLD. Both a poet and an artist, Burliuk studied painting in

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Munich and Paris before becoming a founder of RUSSIAN FUTURISM. Taking the moniker of Hylaea, after the ancient name for the locality, his associates included KHLEBNIKOV, KRUCHONYKH, and MAYAKOVSKY, all to become prominent Futurist poets. Burliuk compiled and published the group pamphlet, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1912), which includes poems, essays, and an important manifesto with the same title. In 1914, he edited Gazeta futuristov (Newspaper of the Futurists). After temporarily relocating to Japan in 1920, he settled in New York in 1922, in time to welcome Mayakovsky for his sole American visit. Burliuk settled in Eastern Long Island around 1930, surviving as an independent artist, but very much a retired star in exile, publishing with his wife an occasional journal titled Color and Rhyme (1930–66). His brother Vladimir (1886–1917) contributed to many of the same pre-Revolutionary exhibitions before dying in battle near Salonika, Greece. Another brother, Nikolai (1890–1920), a promising Futurist poet, was randomly executed by the Bolsheviks during the Red Terror. So remarkable was the impact of the Burliuk clan on Russian cultural life, that the verb burlyuchit’ (to live and express oneself with a wild abandon) has entered Russian language. Despite the growing interest in Russian Futurism in the post-Soviet era, the Burlyuks’s individual contributions aren’t fully recognized.

BURROUGHS, WILLIAM S.

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different circumstances of publication, as well as different editorial collaborators. Most of Burroughs’s other books are indubitably prosaic in style and structure. Some readers admire his rendering of narcotic experiences, including withdrawal; others, his dark vision; yet others, his love for cats and his homosexual fantasies. All these, while sometimes treasured, have little to do with what has made some of his writing avant-garde.

BURSON, NANCY (24 February 1948) One of the great pioneers of computer-enhanced photography, she initially specialized in composites, superimposing within a single visual frame not one face, as FRANCIS GALTON did a century before, but several faces, say of women movie stars, to define visually certain essences of female beauty. Later developing techniques for changing human faces, she artificially simulated aging to portray someone as they might appear in the future. On the side, so to speak, Burson has also been employed to help identify long-lost children by showing how they might appear as adults, incidentally realizing visually a fictional biography. By the measures of decades ago, this work exemplifies magic that normal photographers can’t do. No wonder that Burson has often patented her processes. As happened in computer-assisted music, later developments by others working with computers made successors forget about the genuine achievements of the pioneer.

(5 February 1914–2 August 1997) An American original, the Harvard-educated scion of a family memorialized on a brand of adding machines, Burroughs came late to literature, beginning with a stylistically undistinguished memoir, Junkie (1953, published under the pseudonym of William Lee). Inspired by his friendship with ALLEN GINSBERG, he dabbled in formal experiments, some of them in collaboration with others, including the mixing of passages drawn from different sources, not only in adjacent paragraphs but in the horizontal lines of the page. Some of this experimentation dominates shorter pieces, collected in several books, beginning with The Exterminator (1960, with BRION GYSIN); it informs as well Naked Lunch (1959), a hallucinatory nightmare that remains his masterpiece. One curiosity about this last title is that at least three published editions exist, none more “definitive” than the others. The first appeared in Paris; the second, reedited, in London and New York in 1964. “The Restored Text” was published in the USA and Canada in 2003. Differences reflects

BURSTNORM POETRY (1994) Term coined by taxonomaniac BOB GRUMMAN as an attempt objectively – outside of time, place, politics, philosophy, religion, ethnicity, person or persons of origin – to classify nontraditional poetry – that is, usually but not necessarily “avant garde/otherstream/ out-rider/under-ground/otherground/experimental/ alternative/cutting-edge” poetry. Grumman uses it to distinguish such poetry from what he calls “songmode” and “plaintext” poetry, the first being traditional metric and/or rhymed poetry, the second now-traditional free verse. The norms burst are (1) expressive decorum, or the rule that poetry should be verbal only; (2) logic, in particular, narrative and/or sensory logic; and (3) linguistic propriety, in spelling as well as grammar, both the strict grammar of prose, and the looser grammar of traditional verse that permits, for instance,

66 • BUSONI, FERRUCCIO inversions – e.g., noun followed, in English, by adjective instead of the reverse. According to Grumman’s taxonomy, poetry that uses more than the one expressive modality for words, as visual poetry uses graphics, mathematical poetry math, sound poetry more-than-verbal-sound, and so forth, is “Pluraesthetic Poetry,” or poetry that is esthetically aesthetically expressive in more than one way. Poetry breaking normal logic is “Idiological Poetry” – and is further divided into surrealistic (sensorily illogical) and jump-cut (narratively disjunctive) poetry. The third variety of burstnorm poetry for Grumman is “Xenolinguistic Poetry.” It divides into “Infra-Verbal Poetry,” which is orthographically eccentric, and “Sprung-Grammar Poetry,” which meddles (significantly) with syntax and inflection. Roughly speaking, Xenolinguistic Poetry is a synonym for LanguageCentered Poetry – except that it refers only to what such poetry does verbally, not to the political and other baggage the latter term, and similar terms like “Language Poetry” and “Langpo,” have accumulated. There are, needless to say, subdivisions of these terms, and some poems can be appropriately described by more than one term (in which case Grumman would call them “compound burstnorm poems”). The term, “burstnorm” is also applicable to other forms of literature besides poetry, and to painting, sculpture, music, and the other arts, nonrepresentational painting being a prime example of an art that burst a norm, that the norm it burst is no longer much in evidence is irrelevant. —Bob Grumman

BUSONI, FERRUCCIO (1 April 1866–27 July 1924) After studies in his native Italy and Austria, Busoni lived from 1894 mostly in BERLIN. Traveling widely as both a pianist and a conductor of his own music, he aimed initially at a synthesis of traditional musical techniques with new developments in the early 20th century under the banner “Young Classicism” (preceding the STRAVINSKY-based “neo-classicism” of the 1930s and ’40s, which claimed a similar synthesis). With his seven Elegies (1907) for piano solo, Busoni broached atonality, which culminated in his Sonatina No. 2 (1912). In this period he wrote “Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music” (1911), a brilliant essay that was reprinted into the 1960s, because its radical biases seemed ever fresh. Interested in alternative relationships between music and drama, Busoni worked for years on an opera, Doktor Faust (1925), that was completed by a pupil after Busoni’s death. He also made

classic arrangements for piano of certain J. S. BACH compositions initially for other instruments.

BUTE, MARY ELLEN (21 November 1906–17 October 1983) Originally a painter from Texas, Bute assisted the pioneering light artist THOMAS WILFRED, and collaborated with LEON THEREMIN on the possibility of sound-light synchronization; she also worked with the musicologist-mathematician JOSEPH SCHILLINGER. “We need a new orchestra, a, visual art form, one that unites sound, color, and form,” she told a newspaper reporter in 1936. “We can take a mathematical formula and develop a whole composition exactly synchronized.” Her earliest animated abstract films, based upon mathematical formulas, display, in words of the historian Lewis Jacobs (1904–87), the first great historian of American avant-garde film, “ever-changing lights and shadows, growing lines and forms, deepening colors and tones, the tumbling, racing impressions evoked by the musical accompaniment.” Bute’s later animations were created to music, photographed under various speeds and lights. In the 1950s, she choreographed images with an electronically controlled beam of light, using an oscilloscope. “Beautiful Lissajous curves (curves resulting from the combination of two harmonic motions, named for French scientist Jules A. Lissajous, 1822–80), can be put through a choreography that inspires – and startles – the imagination,” she wrote in 1954. “The resulting beauty and movement contains intimations of occurrences in the sub-atomic world that hitherto have been accessible to the human mind merely as mathematical possibilities.” The two “abstronic films,” as she called them, were based respectively on the Hoe Down music of AARON COPLAND and Ranch House Party by Don Gillis (1912–78). She used an oscilloscope for imagery new to film. In the 1930s, her short films were distributed to appear before features. Ever ambitious, attentive to the very best, Bute also produced with human actors a feature-length version of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1965). Unfortunate was she not to survive into the era of computer animation.

BUTOH (1959) Though this Japanese dance-theater originated in 1959, cofounded by TATSUMI HIJIKATA and

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KAZUO OHNO, only in the 1980s did Western audiences become familiar with it. Although the term “Butoh” incorporates different approaches, a typical performance might include nearly nude, grimacing dancers in white body paint who are striking grotesque poses or contorting in slow motion, summoning up images of nature, crisis, and ancestral spirits. Some, but not all, of the Butoh performances incorporate improvisation. The stark, dangerous aspect of Butoh was evident in Sankai Juku’s Jomon Sho (Hommage to Pre-History, 1982), in which several performers, nearly nude and covered with white powder, hung upside down at perilous heights. (The risk was real; in 1985, in Seattle, one performer fell to his death.) Although drastically different from such reigning forms as traditional Japanese dance and mainstream Euro-American modern dance, Butoh reflects some of their influence (e.g., the slow motion esthetic of the Japanese stage and the angst of German EXPRESSIONISTIC dance). Other performers and companies central to the development of Butoh include Yoko Ashikawa (1947) and the company Hakutobo (founded in 1974), Akali Maro and the company Dal Rakuda Kan (founded in 1972), Ushio Amagatsu and the company Sankai Juku (founded in 1975), Natsu Nakajima (1943) and the company Mutekisha (founded in 1969), and Min Tinaka (1945). —Katy Matheson

BUTOR, MICHEL (14 September 1926–24 August 2016) First connected to the “nouveau roman” school that emerged in France in the late 1950s, Butor remained the most experimental of that bunch, working in various innovative ways, including extended criticism and innovative travelogue. Beginning in the 1960s, after securing a modest fame, he explored alternative structures and typographical possibilities, particularly in Mobile (1963), a detailed but elliptical portrait of America as seen not from the road but from the air, as though the author were a helicopter landing here and there. Advancing the art of travel writing, Butor composed a mosaic of impressions, along with quotations from historic memoirs (especially François René de Chateaubriand’s 18th-century America). Later works exemplifying his exemplary historical-geographic imagination include 6 810 000 litres d’eau par second (étude stéréophonique) (1965; Niagara: A Stereophonic Novel [1969]) and Boomerang (1978; Letters from the Antipodes [1981]). As an innovative essayist, Butor tried to

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replace two-dimensional linear reportage with a more dimensional spatial writing.

BUTTERWORTH, MICHAEL (24 April 1947) With its experimentalism and Cold War and Inner Space themes Michael Butterworth’s early work epitomized the radical trajectory of New Worlds, the British magazine advocating after the 1960s a New Wave of Science Fiction. As he grew up in England looking at the import bookshelves, American culture and writers became a key influence in his development because America seemed more contemporary and immediate in style. In the ’50s and ’60s, America was the future. Butterworth followed WILLIAM BURROUGHS, among others, in the exploration of the grammatical structures of prose lines. Experimentation with disjointed grammar and “cut ups” evolved from the pursuit of schizophrenic epistemological effects into a quasiscience-fiction technique in which space age adventure was turned inward, the final frontier of the cosmos becoming the inner space of an enfolding exploratory horizon, a disorganized yet perceivable psychological matrix where experience becomes interpretation and interpretation becomes experience. Thus, side-slipping subjects and altering predicates function like the classic tropes of time machines, spacecraft, quantum wormholes, or drugs capable of hurling protagonists in and out of parallel universes where grammatically impossible psychological states are the vehicles of the explorers’ conveyance. As much of his fiction can therefore be seen as being more prose poem than fiction, it is appropriate to refer to them as “pieces,” rather than identifying them as “stories” or “fiction.” His longer writings are often assemblies of discrete works drawn together for effect and structurally resembling collage; for example, “Concentrate 1” (1967), “A Hurricane in a Nightjar” (1984), “Scatterhead” (2014). So unusual were Butterworth’s manuscripts at this time that some didn’t appear in print until the 21st century in the annual Emanations and then in an eponymously titled ebook. As a publisher, Butterworth started with the literary periodicals Concentrate, Wordworks, and Corridor before graduating into book publishing when he cofounded the UK small-press Savoy Books (1976), which, like his other editorial projects, have represented avant-garde writing. Not unlike other writers publishing for a half-century, Butterworth has also become a memoirist. —Carter Kaplan

C

CABARET VOLTAIRE (1916) This was the favored name of the first venue for Zurich DADA. Essentially a room perhaps 30 meters square (320 square feet) in the back of the Meierei restaurant on Marktgasse, an alleyway a few yards from the entrance to the Spiegelgasse in Zurich’s Niederdorf (reddish light) section, it contained a small stage, a piano, and enough tables and chairs to seat fifty people, which is to say it was ideal for small pieces for a small audience. Operating only for five months from February through early July 1916, Cabaret Voltaire housed the epochal presentations of TRISTAN TZARA, EMMY HENNINGS, and HUGO BALL, among others. Members of the audience frequently became performers. The classic 1916 painting of Cabaret Voltaire ebullient participants was done by MARCEL JANCO, who was there. Once the cabaret closed, Cabaret Voltaire also became the name of a one-shot anthology (May 1916) and a twenty-first-century Zurich art gallery, not to mention later publications in other countries, so honorific had the name become.

CAGE, JOHN (5 September 1912–12 August 1992; b. J. Milton C. Jr.) Cage was one of the few individuals of whom it can be said, without dispute, that had he not existed, the development of more than one art would have been different. The truest POLYARTIST, Cage produced distinguished work in music, theater, literature, and visual art. As a de facto esthetician, he had a discernible influence upon the creation of music, several areas of performance, the visual arts, and, to a lesser extent, literature, and social thought. His principal theme, applicable to all arts, was the denial of false authority

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by expanding the range of acceptable and thus employable materials, beginning with non-pitched “noises,” which he thought should be heard as music “whether we’re in or out of the concert hall.” Though some consider Cage an avatar of “chance,” I think of him as an extremely fecund inventor who, once he disregarded previous conventions, was able to realize a wealth of indubitably original constraints. The (in)famous “PREPARED PIANO,” which prevented the emergence of familiar keyboard sounds, was merely the beginning of a career that included scrupulously alternative kinds of musical scoring, idiosyncratically structured theatrical events, and unique literary forms. Perhaps because Cage never doubled back, never dismissing his earlier works as wrong, his art remained “far-out,” challenging, and generally unacceptable to the end. In the last months of his life, he completed a ninety-minute film whose visual content was a white screen violated by various shades and shapes of gray. So much of an icon has he become that many forget that, six decades ago, when I first began following Cage’s activities, no one, but no one, received so many persistently negative comments, not just in print but in collegial conversations. When invited to give the 1988–89 Charles Eliot NORTON lectures at Harvard, perhaps the most prestigious appointment of its kind, he delivered statements so barely connected that few professors returned after Cage’s initial lecture! When Cage accepted the Norton position that gave him a title elevating him above the rest of us humans, I asked him what it was like being a Harvard professor. “Not much different from not being a Harvard professor,” he replied, true to his politics. As an anarchist from his professional beginnings, he worked, as much through example as assertion, to eliminate authority and hierarchy, even in his life, never accepting a position that might give him cultural power (as distinct from influence), never composing any work that requires an authoritarian conductor

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or even a lead instrumentalist who stands before a backup group. Not unlike other avant-garde artists, Cage made works, in his case in various media, that are either much more or much less than art used to be. Though the MINIMAL pieces should not be slighted, in my considered opinion the greatest Cage works are his MAXIMAL compositions: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946–48) is his longest and most exhaustive exploration of his first musical invention. Williams Mix (1953) is a tape collage composed of thousands of bits, intricately fused onto six tapes that should be played simultaneously, so that the result is an abundance of sounds within only several minutes. In HPSCHD (1969), Cage filled a humongous 15,000seat basketball arena with a multitude of sounds and sights, and EUROPERA (1987) draws upon 19thcentury European opera for musical parts, costumes, and scenarios that are then distributed at random to performers in a professional opera company. Given my bias toward abundance, my favorite Cage visual art is the sequence of Plexiglas plates that became Not Wanting to Say Anything about Marcel (1969); the single most impressive Cage text, the Harvard lectures that became the long poem l-VI (1990). In his notorious “silent piece,” the superficially much, much less 4′33″ (1952), he became an avatar of CONCEPTUAL ART. By having the distinguished pianist DAVID TUDOR make no sound in a concert otherwise devoted to contemporary piano music, Cage framed four minutes and thirty-three seconds of a pianist’s silence to suggest that the inadvertent sounds within the auditorium constitute the “musical” experience and, by extension, that all sounds, whether intentional or not, can be considered music. (One strain of conceptual art consists of demonstrations or statements that convey radical esthetic implications.) Since the content of 4′33″ and its successors is miscellaneous sounds, it is more accurate to characterize it as a noise piece. Cage also revolutionized musical scoring (eventually collecting an anthology of Notations [1969] that mostly reflects his influence), introducing graphic notations and prose instructions in place of horizontal musical staves. The most extraordinary of his own scores is the two-volume Song Books (Solos for Voice, 3–92) (1970), which contains, in part through length and number, an incomparable wealth of alternative performance instructions. He was also among the rare artists whose statements about his own work were often more true and insightful than his critics’ writings. The surest measure of his works’ canonicity is that they were realized and, yes, discussed as often in the 21st century as they were before his death.

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CAHUN, CLAUDE (25 October 1894–8 December 1954; b. Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob) As a more modest POLYARTIST, she worked strongly in both images and words around themes of gender and identity along the fringes of French SURREALISM. In his early A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935), the British writer David Gascoyne (1916–2001) quotes her as “he,” while some later surveys of Surrealism don’t mention her at all. Well before CINDY SHERMAN, Cahun produced photographic portraits of herself in various guises, including a coquette, a bodybuilder, a vamp, a young boy, and a Japanese puppet. Cahun’s single classic, an androgynous face often reprinted, is Self-Portrait in the Mirror with Checkered Jacket (1928). Her written “Heroines” (1925) contains monologs entwining female fairy-tale characters with contemporary female images. Her book Carrefour (1930) includes dreams illustrated with photomontages. In 1937 Cahun settled in Jersey (in the Channel Islands) with her life-partner Suzanne Malherbe (1892–1972), who took the name, likewise ambiguous in gender, of Marcel Moore for her own work as a writer and photographer. Under German occupation during World War II, the women engaged in subversive artistic activities, mostly requiring the printing of fliers, until they were jailed, though not deported. As much through their ambiguous themes as their polyartistic courage, their artistic fame grew posthumously.

CAL ARTS (1961) This has become the commonly accepted name for the second American arts college (after BLACK MOUNTAIN) to concentrate on avant-garde activities. To the rescue of two finally troubled Los Angeles schools – one teaching visual art, the other music – came the WALT DISNEY family who respected Walt’s vision that all the arts should be taught together. The nick name of California Institute of the Arts echoed that of the California Institute of Technology, likewise around L.A., commonly called Cal Tech. After moving to a new campus in the Valencia section of Santa Clarita, CA, roughly exurban Los Angeles, it hired genuinely avant-garde artists for its faculty. As this new formula worked for a while, some of its students from the early 1970s had visible careers. However, once a Disney son-in-law became the school’s chief, many art stars left the faculty, leaving behind an institution scarcely different from other American art

70 • CALDER, ALEXANDER colleges that had by the late 1970s become more progressive than they used to be. My own sense is that Cal Arts began too big, recalling JOHN CAGE’s two reasons for Black Mountain’s success: 1) it never had more than a hundred students; 2) the students regularly ate with the faculty. Another interpretation for Cal Arts’s decline identifies the hiring of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), no friend of avant-garde art, as prompting the new chief’s blanket dismissals. If true, then it could be said that a lefty political agenda undermined the progressive artistic agenda, finally to the detriment of both. Too bad.

CALDER, ALEXANDER (22 July 1898–11 November 1976) The son and grandson of sculptors, but also an alumnus of the Stevens Institute of Technology, Calder was a great inventor who recognized that the early modern avant-garde idea of KINETIC ART could be realized without motors. His innovation was three-dimensional art that, while suspended from a ceiling mount, moved through the natural balancing and counterbalancing of weights within the piece itself. Early in the history of this departure, his colleague MARCEL DUCHAMP dubbed them mobiles, which became an epithet that stuck. Initially Calder used simple wooden shapes, most of them painted, which are delicately suspended from wooden dowels. He later used metals of various kinds, in various shapes and sizes. Whereas individual images in the 1930s reflected the geometries of PIET MONDRIAN, whose Paris studio Calder first visited in the early 1930; those from later times echo the more organic abstract forms of Joan Miró (1893–1983). Thanks in part to his engineering education, Calder figured how some of his mobiles could be quite large and hang in public spaces, most notably airport terminals. In lieu of physical space typical of previous sculpture, a mobile creates virtual space, which is to say that it needs much more space than it physically occupies (and thus becomes an implicit precursor of other virtual art). Of all Calder’s many enthusiasts, none is more curious, or perceptive, than the French writer JeanPaul Sartre (1905–80), who wrote: A mobile does not suggest anything; it captures genuine living movements and shapes them. Mobiles have no meaning, make you think of nothing but themselves. They are, that is all; they are absolutes. There is more of the unpredictable about them than in any other human creation.

The later major Calder sculptures can be divided into those that hang freely from supports and those that rest stationary on the ground. Having become known for “mobiles,” he had to give another name to his stationary sculptures, “stabiles,” which seems an ironic joke on himself. Generally larger than mobiles, these fulfilled commissions for outdoor sites. The largest, the 60-foot high Teodelapio, was installed at a road junction in Spoleto, Italy, in 1962. None of these, in my judgment, are as strong as his best mobiles. Indeed, most of them, when actually seen nowadays, function to remind me of his superior mobiles. Prior to his discovery of the mobile, Calder was known to his Parisian colleagues for his miniature puppet-circus (late 1920s), with figures and animals made from wire and string. Extraordinary in spite of its modesty, this survived, not only in a short documentary film and in a book but as a semi-permanent display long on the ground floor of the Whitney Museum in New York, becoming perhaps his greatest single masterpiece. A 1943 exhibition of this work at the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART admitted Calder to the canon of modern sculpture. Though Calder’s unwillingness or inability to talk about art made him seem unserious, if not a sort of idiot esthetic savant, the physical truth is that he produced approximately 15,000 pieces, which is to say nearly one a day for fifty years. He was a sort of automatic artist. In a documentary film about Calder, someone notes that, though he may have drunk too much alcohol, his hands never stopped making objects.

CALDIERO, A. F. (23 September 1949; b. Alissandru F. C.) Sicilian-born, NEW YORK CITY-reared, Caldiero has created distinguished sound poetry and performance, as well as visual art, most of it as elaborate expositions of spiritual themes that draw upon his European background. “The sacred and the secular have been at the very core of my formative years,” he writes. “For me this twin presence is a pivot between sideshow and temple, between entertainer or jester and priest. In the process of making and presenting a work, this precarious position is the opening by which I can hope to glimpse the Real.” He moved around 1980 to Utah, where he became a Mormon, and has since been exhibiting and performing mostly in and around Salt Lake City. OR, Book o’ Lights ranks among the most imaginative and ambitious visualverbal books of the 1990s.

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CALLAHAN, MICHAEL

CARDEW, CORNELIUS

See USCO.

(7 May 1936–13 December 1981)

CALVINO, ITALO (15 October 1923–19 September 1985) If I could write a satisfactory entry about this Italian author connected to OULIPO, I would, because colleagues tell me that he belongs here; but as I can’t, I reluctantly leave some white space below for his better admirers please to write their own. —Thanks, appreciatively.

CAMINI, ALDO See VAN DOESBURG, Theo.

CANADA COUNCIL (1958) A culturally superior counterpart to our own NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, this makes the NEA look amateur, perhaps because of the Canadian recognition that the best work and avantgarde art especially must be supported if a country’s culture is to survive. Should you not believe me, just compare its publicly available–once in print, now online–annual reports to those of the NEA.

CAPPA MARINETTI, BENEDETTA (14 August 1897–15 May 1977) At a major ITALIAN FUTURISM exhibition mounted at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2014, the greatest revelation was the excellence of large paintings by F. T. MARINETTI’s wife Benedetta, who professionally signed only her first name. Resembling murals in scale, created in 1933–34 for the conference room of a post office in Palermo, Sicily, these five canvases epitomized certain Futurist principles made large. Collectively titled “Synthesis of Communication,” they depict communication by telephone, telegraph, air, sea, and land, all representing the modernization advocated by Italy’s prime minister at the time, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), whom certain Futurist painters idolized.

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In that vacuum that is avant-garde culture in Great Britain, Cardew filled a big balloon, less through his own originality than for his association with advanced developments elsewhere in the world. The son of a noted potter, he sang in the chorus at Canterbury Cathedral from 1943 to 1950 and studied, from 1953 to 1957, at London’s Royal Academy of Music (granting its alumni a lifetime professional imprimatur unknown elsewhere), before assisting KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN and writing music, mostly for piano, in the SERIAL tradition. Coming under the contrary influence of JOHN CAGE in the 1960s, Cardew then preached and practiced graphic scores and INDETERMINACY, cofounding AMM, an improvisatory group that resembled the Americans in MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva). By the 1970s, he was writing, mostly for nonmusicians, which he called a Scratch Orchestra, defined as “a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily musical) and assembling for action.” Several Cardew compositions from this period acknowledged the influence of Mao Zedong, prompting Cardew to renounce his bourgeois past, and, need we say, the influence of Stockhausen, though Cardew still won attention, especially in England, as a former R.A.M. golden boy. He died after a traffic accident near his home in East London.

CARLOS, WENDY (14 November 1939; b. Walter C.) Educated first in physics and then in music composition, Carlos released Switched-on Bach in 1968, which was the first recording of “ELECTRONIC MUSIC” to sell a million copies. Working with an early monophonic Moog synthesizer, Carlos laid individual lines of notes on a MULTITRACK tape recorder. He then adjusted the levels of the various tracks (or lines) in creating (literally mixing them down onto) a two-track, stereophonic tape. It was painstaking and pioneering work, unlike anything anyone had done (or thought about doing) in Electronic Music before; but one benefit, especially in comparing Carlos’s interpretation of J. S. BACH’s Brandenburg concerti to traditional instrumental recordings, was revealing the master’s contrapuntal lines that were previously muffled. Though these technologies of a sound synthesizer and multitrack tape were widely available then, no other musician utilized them so well. Decades later, Switched-On Bach Set (1999) was a brilliant retrospective.

72 • CARLSON, CHESTER Carlos subsequently produced other albums, some likewise original interpretations of classical warhorses, others of his own music (e.g., the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange), none of which were quite so innovative or successful. By the 21st century, Carlos was producing the most extraordinary photographs of solar eclipses. Born Walter Carlos, he became Wendy C. in the mid-1970s, discussing this voluntary gender reassignment at length in a memorable Playboy interview (May 1979).

CARLSON, CHESTER (8 February 1906–19 September 1968) As a teenager he worked for a printer and even acquired a printing press. After taking a degree in physics from Cal Tech, he joined the BELL Telephone laboratories, which was for decades a hothouse for significant modern inventions incidentally useful in art (computer music, transistors, information theory, etc.). After taking a law degree, Carlson later ran the patent department of another, smaller electronics firm. In his spare time, in the late 1930s, he developed a dry method of direct image production that moved technically beyond wet processes of photography. By 1944 Carlson consigned the development of this invention to the Battelle Memorial Institute, which in turn sold the invention to the Haloid Company, which later called itself Xerox. Whereas writers, say, exploited this new technology to make extra copies previously possible only with carbon paper or expensive photostating, artists in the 1960s exploited Xerox copying for its imperfections, typically making copies of copies until marks indigenous to the copying process obliterated an original image. The introduction of color copying increased the possibilities. However, by the 1990s, copies in both black & white and color were so clear and clean they were superficially indistinguishable from the originals. This technical advance meant that Xerography could replace offset technology in the neat production of books and other “printed” materials. For a while the Xerox company insisted in that word be spelled with a capital letter, even when used as a verb; but once competitors developed equally accurate technology, the preferred epithet became “photocopy.” From the historical point of view, Carlson’s principal error was not naming the process after himself. Had he enough foresight to do so, Carlson would have become a verb, much as Google did.

CARPENTER, EDMUND (2 September 1922–1 July 2011) By common consent the most artful anthropologist of his time, he connected early with MARSHALL MCLUHAN, co-editing the avant-garde interdisciplinary magazine Explorations (1952–59) and then the book selecting from its pages, Explorations in Communication (1960). As an academic, Carpenter made his subject The Inuit inhabiting Canada’s northern regions, initially compiling in Anerca (1959) their lyrical legacy. While an American teaching at the University of Toronto, he co-produced for the CBC documentary films about northern peoples. Carpenter’s single most extraordinary BOOK-ART is Eskimo (1959), which sympathetically discovers their unusual perceptual experience. After marrying a culturally classy supportive heiress, Carpenter retired early from teaching. Her Rock Foundation supported a Houston (TX) museum collection bearing his name and several handsomely produced limited editions that wouldn’t otherwise exist. That’s exactly what culturally classy benefactors are supposed to do, especially after they hook up with world-class cultural avatars; sad it is that so few of the contemporary Medicis do. Do not confuse this Ted with Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), a British writer avant-garde in several ways.

CARRILLO, JULIÁN (28 January 1875–9 September 1965; b. J. C.-Trujillo) Probably the greatest avant-garde Mexican composer, a near contemporary of CHARLES IVES, he discovered as early as 1885 that within the fourth string of his violin, the instrument he mastered, was a tone between the traditional notes of G and A. This “13TH sound,” as he called it, opened the possibility of microtonality to him, as he subsequently worked with as many as ninetysix tones to an octave. Carillo later rethought such compositional staples as rhythm, notation, and textures. Respected in his home country, perhaps because of musical education in Europe, he became, while young, a professor of composition in the National Conservatory and then a kind of Inspector-General for Music in Mexico City. After a year as director of the National Conservatory, he immigrated in 1914 to NEW YORK CITY, where he organized an American Symphony Orchestra to compete with the New York Philharmonic. Invited by return to Mexico in 1918, he soon became head of the National Conservatory until his early retirement in 1924 to concentrate full-time on his own work. His principal patron was the American

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conductor LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI, initially with the Philadelphia Orchestra, prompting Carrillo to compose with both tones and semitones for a full orchestra. In 1930, he organized an Orquestra Sonido 13 that toured throughout Mexico, sometimes conducted by Stokowski. Carillo also patented a scheme for fifteen pianos variously tuned. Eventually built, these were exhibited at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Such radical compositional principles notwithstanding, some of this microtonal music sounds mellifluous to tonally biased ears. Unlike other avant-garde artists who die too young, sometimes because of professional neglect, Carillo lived long enough to collect deserved honors, including a 1962 commission from Stokowski, who premiered his Concertino for fraction-tone piano with an orchestra in Houston.

CARRIÓN, ULISES

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A university lecturer in mathematics who was also an ordained minister, Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), probably the first children’s book to have enough cultural resonance to interest sophisticated adult readers as well. MARTIN GARDNER, among others, has interpreted the book as portraying more than three dimensions and similarly sophisticated themes. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872) continues the story, with a greater sense of what adults might appreciate. Another Carroll classic, The Hunting of the Snark (1876), is a highly metrical nonsense poem, written well before similar efforts by KENNETH KOCH, among others. After you’ve read Carroll, whose complete literary works fit into a single volume, check out the editions intelligently annotated by Martin Gardner.

CARTER, ELLIOTT

(1941– October 1989) Mexican by birth, he published in the late 1960s in his native country two collections of short stories that Mónica de la Torre characterized as “competent but unexceptional.” After moving to Amsterdam in the early 1970s, he became active in several dimensions of avant-garde art. In addition to running a bookshop/ exhibition space called Other Books and So, he became the first great theorist of “Bookworks,” as he preferred to call them in English (over my “Book Art” or the more common “Artists’ Books.” In his classic 1975 manifesto, “The New Art of Making Books,” his simple formulation held that in the “old art the writer writes texts,” but “in the new art the writer makes books.” Exploiting the new technologies initially of mimeographing and then photocopying, implicitly forecasting such later developments as ON-DEMAND PRINTING, Carrión foresaw that the book-artist can safely ignore the cultural gatekeepers in distributing radically innovative (and possibly first rank) work. Variously active, Carrión also produced performances and videos that are recalled decades after his passing, particularly in a 2017 retrospective with nearly 350 pieces in Mexico City titled (in English) “Dear Reader. Don’t read.” I remember best when Ulises and his Dutch partner Aart van Barneveld (?-1990) visited me in ARTISTS’ SOHO the day of a 1977 blackout in New York City, when he gladly accepted a plate of melting ice cream.

CARROLL, LEWIS (27 January 1832–14 January 1898; b. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)

(11 December 1908–5 November 2012) Educated in English literature before he turned to music composition, Carter was, until his forties, one of many Americans working in “neoclassicism,” which was in the 1930s and 1940s an encompassing term for tonal music that acknowledged traditional forms (purportedly in reaction to both 19th-century romantic EXPRESSIONISM and SERIAL MUSIC). With his first Piano Sonata, however, Carter began to explore overtones (sounds inadvertently produced by notes in combination) and also the ways in which these overtones create their own semblance of melodies. His Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948) incorporates a musical idea that he would subsequently develop: the individuality of each instrument prevents a group of them from blending together completely. This idea was developed in a series of string quartets that rank among the strongest in contemporary music (1952, 1959, 1971, 1988–89, 1995). To enhance individuality Carter required that the performers sit farther apart than customary. Carter also introduced an innovative technique, since called “metrical modulation,” which depends upon continual changes of speed. That is to say, his rhythms are neither regular nor syncopated but continually rearticulated until the sense of perpetual rhythmic change becomes itself a major theme of the piece. He recalled in 1969, with characteristically multicultural reference, that: Rhythmic means [had] begun to seem a very limited routine in most contemporary and older Western music. I had taken up again an interest in Indian talas, the Arabic durub, the “tempi” of Balinese gamelans (especially the accelerating

74 • CARTOONS (FILM) Gangsar and Rangkep), and studied the newer recordings of African music, that of the Watusi in particular. At the same time, the music of the early quattrocento, of Scriabin, Ives, and the techniques described in [Henry] Cowell’s New Musical Resources also furnished me with many ideas. The result was a way of evolving rhythms and rhythmic continuities, sometimes called “metrical modulation.” Such Carter music realizes a textual intensity that reflects the complexity of serial music without literally following Schoenbergian rules. Indeed, precisely because Carter’s best music must be reheard even to begin to be understood, it could be said that he composed not for the live concert hall but for reproductive media, at first records, then cassette tapes, and now compact disks, which enable listeners to rehear an initially evasive work as often as they wish. Of his other pieces, the most monumental is A Symphony of Three Orchestras (1977), in which Carter continually divides and redivides the instruments into smaller groups more typical of chamber ensembles. Incidentally, this interest in rearticulating pace prompted the art critic John Russell (1919–2008) for one to suggest that Carter had “speculated about the nature of time and memory as persistently as anyone since Marcel Proust and Edmund Husserl.” Though Carter continued composing into his hundreds, his late monumental birthdays were recognized with more fanfare, not to mention premieres, in England than in the United States, for reasons that are perhaps indicative of larger cultural discrepancies. No other composer ever was as active as Carter past the age of 90, often appearing at concerts aided not by a wheelchair but a cane. Sometimes he would sit on a concert stage answering questions. Between the ages of 90 and 100 he published more than forty new works; once a centenarian, Carter completed at least twenty more. Not unlike other composers of his generation, Carter could also be a discriminating critic, eventually collecting his best essays and talks into a single book, where the strongest single line mocks American orchestras for commissioning in the 1960s not “good, effective yet technically advanced scores [that] would be helpful in maintaining high performance standards in an orchestra . . . but new works that make an immediate effect with a minimum of effort and time.” Decades later, that critical assessment is still true.

CARTOONS (FILM) See AVERY, TEX; DISNEY, WALT; JONES, CHUCK, et al.

CASEMENTS (1923–25) This was the prototypical prophetic undergraduate literary magazine that was so strong it was banned from its campus, even though it served as a launching pad for several distinguished avant-garde careers. Begun at Brown University in 1923, under “the conviction that undergraduates have things to say,” Casements published not only students but established writers. Among the former were S. J. PERELMAN and Nathan Weinstein, later known as NATHANAEL WEST. In the second issue appeared a parody of D. H. Lawrence authored by Fredson T. Bowers (1905–91), later a professor renowned for his reauthentification, yes, of classic American literary texts. After some city official in Providence, RI, judged this parody “obscene and unfit for public reading,” Casements was banned from the Brown campus. Among Casements’ editors was Gordon Keith Chalmers (1904–56), who some fourteen years later, soon after becoming president of a small Midwestern college, founded another literary magazine, The Kenyon Review (1939–69, 1979–), that, though scarcely avant-garde, incidentally publicized internationally the existence of its small sponsoring school. (Other provincial American colleges have since tried to follow Kenyon’s example with an eponymous literary magazine, less successfully.) Some decades after Casements, later students at Brown University published a single issue of another literary magazine, Hubris (1961), which was likewise banned from campus, even though it too printed writers who later had visible literary careers. With certain avant-garde activities, with certain institutions, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose .

CASSAVETES, JOHN (9 December 1929–3 February 1989) Before he became a prominent Hollywood actor and sometime director, Cassavetes independently produced an innovative feature-length film in which he didn’t appear. Shot on 16 mm. film, reportedly for less than $50,000, Shadows (1960) is an extraordinarily intimate portrait of a love affair between a white teenager and a fair-skinned black girl – decades before interracial romance ever became a more familiar subject. Filming in situ in NEW YORK CITY, Cassavetes directed his cameramen to move around, getting close to things and people, again well before such moves became popular. Some of the most memorable scenes

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were filmed in rooms with low ceilings. At the time, I remember comparing the scene of the protagonists in bed to a more formal treatment of a similar sequence in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), which was made around the same time. Indicatively, when Cassavetes’s female protagonist walks down 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue, the lights flicker not up in the sky but right behind her ears. A scene in which guys pick up three girls has an air of authenticity precisely because of the clumsiness of both the actors and the camera. Perhaps Cassavetes’s real achievement was making the camera more responsible than the actors for defining his characters. Even in Hollywood, he did not forget his independence, financing his own films, using hand-held cameras, allowing his releases to appear erratic and perhaps unfinished, frequently blaming corporate studios for their insufficiencies, etc.

CASSERES, BENJAMIN DE (3 April 1873–7 December 1945) Very much an odd man out in the history of American literature, he worked mostly for newspapers while contributing prolifically to literary magazines. Most of his books appeared from small publishers who didn’t survive very long. One poem favored by anthologists in his own time was “Moth-Terror,” which is a sterling example of his apocalyptic prosy poetry in the tradition of WILLIAM BLAKE (well before ALLEN GINSBERG): I have killed the moth flying around my nightlight; wingless and dead it lies upon the floor. (O who will kill the great Time-Moth that eats holes in my soul and that burrows in and through my secretest veils!) My will against its will, and no more will it fly at my night-light or be hidden behind the curtains that swing in the winds. Sephardic-Jewish in ancestry, perhaps descending from the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), his writing didn’t get support from younger Jewish-American literary publicists mostly descended from recent immigrations from Eastern Europe. In 1977, the Gordon Press reissued several earlier books in three pristine hardbacks, though they were, alas, scarcely more visible than Casseres’s initial publications. In the 2010s, Underworld Amusements both reprinted and recollected his fugitive writings in five perfectbound books.

CASTELLI, LEO (4 September 1907–21 August 1999; b. Leo Krausz)

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During the second half of his long life, no gallerist in America succeeded as well at selling new work by certain avant-garde artists. Born in Trieste, educated in Austria and Italy, he came to America during World War II and, though already in his forties, connected to emerging artists by helping with the NINTH STREET SHOW. Later opening an eponymous gallery in the large living room of his Upper East Side Manhattan townhouse, Castelli sponsored initial exhibitions by ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG and JASPER JOHNS before discovering the major avatars of POP ART. No gallerist was shrewder at establishing prices and reputations. Loyal to his chosen artists, Castelli nonetheless kept exhibiting some whose success was limited (e.g., Nassos Daphnis [1914–2010] and Mia Westerhund Roosen [1942]), as Castelli’s touch was hardly golden. Relocating his gallery downtown to a larger space in SoHo in the early 1970s, in the wake of the success of the O.K. Harris Gallery founded by his sometime assistant Ivan Karp (1926–2013), Castelli sold his artists’ newest produce to collectors and institutions loyal to him at levels above other merchants of avant-garde art, rather than of, say, old masters or some exotica. In this respect, he was the principal American successor to such fabled European gallerists of avant-garde art as Ambrose Volland (1867–1939) and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979). At 420 W. Broadway, along ARTISTS’ SOHO’s main drag, his eponymous gallery became the anchor that newcomers to SoHo visited first. Once I suggested that a biography of an art dealer could not be written, because too many of their dealings were kept secret; but Annie Cohen-Solal (1948), a French writer once on a diplomatic mission in New York City, produced Leo and His Circle (2010), which I found credible.

CASTLE, JAMES (24 September 1899–24 October 1977) Born deaf in southwestern Idaho, he resisted education for the disabled, preferring instead to draw on miscellaneous paper. As his family was urged to forbid him art supplies until he could speak or at least use sign language, young Castle retreated daily into the forest or the second story of a family ice house. Innately resourceful, he made ink from stove soot and saliva and pens from sharpened twigs, in addition to thread and yarn for binding his images into unique books. When his family later offered him professional art supplies, he still preferred his informal materials, creating hundreds of objects we would now identify as epitomizing BOOK ART. Since Castle never used titles, they are

76 • CELEBRITY currently known by images on their covers, realizing OUTSIDER ART at its most innocent and yet intelligent. Some of Castle’s sequential pictures tell stories as visual narratives or in sophisticated associational ways. He used words and numbers eccentrically, even redoing calendars so that months may have only two weeks, a week ten days, and a year almost four hundred days. He occasionally incorporated images and papers found in the family trash, reinventing modernist COLLAGE in his isolation. Tom Trusky (1944–2009), a University of Idaho professor, wrote that Castle “relentlessly explores and exploits possibilities of the codex format, frequently altering and expanding the definition of what a book is in profound and witty ways.” Aside from trips to visit relatives in eastern Oregon perhaps 75 miles away, he lived in Idaho and never learned to speak. After his death, his relatives found caches of work that he had hidden away on family property. Twenty-five years later, institutions outside not only his native Idaho but the USA sponsored exhibitions of his work. One in Madrid, in 2011, came with a thick appreciative catalog.

CELEBRITY Unfortunate it is that once the name of an artist, even if his or her work was once avant-garde, becomes familiar with people scarcely interested in art, then he or she often comes to prefer the company and culture of other celebrities over fellow artists and thus to learn more for their professional lives from other celebrities, especially about how to be a celebrity, than from their artistic colleagues. Otherwise, the problems with celebrity for the artist are, that after obtaining it, her or his work usually declines, often because of remunerative commissions reflecting sponsor’s designs over the artist’s purposes, and then that celebrity cannot be tenured, often disintegrating well before the artist’s death, in a negative fall that can’t be controlled or reversed. Consider that among the artists once featured on the cover of TIME magazine since 1923, surely a measure of highest public “classy” fame in, were the painters Thomas Hart Benton, Augustus John, and Andrew Wyeth; the architects Wallace Harrison, Richard Neutra, and Edward D. Stone; the jazz musicians Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington; and the composers Sergei Prokofiev and David Byrne. Q. E. D.

CÉLINE, LOUIS-FERDINAND (27 May 1894–1 July 1961; b. L-F. Auguste Destouches)

Céline was a notable French writer and, by all reports, a humane doctor, in spite of his disagreeable Fascist politics and bursts of inexcusable anti-Semitism. Seriously wounded in the head during World War I, he suffered for the rest of his life from vertigo, chronic migraine, partial paralysis of his right arm, and a constant buzz in his ears. Out of this deranged mentality, he concocted a literary style of unprecedented splenetic frustration and despair, comic in its excesses, whose truest subject is not society but the contents of his damaged head: My great rival is music, it sticks in the bottom of my ears and rots . . . it never stops scolding . . . it dazes me with blasts of the trombone, it keeps on day and night. I’ve got every noise in nature, from the flute to Niagara Falls . . . . Wherever I go, I’ve got drums with me and an avalanche of trombones . . . for weeks on end I play the triangle . . . . On the bugle I can’t be beat. I still have my own private birdhouse complete with three thousand five hundred and seven birds that will never calm down. I am the organs of the Universe. As his later translator Ralph Manheim (1907–92) points out, the slight innovation of three dots, sometimes called ellipses, “which so infuriated academic critics at the time . . . mark the incompleteness, the abruptness, the sudden shifts of direction characteristic of everyday speech.” Those who can read his Parisian slang, itself new to French literature in his time, testify that Céline’s prose is even more extraordinary in the original.

CENDRARS, BLAISE (1 September 1887–21 January 1961; b. Frédéric-Louis Sauser) Born in Switzerland of a Scottish mother, Cendrars wrote in French mostly about his mercurial cosmopolitan life. Creating the persona of himself as a man of action, he concocted a propulsive, rhythmically abrupt literary style that informed both his poetry and his prose. To put it differently, self-possessed and up-todate, he made much, in style as well as content, of the mania of being so self-possessed and up-to-date. “I have deciphered all the confused texts of the wheels and I have assembled the scattered elements of a most violent beauty/That I control/And which compels me,” he writes in La Prose du Transsibérien et la Petite Jehanne de France. Remarkably generous in collaborating with colleagues, he produced GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE

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and SONIA DELAUNEY an edition of Transsibérien (1913), which is commonly regarded among the monuments of modern literary book-art. Printed in an accordion format, over 6 feet tall when unfolded upwise, its continuous vertical imagery becomes a counterpoint to Cendrars’s continuous text whose multiple fonts compliment Delaunay’s free use of many colors. Acclaimed at the time, this book has been inferiorly reproduced often.

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Voltage-Controlled Synthesizer” (1975) and the book Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music (1996). Enterprising as well, Chadabe founded Intelligent Music (1983), a not nonprofit, initially to “distribute software and hardware for interactive composing,” and in 2012 an Electronic Music Foundation in part to publish ebooks about avant-garde music. Curiously perhaps, Chadabe and TED NELSON, both culturally classy computer explorers, went simultaneously to the same Manhattan day high school.

CHAGALL, MARC

(1929–30; 1936–43) Though a 1930 Parisian exhibition with this title found little audience at the time, it became legendary, thanks to a three-shot magazine with the same name and then the later writings of MICHEL SEUPHOR, an enthusiast who later portrayed it as more successful than it actually was. With 130 works by many artists, it tried with numbers to establish credibility for geometric abstraction epitomized by the shapes in its title, all in opposition to SURREALISM then dominant in Paris. Among the featured artists were PIET MONDRIAN, then already in his mid-fifties, ROBERT DELAUNAY and MOHOLY-NAGY. As another theme was the international range of such art, the exhibition included Germans, Russians, Poles, Italians, another Hungarian, a Catalan, a Dane, a Czech, an American, a Dominican, an Alsatian, and an Icelander. In its wake came another group calling itself Abstraction-Création that attracted more members, including NAUM GABO, BARBARA HEPWORTH, and JOSEF ALBERS. This too became the title of another French-language magazine (1931–36). Participating in both exhibitions was JOAQUIN TORRES-GARCIA, who, when he returned to his native Uruguay, published in Montevideo in Spanish and French yet another art magazine titled Círculo y Cuadrado (1936–43; though not between 1939 and 1942) with the same C&C logo, natch.

(7 July 1887–28 March 1985; b. Moishe Shagalov) What to say? From the beginning of his career he participated in various phases of modernism without dominating or losing his SIGNATURE of fantasies at once audacious and charming. Two stylistic tricks were situating his subjects in mid-air and recoloring them. Though a Russian who became a Frenchman, he wisely refused to join Parisian SURREALISM, which invited him, as perhaps did other recruiting art groups, and thus survived its and their decline. PICASSO reportedly judged that Chagall understood color almost as well as MATISSSE. Overcoming a limited imagination, Chagall worked in many media, including stained glass, murals, tapestries, illustrated books, ceramics, and stage sets. At the last, he especially excelled. Glib “humanists” praise his anthropomorphic semblances. Widely admired for his “Jewish art,” Chagall nonetheless violated the proscription against producing graven images, which may or may not be unacceptable. So remarkable was his redoing the interior of the Moscow Jewish Theater late in 1920 that it alone became the subject of a 1992 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. One critical question is whether anything he produced after departing Russia in 1922 was as innovative and/or substantial? Unusually adept at surviving, Chagall nonetheless prospered into his late nineties. Enough said?

CHADABE, JOEL

CHAMBERLAIN, JOHN

(12 December 1938)

(16 April 1927–21 December 2011)

A certified composer, with an MM from Yale University, he ventured early into electronic music, directing an E. M. Studio at SUNY-Albany in 1967, soon afterwards building with ROBERT MOOG a pioneering Coordinated Electronic Music Studio. He later developed early software for composing wholly on a computer. Chadabe also authored an early article on “The

Taking from DAVID SMITH a taste for industrial materials and a competence in welding, Chamberlain made sculptures composed initially of iron pipes and then of crushed automobile parts, usually preserving their original industrial colors. Even with materials so culturally declassé, he realized formal qualities rather than social comment. Reflecting DE KOONING’s

78 • CHARLIP, REMY interpretation of CUBISM In their compositional syntax of colliding planes, his sculptures also epitomize ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM in metal. DONALD JUDD credits Chamberlain in making color an issue in contemporary sculpture. Though he later worked with other materials, including urethane and fiberglass, and then galvanized steel and aluminum, nothing else he ever did was quite as stunning and innovative as his “junk sculpture.”

CHARLIP, REMY

Comparable in form, scale, and thrust to Picasso’s Guernica, The Dinner Party toured and became the subject of a commercially published book before being reinstalled decades later at the Brooklyn Museum. As a feminist art avatar Chicago imagined bigger. Thanks to her celebrity, commercial publishers produced slick coffee-table books about her art. Her principal sequel book, Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1993), is less successful, perhaps because less initiatory and less personal.

CHICHERIN, ALEKSEI NIKOLAEVICH

(10 January 1929–14 August 2012; b. Abraham Remy C.) A superior man of (minor?) arts, Charlip had a rich avant-garde career, initially as a founding member of the MERCE CUMNNINGHAM Dance Company (until dismissed for becoming prematurely bald) and then as an alternative choreographer whose specialty during the 1960s was “air mail dances.” For these he sent instructions to a dance company that would execute them without his participation, much as musicians would perform a distant composer’s score. Charlip later founded a children’s theater company called the Paper Bag Players, taught kindertheater at American universities, and both wrote and illustrated marvelously different children’s books that have remained in print. From the last, my colleague the fictioner Johannah Rodgers (1968) particularly recommends Charlip’s Where Is Everybody (1957), It Looks like Snow (1957), Thirteen (with Jerry Joyner, 1975), My Very Own Special Particular Private and Special Cat (1963), and, especially Arm in Arm: A Collection of Connections, Endless Tales, Reiterations, and Other Echolalia (1979). She adds, “Charlip was at the vanguard of understanding the importance of multiple media to reading practices. I also think he had a very forward-thinking understanding of what literacy meant and what literacy education could be.”

CHICAGO, JUDY

(February 1889–20 October 1960) Initially FUTURIST in his orientation, Chicherin became the founder and theoretician of Russian Literary Constructivism in the early 1920s, attempting to apply the principles of CONSTRUCTIVISM (practical application of avant-garde achievements in the visual arts to design and architecture) within the literary sphere. The main principle was “maximal concentration of function on units of the construction” (“We Know,” 1922). His most significant works are Fluks (1922), in which he introduced a system of phonetic transcription and diacritical marks to convey the precise features of idiolect, and his contributions to the important Constructivist collection Change of All (1924). His works in Change of All initially employ a transcription like those in Fluks, which are designed to ensure the accurate performance of a compact text, but step by step the recitation cues become more elaborate, resembling musical notation, while the text becomes briefer. In the final stages of this development, verbal elements give way entirely to geometric figures that can be interpreted symbolically. Chicherin’s booklet Kan-Fun (1926) elaborates on his theories of Constructivist functionalism. However, a split developed between Chicherin and his less radical, more practical colleagues in Literary CONSTRUCTIVISM, who expelled him from their association in 1924. He spent the latter part of his life quietly working as a book designer. —Gerald Janecek

(20 July 1939; b. J. Sylvia Cohen, later Gerowitz) Her monumental feminist installation, The Dinner Party (1979), identified and represented visually 1,038 women from various historical periods. 999 of them are named on luminous porcelain floor tiles, while thirtynine honorees are represented at the dinner table itself with elaborate needlepoint placemats reflecting techniques from the period in which each woman lived. Her art reflected women’s domestic labor in needlework, ceramics, china painting, and vulva imagery.

CHILDS, LUCINDA (26 June 1940) Noted throughout her career for her cool but dramatic performing presence, Childs contributed to the innovative spirit of the JUDSON DANCE THEATER. In Carnation (1964), she made surprising use of props, such as a

CHRISTO •

colander that she placed on her head like a weird hat and foam hair curlers and sponges that she both stuffed into her mouth and attached to her colander-hat. Her later choreography reflects MINIMALISM. Childs collaborated with PHILIP GLASS and ROBERT WILSON on the classic original production of Glass’s opera, Einstein on the Beach, in 1976. In the evening-length Dance (1979, in a collaboration of choreography with music by Glass and film and decor by SOL LEWITT, eight dancers seem to be in perpetual motion as they sweep through the space. In technically based but minimally ranged movements that seem highly repetitious but are full of subtle changes, their carriage is elegant, their legs extend and point (but do not lift high), and they move buoyantly (but close to the ground, eschewing, say, spectacular leaps). —Katy Matheson

CHIRICO, GIORGIO DE (10 July 1888–20 November 1978) Born in Greece of Italian parents, he studied engineering in Athens and Munich before going to Paris, where he met artists gathered around GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE. His most memorable paintings were produced from 1909 to 1919. Coming to Italy in 1915 for military service, for which he was judged unfit, he went back to a Paris where his sometime admirer Apollinaire was no longer present. After 1920 or so he developed a romantic neoclassism that in its other worldliness resembled Surrealism, but was never so popular. In revenge perhaps but also to make money, he produced backdated paintings that resembled his earlier more successful art while protesting that other lesser paintings with his name were forgeries. He also wrote a single novel, Hebdomeros (1929), as well as distinguished criticism and experimental prose. His career is perhaps too rich a subject for a perfunctory biographer. His brother, who called himself ALBERTO SAVINIO, was a POLYARTIST who produced writing, painting, and even music compositions that are still remembered.

CHOPIN, HENRI (18 June 1922–3 January 2008) A Frenchman who emigrated to England in 1968, this Chopin published for several years a challenging periodical titled simply Ou (1964–74), which included a record, of mostly TEXT-SOUND, along with printed

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texts. His own compositions display hysterical articulations and overlapping speech-sounds, thanks to elementary MULTITRACKING; they are, by common consent, unforgettable. His 1979 book-length history of sound poetry suffers from an egocentrism that makes it no more reliable as criticism than as history (see Claudia Reeder’s review in my anthology Aural Literature Criticism [1981]). Nonetheless, Poèsie sonore Internationale came with two audiocassettes containing works by MICHEL SEUPHOR, FRANÇOIS DUFRÊNE, and BERNARD HEIDSIECK, among others, whose audio realizations were then unavailable elsewhere (and perhaps still are).

CHRISTMAS TRUCE (December 1914; in German, Weihnachtsfrieden; in French, Trêve de Noël) This great collective PERFORMANCE occurred near the beginning of World War I when roughly 100,000 German and British troops spontaneously agreed not to fight. Instead, they sang carols, exchanged Christmas gifts, perhaps played soccer against each, etc., as well they could, thanks to a fortunate press embargo, until their generals, stationed far away, instructed them to return to killing each other, which, nearly all Christian, they were naturally reluctant to do. One dozen years later, a World War I veteran, then a British parliamentarian, imagined that if only the young solders could have kept their essentially anarchist performance going, repudiating their commanders, they could have changed not only World War I but set a beneficial precedent for modern history. Silent Night (2001) is a great appreciation by the major American literary historian Stanley Weintraub (1929). What isn’t commonly celebrated as a great work of innovative Folk Art, with such a large number of participating performers, should be.

CHRISTO (13 June 1935; b. C. Vladimirov Javacheff) Born in Bulgaria, Christo emigrated first to Paris, where he took a wife, Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009; b. J.-C. Denat de Guillebon), whose collaborative support was envied by other artists and their spouses, and then to New York. His original sculptural idea, in the late 1950s, involved wrapping familiar objects in cloth, initially, I suppose, to give them esthetic value by destroying their original identity. He began with small objects before wrapping a wheelchair, a motorcycle, and then

80 • CHUMPS a small car. Instead of moving onto other ideas, Christo escalated his wrapping schemes to monumental and, at times, comic proportions, encasing at various times an exhibition space in Berne, Switzerland, a section of Australian coast, islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Reichstag in BERLIN; and most famously perhaps, in Manhattan’s Central Park in February 2005, each of them for a limited length of time. Temporary and theatrical, such work involved a large number of people. In my own experience, nothing in my hometown had the temporary enhancing presence of over seven thousand tall orange curtains, rearticulating the familiar landscape with a wealth of new images, until they were dismantled, best remembered now with videotapes or large-format picture books. The Gates, as it was called, differed as sculpture in that spectators were invited to walk through and around them for two glorious weeks in an otherwise bleak winter. Self-financing, Christo sold drawings and relics, incidentally giving the official date(s) of this project as “1979–2005,” to acknowledge how long it took for the proposal to be realized. Though several other public artists have promised to do as well again by NEW YORK CITY, which can be a “tough space,” none has come close. Thinking big, not only with his structures but about their “gallery,” Christo also built a fence running 24 miles long in California in 1976. His installation of hundreds of oversize umbrellas in Southern California and Japan (1991) became notorious, particularly after several umbrellas toppled during storms, endangering local populations. Though some of his projects were unrealized, Christo’s proposals, presented in drawings, benefitted from arriving in the wake of CONCEPTUAL ART. Later works were customarily credited to “Christo and Jeanne-Claude.”

CHUMPS This is my epithet, not commonly heard, for artists who assume positions within institutions, such as universities or foundations, where they gain sufficient power to befriend more successful colleagues with the offers of lectures, exhibitions, publications, etc. However, for these artist-functionaries such generosity isn’t entirely eleemosynary if they expect favors in return. Such a power-hungry artist becomes a chump when their benefactors don’t reciprocate. Consider, for example, a minor literary agent ensconced high in a university whose book press has published certain poets, which has sponsored conferences featuring them and their conspiring, etc. Yet his beneficiaries never reciprocated with any benefit for their generous host.

Or the composer who invites performing musicians to his university, even if they scarcely, if ever, play his compositions. Or the professor of painting who invites museum curators who never even tokenly exhibit the painter’s canvases. One wrinkle on this theme is the foundation official who has independently accomplished indubitably major work but never for his beneficiaries who, when they invite him, get lesser efforts. That raises the question of who’s chumping whom? About such hidden history more can no doubt be written, especially with the addition of real names.

CINEMASCOPE (c. 1925) Invented by the French physicist Dr. Henri Chrétien (1879–1956), this is the name for a film projection system that produces a far wider image than that of conventional film. Thirty-five-millimeter film is shot with an anamorphic lens that horizontally squeezes the wider image into the standard film ratios. To be seen properly, this compressed image must then be projected through a compensating lens that extends it horizontally. Cinemascope was first used commercially for The Robe (1953) and contributes, in my opinion, to the excellence and character of such visually spectacular films as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. When shown on television or videotapes, such films generally are visually compromised, their sides lost from view, unless reproduced in the so-called letterbox format with their tops and bottoms blackened.

CINERAMA (c. 1938) Invented by Fred Waller (1886–1954), this is the name for a three-screen projection system whose images were recorded by three synchronized cameras. The synchronized films were then projected with their seams aligned onto a curvilinear screen that filled the audience’s horizontal vision. This Is Cinerama (1952) was one of the great movie going experiences of my youth, establishing my taste for physically expanded film. The success of that film prompted the use of CINEMASCOPE, which offered the economic advantage of requiring only one projector at the esthetic cost of a flatter, less extended image; but every time I remember any multiple projection, I wish that I could see This Is Cinerama again. It is unfortunate that it is no longer

CLAIR, RENÉ •

available, as some of its esthetic terrain was appropriated by more recent developments such as IMAX.

CIRQUE DE SOLEIL (1984) While most circuses are kitchy, the genre has been a fertile PERFORMANCE art susceptible to innovation. The great departure of the most famous American circus, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey (1918– 2017), came from the employment of elephants, many of them, some of them more intelligent than others, all of whom incidentally made the smaller bears favored, say, by the smaller Russian circuses look slight. Indicatively, not only were RB&B pachyderms featured in logos but they became the co-stars for GEORGE BALANCHINE’s single most innovative choreography, Circus Polka (1942) for fifty ballerinas and fifty elephants. The simultaneous use of three stages, called “three rings,” supported RB&B’s claim to be “the greatest show on earth.” As indeed it was – for decades. More recently, none could equal, though some tried to rival, Cirque de Soleil, a French-Canadian group that began on the streets of Quebec province before eventually moving to LAS VEGAS, where they found a corporate patron who employed them regularly, and built theaters especially for them so they could perform simultaneously in more than one venue. Eventually Cirque de Soleil toured their brand around the world. Among the more subtle departures are abolishing the ringmaster that earlier circuses used as a master of ceremonies, if not a guide with his stentorian introductions. Cirque de Soleil retired as well animals, freaks, and unnecessary dangers by having trapeze artists, say, perform with harnesses visibly attached to their bodies. Performers, not stagehands, change props. Technologically sophisticated is the use of both lights and sounds. Rarely are their performances vulgar. Oddly, the story of how an innovative performance group became a billion-dollar company hasn’t yet been fully documented.

CITROEN, PAUL (15 December 1896–13 March 1983) While many artists have made PHOTOMONTAGES that pieced together fragments from different sources within a single frame, the most influential masterpiece was Paul Citroen’s Metropolis (1923), which includes shots of many tall buildings laid side and side to establish the verticality and density typical of the modern

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city. As only a bit of sky is visible at the top, another theme of Metropolis (1923) is diminishing the presence of Nature. So immediately respected was this Citroen image, it was reprinted widely at the time in both magazines and books, also influencing visibly Fritz Lang’s 1926 film with the same name, as well as such paintings such as Downtown (c. 1925) by the American Jan Matulka (1890–1972) and Broadway (c. 1935) by Mark Tobey (1890–1976). Citroen, a Dutch Jew born and raised in BERLIN, made variations, all apparently with the same title. Decades later, his photomontage became a kind of logo for audio portraits of the world’s cities, likewise collectively called Metropolis, produced by various individual artists for Westdeutscher Rundfunk. If an exemplar establishes the validity of a new art form, this is it. Closest are the pre-1925 photomontages by JOHN HEARTFIELD, who, as a Communist political critic, later favored topical subjects; for his Nazis did not survive past World War II as well as Citroen’s vertical Metropolis has. Yet far, far away from arts history are the simple photomontages usually appearing in advertisements.

ČIURLIONIS, MIKALOJUS (10 September 1875–10 April 1911) A trained Lithuanian composer who worked in Warsaw as a choral conductor from 1902 to 1909 and whose Symbolist music resembles that of his contemporary ALEXANDER SCRIABIN, Ĉiurlionis developed theories of “tonal ground formation” that presaged SERIAL music. Clearly a proto-POLYARTIST, he later became a painter of cosmic, Symbolist landscapes, often in series, with such musical titles as Sonata of the Stars and Prelude and Fugue. Sea Sonata (1908–09), for instance, has panels with titles such as “Allegro,” “Andante,” and “Finale.” The third number (1914) of the St. Petersburg magazine Apollon, as well as a 1961 issue of the Brooklyn journal Lituanus (Vol. 7, no. 2), were entirely devoted to the composer-painter who, like KANDINSKY, explored analogies between the two arts. One principal scholar on Ĉiurlionis has been Vytautas Landsbergis (1932), who, after editing his letters, writing monographs, and introducing his visual art, became president of Lithuania in 1990. Unfortunately, Ĉiurlionis himself died young of tuberculosis.

CLAIR, RENÉ (11 November 1898–15 March 1981; b. René-Lucien Chomette)

82 • CLOSE, CHUCK He was among the few involved with experimental short films to have a long filmmaking career, not only in his native France but also later in England and America. Whereas his collaborators in the classic short Entr’acte (1924) – ERIK SATIE, FRANCIS PICABIA, MARCEL DUCHAMP, MAN RAY, among others – later made significant visual art and music, Clair made longer films, some of which reflect his avant-garde origins; others, not. During World War II, he even worked in Hollywood, which at least didn’t destroy him, as it did NATHANAEL WEST, among other avant-garde figures, before Clair returned to his native France. Unlike other American veteran filmmakers, both immigrants and native-born, Clair published prose – his journalism and a novel as well as books with his own screenplays and prefaces. Which Clair works are strongest – what’s most likely to be remembered – is an open question.

CLOSE, CHUCK

20th century, famed mostly for his respectful portraits of prominent artists and writers. His more remarkable photographs, however, portrayed overlapping faces thanks to a contraption made around 1916 of three mirrors clamped together. EZRA POUND, one of the first subjects for these representationally radical portraits, called them Vortographs reflecting VORTICISM that was prominent in England at the time. Though the first great photography gallerist ALFRED STIEGLITZ refused to exhibit Coburn’s departure, which he stopped producing after only a few dozen examples, others did, crediting him with inventing photographs that reflected painterly cubism and thus approached abstraction. Nonetheless, by 1930, as Coburn sadly lost interest in photography, he destroyed several thousand glass and film negatives.

COCTEAU, JEAN (5 July 1889–11 October 1963)

Extending the familiar tradition of human portraiture, Close has created innovative paintings that depend upon making faces devoid of expression very large, say 9 by 7 feet, and thus capturing a wealth of facial detail unavailable even to conventional photography. Initially working in black and white before turning to color, he nonetheless kept his method of subjecting a photograph to a grid of varying light and dark areas that were then transferred to canvas. His familiar subject matter notwithstanding, he developed alternative means of producing a portrait with dots (often sprayed through a grid) and continuous tones (where each color in an image is a single color). Especially in prints, watercolors, and pastels, Close customarily reveals his alternative processes by leaving the grid visible. Sometimes his blurred images resemble computer printouts, increasing the impression of impersonality. Though working with sizes classically conducive to heroic sentiment, Close still presents individuals objectively. Severely crippled by a spinal-artery collapse in his late forties, he later made gridportraits with brighter colors and with less realistic images.

Cocteau was one of those figures who flirt with the avant-garde without ever quite influencing or joining it, who championed certain innovative art without actually making any, perhaps because he was too self-conscious of his early CELEBRITY to be courageously radical, mostly because he simply lacked originality while aspiring to be fashionable. As he once told FRANCIS PICABIA, “You are the extreme left, I am the extreme right.” Among his professional associates at various times in his career were SERGEI DHAGHILEV, PABLO PICASSO, GERTRUDE STEIN, ERIK SATIE, IGOR STRAVINSKY, and KENNETH ANGER. As a slick POLYARTIST who published his first book of poems while still a teenager, Cocteau wrote plays, scripted scenarios, designed theatrical sets, and directed films, in addition to exhibiting drawings that, in LUCY R. LIPPARD’s phrases, “remained firmly Picassoid, dry, coquettish, over-refined, and elegant.” Though he was renowned when alive, posterity defeated his work. Of all his efforts, his film La Belle et la Bête (1946, Beauty and the Beast) is most likely to survive, if any at all. In his pretentious compromises, as well as his position in French culture, Cocteau very much resembled his fellow Parisian, the composer PIERRE BOULEZ.

COBURN, ALVIN LANGDON

COLEMAN, ORNETTE

(11 June 1882–23 November 1966)

(9 March 1930–11 June 2015)

As a Boston native who became an Englishman, he was a pioneering photographer at the beginning of the

Born in Texas, self-taught as a musician, Coleman around 1960 challenged the world of JAZZ music

(5 July 1940; b. Charles Thomas C.)

COLLECTORS, AVANT-GARDE •

much as IGOR STRAVINSKY did in classical music decades before. Coleman’s innovation was instrumental independence, which is to say that the soloist performs independently of any preassigned harmonic scheme, and then that everyone in his group performs with scant acknowledgment of the percussionist’s beat. Called “free jazz,” Coleman’s own improvisations, mostly on the alto saxophone, gained a strong following in New York in the ’60s and Europe in the ’70s. In addition to performing on the violin and trumpet, he composed extended works for classical ensembles.

COLLAGE (c. 1910) The earliest fine-art examples of collage depended upon the incorporation of real objects, such as bits of newspaper or other mass-produced images, into a picture’s field, the objects at once contributing to the image and yet through difference suggesting another dimension of experience. One visual theme was perceiving the difference between pasted object and material surface. Initiated by CUBISTS, the compositional principle was extended by FUTURISTS, DADAISTS, and SURREALISTS, always in ways typical of each. Collage was, by many measures, the most popular artistic innovation of early 20thcentury art. Later collages depended upon using separate images for ironic juxtapositions; others functioned to expand the imagery available to art. The collage principle influenced work in other arts, including sculpture, where ASSEMBLAGE is threedimensional collage; PHOTOMONTAGE; music, where the post-World War II development of audiotape facilitated the mixing of dissimilar sounds; and VIDEO, even though that last art did not arise until the late 1960s. Max Ernst’s La femme 100 fetes (1932) is a book-length narrative composed of collages. The Czech artist JIRÍ KOLÀR (whose last name is pronounced to sound like “collage”) has extended the compositional principle, often in ironic ways, to works he calls “crumplage,” “rollage,” “intercollage,” “prollage,” “chiasmage,” and “anti-collage.” Another innovation in this tradition is the composer MAURICIO KAGEL’s “Metacollage,” where all the materials for his mix come from a single source (e.g., Beethoven’s music, for example, or 19th-century German culture). I judge that collage, as an easily adopted innovation, became dead by the 1960s, which is to say that, although collages continued to appear, none of them, especially in visual art, were strikingly original or excellent.

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A contrary interpretation of collage sees it as not early modernist, as I do, but proto-postmodernist: Unlike the works of modernism proper, it is an assault on the integrity of the work of art in that it brings foreign materials into the space previously reserved for painting on the canvas. Since these materials include such things as newspaper clippings, collage thus forges a line between ‘high’ art and mass culture. This comes from The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism [1995], which was on publication self-consciously up-to-date.

COLLECTORS, AVANT-GARDE While people collecting avant-garde paintings are plentiful, rare are the individuals who compile notable, discriminating, usually unique gatherings of avant-garde materials in the other arts. Most prominent among those for musical manuscripts was PAUL SACHER, already acknowledged here. For kinetic sculptures, few rivaled David Bermant (1919–2000), a developer of retail malls who incidentally placed some of his holdings in them. For FLUXUS scores, objects, and other ephemera, the greatest collectors were Lila and Gilbert Silverman, a Detroit real-estate developer. By contrast, the collection of Francesco Conz (1935–2010), an Italian based in Asolo and then Verona, included much FLUXUS along with VISUAL POETRY, LETTRISM, and VIENNA ACTIONISM. Another collection, not only of Fluxus but also of Happenings documents, was amassed by Hanns Sohm (1921–99), a suburban Stuttgart dentist, who donated it to a local Staatsgalerie. As its website claims, “As these were objects which no-one else bothered to keep, Sohm can be said to have preserved this culture almost single-handedly.” Martin Sackner (1931), a Miami (FL) physician and inventor, and his wife Ruth (1936–2005) gathered over 75,000 objects relating to CONCRETE and visual poetries. Discriminating collectors are special people, as scarce as discriminating critics, and perhaps much like artists in their passionate focus. When the Italian-German collector of avant-garde materials Egidio Marzona (1944) visited my SoHo studio in the 1990s, he looked at my library and estimated 17,000 books. When I asked how he derived that number, which was news to me, he replied, “I have 40,000.” Dispute I couldn’t. When the director of the Humanities Research Center

84 • COLOMBO, JOHN ROBERT at the University of Texas visited the Sackners, he noticed many books he had never seen before, implicitly measuring their collection’s distinction. Marvin Sackner tells the illustrative story of his visiting Sohm in the latter’s home/office/archive. He invited Sackner to select from the dentist’s collection any duplicates that Sackner didn’t already have. While Sohm attended to a patient, Sackner selected several items. When he eventually showed his choices to Sohm, the latter rebuked Sacker by identifying which ones were already in Sackner’s collection whose inventory Sohm had apparently memorized. Normal people scarcely know what’s in their closets.

COLOMBO, JOHN ROBERT (24 March 1936) Very much a strong man both inside and outside within Canadian literature, a prolific writer and editor whose achievements are so plentiful they are foolishly taken for granted in his native country, Colombo has worked with a variety of unusual poetic strategies. His first books were found poetry, each dependent upon making art from esoteric texts found in his unusually wide reading; his term at the time was “redeemed prose.” The Canadian critic Douglas Barbour (1940) writes that Colombo’s The Great Cities of Antiquity (1979): Is a collection of found poems in a dizzying variety of modes, based on entries in the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Written in 1969, it is possibly Colombo’s most extreme collage, a veritable textbook on the many formal experiments of modern and postmodern poetry. Finding language, rather than creating it, has been a fertile idea for new poetry into the 21st century. Of the poems written, by contrast, out of Colombo’s own head, consider the excellence of “Secret Wants” in Neo Poems (1971). A full-time booksmith, writing, and editing well over two hundred volumes for publishers both large and small (no false snob he), Colombo has also collaborated on literary translations from several languages and edited several important anthologies of poetry and of paranormal experience, including New Direction in Canadian Poetry (1970, perhaps the only English language anthology of avant-garde poetries aimed at high school students). In addition, he compiled such pioneering culturally patriotic compendia as Colombo’s Canadian Quotations (1994), Colombo’s Canadian

References (1976), Colombo’s Book of Canada (1978), and The Dictionary of Canadian Quotations (1991), which all have the distinction of being books that nobody else could create, even if they tried. That’s one reason why they’ve survived decades later. One mark of his anthologies is bookish distance, perhaps reflecting the Olympian influence of his teacher NORTHROP FRYE, as distinct from journalistic topicality. Colombo’s single most marvelous book is likewise unique – Self-Schrift (1999), which contains, as he puts it, “commentaries – anecdotes, insights, appreciations, criticisms, ideas, and theories – about the 136 books that he has written, compiled, or translated over the years.” Why invite others, the book implies, when a prolific author can honor himself? Contagiously readable, at once proud and modest, it will become, I suspect, a model for similarly professional autobiographies by authors fortunate enough to be prolific. In reviewing The Collected Poems of John Robert Colombo (2005), three volumes that gather a rich assortment of verbal departures, I discovered a major unintentional poem within the book’s table of contents, which, incidentally, became a “found” text that no one else could have written. Innately irrepressiable, he has in the 21st century self-published annual collections of his latest writing, incidentally setting a good example for other veteran writers overcoming what he charmingly dubs “a publishing block.”

COLON, FLEURY (9 September 1905–21 May 1964) This enigmatic French architect carried reductionist architectural doctrines to new heights by isolating the decorative finial, or épi, that usually adorns the top of a gable, canopy, or pinnacle in French architecture, thus making the finial his ultimate form. Educated at L’École d’Architecture (Paris), Colon was one of many gifted graduates employed in the construction of the Maginot Line. Eager for exciting architectural challenges in postwar Paris, Colon was drawn to Isidore Isou’s Lettriste ideology wherein art, according to Isou, has two characteristic phases: amplic (expansion) and “chiseling” (deconstruction). Colon saw Isou’s doctrine as further justification of his own theory to dismiss traditional structure and to focus solely on the finial. But the ideological tryst was shortlived. In a fierce cafe debate, Colon accused Isidore Isou (1924–2007) of expanding his ego and nothing else. Isou’s followers retaliated by accusing Colon of “intention to collaborate” with the Vichy Government, citing his failed proposal to design train station shelters shaped like finials.

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Bruised by the politics of LETTRISM, the architect manqué relocated to Montreal in 1950 and changed his name to Regarder Plus (To Look Further). Colon acquired financiers, and established an artistic commune in the wilderness northwest of Montreal, wherein his application of the finial was finally realized. Although similar in some regards to R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER’s Dymaxion Deployment Unit, Colon’s Max Épi Maison (MÉM) was finial-shaped, stood 25 feet high, and was made of pewter. This commune consisted of sixteen of these spire-like MÉMs standing in a teepee-like cluster on the edge of a meadow. Amidst the dense Canadian forest and without the artificial light of the city, Colon became enamored with the stars and turned MÉM 3, his studio, into an observatory complete with telescope. Convinced he could see Sputnik in orbit above the tops of the pines, Colon hurled himself into the most peculiar of his finial-related obsessions: Aeronautics. Blueprints and sketches for hundreds of finial-shaped missiles and rockets adorned the inside of his studio/observatory. Colon wrote volumes of letters petitioning the Canadian Space & Aeronautics Commission (CSAC) with the hope of gaining funding for the finial’s aerodynamic possibilities. Small finial-fuselage test models were built from scraps of pewter while Colon anxiously awaited access to CSAC’s wind tunnels. But his pleas for assistance met with bureaucratic indifference. The letters slowed to a trickle. Colon cloistered himself inside his MÉM developing a morose dementia for the night sky. It was clear, even to the commune, that Colon’s cause was failing. Death can be impressive, even to the avant-garde, and Colon’s demise was no less ironic. Alarmed commune members looked on as the aging architect, with the intention of cleaning his telescope lens, scaled the MÉM Observatory using a new system of ropes and pulleys. A pulley snapped, and Colon fell, impaling himself on a small doghouse shaped like a finial. —Michael Peters

COLOR-FIELD PAINTING (c. 1950) The theme was using color apart from drawing, apart from shape and shading, until it acquires a purely visual status. However, in contrast to monochromic painting, most color-field work involves at least two colors, which prompt surprising retinal responses, such as ambiguous figure-ground reversals, usually along the sharply delineated border between the colors. The last fact prompted the epithet “hard-edge

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abstraction,” which is also used to describe this style of painting. One master was ELLSWORTH KELLY, who was also among the first to paint on nonrectangular canvases. Since some post-World War II colorfield painters had worked in camouflage during the War, their military experience must have taught them strategic tricks about color relationships that afterwards were turned to esthetic uses. In my collection is a SUZAN FRECON painting, in which a deeply repainted black rectangle sits in the center of a very white larger canvas. Stand at least 14 feet away from this work and stare at it intently, and you will observe that the black rectangle starts to shimmer. (And the shimmering won’t stop!)

COLTRANE, JOHN (23 September 1926–17 July 1967) Working out of a jazz tradition, he assimilated an interest, more typical of modernist classical music, in alternative tonalities, beginning with his close study from the 1950s of NICOLAS SLONIMSKY’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (1947), which is a brilliant compendium of how else the notes within a scale might be played. As John Schott wrote, “Its exhaustive treatment of octave divisions and symmetrical interval patterns was also a goad in his quest for a tonal system that would supplant traditional tonality.” Initially recognized as an accomplished saxophonist, Coltrane created long melodic lines that reflected the modernist “emancipation of dissonance,” in ARNOLD SCHOENBERG’s phrase. Coltrane was also interested in original aggregate relationships, which is to say chords, but again with a taste for atonality. One recurring theme of his improvisations was symmetry. In his classic appreciation of Coltrane’s complexity, Schott reprints a rich diagram drawn by Coltrane in 1960 and explains: The diagram juxtaposes the two whole-tone collections five times around the perimeters of a circle. Lines are drawn connecting each tone to its tritone across the circle, bisecting the circle thirty times. Every fifth tone is enclosed is a box to show the circle of fifths. Each member of the circle of fifths is also enclosed with its upper and lower neighbors in two ovals, etc. While acknowledging the metaphysical implications of the diagram’s configuration, Schott’s theme is Coltrane’s ambition to realize within an improvisatory context the intensity of overlapping interconnections

86 • COMBINATORIALITY typical of serial composition. In the wake of too much heroin and alcohol, he died too young.

with artificial scales of thirteen equal degrees, obtained with the aid of electronic instruments. Potential uses of combinatoriality operating with sets of more than twelve notes in an octave are limitless.

COMBINATORIALITY

—Nicolas Slonimsky

(1950s) In general topology the concept of combinatoriality applies to the functional congruence of geometrical figures of the same order of continuity. Thus a square can be brought into topological congruence with a circle because all the points of the former are in an enumerable correspondence of the other. On the other hand, the geometry of Dick Higgins’ Intermedia chart cannot be made congruent with a square or a circle without cutting. The American composer and theorist MILTON BABBITT extended the term combinatoriality to serial techniques. The parameter of continuity in dodecaphonic writing is the order of succession of the twelve thematic notes in their four forms, basic, retrograde, inversion, and inverted retrograde, all of which are combinatorially congruent. Furthermore, the tone-row can be functionally divided into two potentially congruent groups of six notes each, or three groups of four notes each, or four groups of three notes each, with each such group becoming a generating serial nucleus possessing a degree of subsidiary combinatoriality. Extending the concept of combinatoriality to other parameters of SERIAL MUSIC, a state of total Serialism is attained, in which not only the actual notes of a series, but also meter, rhythm, intervallic configurations, dynamics, and instrumental timbres are organized in sets and subsets. The subsets in turn are organized as combinatorial derivations, possessing their own order of continuity and congruence. Of these, the most fruitful is the principle of rotation, in which each successive set is obtained by the transposition of the first note of the series to the end of a derived set. Thus the first set, 1, 2, 3, . . . 12, appears after rotation as subset 2, 3, 4, 5, . . . 12, 1, or as 3, 4, 5, 6, . . . 12, 1, 2, etc. Inversion, retrograde, and inverted retrograde can be subjected to a similar type of rotation. The additive Fibonacci series, in which each number equals the sum of the two preceding numbers, as in 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, is another fertile resource for the formation of sets, subsets, and other derivations. The Fibonacci numbers can be used for building non-dodecaphonic tone-rows, in which case the numbers will indicate the distance from the central tone in semitones, modulo 12, so that 13 becomes functionally identical with 1, 21 with 9, etc. The numerical field of combinatoriality is circumscribed by twelve different notes. But experiments have been conducted, notably by ERNST KRENEK,

COMBINE (1954) ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG purportedly coined this nifty epithet to define painting enhanced with protrusive objects. The classic precursor was, of course, “a real bottle brush projecting at right angles from the painted surface” in MARCEL DUCHAMP’s TU’M (1918). Within his own painterly fields Rauschenberg in the 1950s incorporated pillows, clocks, and stuffed animals, among other sub-artistic objects. Other canvasmen did likewise after him, including JASPER JOHNS and Jim Dine (1935). Their obvious unacceptability notwithstanding, the best of these junk-filled combines ended on the walls not of private collectors but in museums that have often paid millions of dollars to own and display them.

COMEDIANS’ COMEDIANS (forever) These are the comedians whom their colleagues respect enormously, simply because, as avant-garde in their own art, they’ve gone so far ahead. In his thick Make ‘Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America (2008), Lawrence Maslon identifies three whom their colleagues identify as the greatest: Jack Benny (1894– 1974), Jonathan Winters (1925–2013), and Richard Pryor (1940–2005). The first fielded a situation comedy so rich with unique comic characters (including a surrogate for himself) that he was able to produce several hundred different programs for radio and then television. The second was incomparably skilled at spontaneous invention. The third told stories that no one else could. (None of this trio simply recited jokes.) To these three I would add MAE WEST for her memorable aphorisms, Groucho Marx (1890–1977) for his verbal dexterity, Lenny Bruce (1925–66) for his courage in mocking taboos, and the Anglo-Indian-Irishman SPIKE MILLIGAN, whose live performances were manic, much like the Americans Robin Williams (1951– 2014) and Don Rickles (1926–17). Once investigating German comedians, whose legion is few, I could identify

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only one true master, Karl Valentin (1882–1948). With the high standard of this pantheon seriously in mind, others might select other comedians’ comedians.

COMEDY This has become the preferred mode for avant-garde art, in contrast to its antipode Tragedy, which belongs to traditional art. If Tragedy portrays what should not happen, one theme of Comedy is possibility not only with the materials of art but in human existence. It follows that many major avant-garde artists were incidentally great comedians. Need I add that some artists are oblivious to comedy. Likewise some arts critics. Likewise to irony that depends upon seeing through transparent façades. Those so oblivious usually oppose avant-garde arts. Consider from George Lord Byron (1788–1824): “All tragedies are finished by a death, all comedies are ended by a marriage.” If so, I’ll take comedy any time. NORTHROP FRYE, accepting this dichotomy, famously classified the Book of Job as a comedy. I once heard JOHN CAGE say that comedy was “more profound” than tragedy; but since no one else heard that judgment from him, may I claim it as mine?

COMPETITION The great secret of professional arts is that their worlds are ferociously competitive. Of the many who aspire, only a few reach the top, if only briefly, and fewer for long; and what is true of art worlds in general is even more true of avant-garde turfs. This truth accounts for why even aspirants with the best preparations and/or the strongest backers don’t necessarily prosper, and why, by contrast, some major artists began with negligible connections. And then why as well anyone swimming high is liable not only to drowning sometime soon or attack from below. Good fortune can help now and then, as well as here and there; but nothing ultimately succeeds as much as strong work that lasts and then more strong work.

COMPUTER (c. 1945) Information is entered, by one of many possible channels, into a machine that converts it into digital impulses that can then be manipulated in a variety of ways. Such

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information may be words, as many of us enter these on word processors; it may also be pictures or sounds. In music, computers enabled composers to create on their cathode-ray tubes (aka CRTs) works that could be transformed, thanks to digital-to-analog conversion, into a permanent storage format such as audiotape or computer file that could be played back through conveniently available transducers. In literary composition, computers had less influence until the 1980s, with the development first affordable “personal computer” that could sit on your desk next to, or in place of, the typewriter, and then of multipath HYPERTEXTS that are best “read” not sequentially in print but by clicking various options presented on a cathode-ray tube. In visual art, the influence of the computer has been more problematic, in part because it works so much better with abstraction than representation. Look at the catalog of the first institutional computer art exhibition, Cybernetic Serendipity, organized in 1968 by Jasia Reichardt for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and you’ll be struck by the lack of interesting art. This exhibition partially accounts for the anonymous author of the entry on computer art in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Art (1981) declaring, partly out of ignorance, “By the mid 1970s no visual art of significant quality had been produced with the aid of computers.” By the 1980s, exhibitions were filled with computer graphics different in content but lacking individual style, all in contrast to the distinguished computer-assisted art of MANFRED MOHR, who begins with algorithms. My own opinion, evident occasionally in this book, is that computers have been most successful in film (particularly by STAN VANDERBEEK) and then video animation (particularly by STEPHEN BECK), but then the latter happens to be the best artistic use to which I put them in my own work.

COMPUTER POETRY (1960s–90s) A term used so loosely that it has become almost useless, as computer poetry was any poetry that relied on the computer for its construction and presentation. The earliest examples consisted of “poems” devised of randomly generated or randomly ordered words. The output that spilled forth was nonsense made interesting by two facts: that it was generated without the direct intervention of a human mind and that it veered unexpectedly towards sense as the reader attempted to distill order from the chaos. These were programmer’s games: yards of scrolls furling forth from TRS-80

88 • CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE computers onto the floor of a Radio Shack, more a sideshow than a performance. Occasionally, the term “computer poetry” was used to define visual poems written with the aid of the computer (just as the term “typewriter poem” described a type of poetry that depended on the typogrammar of the Olivetti, or the Selectric II, or the Smith-Corona for its particular presence). These poems might consist of visual collage, shaped text, overwriting, or a faux palimpsest for their visual and semiotic sense. Other computer poetry included visual kinetic poems programmed for the computer screen. Poets have fashioned these poems using such varied tools as BASIC and HTML to produce everything from growing, twisting, and contracting words that shuffle across or huddle upon the screen to complex hyperhuman bursts of visual text, reminiscent of Conlon Nancarrow’s music for the piano roll. With the advent of the Internet as a canvas and lingua franca for these poems, work of this type migrated to that space and became something more varied, more colorful, and more of an INTERMEDIA – combining movement, word, color, and even sound into mini-movies of cybertext, a new cinematic poetry for a new age.

building [because models] could well have an artistic or conceptual existence of their own, one which was relatively independent of the project that they represented.” CLAES OLDENBURG’s books of his public art include drawings of proposals along with works actually realized. The critical question posed by the publication or exhibition of such work is whether the proposal can have an esthetic status comparable to its realization, and thus whether a comprehensive critical appraisal of, say, an architect’s work should include those images that were never realized along with those that were. If, like myself, you affirm the former position, then you must consider extending the principle to other cultural areas, such as intellectual history If only to raise the possibility of others doing likewise, I once self-published Unfinished Business (1991) and then What I Didn’t Do: An Essay in Conceptual Historiography (2013), collecting my grant applications, anthology outlines, and proposals for both fulllength books and extended media compositions, all of which went unrealized for reasons beyond my control, implicitly raising the question whether such “unfinished business” belongs to my cultural record.

—Geof Huth

CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE

CONCEPTUAL ART (c. 1960)

(forever) This is my coinage for architectural proposals that were never realized, and were in some cases never intended to be realized, but have in a format other than a constructed building sufficient clarity and originality to be exhibited and then appreciated. The classic modernist example is VLADIMIR TATLIN’s Monument to the Third International (1920), which had considerable influence on subsequent architecture, even though it was never more substantial than a sculpture. FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT once offered a drawing for a skinny skyscraper a full mile high (1956). A later example of Conceptual Architecture was BUCKMINSTER FULLER’s proposal to put a geodesic dome over an entire city. In their book Unbuilt America (1977), the visual poet Alison Sky (1946) and Michelle Stone compiled a marvelous anthology of comparable plans drawn from American history. Around the same time, an ambitious architect, since more successful, Peter Eisenman (1932), organized an exhibition whose catalog became the book Idea as Model (1981). In the introduction, he suggested that an architectural model “could be something other than a narrative record of a project or a

The radical idea is that the FRAMING of absence can generate esthetic experience, if properly interpreted. The classic forerunner, conceived nearly a decade before the epithet was coined, is JOHN CAGE’s oftcalled “silent” piece, 4′33″ (1952), in which, in a concert situation, pianist DAVID TUDOR plays no notes for the required duration of four minutes and thirty-three seconds. By framing the performance situation of a concert with a prominent pianist, Cage suggested that all the miscellaneous noises heard in that space during that duration constitute “music.” It logically follows that any unintended noise, even apart from the enclosure of 4-minute 33 seconds, could provide esthetic experience (and thus that what has commonly been called Cage’s “silent piece” is really a noise piece). Much depends upon a resonant context. The sometime economist HENRY FLYNT is commonly credited with originating the radical notion of statement-aloneart in his 1961 essay “Concept Art,” which he defined as “first of all an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of e.g. music is sound.” Self-conscious conceptual art, which arrived in the late 1960s, customarily took such forms as written instructions, esthetically undistinguished photographs,

CONDUITS, DISSEMENATORS? •

scale models, maps, or documentary videotapes, all of which are theoretically intended to suggest esthetic experiences that could not be evoked in any other way. YOKO ONO specialized in performance instructions that could not be realized, such as, simply, “Fly.” A later, charming example was CLAES OLDENBURG’s “inverted monument” for New York City, for which he hired professional grave diggers to excavate and then fill in a large rectangular hole behind New York’s Metropolitan Museum (rather than, say, at a garbage dump, which would be contextually less resonant). Extending the radical principle, SOL LEWITT suggested, “In conceptual art, the idea, or concept, is the most important aspect of the work.” Among the pioneering practitioners of such Idea Art, to recall another epithet, were Douglas Huebler (1924–97), JOSEPH KOSUTH, LAWRENCE WEINER, DAN GRAHAM, John Baldessari (1931), HANS HAACKE, the German Hanne Darboven (1941–2009), and Frenchman Daniel Buren (1938). Some of these artists specialized in written texts that they insisted should not be considered Literature. Even as late as 1996, Darboven explored the nature of time in Kulturgeschichte 1880– 1983, an exhibition of 1,589 panels uniform in size and format that document those years with photographs, numbers, texts, and historic postcards.

CONCEPTUAL DANCE (1910s) This is my coinage for printed proposals, usually wholly of words but sometimes with pictures or drawings, for a physical performance that wasn’t realized and perhaps cannot be. Sometimes their instructions are impossible, such as NAM JUNE PAIK’s “Climb inside the vagina of a live whale.” Others are possible but problematic, such as my own “In Memorium John Cage” (2014): “Speak only his name at every midnight for seventynine years, eleven months, seven days, by such measure duplicating the span of his life in a manner he would have thought most appropriate.” While some are short, mostly in the tradition of FLUXUS, other Conceptual Dance can be long and detailed: E. E. CUMMINGS’s “Tom: A Ballet,” EDMUND WILSON’s “Cronkhite’s Clocks,” WOODY ALLEN’s “A Guide to Some of the Lesser Ballets,” REMY CHARLIP’s “Bound for Stardom,” and “The Elephant and the Birds” (1942) by the British poet/ critic William Empson (1906–84). The earliest examples known to me were created by Italian FUTURISTS, as collected in MICHAEL and Victoria KIRBY’s anthology of Future Performance (1971). As long as these

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proposed ballets aren’t realized, their printed texts framing thus absence, they remain truly Conceptual.

CONCRETE POETRY (1950s) Concrete Poetry aims to reduce language to its concrete essentials, free not only of semantic but of syntactical necessities. It is often confused with SOUND POETRY and VISUAL POETRY (which are, respectively, the enhancement of language primarily in terms of acoustic qualities and the enhancement of language primarily through image), but is really something else. The true Concrete Poem is simply letters or disconnected words scattered abstractly across the page or a succession of aurally nonrepresentational (and linguistically incomprehensible) sounds. The rationale comes from KURT SCHWITTERS’s 1924 manifesto “Consistent Poetry”: Not the word but the letter is the original material of poetry. Word is 1.) Composition of Letters. 2.) Sound. 3.) Denotation (Meaning). 4.) Carrier of associations of ideas. In his or her use of language, the Concrete poet is generally reductive; the choice of methods for enhancing language could be expansive. Unfortunately, the earliest anthologies of Concrete Poetry did more to obscure than clarify the issue of its differences, particularly by including poems that were primarily visual or acoustic. Among the truest practitioners of Concrete Poetry were IAN HAMILTON FINLAY, DOM SYLVESTER HOUÉDARD, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos (1929–2003, 1931), Decio Pignatari (1927–2012), Max Bense (1910–90), Pierre Garnier (1928–2014), Paul de Vree (1909–84), and EUGEN GOMRINGER. What had at first seemed puzzling to readers, not to mention critics, has since inspired a growing scholarly literature.

CONCRETISM See FOUND ART.

CONDUITS, DISSEMENATORS? (forever) What might be the best elegant epithet for individuals, usually artists, not customarily of the first rank, who should be remembered for personally spreading a new

90 • CONSTRUCTIVISM style through intimate relations with major figures. The art critic HAROLD ROSENBERG once confided to me the painterly style later called ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM was passed by certain women in their relationships with various men. Somewhat awed at the time, I didn’t ask the next questions. Later I discovered that one must have been the painter Elaine de Kooning (1918–89), who married WILLEM DE KOONING in 1943 and subsequently exhibited her own abstractive paintings mostly of landscapes and people, in addition to conducting intimate relations with other painters and a prominent reviewer. Another was Mercedes Matter (1913–2001; née Carles), whom Rosenberg loved, as did others. ‘Tis said that for a next generation of New York painters the poet FRANK O’HARA functioned similarly. Some of the writers making the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s loved Harold Jackman (1901–61), a legendarily handsome gay man, who connected his admirers to each other. Only in the 21st century perhaps, with higher (or lower) standards for historical truth-telling could such honorable and honorific facilitators be identified.

CONSTRUCTIVISM (c. late 1910s) In the decade after World War I, this term was, like FUTURISM, adopted by two groups – one in Russia, the other in Western Europe – whose aims were sufficiently different to distinguish between them. Coming in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, most Soviet Constructivists were ABSTRACT artists participating in social change with applied projects that nonetheless reflected their esthetic program. Thus, the historical exhibition Art into Life (1990) included large-scale graphics, environments, photomontage, stage designs, and architectural proposals, along with paintings and sculptures. The key figure in this exhibition was ALEKSANDR RODCHENKO, whose environmental The Workers Club (1925) included unusual chairs and reading tables. Also in this exhibition was VLADIMIR TATLIN’s Letatlin (1932), which is the model for a flying machine; EL LISSITZKY; and various works by GUSTAV KLUCIS, a Latvian slighted in previous surveys. (This exhibition did not include Antoine Pevsner [1886–1962] and NAUM GABO, brothers who objected to utilitarian art, or the mercurial KAZIMIR MALEVICH, who was, strictly speaking, not a Constructivist.) Rejecting traditional artistic practice as reflecting bourgeois individualism, they explored

factory production. Once cultural policy tightened in Russia, culminating in the terrible purges of the 1930s, Russian Constructivism disintegrated. Klucis died in a World War II concentration camp and Tatlin died a decade later of food poisoning, in relative obscurity. European Constructivism, sometimes called International Constructivism, favored conscious and deliberate compositions that were supposedly reflective of recently discovered universal and purportedly objective esthetic principles. Thus, its artists made scrupulously nonrepresentational Abstract structures that differed from the other avant-gardes of the earlier 20th century in favoring simplicity, clarity, and precision. Among the principal participants at the beginning were THEO VAN DOESBURG, PIET MONDRIAN, and HANS RICHTER; the principal magazines were DE STIJL and Richter’s G. Among the later International Constructivists were MICHEL SEUPHOR, GEORGES VANTONGERLOO, JOAQUIN TORRES-GARCIA, and MOHOLY-NAGY. The last of these artists introduced Constructivist ideas to the BAUHAUS, where he taught from 1923 to 1928; and as the publisher of the pioneering Bauhaus books, Moholy-Nagy issued a collection of Mondrian’s essays in 1925 and Malevich’s The Non-Objective World in 1927. When Naum Gabo moved to England, he collaborated with the painter Ben Nicholson (1894–1982) and the young architect J. L. Martin in editing Circle (1937), an impressive anthology subtitled International Survey of Constructive Art. Constructivism came to America with art-school teachers such as MoholyNagy and JOSEF ALBERS, the former in Chicago after 1938, the latter first at BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE from the middle 1930s to the late 1940s and then at Yale until he retired. Constructivism survives in certain kinds of Minimal geometric sculpture; in the mobiles of GEORGE RICKEY, incidentally wrote an excellent history of the movement; in certain strains of COLOR-FIELD painting; in the Constructivist Fictions of RICHARD KOSTELANETZ; and in the magazine The Structurist (1958), which the American-Canadian artist Eli Bornstein (1922) has edited out of the University of Saskatchewan.

COPLAND, AARON (14 November 1900–2 December 1990) Very much a two-sided composer, he produced a few works that were moderately innovative and much music that wasn’t. These more avant-garde efforts appear, almost as surprises, at various times in his career. One is a Concerto for Piano and Orchestra

CORNELL, JOSEPH •

(1927) that incorporated JAZZ elements into a score for the Boston Symphony. A second is Vitebsk: Study on a Jewish Theme (1928) for piano trio. A third is the Piano Variations (1930), which has in its dissonance a seven-note theme that is repeated in ways suggesting SERIAL MUSIC, which appears fully formed in Copland’s Piano Quartet (1950). Another is his Piano Fantasy (1952–57). Those committed to strict Serial Music consider Copland’s Connotations (1962) for orchestra to signal his conversion, but he later strayed from that church. Perhaps a few other pieces belong in the select canon of his avant-garde works. Otherwise, Copland produced many compositions that made his name familiar around the world, most of them sounding much like one another in the repeated use of certain strategies, such as open chords and modest syncopation. My own sense of his career is that Copland’s compositions became thinner whenever he got involved with theater or film, even though the results of these involvements include some of his more attractive scores – Rodeo (1942), Appalachian Spring (1944), The Red Pony (1948), and the ever-popular Lincoln Portrait (1942), which has a narration so performerproof that hot politicians and celebrities can declaim it without embarrassment. Nonetheless, Copland’s music for the film Our Town (1940) ranks among the most effective for that purpose, ever. Copland was also a masterful arts politician particularly skilled at forging alliances and getting rewards for himself (including his name on a school of music founded at the City University of New York during his lifetime) but also, more significantly perhaps, at apportioning widely the spoils that came to and through him and especially in giving advice to potential sponsors. Notwithstanding his homosexuality and sometime Communist sympathies, he could be an incomparably effective advocate for an American-American classical music. As early as 1928, he joined ROGER SESSIONS, then a young composer slightly older and likewise Brooklyn-born, in sponsoring three years of presentations that were known and long remembered as the Copland-Sessions Concerts because of their influence. As a result, just as several younger composers acknowledged Sessions among their teachers, so many more American composers of this next generation readily identified “Aaron” as their “best friend” among the older titans. These last achievements of his extraordinary career shouldn’t be ignored.

COPLANS, JOHN (24 June 1920–21 August 2003)

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When I was writing criticism for magazines, particularly in the 1970s, I judged him, then editing the monthly Artforum, among the most hideous people I fortunately knew only by snail mail. (This was before email, while telephone I didn’t often do.) Quit (or fired) in the early 1980s, already in his sixties, Coplans, once a painter, was old enough to know that he had to do something unique. About his black & white photographs, IRVING SANDLER (not myself) wrote: “His subject was his own vulnerable and deteriorating naked body. He recorded the ravages of time – his sagging chest, fat belly, misshapen feet – with a classical eye to detail.” Especially enlarged beyond lifesize, at once mocking both CHUCK CLOSE for size and ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE by acknowledging human imperfection, these photographs are so hideous that, unique though they are, I can’t imagine anyone displaying, let alone owning, them, though one truth about art collecting (as well as magazine editing) is, I suppose, different strokes for certain folks.

COPY CULTURE (c. 1980s) One important aspect of our culture is the numerous technological opportunities, chiefly XEROGRAPHIC ART, that allow individuals to produce and reproduce “publications” cheaply. Because xerography allows the quick and simple reproduction of images, it encourages distribution to others. The most important concept in copy culture is that an individual, without the prerequisite of massive amounts of capital, can copy and distribute art, literature, or political ranting without resorting to a “publisher” as an intermediary. The advantages of this system of personal dissemination are present not only in xerography, but also in audiotape, videotape, computer disks, and, to a lesser degree, microfiche. Precisely because such methods of reproduction are more accessible to the individual, they make possible the unfettered distribution of even the most avant-garde, or culturally unacceptable, arts and thoughts. —Geof Huth

CORNELL, JOSEPH (24 December 1903–29 December 1972) An American original, working without formal art education, lacking even rudimentary competence at artful drawing, Cornell made small boxes with cutaway fronts – a form closer to reliefs and theatrical

92 • CORRESPONDENCE proscenia than to sculpture proper in demanding to be viewed from the frontal perpendicular perspective. He meticulously filled these miniature stages with many objects not usually found together in either art or life. “Their imagery includes mementos of the theater and the dance, the world of nature and that of the heavens,” writes the arts historian Matthew Baigell (1933). “Cornell’s boxes also often contain 19th century memorabilia (especially those made during the 1940s, of ballerinas).” As intimate tableaus, these boxes combine the dreaminess of SURREALISM with the formal austerity of CONSTRUCTIVISM, the free use of materials typical of DADA, and the mellow vision of Christian Science, the American faith that Cornell practiced. Each enclosure seems, not unlike a JACKSON POLLOCK painting, to represent in objective form a particular state of mind in a moment of time, as well as an immense but circumscribed world of theatrical activity. Though he never visited Europe, Cornell introduced 1930s Parisian ASSEMBLAGE to post-World War II New York. He often produced works in series, exploring themes through variations. Though others have made excellent tableaus, no one else ever did boxed sculpture so well. With help from others, as he never learned to use a motion-picture camera, Cornell also made memorable short films. Thanks to his regular visits to Manhattan junk shops, he amassed a rich collection of silent films that he generously shared with his artist colleagues. As he lived to their deaths with his problematic mother and his invalid brother in lower-middle class Queens (NYC), few major artists ever overcame so brilliantly so many personal obstacles and insufficiencies.

CORRESPONDENCE From time to time book publishers issue volumes collecting the personal letters of the figures featured in this Dictionary. Much as I wish I could identify one or another of these collections as especially distinguished for writing style(s) or alternative forms, I can’t. For the former perhaps those by ROBERT LAX, T. E. LAWRENCE, THOMAS MERTON, EZRA POUND, GERTRUDE STEIN, and CARL VAN VECHTEN come closest. As the most literate of the MARX BROTHERS, Groucho published correspondence that is less constrained and thus far funnier than the books published under in own name (written perhaps with assistance from ghosts). By contrast, the letters between the American writers Thornton Wilder and Stein, say, portray both as carefully circumspect, perhaps out of fear of losing an important connection, to

the detriment of possibly stronger writing. Some of these correspondence gatherings become more embarrassing when reprinted as well replies by a recipient, particularly if, say, a publisher is swimming over his or her head..

CORRIGAN, DONALD (4 November 1943) One of the most audacious CONCEPTUAL ARTISTS, for professional courage the equal of ELAINE STURTEVANT, Corrigan exhibited charts of power in the art world, particularly in his hometown. In his Tree of Modern Art in Washington, DC (1972), a detailed drawing measuring 23 by 18 inches, Corrigan graphs relationships and sympathies among the commercial galleries on one side and the nonprofit institutions on the other in a brilliant and accurate way, adding art critics, art schools, and constellations of avowedly independent individuals, by his documentation making the invisible visible, which is what visual art has always done. Rarely permitted to exhibit, Corrigan gave up visual art by the 1980s; he worked, like HERMAN MELVILLE and CLEMENT GREENBERG before him, for the US Customs Service. A later epithet for what he did was Context Art: “Criticizes the art business and its institutions. Power structures are disclosed; distribution mechanisms and exhibition structures are investigated for their political function.” Necessary and done it still is.

CORTÁZAR, JULIO (26 August 1914–12 February 1984) An Argentine who lived mostly in Paris, whose books were initially published everywhere besides his two home countries, Cortázar made formal alternatives a recurring subject. He prefaces Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966) with the advice that it “consists of many books, but two books above all. The first can be read in a normal fashion, and it ends with Chapter 56.” He then suggests an alternative route, beginning with chapter 73 and continuing with “1-2-116-3-84-4-71-581-74 . . .” that not only includes certain chapters twice but directs the reader as far as chapter 155. The American edition sold surprisingly well, perhaps because the cover of its 1967 paperback edition promised “life/ love/sex.” Some admirers judge Cortázar’s 62: Modelo Para Amar (1968, A Model Kit) as formally more challenging. Although other Cortázar books were commercially credible, his more experimental short pieces,

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collected in La Vuelta al dia en ochenta mundos (1967) and Ultimo Round (1969), both of which were initially published in Mexico, are scarcely known.

COUNTERCULTURE (1960) This epithet identifies the social avant-garde that advocates unpredictable innovation(s) that, though commonly dismissed as unacceptable at its beginnings, necessarily overcomes resistances to achieve what’s not been done before, with the likelihood of greater influence. In authoritarian societies, the counterculture attacks government; in democratic societies, it focuses more on social customs, in recent decades advocating, say, the acceptance of divorce, recreational drugs, non-contractual cohabitation, and, most important, the emergence of underclasses whether defined by race, gender, or other derogatory discriminations. With certain commercial success came, especially in the popular arts, some bargain counterculture. At influencing social change, the greatest countercultural surprise for me has been the widespread acceptance in Western countries of alternatives to traditional heterosexuality. Fifty years ago, I wouldn’t have predicted, let alone imagined, the gender options publicly available in the twenty-first century. As a general rule, consider that thriving countercultures are a measure of an open society; a closed society would suppress any semblance of one out of existence. One theme for me is that the histories of avantgarde arts, which epitomize INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, should not be confused with avant-garde social history, though the two can be complementary, occasionally involving the same active individuals.

COUNTERTENORS (c. 1960s) When I was young in the 1960s, there were only two countertenors of note – the Englishman Alfred Deller (1912–79) and the American Russell Oberlin (1928–2016). Much as a great contralto such as Marian Anderson (1897–1993) could sing notes lower than those available to most female altos, so a countertenor could reach notes higher than most tenors. One difference between Deller and Oberlin was that the Englishman sang falsetto – with a sound false to his own speaking voice because it was produced in the throat, rather than in the chest, from where most concert singers gain their power. Indeed, especially when heard

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after Oberlin, Deller’s voice sounded thinner, needing microphones to be heard, especially in concert with others. Falsettos were also used by pop singers, likewise microphone-dependent, such as Gene Vincent (1935–71) in “Be-Bop-A-Lula” (1956). A subsequent generation of male singers began to develop their throat voices, sometimes to sound like women, usually to sound like something neither male nor female but uniquely countertenored, to so speak. Among the most successful are Derek Lee Ragin (1958), an American working mostly in Europe, who became one of the two off-screen voices in a 1994 biographical feature-length film about the historic castrato Farinelli. Late in 2001, I heard the German countertenor Andreas Scholl (1967), also among the greatest, sing in duet with a French horn unamplified at Carnegie Hall, the impressive volume of his high voice the equal of an instrument normally played. Years later I saw a singer named only Shequida (b. 1980, Gary Hall) do an awesome act that included a falsetto I could only characterize as “fat” with a heavy vibrato in the tradition of large-framed female opera singers whom he was at once honoring and parodying. If Scholl in a man’s suit resembled a broad shouldered American football player, Shequida was skinny in a dress that came down to his ankles; he had a blonde wig over his brown face and high heels. Only his great height, well over 6 feet tall, and the large size of his feet would have prompted questions. Among the post-Deller & Oberlin countertenors I deem extraordinary are James Bowman (1941) and René Jacobs (1946) from the second generation; Jochen Kowalski (1954) and Ragin from a third; David Daniels (1966) and Scholl from a forth; and Max Emanuel Cenčić (1976) and Philippe Jaroussky (1978) from a fifth. Though I discover more new good countertenors every year, none of these falsetto singers, however, sound like Russell Oberlin whose unique voice is still instantly recognizable in recordings made before his retirement in the early 1960s. (For a masterpiece available on YouTube, may I recommend his performing J. S. Bach’s Cantata #54 with GLENN GOULD at the CBC.) To me the measure of a successful countertenor is realizing, much as Marian Anderson did in her lowest register, a vocal sound beyond or above gender, suggesting the voices of angels – yes, angels.

COURAGE (forever) As an essential quality informing not only the creation of avant-garde art but also writing about it, courage

94 • COWELL, HENRY can’t be faked; it can’t be bestowed or assigned to an underling. Development depends upon practice, as well as overcoming resistance, again and again.

COWELL, HENRY (11 March 1897–10 December 1965) If AARON COPLAND was the great mainstream arts politician of his time, distributing patronage to a wide variety of otherwise neglected composers who would remain personally indebted to him, Cowell was the great radical mover and shaker, helping establish the reputations of many American radical composers, beginning with CHARLES IVES, in the course of his own productive compositional career. As a teenager, Cowell wrote and performed piano pieces that incorporated what he called tone-clusters, which are produced by striking groups of adjoining notes simultaneously, customarily not with one’s fingers but with a fist, a palm, or even a whole forearm. Within the composition, the clusters become huge blocks of sound moving up and down the keyboard, sometimes becoming atonal clouds that complement the melodic lines. In the early 1920s, while still in his own mid-twenties, Cowell directly attacked the strings of a grand piano – plucking, striking, sweeping, and dampening them as though they were on a harp; sometimes stroking them with a china darning egg. His classic Aeolian Harp (1923) requires that one hand work the piano keyboard, holding down keys, while the other “plays” the strings until the sound of the depressed keys decays. In the 1930s, Cowell collaborated with LEON THEREMIN in constructing a keyboard percussion instrument that he called the “rhythmicon,” a precursor of modern drum machines, to create music with overlapping rhythmic patterns. As a prolific composer, Cowell worked with a variety of ideas, some of them more radical than others, beginning with, as noted already, alternative ways of striking the piano. Some pieces from the 1930s have parts of varying lengths that he instructed performers to assemble to their tastes, even excluding or repeating sections. Others permitted improvisation in certain sections. Later pieces drew upon Americana and modal folk tunes. Late in his career, Cowell discovered Asian musics and their instruments, less for quotations than for sonorities and rhythms unavailable in the West. Typical pieces from this period combine an Asian soloist with a Western orchestra. Some mellifluous works composed just before his death reflect Persian music. As a musical theorist, Cowell wrote between 1916 and 1919 the manuscript later released as New Musical

Resources (1930), whose theme was expanding the musical palette. He edited and partially authored American Composers on American Music: A Symposium (1933), which was the first survey of native achievement. In collaboration with his wife Sidney Robertson Cowell (1903–97), he published the first book on Charles Ives and His Music (1955), which remains a model of its introductory kind. Cowell was often the first to write extended articles on emerging American composers; so that nearly every advanced composer’s bibliography, from CARL RUGGLES to JOHN CAGE, includes a reference to Cowell. As an advocate of American composition, he founded in 1927 New Music Quarterly, not only to publish their works but to record them. Among the composers issued under the New Music imprint were Ives, Ruggles, and VIRGIL THOMSON; it even included distinguished Europeans such as ARNOLD SCHOENBERG and ANTON WEBERN. As a generous teacher, Cowell directed musical activities intermittently at New York’s New School from 1928 to 1963 and taught at Columbia from 1951 to 1965; he gave private lessons to John Cage, Lou Harrison (1917), and GEORGE GERSHWIN. Sent to San Quentin prison on a trumped-up homosexual charge in 1937, he spent four years giving music lessons to his fellow inmates and organizing a band. Once released, he married Ms. Robertson and, as a devoted lover, incidentally composed 85 short pieces for her to celebrate various anniversaries. As both a teacher and a publicist, Cowell anticipated current opinion in insisting that Americans pay greater attention to “music of the world’s peoples,” as he called it, directing the recording long-playing records of world music for the Folkways label in the early 1950s.

CRAGG, TONY (1949) Cragg emerged in the late 1970s as the most interesting of a group of young sculptors who sought to reorient British sculpture away from landscape and onto the urban environment, rejecting the influence of the Earth Artists who preceded them. Cragg’s earliest significant works are assemblies of found and used manufactured objects, distributed in carefully arranged patterns on gallery floors and walls. In New Stones, Newton’s Tones (1978), he laid on the floor such items as small shovels, combs, cigarette lighters, spoons, and broken plates. The items were arranged in a rectangle and painted in solid colors that made a rainbow running from one end of the pattern to the other. At the time, his works

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were viewed as attempts to flout traditional sculptural practices, particularly the conventions of direct carving and the welding of metals, but such titles as New Stones, Newton’s Tones indicated, or should have, that his concerns were more intellectually intriguing. Cragg in that period was something of an archeologist of contemporary culture, conveying the idea that the very science upon which our industrial civilization is based, and the simple geometric conceptions that underlie that science, have become obsolete and are already part of the past. Simple linear geometry is virtually useless in the post-Newtonian science that is now directing the development of technology. (Cragg worked as a scientist before he became an artist.) More interesting, more direct, and more individual are Cragg’s later works, in which he attempts to employ directly more complex forms of geometry. In such works as Envelope (1998), a single molded shape overlays the forms of simple geometry upon more mathematically complex ones, such as toruses. (A torus is a smoothly curving shape whose surface folds in on itself to create a tube that runs through the entire form and emerges on the other side. One very simple example is a donut.) Cragg’s work shares with the recent work of Richard Serra this interest in advanced geometry. —Mark Daniel Cohen

CRAIG, GORDON (16 January 1872–29 July 1966; b. Edward Godwin) The illegitimate son of the prominent British actress Ellen Terry (1847–1928), purportedly by the architect Edward William Godwin (1833–86), Craig began as an actor. In addition to producing visual art, particularly wood-engraving, Craig worked in fringe English theaters at the beginning of the century, designing several productions that were regarded as challenges to the conventions of Victorian theater. Disappointed with his native country, he moved to the European continent where he developed a vision of an alternative theater less in actual productions than in books and articles, drawings, and woodcuts, models and engravings. Many of his essays appeared in a periodical he founded and edited intermittently between 1908 and 1929, The Mask, and in his book On the Art of Theatre (1911). A series of etchings, Scene (1923), advocates a great flexible performing area in which a great variety of things can happen. Craig imagined a PERFORMANCE that would engage spectators through movement alone, probably without a plot or verbal text, but through the programmed movement of sound, light, and people in motion.

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Not unlike other theatrical visionaries later in the 20th century, he thought the actor to be the most recalcitrant link in a retrograde chain, and so proposed in his classic 1907 essay that “in his place comes the inanimate figure – the Uber-marionette we may call him.” Craig continued, The Uber-marionette will not compete with life – rather will go beyond it. Its ideal will not be the flesh and blood but rather the body in trance – it will aim to clothe itself with a death-life beauty while exhaling a living spirit. Raising the ante yet more, as any good polemicist should, Craig concluded: I pray earnestly for the return of the image – the Uber-marionette to the theatre; and when he comes again and is but seen, he will be loved so well that once more will it be possible for the people to return to their ancient joy in ceremonies – once more will Creation be celebrated – homage rendered to existence – and divine and happy intercession made to Death. Wow! Writing like this could be influential, even as it was resisted and dismissed. Craig lived another fifty years, producing books about his mother and other British theatricists, in addition to an autobiography, Index to the Story of My Days (1957); so that his evocative prose about theater remained more influential than any productions.

CRAVAN, ARTHUR (22 May 1887–November 1918; b. Fabian Avenarius Lloyd) By common consent, a legendary artistic non-artist, he lived an artistic life among artists involved with the vanguards of DADA and SURREALISM. Typically inventing various pseudonyms, he traveled widely, often with forged passports, in sum creating the unique fiction that was himself. As an aristocratically self-possessed con(show)man, Cravan pitched himself to the center of many spectacles, even challenging the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson (1878–1946) to a boxing match in Barcelona. (The veteran boxer later noted casually that his voluntary opponent, knocked out, didn’t train sufficiently.) Living outside the ART WORLD, Johnson couldn’t appreciate the artist Cravan’s doing what no other artist did (or dare do). ‘Tis said that his negative review of APOLLINAIRE’s

96 • CRESHEVSKY, NOAH partner’s self-portrait prompted the French writer to propose a duel with Cravan. From 1911 to 1915 Cravan also published a Dada magazine, Maintenant! (Now!), whose five issues were worth reprinting as a single book in 1971. The Parisian critic MARC DACHY reminds us that one issue he wrote entirely by himself: W. Cooper for articles on Oscar Wilde, Eduard Archinard (almost a phonetic anagram of anarchie) for a poem in classical alexandrines, Marie Lowitska for aphorisms, Robert Miradique for literary criticism. The boxer-poet signed his own name to his apocryphal encounters with Andre Gide and to his detailed, mordant comments upon the artists exhibiting at the Salon des Independants. Coming to New York in 1914, initially to dodge conscription into World War I, Cravan loved the prominent poet Mina Loy (1882–1966). They agreed to travel to South America separately, she by steamer, he by sailboat. However, as he never arrived, his disappearance became another mythic GESTURE for his colleagues. In short, the Cravan persona gained sufficient weight to bestow artistic value on vanishing. Many poseurs since have tried to redo his act, never as successfully, perhaps most of them lived too long. One hypothesis not incredible, given two reputations, claims that Cravan survived to become the famous but publicly invisible German-Mexican novelist B. Traven whose nom de plume, do note, incidentally differs by only one letter from Fabian Avenarius Lloyd’s adopted surname.

CRESHEVSKY, NOAH (31 January 1945) Trained in music composition at the Eastman School of Music and Juilliard, Creshevsky became by the 1980s an audiotape artist using familiar devices of processing and editing in distinguished ways. In Other Words (1976) enhances the distinctive speaking voice of JOHN CAGE. His Highway (1978), which is MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE of and about familiar Americana, becomes an acoustic trip through the aural equivalent of POP ART. His ten-minute Strategic Defense Initiative (1986), its title alluding to President Reagan’s “Star Wars” proposal, draws upon the soundtrack of Bruce Lee movies to satirize sadism. Another Creshevsky departure involves giving instrumentalists a score composed not of traditional musical notes but only of words. Later he used electronic

sampling to incorporate fragments of classical music into his own work.

CRITIC X (1940) Perhaps the most productive European arts writer of his generation that’s also mine, he interests me less for critical insights, which haven’t taught me much, than for his American enthusiasms that so often overlap with mine that he implicitly gains value for me. Simply, anyone exploring unfamiliar territory is always gratified to find someone else’s footprints nearby. Critic X has produced a whole book about MERCE CUNNINGHAM, as have I. In his 2008 book collecting his visual arts journalism are extended appreciations of DONALD JUDD, ROBERT MORRIS, ROBERT RYMAN, DAN FLAVIN, DAN GRAHAM, SIAH ARMAJANI, LUCAS SAMARAS, AGNES MARTIN, and SOL LEWITT, among others I’ve written about as well. No doubt unintentionally, Critic X certifies my sense of who, among the many fish in the spacious sea, is most worth appreciating in recent American art. Thanks, mate, whom I may (or not) have met once. May others agree with our selection(s).

CRITICAL IMAGINATION As a key quality prerequisite to understanding and, later, supporting avant-garde art, this is possessed by not only the critics but the greatest CULTURAL LEADERS. The measures are, simply, identifying originality that hadn’t been understood before and making connections not recognized before. Anyone who ever looked at, say, JACKSON POLLOCK’s paintings in the early 1950s knew they were strong and different, but CLEMENT GREENBERG and HAROLD ROSENBERG identified why and how, if differently. DICK HIGGINS clarified a new direction in many avant-garde arts by coining INTERMEDIA. LINCOLN KIRSTEIN imagined that classical ballet could thrive in America. And so on. Much of this book honors superior Critical Imagination, which surely exists, much like higher artistic imagination.

CROCKWELL, DOUGLASS (29 April 1904–30 November 1968; b. Spencer D. C.) A highly successful American commercial illustrator, working very much in the wake of Norman Rockwell

CRUYFF, JOHAN •

(1894–1978), whose surname rhymed with his, Crockwell also produced pioneering abstract films that are now better remembered than his work once thought more prominent. Animating like no other, he worked with panes of glass, shooting paint and wax between them; the result was kinetic abstractions. His highly original short films must be seen, if possible, to be believed. So under-known is Crockwell’s work that not until 2017 did Wikipedia’s voluntary minions begin a sketchy entry on him. Even on such repositories as YouTube his films are hard to find. Perhaps I made them up. Though certain other entries in this Dictionary might be intentionally fictitious, this isn’t meant to be.

CROTTI, JEAN

was graphic sex (sometimes undertaken by furry animals) and freedom of expression but also a disdain for narrative flow. Crumb was more willing than anyone else in the field to experiment with narrative: to tell the modern disjointed story. Some of his stories had neither protagonists nor stable settings, and although such tricks might have been common in the nouveau roman, they were never common in American comic book-art. Crumb is best remembered for his character Fritz the Cat and his slogan (in its familiar big-footed incarnation) “Keep on Truckin.’” Remarkably, Crumb lost two lawsuits: one where he tried to receive compensation for the use of Fritz the Cat in the eponymous X-rated cartoon and a similar suit concerning the once-ubiquitous “Keep on Truckin’” logo. A quirky and powerful portrait of Crumb and his family emerges from Terry Zwigoff’s documentary film Crumb (1994). —Geof Huth

(24 April 1878–30 January 1958) This Swiss-French painter participated in various avant-garde movements without leading them. Not until his thirties, in Paris, was his work recognized, initially as CUBISM. Escaping from World War I, he immigrated to NEW YORK where he shared a studio with MARCEL DUCHAMP around Broadway and 65th Street and so participated in New York DADA. Here he executed in 1916 his closest semblance of a masterpiece – Les Forces mécaniques de l’amour en movement (Forces of Mechanical Love in Movement), which has oil painted on glass with wood, newsprint, tin, and metal wire. Beginning a lifelong relationship with Suzanne Duchamp (1889–1963), Marcel’s sister, Crotti divorced his wife (who soon afterwards traveled to South America with brother-in-law-to-be Marcel). The Crottis returned to Paris, where Jean continued to paint in various abstract ways, producing admirable art without establishing a SIGNATURE style. His reputation was revived in America by the gallerist Francis M. Naumann (1948), who, as a major Duchamp scholar, has devoted his eponymous midtown Manhattan gallery mostly to honoring Duh Champ and his associations.

CRUMB, R. (30 August 1943; b. Robert C.) Certainly the most famous of the underground comics artists of the 1960s, Crumb was one of the artists instrumental in expanding the possibilities for the comic book form. Before him and his compatriots, comic books were stories of superheros and furry animals, but little else. What Crumb added to comic books

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CRUYFF, JOHAN (25 April 1947–24 March 2016; b. Hendrik Johannes Cruijff) Commonly considered among the five dominant figures in late-20th-century soccer, he began as a teenage star for the Ajax team in his native Amsterdam. In the course of retiring and unretiring, he played around the world and was thus, though he never completed high school, able fluently to answer journalists’ questions not only in his native Dutch, which he spoke with a shamelessly declassé accent, but also, unique among star athletes, in German, Spanish, French, and English. Assertively independent, thanks to his celebrity, Cruyff also coined such memorable aphorisms, as: “You can’t win without the ball.” “Winning is an important thing, but to have your own style, to have people copy you, to admire you; that is the greatest gift.” This last nugget is likewise true in art, among other domains. As a soccer intellectual, Cruyff espoused the choreography of Total Football (totaalvoetbal, in Dutch), where individual field players learned to exceed the limitations of their assigned positions by assuming others’ roles, say with midfielders becoming strikers, especially in the course of attacking the opponents’ goal, resulting in a more fluid, improvisational game whose higher theatricality appealed to fans. ’Tis said that before he concentrated on soccer, Cruyff as a young teenager starred on the Ajax baseball team. May we wonder if he ever met, or simply just appreciated from afar, the American baseballer YOGI BERRA with whom he shared so much as a famous player, a successful coach, and ingenious wordsmith?

98 • CUBISM Though English-speakers tend to pronounce “Croif,” his surname sounds slightly different in Dutch, just like “Van Go” to me is “Von Hoch” to them. From PETER FRANK, an American fluent in Dutch, comes this guidance: The Dutch “uy” is one of the great impossible diphthongs – nay, triphthongs – of the world. It is a combination of “ui” and “ij” (= “y”). both mezzo-multi-vowels, if you would. “Ij” begins as the English long “i,” but modifies halfway to a long “a” – something along the lines of “aey.” As for “ui,” think of it as every vowel at once. “Ow” is probably the closest sound we have in English; if you can keep your mouth agape but taut, as if you were making a flat “e” sound or a schwa, and say “ow,” you might approximate it. It has an etymological relationship to our “ow,” as it appears in “huis,” “uit,” and other English-related words. Okay, now combine “ui” and “ij” and your tongue is going one way while your mouth goes another. I think you could get away with a simply “oy,” appropriately enough. And don’t forget to gargle the “r” ever so slightly. It’ll ease you into “uy.” Got it?

CUBISM (c. 1907–21) Cubism was the creation of the painters Georges Braque (1882–1963) and PABLO PICASSO, working separately in Paris around 1907. Art historians customarily divide its subsequent development into two periods: Analytic Cubism (1907–12) and Synthetic Cubism (1912–21). The SIGNATURE of Cubism is the rendering of solid objects – whether they be musical instruments, household objects, or human forms – as overlapping “cubes” or planes, giving the illusion of portraying simultaneously several different perspectives and, by extension, different moments in time. Regarding the radical implications of such reinterpretation of pictorial representations, the American art historian Robert Rosenblum (1927–2006) wrote: For the traditional distinction between solid form and the space around it, Cubism substituted a radically new fusion of mass and void. In place of earlier perspective systems that determined the precise location of discrete objects in illusory depth, Cubism offered an unstable structure of dismembered planes in indeterminate spatial positions. Instead of assuming that the work of

art was an illusion of a reality that lay behind it, Cubism proposed that the work of art was itself a reality that represented the very process by which nature is transformed into art. The rigorous analytic phase epitomized a more austere Cubism, as painters eschewed traditional subject matter and a full palette in the course of dissecting light, line, and plane, incidentally draining much earlier emotional content from painting. Thus, a typical Cubist still life from this period might consist of several intersecting planes portrayed in various neutral, nearly monochromatic tones. Synthetic Cubism, by contrast, introduced objects found in the real world, such as newspaper clippings, wallpaper, ticket stubs, or matchbooks, which were attached to the canvas. Rosenblum comments on an example, “Perhaps the greatest heresy introduced in this collage concerns Western painting’s convention that the artist achieve his illusion of reality with paint or pencil alone.” Cubist painters introduced an additional visual irony by simulating these objects, thus introducing trompe I’oeil effects by creating false woodgrains or wallpaper patterns, making it appear as if fragments of these objects were part of the canvas. A fuller palette and more sensuous texture were other hallmarks of Synthetic Cubism. The Cubist movement was perhaps as important as a critical revolt against “pretty” art as for its actual products. Many Cubist paintings inspired heated debate not only among art critics but among the general public as well. Perhaps the most famous single example was MARCEL DUCHAMP’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which was the star of the ARMORY SHOW NEW YORK, although it could be said that Duchamp departed from Cubism as quickly as he entered it. Though both Duchamp and Picasso began with Cubism, it wasn’t visible in their later work, and they had little influence upon each other. Instead, the strength of Cubism is evident not only in such immediate successors as FUTURISM (ITALIAN) and VORTICISM, especially in WYNDHAM LEWIS’s illustrations for SHAKESPEARE’s Timon of Athens (1913 or 1914), but also in the careers of such older artists as PIET MONDRIAN and KAZIMIR MALEVICH, and then, more than a generation later, in the best work of WILLEM DE KOONING, among other major post-World War II painters.

CUBO-FUTURISM (c. 1909) This term arose in Russia to distinguish native work from EUROPEAN CUBISM. Whereas the work of

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Natalia Goncharova (1882–1962) and Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964) favored a POST-PICASSO modernist primitivism based upon Russian peasant art, the brothers BURLIUK (Vladimir [1886–1917] and DAVID [1882–1967]) preferred more urban subjects. The innately mercurial KAZIMIR MALEVICH used this epithet for works that he submitted for exhibitions in 1912 and 1913. Vladimir Markov’s pioneering Russian Futurism (1968) devotes an entire chapter to Cubo-Futurism in poetry.

CUDDON, J. A. (2 June 1928–12 March 1996; b. John Anthony Bowden C.) Just below NICOLAS SLONIMSKY, Cuddon ranks among the most prodigious and original cultural lexicographers, producing thick alphabetical books about subjects scarcely documented before. The first was his A Dictionary of Literary Terms, expanded through three editions under his own name (1977, 1982, 1991) before being posthumously amended by others (2000, 2015); the second and more surprising, marking his superiority at the alphabetical genre, was his Dictionary of Sports and Games (1980), which covers everything – yes, everything – worth remembering in two million words. While Terms beats its competition, mostly with more elaborate entries, Cuddon’s Sports has no competitors and probably never will, at least not in print. Stylishly written, both books can be read from start to finish. In addition to teaching English, rugby, and cricket at the Emanuel School in southwest London, the prodigious Cuddon wrote five novels and edited several book anthologies.

CULTURAL LEADERS The measure is that while working within institutions these individuals supported imaginative art that wouldn’t have otherwise happened, usually by funding advanced artists to produce excellence that they wouldn’t have otherwise done – more specifically, what they wouldn’t have done before but what needed to be done. Personally I’ve known Klaus Schöning (1936), who established a different kind and quality of acoustic Hörspiel radio art during three decades on the staff at Westdeutscher Rundfunk; BRIAN O’DOHERTY, who introduced several innovative programs during his many years at the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, first in visual arts department, then in media arts; DICK HIGGINS whose SOMETHING ELSE PRESS educated my generation about the most

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avant-garde arts during the 1960s into the early 1970s; and JONAS MEKAS, who championed alternative American filmmaking from the 1950s into the 21st century, not only as a writer and the co-publisher of the indispensable magazine Film Culture (1955–96) but as cofounder in Manhattan of both the Filmmakers Cooperative (1960) and the Anthology Film Archives (1970), both which survive decades later. Again, all of men (yes, men) did what wasn’t imagined before, what no one else was doing, and what needed to be done. Among those avant-garde cultural leaders preceding me were EUGÈNE JOLAS as the founding editor of the most progressive literary arts magazine of the 1920s and 1930s, TRANSITION; GERTRUDE VANDERBILT WHITNEY for her progressive philanthropy in more than one art and founding an eponymous museum; ALFRED STIEGLITZ, who established photography as a significant art through his gallery and his magazine Camera Work; LINCOLN KIRSTEIN, as much through supporting American ballet and ballet pedagogy as through founding the second (after THE DIAL) major American modernist literary magazine, The Hound and the Horn (1927–34); LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI for commissioning and then performing more new American classical music than anyone else; John Roberts (1930), who governed music programming at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; Henry Allen Moe (1894–1975) as the founding principal administrator at the GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION, which merited early a reputation as the most discriminating and thus prestigious of its kind precisely by rewarding avant-garde figures early in their careers; Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1902–81), on behalf of advanced visual art not only as an executive at the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART but as a strong writer; Dorothy C. Miller (1904–2003), his long-time associate for American art at MoMA; Holger Cahill (1887–1960) as national director of the Federal Arts Project from 1935 to 1943: Michel Guy (1927–90), who founded the annual Festival d’automne de Paris, directing it except for a spell as France’s most progressive Minister of Culture; and John Andrew Rice (1888–68), the initial director (to 1940) of the legendary BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE. (I suspect that comparably consequential officials existed elsewhere in the world, but they are unknown to me.) To my pantheon of cultural leaders may I add, even though they bore no institutional titles, GEORGE MACIUNAS, who led the transformation of an industrial slum into ARTISTS’ SOHO that incidentally became a de facto educational institution; and JOHN CAGE, who influenced so many arts and artists in various ways. As any fool with a purse can bankroll what’s been done before and or what others would support,

100 • “CULTURE WARS” one measure of cultural leadership is imagination comparable in quality to high artistic vision.

“CULTURE WARS” (1980–) This term arose in America to characterize the challenges posed by artists belonging to minorities previously slighted initially because of race, sometimes geography, later of gender (but never religion or age). Legitimate though the outsiders’ protests and claims were socially, they distracted from the more profound, more historic, more continuing conflicts between the commercial and the noncommercial, between mediocrity and excellence, and between establishments and the avant-gardes. In all three pairs, the latter are initially disadvantaged only to overcome eventually, as nearly all critical histories of modern arts – the ultimate arbiters – invariably favor not economically needy people but, crucially, certain work that was not just avant-garde and excellent, but usually noncommercial at its beginnings.

CUMMINGS, E. E. (14 October 1894–3 September 1962) The avant-garde Cummings is not the author of charming lyrics reprinted in nearly every anthology of American verse or of a name entirely printed in lowercase letters, but of several more inventive, less familiar poems. Appreciation of this alternative Cummings should begin with such poetic wit as “Gay-Pay-Oo” for the Soviet secret police (G.P.U.); his use of prefixes and suffixes to modify a root word in various subtle ways (so that “unalive” is not synonymous with dead); his evocative typography (as in a familiar poem about grasshoppers, or “t,a,p,s,” or “SpRiN,K,LiNG”); and his integration of the erotic with the experimental. He wrote poems that cohere more in terms of sound than syntax or semantics: “bingbongwhom chewchoo/ laugh dingle nails personally/bin loamhome picpac / obviously scratches tomorrowlobs.” He wrote abstract poetry long before everyone else, the opening poem of 1 X 1 (1944) beginning: “nonsum blob a /cold to / skylessness /sticking fire Amy are you /are birds our all/and one gone/away the they.” As an extraordinary exercise in radical formalism, “No Thanks” (1935), beginning with “bright,” contains only eleven discrete words, all six letters or less in length. Successfully broken apart and nonsyntactically combined, they form fifteen lines of forty-four words with all three-letter words appearing thrice, all

four-letter words four times, etc. With such rigorous structures Cummings presaged several major developments in later avant-garde poetry.Though some of these innovations were not included in earlier selections and collections of Cummings’s poetry, thankfully they all appear in his Complete Poems (1991, 2016), which incidentally demonstrates that these more experimental poems were written throughout his career, rather than, say, being bunched within a short period. They are featured in AnOther E. E. Cummings (1998), which also includes examples of his highly experimental plays, perhaps the first film scenario written in America by a noted poet (1926), elliptical narratives, theater criticism that emphasizes PERFORMANCE over drama, and the opening chapter of a text known only as [No Title] (1930), whose prose broaches abstraction. Consider these concluding lines from its opening chapter: while generating a heat so terrific as to evaporate the largest river of the kingdom – which, completely disappearing in less than eleven seconds, revealed a gilt-edged submarine of the UR type, containing(among other things)the entire royal family(including the king, who still held his hat in his hand) in the act of escaping, disguised as cheeses. (A reviewer of AnOther E.E.C noted that the book places Cummings “not among Pound and Eliot, with whom he has little in common, but rather with Russian Futurists and Dadaists; with Latin American and German concrete poets; [etc.],” all of which I wish I had said before him, because this reassignment is true.) No appreciation of the avant-garde Cummings would be complete without acknowledging his Eimi (1933), a prose memoir of his disillusioning 1931 trip to the Soviet Union, as audacious in style as it is in content, along with the brilliant retrospective summary of this book that he prepared especially for a reprint in the late 1950s. Cummings also produced a considerable amount of visual art, which has never been fully exhibited (even though his oeuvre reportedly includes over two thousand paintings and over ten thousand sheets of drawings). In short, don’t forget the avant-garde Cummings behind the familiar versifier.

CUNNINGHAM, MERCE (16 April 1919–26 July 2009; b. Mercier Philip C.) After years off the edge of American dance, Cunningham became, beginning in the late 1960s, the principal

CUNNINGHAM, MERCE •

figure in advanced American choreography, remaining for decades after its most influential individual, as much by example as by becoming a monument whose activity long intimidated his successors. Originally part of MARTHA GRAHAM’s dance company, he presented in 1944, in collaboration with JOHN CAGE, his first New York recital of self-composed solos. Rejected by dance aficionados who were devoted to prior masters, Cunningham earned his initial following among professionals in other arts. The initial reason for the dance world’s neglect was that Cunningham had drastically reworked many dimensions of dance-making: not only the articulation of performance time, but the use of theatrical space; not only the movements of dancers’ bodies, but their relationship to one another on the stage. For instance, if most ballet and even modern dance had a front and a back, Cunningham’s works are designed to be seen from all sides; and though theatrical custom forced him to mount most of his performances on a proscenium stage (one that has a front and thus a back), his pieces have also been successfully performed in gymnasiums and museums. Time in Cunningham’s work is nonclimactic, which means that a piece begins not with a fanfare but a movement, and it ends not with a flourish but simply when the performers stop. Because he eschews the traditional structure of theme and variation, the dominant events within a work seem to proceed at an irregular, unpredictable pace; their temporal form is, metaphorically, lumpy. “It’s human time,” he explains, “which can’t be too slow or too fast, but includes various time possibilities. I like to change tempos.” Cunningham’s dances generally lack a specific subject or story, even though interpretation-hungry spectators sometimes identify particular subjects and/ or semblances of narrative (and more than one Cunningham dancer has suspected the existence of secret stories). It follows that his dancers eschew dramatic characterizations for nonparticularized roles, which is to say that Cunningham dancers always play themselves and no one else. Just as he defied tradition by allowing parts of a dancer’s body to function disjunctively and nonsynchronously, so the distribution of Cunningham’s performers customarily lacks a center – important events occur all over the performing area, even in the corners. The result is organized disorganization, so to speak, that initially seems chaotic only if stricter forms of ordering are expected. The titles of Cunningham’s works tend to be abstract (Aeon [1961], Winterbranch [1964]), or situational (Rain-Forest [1968], Summerspace [1958], Place [1966]), or formally descriptive (Story [1963], Scramble [1967], Walkaround Time [1968]). As his

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dancers’ gestures have been ends in themselves, rather than vehicles of emotional representation or narrative progression, Cunningham freed himself to explore the possibilities of human movement. In this respect, he was incomparably inventive and remarkably prolific. To put it differently, once he decided that traditional rules need not be followed, he was free to produce many dances filled with unfamiliar moves and innovative choreographic relationships. Cunningham also developed, especially for dancing in nontheatrical spaces, a genre he called Events, which incorporated selections from earlier works into a continuous stream with nothing to announce their sources, their theme thus becoming the characteristics and integrity of his SIGNATURE choreography. During the 1980s, Cunningham produced a series of distinguished videotapes, often in collaboration with Charles Atlas (1949), of dances made only for the medium, with the camera sometimes appearing as a participating dancer, all in contrast to the taping of pre-existing performances. Biped (1999) cleverly exploited new animation technology of capturing movements that are projected on a front scrim not as dancers’ bodies but as movements in outline. As walking became problematic for him by the 1990s, he produced for the Identities exhibition (2001) at the MIT Media Lab a dance for his hands. Thanks to its videographer Paul Kaiser (1956), Loops, to quote a press release, offers: A definitive recording of Cunningham performing the work in a motion capture studio. This recording preserved the intricate performance as 3D data, which portrayed not Cunningham’s appearance, but rather his motion. Cunningham’s joints become nodes in a network that sets them into fluctuating relationships with one another, at times suggesting the hands underlying them, but more often depicting complex cat’s-cradle variations. Because Cunningham’s activities are not symbolic of human activities or emotions, they are meant to be appreciated as ends in themselves. His dance thus demands not empathy from the spectator but, as Cage once explained, “your faculty of kinesthetic sympathy. It is this faculty we employ when, seeing the flight of birds, we ourselves, by identification, fly up, glide and soar.” What seems at first inscrutable about Cunningham’s choreography is quite comprehensible, providing one does not strive too hard to find underlying “significances.” What you see is most of what there is. Another departure came with his use of music. Whereas most choreographers draw their inspirations

102 • CURRY, JW from particular scores, Cunningham composed all but a few of his pieces without music; his dancers count to themselves for their cues. What music is heard in his work is customarily composed apart from the dance, as are the decor and costumes, and thus not mixed with the dance until the final rehearsals. The music tends to be harshly atonal and rhythmically irrelevant, as Cunningham for his accompaniments long favored John Cage and those composers gathered around him. Cunningham’s choreographies are generally manysided, nonlinear, nonexpressionistic, spatially noncentered, temporally nonclimactic, and compositionally assembled. The decor and sound are supplementary, rather than complementary; and the dancers are highly individualized. Though Cunningham’s art was avant-garde, his sensibility was classical, which is to say precise, CONSTRUCTIVIST, and severe. He revealed the scope of his choreographic intelligence through his profound knowledge of dance and dancers, coupled with his seemingly limitless capacity for invention. Though Cunnngham’s will stipulated that his company be dissolved, as he perhaps feared the disasters following other choreographers’ deaths, certain sometime Cunningham dancers have continued his tradition – particularly Robert Swinston (1950), long his company’s assistant director, as an American working mostly in France.

CURRY, JW (c. 1959) The avant-garde Canadian poet, publisher, and bookseller jwcurry (né John Curry) began reading the polypoet BPNICHOL’s small magazine GrOnk when he was about 15, and that experience deeply influenced both his writing and publishing. Even curry’s chosen form for his name echoes the outré capitalization practices of Nichol and other early CONCRETE poets. Curry began publishing in 1979 under a variety of imprints, but most of his micropublications form part of his Curved H&z imprint, relatively well known for its 1cent series consisting of small publications costing only a cent. His publishing focuses on extravagantly ambitious and impeccably produced micropublications. He prints most of these with small rubberstamp kits, forcing himself to focus primarily on tiny poems, but he also has used many other means of printing. Curry’s literary output includes visual poetry, sound poetry, and minimalist textual poetry with a definite avant-garde bent. His visual poetry takes on many different styles: COLLAGE poems, hand-drawn poems, typewriter poems, and serigraphed poems. One of his

most productive, but little recognized, literary forms has been the personal letter. For many years, curry was a prolific letter writer who corresponded with dozens of poets across the globe. In these letters, he shared his demanding criteria for good poetry and his views on the endeavor of micropublishing. One form for curry’s artmaking is an invented alter ego named Wharton Hood, putatively a Canadian poet who lived near curry when he himself lived in Toronto. Hood had his own set of correspondents, used completely different handwriting than curry, and appeared in curry’s own letters as a local character whom curry could not quite control. (When I had arrived once at his apartment in Toronto, he told me I had just missed Hood.) This alter ego was the supposed editor of Utopic Furnace Press – a press that published only found work – even though, of course, curry served as the publisher of the venture as well. —Geof Huth

CYBERNETICS (c. 1945) This word was coined by Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), an MIT professor, for self-steering mechanisms, which is to say those entities that, like human beings, consider intelligently their results of their own output. For example, if you step (output) on a hot coal (input), you’ll probably pull back your foot and won’t step on hot coals again. The initial idea was to make robots capable of this human trait. Necessarily incorporating the new disciplines of information theory, control systems, automatons, artificial intelligence, computersimulated activities, and information processing, the ideal of cybernetics had great influence, particularly in the 1960s. A good example of cybernetic art would be the responsive mechanism, such as James Seawright’s Scanner (1966), which is a large, plastic-ribbed, ballshaped cage some 6 feet in diameter that is suspended from the ceiling. From the ball’s lowest point extends a thin metal arm that contains photocells. A STROBE LIGHT is projected upwards out of the piece’s vertical core and then reflected by mirrors at its top, both down the plastic ribs and into the field around the sculpture. The photocells respond to decided changes in the room’s lighting (natural as well as artificial, depending upon the hour) by halting the arm, which then swings in either direction (depending upon whether the alternating current is positive or negative at the precise moment of contact). The turning of the arm inevitably gives the photocells a different perspective on the

CYBERPOETRY •

field, causing another decisive change in the light that prompts the system to halt again and electronically reconsider the direction of its movement. In sum, then, this self-considering activity makes Scanner a genuine example of a cybernetic machine whose output (the movement of the arm) causes it to reconsider its input (the field of light) and to continually adjust itself. Within its normal operations are the cybernetic processes of response, information processing, selection, and self-control. The critic/curator Cynthia Goodman describes NICOLAS SCHÖFFER’s earlier “Cysp” series (the term being an abbreviation of cybernetics and spatiodynamics), which were CONSTRUCTIVIST structures that performed like robots: They were mounted on four rollers that gave them the capability to move. Photoelectric cells, microphones, and rotating blades powered by small motors were connected to their scaffoldlike structures. Controlled by an electronic brain developed by Philips [the Dutch electronics business], a Cysp responded to variations in color intensity, light, and sound. Goodman, who has been the principal American critic/ curator of this underacknowledged turf, praises a robot (1984–87) modeled after ANDY WARHOL that was constructed by a former Walt Disney animator to be a surrogate for Warhol on lecture tours. “An appropriate

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tribute to a man who so often claimed he wanted to be a machine, the computer-controlled robot is endowed with preprogrammed speech and fifty-four separate body movements that supposedly will be barely distinguishable from Warhol’s.”

CYBERPOETRY (1990s) The most common name for a brand of visual poetry that expresses itself over the Internet, rather than on the page, on film, or across the air, cyberpoetry has come into its own only as of the mid-1990s. Examples existed before that time, but without the development of HTML, the regularization of the Internet, and the mass ingress of people to the Internet, little occurred. These new kinetic poems have more potential than their decades of predecessors beginning with the kinetic semiobjects of the 1960s. Today’s cyberpoet can work with color and movement just as easily as earlier poets worked with shapes and words. Some of the current crop of cyberpoetry stuns the viewer with its naturalness, its ease of presentation. These cyberpoems seem less forced than the crude beginnings of visual computer poetry in the mid-1980s. No real master of the form has yet appeared, but soon that should occur. —Geof Huth

D

DAAD BERLINER KUNSTLERPROGRAMM (1963–; The Berlin Artists’ Program) Whereas most of the grant-giving programs in the arts have no shame about mostly supporting people whose work has been conventional, who are safely established professionally, who don’t need support for their more readily acceptable work, the first distinction of this more progressive artists’ program was to invite to West Berlin, customarily for several months at a stretch, the world’s avant-garde, including many of the artists and writers featured in this book – among them, MICHEL BUTOR (in 1964), GYÖRGY LIGETI (1969), DICK HIGGINS (1969, 1981), YVONNE RAINER (1976), DAN GRAHAM (1976), ON KAWARA (1976), STEPHEN ANTONAKOS (1980), and GEORGE RICKEY (1968). And recipients were encouraged to produce work they could not have done before at home. Founded by the Ford Foundation in 1963, perhaps with a dash of surreptitious US government money, it was turned over to German control in 1966. Perhaps because of its origins, in addition to its location in West Berlin then under American military occupation, it was more predisposed than other post-World War II European institutions to avant-garde Americans. More crucially, had it not invited strong artists and encouraged them to work in BERLIN, the DAAD program would have jeopardized its funding. (Few cultural benefactors known to me operate under as much reality-corrective.) Because the DAAD artists’ program was part of the effort to bolster the culture of West Berlin as a vulnerable island inside East Germany, it wanted its beneficiaries to contribute visibly to local culture. So, instead of simply giving the recipient a place to live along with a stipend, as most “residency” programs do, DAAD

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administrators invited the program’s guests to cultural events around town and introduced them to cultural officials who could mount exhibitions by the guestartists, perform their music, commission radio programs, finance independent films, and much, much else. The American composer ROGER SESSIONS came in 1964 to oversee the first production anywhere of the opera Montezuma (1964) that he had begun decades before. GEORGE RICKEY came in 1968 to install a sculpture and returned annually to Berlin for many years afterwards. A few guests stayed permanently in Berlin, in part because their native countries were politically inhospitable: ARVO PÄRT (arriving in 1981), the Chilean writer Antonio Avaria (in 1978), and the Korean composer Isang Yun (in 1964). I know about the DAAD program, because I was a guest in 1981–83, and while in Berlin I wrote severely minimal fictions, coproduced one film and began another, and composed electroacoustic art for the radio stations, among other things I couldn’t do back home. One way I can personally measure DAAD’s decidedly avant-garde bias is that I have received grants for many things (scholarship, films, criticism, radio, visual art), but only the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm ever rewarded me as a Schriftsteller, or writer, which is what most colleagues think I mostly do, albeit in provocatively unusual ways. (Once offered a similarly extended residency in another place, I turned it down, because the patrons wanted that I live among them, rather than supporting my creation of significant work.) Unfortunately, once the Berlin Wall went down and Germany was unified, the rationale for bolstering Berlin’s isolated culture disintegrated. The exemplary Kunstlerprogramm has nonetheless continued, albeit with fewer funds and, alas, less impact. It is lamentable that cultural officials in other major cities aren’t so needy, or so smart.

DADA •

DACHY, MARC (5 November 1952–8 October 2015) A Parisian impresario of the avant-garde in the 20th century, he wrote a monumental book on DADA, curated exhibitions, translated avant-garde texts, and published under various imprints books and compact disks. Among the last is the very best compilation of acoustic literature with examples from JAMES JOYCE, ANTONIN ARTAUD, E. E. CUMMINGS, GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE, et al., all in their own voices. His research achievement was uncovering Japanese Dada. Two qualities of Dachy’s work are equal familiarity with visual art along with literature and better taste, for instance in his Dada (1989) carefully distinguishing it from SURREALISM. Indicative it is that the entry on him in this Dictionary should be adjacent to DADA’s.

DADA (1915–24) Dada and SURREALISM are popularly regarded as nearly synonymous movements, or as precursor and successor in the step-by-step history of modern art. Although their memberships overlapped and both espoused two major esthetic positions in common – the irrelevance of 19th-century forms of comprehension and the rejection of established modes of artistic rendering – they differed from each other in one crucial respect. Whereas Surrealism was the art of representing subconscious psychological terrains, Dada artists dealt primarily with the external world: the character of the commonly perceived environment; patterns of intellectual and artistic coherence; and standard definitions of meaning and significance. Therefore, while Surrealistic art presents the experience of hallucinations, Dada favors the distortion, often ludicrous, of familiar contexts and the portrayal of worldly absurdity. Surrealists ANDRÉ BRETON and SALVADOR DALI purportedly cast their interior fantasies in objective forms and, unlike the Dadaists, acknowledged the theories of Sigmund Freud. Dada master MARCEL DUCHAMP, by contrast, drew his models from the mundane environment (often finding his actual material there) and thereby challenged “Art” with “nonart,” implicitly questioning all absolutist esthetics and creating impersonal objects that relate not to the psychic life of his audience but to their perception of experience. Finally, whereas Surrealism was serious, Dada established a radical esthetic that regarded laughter as a laudable response (so that any subsequent art

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incorporating higher humor was glibly classified [if not denegrated] as neo-Dada). The masters of Dada used a variety of esthetic designs on behalf of their purposes. One consisted of infusing distortion and mundane gesture into a conventional form: painting a mustache on LEONARDO’s Mona Lisa, speaking gibberish at a poetry reading, fragmenting an image or narrative beyond the point of comprehension, introducing a urinal into an exhibition of sculpture, etc. At its best, this dash of nonsense revealed the ridiculous irrelevance of certain social or artistic hierarchies and conventions, as well as initiating such anti-conventions for subsequent modern art as the artistic validity of all manufactured objects. This rejection of established forms of order complemented an anarchistic political bias. Whereas Surrealism is concise and imagistic, like poetry, Dada is more diffuse, like fiction. Dada historically began in Zurich in 1915–16 when young artists, very much distressed by the burgeoning world war, engaged in esthetic actions, collectively, and individually, that seemed socially subversive and politically revolutionary. The origin of the name Dada has been endlessly debated, some saying it comes from the French word for a “hobbyhorse,” while others regard it as taken from the Slavonic words for “yes, yes.” Within two years, similar developments occurred in New York and BERLIN particularly, but also in Hanover, Cologne, and Paris. Zurich Dada was predominantly literary and theatrical. RICHARD HUELSENBECK brought to Berlin a Dada more predisposed to public art exhibitions and political satire. Hanover Dada was mostly the creation of KURT SCHWITTERS; Cologne Dada depended upon MAX ERNST. Paris Dada initially consisted mostly of young writers briefly enamored with TRISTAN TZARA; most of them eventually became, like Tzara, Surrealists. New York Dada has a more complicated history, including as it does immigrants such as Marcel Duchamp and FRANCIS PICABIA, along with natives, all of whom gathered regularly at the West 67th Street apartment of the art patron Walter Conrad ARENSBERG. So pervasive were Dada ideas that they persisted even among those who publicly converted to Surrealism, who sometimes insisted that they were Dadaists at heart. So strong was the Dada esthetic that a Dada magazine appeared in the mid-1920s in the European boonies of the Soviet republic of Georgia (I remember the Slavic scholar John Bowlt [1943] sharing this information with a professional audience, all of us as ignorant of Georgian as he). So resonant was Dada politics that even a century later we sympathize with the 1918 demand for “the introduction of progressive

106 • DALI, SALVADOR unemployment through comprehensive mechanization of every field of activity.”

DALI, SALVADOR (11 May 1904–23 January 1989) As a painter, Dali is best remembered for meticulously rendered SURREALIST paintings that portray a dreamlike world with images of melting watches and half-open drawers suggesting erotic resonances. Such paintings influenced subsequent realists, sometimes called Magic Realists, who adopted the surrealist interest in dream imagery while primarily portraying semblances of the real world. As a filmmaker, Dali also collaborated with LUIS BUÑUEL on two classic avant-garde films, Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L ‘Age d’Or (1931), which feature Surrealist imagery and allusions to both classical mythology and Freudian symbolism. Such classic/ contemporary juxtapositions of often violent images greatly influenced later filmmakers, both avant-garde and mainstream. From roughly 1940 onwards, Dali and his wife Gaia (1894–1982), a true coconspirator, spent (too?) much of their time in ceaseless self-promotion, remaking his initially innocent face to have wide-open eyes and a pencil-thin mustache. This new self-creation became as unique in its day as ANDY WARHOL’s visage or JOSEPH BEUYS’s would become years later, in all cases the face becoming a stronger professional SIGNATURE, or afterimage, than any other of their creations. In this sense, Dali’s image/persona was his most memorable invention, a Surreal figure come to life. Though initially a strong writer, he later authored books whose pages, as well as their titles, reflect his commitment to relentless self-promotion: The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1961) and Diary of a Genius (1966). Whole books debunking him (and her) have since appeared, to no surprise.

DAMON, S. FOSTER (12 February 1893–25 December 1971; b. Samuel F. D.) An intellectual pioneer, he is known to literary history for having published the first sympathetic critical book on WILLIAM BLAKE in America (1924) and for early extended critical essays on JAMES JOYCE. Music historians honor him for his pioneering 1936 collection of one hundred American popular songs. Damon is better remembered decades later for his crucial influence on avant-garde people. VIRGIL

THOMSON testifies that Damon introduced him to ERIK SATIE and GERTRUDE STEIN, in addition to later publishing the song scores from which Thomson frequently drew American tunes for his own compositions. In 1952 E. E. CUMMINGS recalled that four decades before Damon “opened my eyes and ears not merely to Domenico Theotocopuli [commonly known as ‘El Greco’] and William Blake, but to all ultra (at that moment) modern music and poetry and painting.” The impresario and critic LINCOLN KIRSTEIN wrote in his autobiography: I had as my freshman advisor S. Foster Damon, who had just published the first important American explication of William Blake’s symbols and story. To Harvard’s everlasting shame, he was denied tenure and was let go to Brown. Providence was then considered provincial exile, and it was this proprietary attitude of Harvard’s Department of English that Hound and Horn [the literary magazine that Kirstein founded] sought to contest. Even in his absence, Damon had immense influence. Were Damon not already enough of a hidden presence behind advanced arts in America, I recall that, of all the teachers I had, first in college, and then in graduate school here and abroad, he had the greatest impact in shaping the polyartistic, avant-garde intelligence behind this book, though, I should add, he was 67 years old when I first met him. A few years later, he published his summa summarum on William Blake in the form of published an alphabetical dictionary (1965), much like this summa summarum of mine.

DANTO, ARTHUR (1 January 1924–25 October 2013) Different in his origins from other art critics, he was a philosophy professor at Columbia University before becoming, past the age of 40, an art pundit. His understanding of contemporary art was based peculiarly upon his discovery around 1964 of ANDY WARHOL. If an earlier generation of painting American critics learned from JACKSON POLLOCK and WILLEM DE KOONING (and I from JOHN CAGE, also discovered around 1964), Danto either gained or lost by feasting upon an artist younger than (and perhaps lesser than) other critics’ touchstones. Danto’s writing came less from a meeting of human minds, as Warhol portrayed himself as a simpleton, than the latter’s artistic work raising philosophical issues that

DE KOONING, WILLEM •

Danto understood more elaborately than others. The critic’s major theme, first articulated in an academic journal, held that the ART WORLD certifies as acceptable artworks that might otherwise be dismissed. Much like Greenberg before him, Danto began as a staff art reviewer for The Nation magazine; and while his individual notices realized some credibility, his collected reviews portray him as intellectually limited about every artist except Warhol. Such an odd critic Danto was. Incidentally, of the academic philosophers few addressed the new issues posed by avant-garde arts as well or as originally as Nelson Goodman (1906–98) and then Richard Wollheim (1923–2003), both of whom probably deserve an entry here if a summary could be written.

DAVIS, R. G. See SAN FRANCISCO MIME TROUPE.

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athletic, Dawkins was able to get his favored hand so far above the basket that he could propel the big ball downwards with thunderous aplomb. It was a choreographic feat that others quickly imitated. So spectacular was Dawkins that his slam dunk would sometimes tear the hoop away from its moorings, shattering the backboard glass (and, needless to say, bringing the game to a halt until it could be replaced). Though this practice was initially banned by the NBA, such slam dunks became crowd-pleasers that kept basketball officials from the obvious obstacle of raising the hoop a foot or two. Also verbally adept, Dawkins is credited in some anthologies with this bit of Zen: “Nothing means nothing, but it isn’t really nothing because nothing is something that isn’t.” In a dance sequel, the choreographer ELIZABETH STREB often concluded her program with a dancer diving fist-first through a pane of glass. When a spectator is anticipating either this choreographic move or a likely slam dunk, don’t blink, or you might miss it.

DAVIS, STUART (7 December 1894–24 June 1964) Beginning as a realist, Davis created some of the earliest American pseudo-collages in the early 1920s, incorporating trompe I’oeil depictions of cigarette packs and lettering drawn from advertising art into his paintings (much as NICOLAS SLONIMSKY, say, incorporated jingles into his music compositions around that time). As one of the first Americans to understand European CUBISM, particularly FERNAND LÉGER and PABLO PICASSO, Davis created by the end of the 1920s a series of paintings of two mundane objects, the percolator and eggbeater, implicitly forecasting Pop ART. From the thirties to his death, Davis’s work took an original, if limited, direction in emphasizing colorful shapes arrayed in flat, poster-like patterns that emulated the rhythms of jazz music. Perhaps the most interesting departure in his later works was the addition to his canvases of large words, arrayed without syntactic connections to one another or much semantic relations to the images. —with Richard Carlin

DAWKINS, DARYL (11 January 1957–27 August 2015) My initial publisher for this Dictionary, who previously edited books about modern dance, suggested that I include an entry on this African-American basketball player, whose great choreographic innovation was called a Slam Dunk. Nearly 7 feet tall and propulsively

DE ANDREA, JOHN (24 November 1941) De Andrea, among others, has created awesomely lifelike sculptures of people, especially nudes with nothing to hide. Such sculptures reflect as they transcend the illusions typical of, say, the traditional wax museum. Hyperrealism is more successful in sculpture than in painting or photography, in part because threedimensionality is unavailable to the latter art forms, but mostly because of new materials, as well as new intelligence, that have become available to sculptors. De Andrea has an unusual ability to give his sculptures humanity. It was the British poet-critic Edward Lucie-Smith (1933) who pointed out, “They somehow give away both their class and their national origin through details of posture, hair style, and expression.” The cleverest de Andrea in my experience involved three figures – two nude women and a clothed man facing them. You knew the women were “fake,” so to speak, but you had to look and think twice to realize that the man with his back to you was an inanimate sculpture as well.

DE KOONING, WILLEM (24 April 1904–19 March 1997) Born in Holland, de Kooning emigrated to America as a young man and worked as a W.P.A. muralist. His midlife innovation came from imaginatively developing

108 • DE MARIA, WALTER and extending a major stylistic contribution of European CUBISM, breaking up the representational plane to portray an object or field as seen from two or more perspectives simultaneously. The initial paintings in his Women series, done in the early 1950s, evoke in impulsive and yet well-drawn strokes (and colors identical to those in the environment portrayed) a single figure regarded from a multitude of perspectives, both vertical and horizontal, in several kinds of light and, therefore, implicitly at various moments in time. Not only are the differences between figure and setting, past and present, and background and foreground all thoroughly blurred, but nearly every major detail in this all-over and yet focused field suggests a different angle of vision or a different intensity of light. De Kooning never did as well again, even in roughly similar styles, though his admirers were forever hailing later works with the wish that he had.

DE MARIA, WALTER (1 October 1935–25 July 2013) An eccentric artist’s eccentric artist, de Maria first made sculptures that posed genuine dangers to viewers, such as a bed of spikes pointed upwards, and then extravagant inaccessible art with Mile Long Drawing (1968), for which he drew two parallel lines, 12 feet apart, in the Mojave Desert, and Las Vegas Piece (1969), where he made with a bulldozer’s 6-foot blade. four shallow cuts, two one mile long and the other two only a half-mile long, thus forming a half-mile square with two tails. (As this piece was not maintained, Nature defaced it.) In 1968, de Maria filled an entire Munich gallery with earth a few feet deep, which was such a good idea that he was asked to do it again, first at another gallery in Cologne, and then in a former gallery in ARTISTS’ SOHO, where it has been on museum-like permanent display for decades as The New York Earth Room. Nearby in SoHo is another apparently permanent de Maria installation, The Broken Kilometer (1979), where the entire floor of an 11,000-square-foot space has highly polished brass rods arrayed in parallel rows. Fortunate was he, early in his career, to win the favor of the Dia Foundation, very much an art patron’s art patron, which gave him not only permanent exhibition spaces but a stipend.

DE STIJL (1917–32) A Dutch periodical of art and esthetics edited by THEO VAN DOESBURG until his premature death,

De Stijl was commonly considered the most influential avant-garde art magazine of its time, representing not just Dutch CONSTRUCTIVISM but a rationalist approach to art and society. Its title, meaning “the style,” is pronounced (in English) as, roughly, “duh style.” Among the member-contributors were PIET MONDRIAN, GEORGES VANTONGERLOO, EL LISSITZKY, GEORGE ANTHEIL, JEAN/HANS ARP, and architects and industrial designers. Rejecting particularly EXPRESSIONISM along with nearly everything else, “This periodical hopes to make a contribution to the development of a new awareness of beauty,” van Doesburg wrote in the initial issue. “It wishes to make modern man receptive to what is new in the visual arts.” This “new” they called the “new plasticism,” which not only rejected representation (Mondrian having once specialized in flowers) but, instead, strictly limited painting to straight lines, 90-degree angles, and the three primary colors of red, yellow, and blue (along with the neutrals of black, white, and gray). As a polemic in the great modernist tradition, all on behalf of certain socially redemptive higher idealisms, the Stijl writers promised heroically to realize spiritually with art what it could not do before. As H. L. C. Jaffe (1915) wrote in the principal history of the magazine, “The purification of the plastic means of expression should also serve to solve various actual problems of our present time.” Because van Doesburg as a POLYARTIST was as much a writer as a painter, one of De Stijl’s issues was devoted to literature that was avant-garde at the time; and because he became involved with DADA, a 1922 issue had a Dada supplement titled Mecano. Too radical at the time for Holland, the Stijl artists were excluded from the Dutch pavilion at a Paris art fair in 1925. Just as they rejected much to establish its highly particular terrain, so were their limitations easily spurned by other artists. Their polemic finally had more influence on architecture and design, particularly of furniture. From the American critic PETER FRANK, who speaks Dutch, comes this advice: Because “de Stijl” is integrally the name of an art movement, it would be under “D” even though the “de” is not capitalized. Were it the name of someone, however – like “de Hooch” or “de Leeuw” – it would be under the capitalized letter if the person were still in the Netherlands. If s/he has moved to another country, the naming and alphabetizing would follow that country’s protocols, right down to capitalizing what hadn’t been capitalized (e.g. “De Kooning”). Got it?

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DEAN, LAURA

DELANY, SAMUEL R.

(3 December 1945)

(1 April 1942)

As a choreographer once closely associated with STEVE REICH, Dean created highly inventive dances that depended upon simple repeated moves. In Jumping Dance (1973), twelve performers, lined up in three rows of four, jump up and down, making their own noises, until everyone is exhausted, incidentally illustrating JOHN CAGE’s classic remark about doing something again and again until it is no longer boring but interesting. Circle Dance (1972) has ten performers shuffling their feet around four concentric circles in unison. However, since they move around four completely different circumferences, the performers go in and out of visible phase (the work thus resembling early Reich music). As in Jumping Dance, the music comes only from sounds made by the performers themselves. Having ceased choreographing and writing music in 2001, she declared in 2009 that she is no longer arranging and allowing restaging/reconstruction projects of her dance and music works. Nor does she encourage the teaching of her work anywhere in any way. Too bad. This entry appears because some people have favorable memories that cannot be erased.

Though he has been a prolific and prominent author of science fiction that represents an advance within that genre but has little influence on new literature, his more avant-garde activities have involved, first, criticism, which he often casts as rewritten interviews, in which he sympathetically understands the most extreme literary developments; and, then, co-editing a masspaperback periodical Quark/ (1970–72) that published among other radical texts JAMES KEILTY’s “The People of Prashad,” which includes a radical language of alternative signs. As none of the other mass paperback periodicals were so receptive to avant-garde writing, a selection from this magazine should be reissued; even decades later, it would surprise. Delany’s novel Hogg (1995) is a fictional memoir of prepubscent homosexual experience that took years to get into print and then, its text corrected, reprint. His Dahlgren (1974) has won more readers than any other Delany book, its daunting length notwithstanding.

DEFAMILIARIZATION (c. 1920s) One of the great modernist esthetic ideas, sometimes translated as “making strange” and other times as “estrangement,” this was coined by the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) to honor the process of disrupting conventional forms of literary presentation and thus habitual forms of literary experience – in his phrases, “to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of the perception process.” Defamiliarization comes from deviations in literary devices such as language, syntax, narrative, or point of view. (Writing in the 1920s, Shklovsky cites Leo Tolstoy’s story “Kholsomer,” which is told from a horse’s perspective. Later literature offers more extreme examples.) The principle of defamiliarization is applicable to the nonliterary arts as well. It is scarcely surprising that in the late teens of the 20th century, as he came to maturity, Shklovsky was personally close to the poets who made RUSSIAN FUTURISM.

DELAUNAY, ROBERT (12 April 1885–25 October 1941) As a pioneering abstract painter, he founded, in collaboration with his wife SONIA, among others, a movement that GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE called Orphism. In contrast to other early abstractionists favoring alternative, often geometric shapes, they favored strong colors verging on vulgarity. At their best, his paintings suggest movements not only back and forth but side to side in a vibrant field, all devoid of any exterior reference. To put it differently, in his masterpiece Homage à Blériot (1914), the shapes become resonant planes that move. From MICHEL SEUPHOR comes the best summary: “He thus revealed a highly individual approach, never tired of trying new resonances of colours, of experimenting with new rhythms, which always, as though spontaneous, blended in an absolute harmony.” Especially with frequent references to the Eiffel Tower, they epitomize Parisian art. Over the years Delaunay also published texts advocating his grand ideas about color. Odd it seems to me that some histories feature his early portraits, which I find peculiar. Perhaps Delaunay’s single most spectacular work came in 1937, when the prime minister of France, Léon Blum, more sympathetic to avant-garde art than most statesmen, invited Delaunay to make for an International Exposition several thousand square feet of paintings. One condition of this commission was hiring

110 • DELAUNAY, SONIA at least fifty unemployed artists, among them several who later had visible careers. Given that his images could be expanded in size without much esthetic loss, the results were as spectacular as avant-garde art for World’s Fairs can be.

DELAUNAY, SONIA (14 November 1885–5 December 1979; b. Sarah Ilinitchna Stern) One of the great partners of modern art, she supported her more prominent husband Robert D. not only in their time together but for thirty-eight years after his death. In MICHEL SEUPHOR’s firsthand judgment: “I have heard [Mr.] DELAUNAY say that but for her many a canvas would have remained unfinished.” While earning income greater than his in fashion design and decoration, she also ran a salon connecting artists to sponsors of fashion and mounted a prominent contribution to the annual Parisian exhibitions of Art Décoratifs. About her own painting, Seuphor wrote when she was still alive: “Her art, which at the beginning inclined more toward the Fauves and Gauguin then Cézanne and Cubism, has retained its warmth and an exuberant lyricism befitting the ‘orphic’ powers of the Delaunays.” As a Jewish artist born in the Ukraine, raised in Jewish St. Petersburg, she respected the commandment against representing graven images.

DELLSCHAU, CHARLES A. A. (4 June 1830–20 April 1923) Among the great American practitioners of OUTSIDER ART perhaps the most familiar is Henry Darger (1892–1973), whose works have become widely exhibited and appreciated since his death. More extraordinary, as well as earlier, was Dellschau, who came to Texas from Prussia in his early twenties. Claiming to belong to the Sonora Aero Club, which perhaps didn’t exist, he made visionary pictures of airplanes well before they actually existed. After retiring as a butcher, around the turn of the century, Dellschau produced large notebooks with over five thousand richly visionary, often detailed drawings of flying machines. Well after his death, they were retrieved from, no joke, a Houston landfill, to be appreciated by connoisseurs.

DELLUC, LOUIS (14 October 1890–22 March 1924)

As a literary critic who then became a film critic, he also founded an early Parisian film magazine and film society before directing his own films, thereby establishing a precedent for later writers becoming directors (which has been a route more common in France than elsewhere). As a film intellectual, Delluc advocated a cinema emphasizing images over the more literary theatrical melodramas that were then dominant. In his most famous film, La Femme de nulle part (1922, The Woman from Nowhere), he realized a dreamy atmosphere with frequent flashbacks and closeup shots of objects. To no surprise, given Delluc’s literary beginnings, the screenplay was published in a book, Drames du Cinema, the following year.

DENBY, EDWIN (4 February 1903–12 July 1983) He was, by common consent, the most intelligent dance critic in America before 1950, contributing long essays to the most distinguished cultural periodicals, such as Modern Music from 1936 to 1943, and then, from 1942 to 1945, reviews to the New York HeraldTribune, which had at that time the most sophisticated arts reviewing ever available in any American newspaper (where VIRGIL THOMSON was the principal music critic, part-timers included the composers JOHN CAGE, Paul Bowles [1910–99], Lou Harrison [1917–2003], and Peggy Glanville-Hicks [1912–90], all of whom wrote well). Denby’s first collection of essays, simply and yet classically titled Looking at the Dance (1949), revealed for at least one generation in America the possibilities of dance writing based on evocative descriptions in a luminous prose style: A leap is a whole story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you want to try it, here are some of the simplest directions for this kind of soaring flight. It begins with a knee bend, knees turned out, feet turned out, and heels pressed down, to get a surer grip and a smoother flow in the leg action. The bend goes down softly (“as if the body were being sucked to the floor”) with a slight accelerando. The thrust upward, the stretch of the legs, is faster than the bend was. Additionally, Denby’s perceptions were often original then and no less so now: Orson Welles is the greatest dance director in our theater. He is also the only producer who gives

DEREN, MAYA •

us scenery which is a delight to look at – the only scenery that sets the size of an actor in a dramatic proportion to the frame of the set. Looking small, Denby also saw big, identifying early (in 1947) a distinctively American style in ballet: The charming figures, the long legs of American girls, are a part of that new American flavor. In any kind of dancing a bunch of young Americans do together, they are likely to show a steadier and keener sense of bearing and a clearer carriage of the body than Europeans would, and they are apt to wear a more sober and noncommittal look than European Latins or Slavs. As Denby developed sometime in the 1950s a so-called writer’s block, his scarce publications gained a weight of oracular pronouncements. Even truculent editors would print anything he gave them, The New York Times, for instance, publishing his praise of ROBERT WILSON as early as 1973. I remember attending post-concert gatherings that would come to a halt whenever the wispy, soft-spoken, grey-haired man said anything, so awesome was his personal authority within the dance community. Denby also published poems and a novel, to less universal acclaim. Even decades later, dance aficionados often debate whether anyone since has written as well about dance in any language.

DEPERO, FORTUNATO (30 March 1892–29 November 1960) Born an Austrian citizen in northern Italy, he was a precocious toy designer as a child. He moved to Rome in 1913 and participated in Futurist exhibitions, becoming a leader of the movement’s second phase. After collaborating with Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) on Ricostruzione Futurista dell’Universo (The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, 1915), Depero produced kinetic sculpture and mechanical theater, along with stunning theatrical texts, some of which were collected in Michael and Victoria Nes Kirby’s pioneering anthology, Futurist Performance (1971). The summa of his Futurist design visions were Vegetazione a deformazione artificiale (1915, Artificially Deformed Vegetables) and Typographical Architecture (1927). Historians of the history of BOOK-ART credit Depero with preceding GEORGE MACIUNAS in using industrial bolts in 1927 to bind a book.

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Between 1928 and 1930 Depero resided in NEW YORK CITY. Though he barely spoke English, he designed covers for slick magazines, produced interiors for midtown restaurants, and even built a house on 23rd Street. After World War II, he returned to America, living in Fairfield Country, Connecticut, with a plan to open an eponymous museum. Returning to his native Italy in 1950, he fulfilled this dream, instead, in the small city of Rovereto where he grew up. With more than 3,000 objects the Casa d’Arte Futurista Depero is said to be the only Italian museum wholly devoted to ITALIAN FUTURISM.

DER BLAU REITER (1911–14) As a successor to the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (1909–12), this short-lived populous art group with a catchier moniker represented basically the aspirations of young Munich artists desiring to overthrow the dominance of BERLIN. Taking the name of an important 1903 painting by WASSILY KANDINSKY, then perhaps the most prominent vanguard painter residing there, they sponsored a large exhibition and published an illustrated anthology, actually titled an Almanach that was emblazoned with their name. Among the more prominent were LYONEL FEININGER, Gabriele Münter (1877–1962), Franz Marc (1880–1916), and Kandinsky, all of them then residing in Munich. After an initial show came other populous exhibitions including more new artists, many of them residing elsewhere: PABLO PICASSO, DAVID BURLIUK, ROBERT DELAUNAY, KASIMIR MALEVICH, and ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (with his paintings). So disparate was the group and so diffuse their esthetics that they soon dispersed, perhaps fortunately, before the beginning of World War I and later political strife within Munich. Berlin later reigned again.

DER STURM See WALDEN, Herwarth.

DEREN, MAYA (29 April 1917–13 October 1961; b. Eleanora Derenkowskaia) For many years the doyenne of Manhattan avant-garde film, she coproduced an avant-garde silent classic,

112 • DERMISACHE, MIRTHA Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), that in fourteen minutes evokes the unconscious of a female protagonist, played by herself, caught in a web of dreams. Reflecting post-Freudian literature popular at the time, it is filled with symbols (e.g., a key and a knife) meant to be interpreted. Even if Meshes remains more famous, Lauren Rabinovitz (1950), in her thoughtful book on American women’s avant-garde cinema, judges a later Deren film, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), to represent superior art for silently portraying interactions among people. Very much a strong lecturer, an enthusiastic traveler, and writer whose texts were posthumously collected, Deren reiterated her intention “to put on film the feelings which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.” With that one sharp sentence Deren separated her low-budget aims from Hollywood filmmaking, as well as from live theater, still photography, and literature. Rather than staffing a production studio, she worked on Meshes with her husband ALEXANDER HAMMID, an experienced filmmaker/cameraman who later collaborated with FRANCIS THOMPSON. As Deren became a powerful personality in 1950s DOWNTOWN New York, perhaps because of an amphetamine dependency, her presence was vividly recalled for decades after her death.

DERMISACHE, MIRTHA (21 February 1940–5 January 2012) An Argentine woman with a striking name, she published and exhibited in the 1970s within the context of VISUAL POETRY handwritten lines that suggested writing while rarely revealing recognizable words. Though I didn’t much like such work at the time, because identifiable words as such were crucial to my definition of Visual Poetry, her delicate lines had sufficient elegance to appear in avant-garde literary magazines in Europe. Her principal publicist during the 1970s was the Center for Art and Communication (CAyC) based in Buenos Aires which would send modestly printed fliers and booklets around the world, in sum portraying an institution that, so I discovered while visiting Buenos Aires in 1987, wasn’t as grand as it self-portrayed. Dermisache’s work now stands as a major precursor of what has come to be known as Asemic Writing, because her semblances of handwriting are devoid of semantic content. Among the numerous practitioners around the world are many appearing with a single page apiece in An Anthology of Asemic Writing (2013),

which epitomizes the selection that tries to establish artistic importance not through strong examples but by the sheer number of contributors. One risk implicit in an anthology composed on that principle is pleasing those included more than persuading outsiders.

DERRIDA, JACQUES (15 July 1930–8 October 2004; b. Jackie Élie D.) A Frenchman from North Africa, Derrida became in some academic literature (not literary) circles the most influential critical theorist since NORTHROP FRYE. His dense and often confusing books seem designed for the classroom, which means that initially they are most successfully read with a guide, in concert with other seekers. Where they are comprehensible, at least in my experience, their ideas are obvious; where they are incomprehensible, Derrida’s theories of Deconstruction offer the cognoscenti rich opportunities for the kinds of one-upmanship endemic to such hierarchical societies as the military and most universities. I quote one summary, from Philip M. W. Thody’s contribution to the encyclopedia Twentieth-Century Culture (1983), not because I agree with it but because Thody (1928), who once wrote a good book on Albert Camus, seems to know what he’s talking about (and I can’t confidently summarize it): Philosophers have gone wrong in trying to make sense of experience by looking for essential truth lying with the “essence of things.” What they should do is look at language itself, but without seeing individual words as having a meaning because of the link which they are alleged to have with the object, concepts, or activities they designate. Instead they should follow out the full implications of Saussure’s remark that language contains only difference and that meaning is created by the distinction between the sounds of e.g., “pin” and “pen.” The task of the philosopher is to examine how language works both by the differences within it and by the chain of expectations which the writer or speaker sets up and which require the listener to defer the moment when she or he decides what a particular sentence may nor may not mean. Got it? If not, don’t ask me to make it any clearer for you. To my mind, Derrida’s originality comes from his way of expressing his thoughts, which I discovered not from reading his works but from hearing him speak.

DI SUVERO, MARK •

In Jerusalem in the 1980s, I witnessed a question and answer performance before a predominantly academic audience, most speaking, as he does, non-native English. Whenever Derrida took a question, you could see him fumble for the beginnings of an answer, but once he got on track, an elaborate digression followed, at once elegant and idiosyncratic, until he reached a pause. Having followed him so far, you wondered whether he would then turn to the left or to the right, each direction seeming equally valid, only to admire the next verbal flight that led to another roadstop, with similarly arbitrary choices before continuing or concluding. In response to the next question, Derrida improvised structurally similar rhetorical gymnastics. What separates Derrida from traditional literary theorists is this commitment to improvisatory thinking, with all of its possibilities and limitations. I suspected the influence of 1950s American jazz; he was playing CHARLIE PARKER, so to speak. Should you have a taste for high-flown intellectual flights, consider MARSHALL MCLUHAN, whose similarly improvised perceptions were sociologically more substantial. If you think improvisation is “no way to play music,” you might judge that Derrida’s example is no way to think.

DE ZAYAS, MARIUS (13 March 1880–10 January 1961) Born aristocratic in Mexico, he in 1906 contributed his caricatures to a Mexico City newspaper cofounded by BENJAMIN DE CASSERES. After El Dario editorially opposed the Mexican president, both men fled to New York. By 1909 Zayas exhibited his caricatures in ALFRED STIEGLITZ’s 291 gallery as well as contributing to the gallery’s eponymous magazine. Reflecting painterly abstraction, his stylish portraits radically distort their subjects while making their unique visages identifiable. Zayas also coauthored a 36-page pamphlet, A Study of the Modern Evolution of Plastic Expression (1913), that opened advanced American minds to new European art. He contributed his drawings to Caroline Caffin’s early appreciative book on Vaudeville (1914, often reprinted, even in the 21st century). By 1915 Zayas opened The Modern Gallery on Fifth Avenue to show emerging European artists whom he later featured in a Manhattan gallery bearing his surname. After visiting Europe a few times, he resettled there in 1920 staying mostly in Paris before returning to New York during World War II. Once Zayas was again in his second city, Alfred Barr at MoMA persuaded him to write from his own notes and with his own photos the book How, When and Why Modern Art Came to New York, which

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didn’t appear until edited by an admirer, decades after his death. Zayas stands as a minor figure who sporadically served major avant-garde art indispensably.

DI SUVERO, MARK (18 September 1933; b. Marco Polo di S.) Born in Shanghai of Italian-Jewish parents, di Suvero moved with his family to California in 1941 and majored in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. Taking off from DAVID SMITH’s sense of sculpture as an outdoor art and FRANZ KLINE’s taste for broad lines and odd angles, di Suvero fabricated monumental sculptures initially of thick wood and then of scrap steel beams retrieved from demolished buildings and junkyards. Asymmetrical and firmly attached to the ground, these sculptures sometimes contain seats inviting the spectator to gain a more intimate experience of the work. Some contain parts that can be slightly moved. Though CUBIST in syntax, they look like nothing found in life and could thus be considered CONSTRUCTIVIST as well. He is credited among the first sculptors to use a construction crane in fabricating his work. A distinguished older sculptor who was famously generous, Sidney Geist (1914–2005), greeted di Suvero’s first exhibition in 1960 with this published encomium: “I myself have not been so moved by a show of sculpture since the Brancusi exhibition of 1933.” In a classic of appreciative criticism, Geist continued: “History is glad to record the arrival of any new artist, the creation of a new beauty, or the presence of a singular work of art; but the real stuff of history is made of those moments at which one can say: from now on nothing will be the same.” After leaving America in protest against the Vietnam War, di Suvero returned to the NEW YORK CITY borough of Queens, where he located his huge studio in an abandoned waterfront pier and later established outdoors in an adjacent property Socrates Sculpture Park that he donated to New York City. A few years older than RICHARD SERRA, who is likewise a Jewish Californian who passed through the state university in Berkeley, di Suvero similarly made abstract sculpture far larger than David Smith, say, could have imagined working in his studio home barely larger than a modest SoHo loft. However, whereas Serra’s structures try to intimidate through their massive presence, di Suvero’s are skeletal and mellow. Typically perhaps, di Suvero tends to work with available materials, rather than preparing drawings for himself (or others) to fabricate. Among the geometric forms repeated in his sculptures are triangles, extended

114 • DIAGHILEV, SERGEI PAVLOVICH straight diagonal lines, the letters X and V, and acute angles. While most of his sculptures are easily identifiable as his, selecting which ones might be better and why becomes problematic. The Storm King Art Center up the Hudson River from NYC invited him in the 1970s to “store” his sculptures on its palatial grounds where they are indeed magnificent, sometimes suggesting that, since none stands above the others, all of them might comprise a single work.

DIAGHILEV, SERGEI PAVLOVICH (19 March 1872–20 August 1929) One of the greatest organizers of innovative artistic performance, Diaghilev first became known as a leading figure in the St. Petersburg World of Art Group, as founder and editor of the journal World of Art (Mir iskusstva, 1899–1904), which introduced important new European art movements to the Russian public in an elegantly printed format, setting a high standard for subsequent Russian art and literary journals. Diaghilev ceaselessly promoted native Russian achievements, as well as innovative trends in the fields of art, music, opera, and ballet. His most significant accomplishment was the creation and management of the renowned Les Ballets Russes, which, beginning in 1909, produced some of the most brilliant spectacles in the history of ballet. To realize his high ambitions, he engaged some of the most talented avant-garde artists, composers, choreographers, and dancers of Russia and France, including Leon Bakst (1866–1924), Aleksandr Benois (1870– 1960), Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962), Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964), PABLO PICASSO, Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Georges Braque (1882–1963), IGOR STRAVINSKY, Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), Claude Debussy (1862– 1918), Mikhail Fokine (1880–1942), Vaslav Nijinsky (1890–1950), Anna Pavlova (1881–1931), and Tamara Karsavina (1885–1978). Perhaps his most artistically successful production was Petrushka (1912), with music by Stravinsky, stage design by Benois, choreography by Fokine, and Nijinsky dancing the title role. His most scandalous success occurred in May 1913, with the premier of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Nijinsky’s unusual choreography, evoking pagan rituals in pre-Christian Russia, plus the wild music, caused a riot during the performance. Diaghilev’s role was to stimulate, in fact to demand, innovative work from his collaborators and to provide them with the resources to stage the results. His motto was “surprise me.” —Gerald Janecek

THE DIAL (1840–44; 1920–29) Doubly significant, because it was twice an influential magazine credited with publishing emerging writers, The Dial in its first emanation was, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s introduction, a “Journal of the new spirit.” Its first editor was Margaret Fuller (1810–50), the most important American woman writer of her time. Among its contributors were the historical American Transcendentalists: not only Emerson but Theodore Parker and Henry David Thoreau. Scarcely popular enough, this Dial never gained more than two hundred subscribers and so closed too soon. A second Dial appeared in the 1860s; a third began publishing in 1880 with the promise to continue the first. Though this third Dial survived into the second decade of the 20th century, it was less legendary. Its owners sold The Dial to yet another publisher, Scofield Thayer (1889–1982), who recruited JAMES SIBLEY WATSON, JR, as a co-conspirator. Together they redefined it as the first truly modernist literary magazine in America, as this Dial published T. S. ELIOT’s The Waste Land (1922), among other future classics. In its first year alone contributors included such avant-garde heavies as DJUNA BARNES, KENNETH BURKE, E. E. CUMMINGS, W. C. WILLIAMS, EZRA POUND, and AMY LOWELL. Though this Dial died in 1929, a later attempt to revive the title yet again, via a commercial book publisher in the 1960s, swiftly piffed.

DIGITAL (1960s) This term is a euphemism for any mechanism, commonly computer-assisted, that converts an input to numerical quantities, which are positive or negative impulses (commonly characterized as 0/1). The term is applicable to visual and video as well as audio machines. Digital-to-analog conversion refers to the process of taking material stored in a computer medium, such as on a tape or a hard disk, and making it more accessible, whether on paper or on analog audiotape.

DIGITAL ARCHIVES (2000s) Only in the 21st century have archivists seriously begun to address the issue of preservation of digital art (any art created digitally and also retained and experienced

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in that digital form), yet the proposed and implemented solutions remain inchoate and not always reliable. The first flowerings of any art form are naturally avantgarde; they represent a separation from the long wide stream of art into a narrow and initially small outlet. Given their initial position on the periphery of the art world, the avant-garde art of the past has sometimes been ignored or despised at its birth, only later to be re-discovered and cherished. This process worked well enough when the artworks in question were in analog media: paper, canvas, paint. But any digital art is more complex than its analogous analog forms, each piece requiring a certain digital environment in which to exist and from which to present itself. Given the proliferation of digital art forms, the need for digital archives focused on the preservation of these complex digital objects is greater than ever. Many of the computer artworks of the 1980s are already disappearing or unintelligible. For instance, during the mid-1980s, a few poets wrote kinetic computer poems in BASIC for the Apple IIe computer. A few of these computers still exist, but the media holding the digital artworks (5.25-inch computer disks) are usually unintelligible, now decades past their expected viability. Four Canadian and American poets solved, at least temporarily, the preservation of the Apple Basic poems of BPNICHOL through emulation, whereby the original code was maintained without modification or migration but set to play within a piece of software that emulated the original digital environment of the piece. In another vein, the Media Archeology Lab at the University of Colorado in Boulder is a research center that runs and keeps operational old digital equipment to ensure access to all important media, especially artworks, of the technological past. Neither of these solutions addresses the larger and more difficult issue of maintaining access to artworks existing on old digital formats and that were designed to play on obsolete machines. Since digital archives have become much more sophisticated in the 21st century, there is some hope that we might be able to save the kinetic, interactive, and aleatoric digital artworks of our near past. If not, this art designed to take advantage of the possibilities of the computer will be sacrificed on the altar of computer evolution. What this may mean is that much of the avant-garde art of our age will be lost to the future and be remembered only through description. —Geof Huth

DILLER, BURGOYNE (13 January 1906–30 January 1965)

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A dedicated abstract painter from his professional beginnings, he moved from EXPRESSIONISM through CUBISM and MONDRIAN to what came to be called “hard edge” painting because the lines between one shape and another in his canvas were so clearly demarked. A masterpiece is First Theme (1938), which has three rectangles – one white, the second red, a third ochre – alternately protruding and receding on a black field. After working minimally, he produced busier paintings closer to Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. Oddly, when the US government in the 1930s created a Federal Arts Project within the Works Progress Administration mostly to employ painters to create murals, Diller became an administrator, because, it was joked, “He could really paint.” Greater recognition for his art came just before his early death, ONLY to lapse, alas.

DISNEY, WALT (5 December 1901–15 December 1966) Though so much done with his name is discreditable, he was from his beginnings in Kansas City an ambitious and determined artist who revolutionized film animation along with producing some great films, particularly FANTASIA which reflects his efforts with both time and money. Technically Disney introduced synchronized sound and feature-length animation. He also envisioned, unlike any European animator, that his films devoid of human “stars” could be massmerchandized. Don’t forget as well that soon after his death, from lung cancer probably caused by heavy cigarette-smoking, his estate bankrolled CAL ARTS to be, for a while, the most advanced multiarts college in America. May I leave for another entry an appreciation of his eponymous theme parks.

DISNEYLAND (1955)/DISNEY WORLD (C. 1971) Besides his classsic animated feature FANTASIA and his development of synchronized sound for film animation in Steamboat Willie (1928), WALT DISNEY must surely be counted among the few visionaries who actually created from scratch a parallel fantasy world. While others have proposed creating self-contained environments, Disney’s Disneyland and, later, Disney World, Euro-Disney, and Disneyland-Tokyo, became among the first large-scale alternate worlds created and operated successfully. Not only business models for later developments (the so-called theme

116 • DOCUMENTARY ARCHIVISTS parks that now dot the landscape promoting various commercial operations), Disney’s parks also became neat universes where visitors could enter not only the childlike world of Disney’s characters but also experience, through sub-parks like Epcot Center, various world cultures (without the tedium or danger of world travel). Just as American culture has invaded the world, Disney has scooped up the world and Americanized it, making it palatable for mass audiences. Disney’s success relied on total control of the environment, so that ideally visitors must stay in Disney-operated hotels, eat at Disney-operated concessions, and see only Disneyoperated attractions. To do otherwise would be to explode the mythic power of Disney’s creation (and also rob corporate Disney of its stranglehold on your pocketbook). While the artistic LAS VEGAS is an artificial neighborhood within a larger city with many owners and a resident population, Disneyland and Disney World are perhaps more perfect because more complete, as the entire artificial reality is maintained consistently through one owner, and whose only real population are tourists. —with Richard Carlin

DOCUMENTARY ARCHIVISTS Within every serious art scene potentially worthy of historical remembering are individuals who collect whatever they can. Sometimes they accumulate books; other times, composers’ scores, which became PAUL SACHER’s specialty. In visual arts, whoever couldn’t afford paintings or sculptures could at least accumulate photographs or, more conveniently, slides. For DOWNTOWN New York art, the key documentarian was Larry Qualls (1946), who happened to be a partner for three decades in my ARTISTS’ SOHO coop. (No one else among us had a Ph.D.) Simply, from the late 1970s into the 21st century, he asked gallerists to give him their own slides of whatever they were exhibiting. Additionally he took his own photographs. Working modestly, without drawing much attention to himself, he amassed not thousands of images but a few hundred thousand. As no else had so many slides of contemporary art, he initially duplicated them to sell as packages to provincial institutions. Eventually, his entire archive of more than 350,000 images went to Yale University, which digitized them for public use. Other people have no doubt done likewise elsewhere in history and around the world. Though I asked around, no names were offered to me. Younger people could no doubt do likewise again.

DODECAPHONIC MUSIC (1924) In historical perspective, dodecaphonic music is the product of a luxuriant development of chromatic melody and harmony. A conscious avoidance of all tonal centers led to the abolition of key signature and a decline of triadic harmony. The type of composition in which all tonal points of reference have been eliminated became known as ATONALITY. It was from this paludous atmosphere of inchoate atonality that the positive and important technical idiom of dodecaphonic composition was gradually evolved and eventually formulated by ARNOLD SCHOENBERG as the “method of composing with 12 tones related only to one another.” Schoenberg’s first explicit use of his method occurs in his Serenade, op. 24, written in 1924. Five fundamental ideas underlie Schoenberg’s method: (1) Dodecaphonic monothematism in which the entire work is derived from a twelve-tone row (Tonreihe), which comprises twelve different notes of the chromatic scale. (2) The tone-row is utilized in four conjugate forms: original, retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion. (3) Although the order of the notes in the tone-row is rigidly observed, the individual members of the series can be placed in any octave position, a peculiar feature of dodecaphonic music which results in the wide distribution of the thematic ingredients over the entire vocal or instrumental range of a single part or over sections of different parts. (4) Since each of the four forms of the basic twelvetone series can be transposed to any starting point of the chromatic scale, the total of all available forms is forty-eight. (5) Melody, harmony, and counterpoint are functions of the tone-row, which may appear in all its avatars, horizontally as melody, vertically as harmony and diagonally as canonic counterpoint. It may also be distributed partly in melodic progressions, partly in harmonic or contrapuntal structures, creating dodecaphonic meloharmony or melocounterpoint. Because of the providential divisibility of the number 12, the twelve-tone row can be arranged in six groups in twopart counterpoint, four groups in three-part counterpoint (or harmony), three groups in four-part harmony, or two groups in six-part harmony. In a communication sent to NICOLAS SLONIMSKY in 1939, Ernst Krenek describes the relationship between atonality and the method of composing with twelve tones as follows: Atonality is a state of the musical material brought about through a general historical development. The 12-tone technique is a method

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of writing music within the realm of atonality. The sense of key has been destroyed by atonality. The method of composing with 12 tones was worked out in order to replace the old organization of the material by certain new devices. SCHOENBERG was not alone in his dodecaphonic illumination. Several musicians, mostly in Austria and Germany, evolved similar systems of organizing the resources of the chromatic scale in a logical and selfcontained system of composition. JEF GOLYSCHEFF, Russian composer and painter who lived in Germany and eventually settled in Brazil, worked on the problem as early as 1914, and in 1924 published a collection which he called twelve Tondauer Musik, making use of twelve different tones in thematic structures. At about the same time, Nicolas Obouhov invented a system that he called “Absolute Harmony,” which involved the use of all twelve chromatic tones without doubling; he played his piano pieces written in this system at a concert in Petrograd on 3 February 1916. Passages containing twelve different notes in succession, apart from the simple chromatic scale, are found even in classical works. There is a highly chromaticized passage in Mozart’s G Minor Symphony derived from three mutually exclusive diminished-seventh chords, aggregating to twelve different notes. The main subject in the section “Of Science” in the score of Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss contains the twelve different notes of the chromatic scale, but they remain uninverted, untergiversated, and otherwise unmetamorphosed, and thus cannot be regarded as a sampler of dodecaphonic writing. Liszt’s Faust Symphony opens with a theme consisting of four successive augmented triads descending by semitones, comprising the twelve different tones, but it cannot be meaningfully described as an anticipation of the dodecaphonic method. CHARLES IVES uses a twelve-tone series of different chromatic notes in his instrumental piece Tone Road No. 3, which he wrote in 1915. This intuitive invention is important not only as an illustration of his prophetic genius, but also as another indication that dodecaphonic ideas appeared in the minds of musicians working in different parts of the world, completely independently of each other. Among scattered examples of twelve-tone composition of the pre-dodecaphonic years is L’adieu à la vie for piano by Alfredo Casella, which ends on a chord of twelve different notes. An amusing example of dodecaphonic prevision is the Hymn to Futurism by Cesar Cui, written in 1917, when the last surviving member of the Russian Mighty Five was 82 years old. Intended as a spoof, the piece contains a passage of three mutually exclusive diminished-seventh chords in arpeggio

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adding up to twelve different notes, and another passage comprising two mutually exclusive augmented triads with a complementary scale of whole tones passing through the unoccupied six spaces, forming another series of twelve different notes. The fact that Cui had two dodecaphonic series in his short composition demonstrates that even in a musical satire the thematic use of twelve different notes was a logical outcome of the process of tonal decay, serving as a fertilizer for the germination of dodecaphonic organisms. The method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another did not remain a rigid dogma. Its greatest protagonists, besides Schoenberg himself, were his disciples Alban Berg (1885–1935) and ANTON VON WEBERN. Somewhat frivolously, they have been described as the Vienna Trinity, with Schoenberg the Father, Berg the Son, and Webern the Holy Ghost. Both Berg and Webern introduced considerable innovations into the Schoenbergian practice. While Schoenberg studiously avoided triadic constructions, Alban Berg used the conjunct series of alternating minor and major triads capped by three whole tones as the principal subject of his last work, the Violin Concerto op. 36 (1936). Schoenberg practically excluded symmetric intervallic constructions and sequences, but Alban Berg inserted, in his opera Lulu, a dodecaphonic episode built on two mutually exclusive whole-tone scales. Anton von Webern dissected the twelve-tone series into autonomous sections of six, four, or three units in a group, and related them individually to one another by inversion, retrograde, and inverted retrograde. This fragmentation enabled him to make use of canonic imitation much more freely than would have been possible according to the strict Schoenbergian doctrine. The commonly used term for dodecaphonic music in German is Zwölftonmusik. In American usage it was translated literally as twelve-tone music, but English music theorists strenuously object to this terminology, pointing out that a tone is an acoustical phenomenon, that dodecaphony deals with the arrangement of written notes, and that it should be consequently called twelve-note music. In Italy the method became known as Dodecafonia or Musica dodecafonica. Incidentally, the term Dodecafonia was first used by the Italian music scholar Domenico Alaleona in his article “L’armonia modernissima,” published in Rivista Musicale in 1911, but it was applied there in the sense of total chromaticism as an extension of Wagnerian harmony. The proliferation of dodecaphony in Italy was as potent as it was unexpected, considering the differences between Germanic and Latin cultures, the one introspective and speculative, the other humanistic and practical. Luigi Dallapiccola was one of the earliest adepts,

118 • DONAUESCHINGEN FESTIVAL but he liberalized Schoenberg’s method and admitted tonal elements. In his opera II Prigioniero, written in 1944, he made use of four mutually exclusive triads. The greatest conquest of Schoenberg’s method was the totally unexpected conversion of IGOR STRAVINSKY, whose entire esthetic code had seemed to stand in opposition to any predetermined scheme of composition; yet he adopted it when he was already in his seventies. Many other composers of world renown turned to dodecaphonic devices as a thematic expedient, without full utilization of the four basic forms of the tonerow. Bela Bartok made use of a twelve-tone melody in his Second Violin Concerto op. 112 (1937–38), but he modified its structure by inner permutations within the second statement of the tone-row. Ernest Bloch, a composer for whom the constrictions of modern techniques had little attraction, made use of twelve-tone subjects in his Sinfonia Breve and in his last string quartets. English composers who have adopted the technique of twelve-tone composition with various degrees of consistency are Michael Tippett, Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Frankel, Humphrey Searle, and Richard Rodney Bennett. William Walton makes use of a twelve-tone subject in the fugal finale of his Second Symphony. Benjamin Britten joined the dodecaphonic community by way of tonality., when in his Eighth Symphony he adopted Schoenberg’s method in all its orthodoxy. Leonard Bernstein inserted a twelve-tone series in the score of his Age of Anxiety to express inner agitation and anguished expectancy of the music. Samuel Barber made an excursion into the dodecaphonic field in a movement of his Piano Sonata. Gian Carlo Menotti turned dodecaphony into parody in his opera The Last Savage to illustrate the decadence of modern civilization into which the hero was unexpectedly catapulted from his primitivistic habitat. —Nicolas Slonimsky

DONAUESCHINGEN FESTIVAL (1921; Donaueschinger Musiktag) It began in the wake of World War I as an annual summer festival of new music under the patronage of Prince Max Egon zu Fürstenberg. Early festivals featured auspiciously the first performances of Paul Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 1 (1922) and ANTON VON WEBERN’s Trakl songs, Op. 14 (1924). The festival moved in 1927 to Baden-Baden, where the premieres included Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny “Songspiel,” Paul Hindemith’s Hin und Zurück and Darius Milhaud’s L’enlèvement d’Europe (all in 1927) and the Hindemith-Weill collaboration of a piece about the

Charles Lindbergh flight. A 1930 festival in BERLIN terminated the first series. In 1950, some discriminating aficionados remembering the earlier festivals revived it as an October weekend sponsored by Sudwestfunk (Southwest German radio). Here it initially became the platform where new works by KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN in particular were introduced to his European colleagues. Appearance at Donaueschingen conferred publicity and some prestige, but no degrees, the clumsiness of its name notwithstanding. The biographical history of contemporary music is filled with stories of influential appearances by JOHN CAGE or MORTON FELDMAN, among others, at this festival, or of one composer first meeting another who subsequently became a close professional colleague. Perhaps because of other festivals created partly on its model, Donaueschingen had by the 21st century lost its earlier cachet.

DONEN, STANLEY (13 April 1924) A veteran Hollywood director, particularly renowned for his films including dance, Donen made at least one extraordinary short film, scarcely known, in which he shot with several cameras the pianist Micha Dichter (1945) playing the extremely frenetic and daunting third movement of Sergei Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata. Through juggling several images simultaneously and variously on a single screen, Donen realizes a visual density comparable to the musical density. I’ve seen this short dozens of times, which is not a measure I’ll honor any feature-length Hollywood film. One implicit theme of this short, titled simply Prokofieff Sonata No. 7, Op. 83 (1999), is that a Hollywood director can produce avantgarde film if he wants; a second theme, likewise general, is that nearly all the most innovative films to come out of Hollywood, even recently, are less than thirty minutes in length. To no surprise perhaps, this film is not mentioned in short Donen biographies, including Wikipedia’s the last time I looked. Oddly, I find no mention of Donen’s producing anything else comparable.

DORIA, CHARLES (18 April 1938) A poet and translator, initially trained in classical languages, Doria turned his deep knowledge of contemporary avant-garde poetry toward finding precursors in ancient writing, compiling anthologies by

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himself and in collaboration with others, as well as writing critical articles about previously unexamined classical examples. In The Game of Europe (1983), his own book-length poem, each section expires as it extrapolates a different writing convention, beginning with that of the novel, passing through Greek chorus, medieval sequence, ballad, literary epistle, newspaper article, and shaped poems/text-sound, concluding with riddles, graffiti, and broken texts from the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead, all of which indicates that the range of its allusion includes forms as well as content. (Another translator from the classical languages, likewise reflecting avant-garde intelligence, is Geoffrey Cook [1946]. Paul Schmidt (1932–99) had few peers as an excellent translator of innovative poetry by ARTHUR RIMBAUD and VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV, French avant-garde as well as Russian.) Otherwise, Doria’s Ars Nova (2019) is a rich masterpiece of visual literature over 1200 pages in length.

DORNER, ALEXANDER (19 November 1893–2 November 1957) The most imaginative art museum director of his time, he began in Hannover (in English, Hanover), a smaller German city halfway between Berlin and Köln, becoming in the mid-1920s curator and then director of its Landesmuseum. In collaboration with EL LISSITZKY, Dorner developed the Abstraktes Cabinett (Abstract Cabinet): a series of “atmosphere rooms,” where he, in Bruce Altschuler’s summary, “reinstalled the collection in galleries meant – through wall color and decorative appointments – to immerse the viewer in the spirit of each art historical period.” In the wake of Nazi rise, Dorner immigrated to the United States where he headed first from 1938 to 1941 the art museum at the Rhode Island School of Design where he established “five evolutionary atmosphere rooms that displayed works within the context of their time,” in Curt Germundson’s summary. “Dorner questioned static ideas of the museum by using transparencies, reproductions, and other educational elements, arguing for a dynamic and progressive experiential space.” Dismissed from RISD, purportedly as a Nazi sympathizer, he later taught contemporary art at Brown University and, after 1948, at Bennington College though, unfortunately, he never again directed a museum.

DOUBLE DUTCH See STEPPING.

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DOVE, ARTHUR (2 August 1880–23 November 1946) Dove gets the credit for being the first American artist to paint a work of nonrepresentational abstraction. He is perhaps the first artist in the world to do so. His five small, numbered Abstraction paintings (1910–11) are roughly contemporaneous with the earliest efforts at pure abstraction by WASSILY KANDINSKY, and may well have preceded them. Dove’s five paintings are compositions of oval, rectangular, and curving forms, rendered in earth tones and vibrant reds with short, hatching brush strokes. They vaguely resemble images of trees, hills, and buildings, but none of them can be fully resolved into a coherent landscape. Despite this moment of artistic prescience, most of the work that followed is remarkably unimpressive. Simplifications of natural scenery, such as mountains, streams, sunrises, and storms, they reduce landscape painting to crude arrangements of ovals, triangles, and rectangles that lack any formal ingenuity or visual resonance but are notable for appearing dull and inert. Dove is more successful when he attempts to render nonvisual sensations by visual means. In his Fog Horns (1929), the piercing blare of the horns appears to blast forward from the surface of the work. His granddaughter Toni Dove (1946) works prominently in interactive cinema. —Mark Daniel Cohen

“DOWNTOWN” (1970s) This epithet, based on NEW YORK CITY art geography, arose initially in talk about classical music to distinguish work produced below 14th Street from that more typical of “uptown,” which refers pointedly to culture produced on the Upper West Side between Lincoln Center in the south and Columbia University to the north. If uptown composers were affiliated with institutions such as universities, those working downtown were customarily independent. Audiences at uptown concerts tended to be older and better dressed than those downtown. If uptown composers tended to write serial music for their university colleagues to play, those residing downtown tended to modular or other kinds of alternative music for themselves and their similarly unaffiliated friends to play. The uptown composer MILTON BABBITT (who curiously lived most of his Manhattan life downtown, south of 23rd Street), told me in 1997 that “midtown composers” were the New Yorkers who, regardless of where they

120 • DOYLE, TOM actually lived, “get the token commissions from provincial orchestras.” The remark was fresh enough at the time for me to tell it to others. So applicable was this binary New York geographical distinction that it was extended to other cultural domains. Here the stylistic measure is difference, if not “deviance,” in form and/or content, particularly literature. Most of the art produced in SOHO couldn’t have been made, let alone exhibited, uptown. Similarly, it makes symbolic sense that the Fales Special Collections at New York University, once specializing in 19th-century British fiction, should concentrate on downtown New York writing, much as its music library collects downtown scores and recordings, as New York University is the only major Manhattan academic institution located south of Tenth Street. Refining this theme of geographical difference down to finer details, I once identified several strains within downtown Manhattan literature, distinguishing that produced in the West Village from East Village writing, which in turn differed from SoHo literature. Specifically, as the East Village literature extended developments in poetry, SoHo writing reflected advanced visual and musical arts. Its fairly broad strokes notwithstanding, downtown/uptown defines clear differences in New York City dance and even visual art. The point of the pioneering 1976 BERLIN exhibition, SoHo, was introducing Europe to artistic styles that then could not prosper above 14th Street. Geographical differences are probably applicable to arts in other cities as well, though their fault lines might be different (east vs. west, lakefront vs. interior, etc.).

DOYLE, TOM (23 May 1928) After practicing a style of floor-hugging, linoleum sculpture that seemed to wave across an exhibition space, Doyle turned to the creation of large wooden architectural structures that were concerned with carving out volumes of space. Assembled from members hewn out of logs of cherry and oak, his works brought the concept of the arch into modern art. Sinewy and highly organic in appearance due to Doyle’s retention of the natural forms of the wood, the delicately poised timbers seem to be arranged by expressive impulse, suggesting the influence of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. Yet, they display a subtle and ingenious use of geometry, indicating concerns that match those of CONSTRUCTIVISM. Although the majority of his arches stand on three points and appear to be designed

strictly out of triangles, looking at them from a variety of angles reveals an array of implied geometric forms: squares and rectangles that emerge from changing perspectives. —Mark Daniel Cohen

DREIER, KATHERINE S. (10 September 1877–29 March 1952) For generously supporting artists more visible than herself, she should be remembered as a major subterranean American exemplar. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Brooklyn Heights, she studied painting from her childhood and soon became, after receiving her inheritance in the 1890s, a generous patron of the arts, even marrying in 1911 a minor painter whom, she swiftly discovered, was already married to someone else. When the European DADA artists came to American during World War I, Dreier befriended MARCEL DUCHAMP, cofounding with him and MAN RAY, the Société Anonyme, Inc., which organized events and purchased new art, establishing the first major truly modernist art collection in America with over eight hundred works. Among the other artists favored were WASSILY KANDINSKY, JOSEPH STELLA, DAVID BURLIUK, and PATRICK HENRY BRUCE. Temporarily sympathetic to the Soviet Union, she supported the first exhibitions of post-World War I Russian avantgarde art in America. Of Dreier’s own painterly effort the best remembered is her remarkable Abstract Painting of Marcel Duchamp (1918), its superiority no doubt prompted by her subject, and her Explosion (1940–47). A formidable woman, customarily photographed as handsomely dressed in the fashions of her time, Dreier also published books: one about the American dancer Ted Shawn (1891–1972), Western Art and the New Era (1923), and Five Months in the Argentine from a Woman’s Point of View, 1918 to 1919 (1920). The best history about her collecting is The Société Anonyme (2006) that the Yale Art Gallery elegantly produced for an exhibition there. Shouldn’t Dreier be honored on a USPS postage stamp, say, because, if not for her unique efforts, the presence of avant-garde art in America would have been slighter.

DU PERRON, EDGAR (2 November 1899–14 May 1940; b. Charles E. du P.) Just as many major contributors to ENGLISH LITERATURE were born outside Britain proper, so did

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several major Dutch writers come from its colonies, usually Indonesia. Born in Batavia, with a patently French (Waloon) name, du Perron moved in 1921 with his family to Belgium, where he produced literary journalism and in 1932 cofounded a short-lived influential literary magazine with MENNO TER BRAAK. Andre Malraux’s famous La Condition Humaine (1933, Man’s Fate) is dedicated to du Perron. Before returning to his native Indonesia, he wrote his masterpiece, Het land van herkomst (1935, Country of Origin), a long autobiographical novel commonly regarded among the best ever in Dutch. Back in Holland on 14 May 1940, the day Holland fell to the Nazis, du Perron died young of a heart attack. Another important Indonesian-Dutch author is Marion Bloem (1952), who also makes films and exhibits paintings, often about her Eurasian culture.

DUBUFFET, JEAN (31 July 1901–12 May 1985) The son of a wealthy wine merchant, Dubuffet had little serious artistic training and spent little of his early life painting before beginning a life in Paris as a rich dilettante. After World War II, he took up painting again, developing a technique in which he loaded the canvas with a heavy paste made of plaster, putty, asphalt, concrete, and glue, and in which he embedded pebbles, broken glass, and various kinds of rubbish. Onto this dense paste, he scrawled and scratched crude renderings of figures reminiscent of the drawings of children and, to some extent, the childlike drawings of Paul Klee. He also championed the artworks of the insane, the untutored, and children, which he viewed as directly and intimately expressive and unencumbered by the stultifying (in his view) traditions of art history. He collected and exhibited the artworks of the mentally handicapped and gave them the title “Art Brut.” His own work did not advance. Although he briefly turned to sculpture in the 1950s, he showed little ability for it, and he lacked the training and wherewithal to develop artistically in any way. Critics and art historians have disagreed sharply over the worth of his work. Some find it valueless. Others see Dubuffet as a pioneer of anti-art and of the movement away from the use of traditional materials. Certainly, it can be said that his work provided hope and an unfortunate impetus to many artists in the late 20th century who possessed insufficient talent to have flourished at any other time. —Mark Daniel Cohen

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DUCHAMP, MARCEL (28 July 1887–2 October 1968) The grandson of a painter, this Duchamp had three siblings who were also visual artists; but unlike them, he turned his ironic skepticism about art into a most extraordinary career built on the smallest amount of work. Indeed, it was his unique and improbable talent to endow, or get others to endow, even his inactivity with esthetic weight. Ostensibly, he went to Paris at sixteen to study art. From 1905 to 1910 he contributed cartoons to French papers. Early paintings, from 1910 to 1911, depict members of his family. His next paintings reflect an interest in movement, presaging the themes of ITALIAN FUTURIST work; the epitome is the multiframe NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE NO. 2 (1912), which became the single most notorious work at the ARMORY SHOW in NEW YORK CITY. Abandoning painting for three-dimensional art, Duchamp then offered such common objects as a Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Bottle Rack (1914) as “readymades.” Moving to New York in 1915, he spent several years working on Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), which is often regarded as his single most monumental piece. Built from lead wire and tinfoil affixed to a sheet of glass, it is nearly 9 feet high and 6 feet wide. Exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, it was later found shattered and then restored in 1936 with repaired glass for permanent installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Facsimiles were made for Duchamp exhibitions in London in 1966 and in Venice in 1993.) Meanwhile, Duchamp became the modern master of the provocative and resonant esthetic GESTURE. With courage based upon self-confidence, he submitted a urinal titled Fountain to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, which he had cofounded and whose vice president he was. When the exhibition organizers refused to accept it, he resigned. (The implication, subsequently developed by others, was that esthetic value could be bestowed upon commonly available objects.) Similarly, to a DADA exhibition in Paris in 1920 Duchamp submitted a full-color reproduction of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa to which he had added a beard and mustache; its official title was L. H. O. O. Q. (Elle a chaud au cui), whose French is loosely translated as she has a hot arse. Whereas successful visual artists are encouraged to repeat themselves by their dealers and collectors, Duchamp alternatively established the avoidance of repetition as a laudatory professional principle. Implicitly he became a crucial contrast to PICASSO, if not his de facto professional conscience. By the mid-1920s,

122 • DUCHAMP LITERATURE Duchamp had publicly abandoned painting in favor first of chess, his principal pastime, and then certain experiments in kineticism: Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) (1925), film collaborations with MAN RAY, and Rotoreliefs (c. 1935), or disks with regular lines that create three-dimensional illusions when rotated like a phonograph record. Returning to New York in 1942, Duchamp became a presence, even in his inactivity, especially at exhibitions including his early work. He worked on the contents of his Boîte-en-Valise/Box in a Valise, which he designed in the 1930s and began selling in the 1940s as a kind of autobiographical container with miniatures of his most important works, even adding Paysage Fautif (1946, Wayward Landscape) which appears to contain semen, probably his own, as a representation of frustrated love at age 59. Yet so controversial was his art, and so generally unacceptable to the reigning gate-keepers, that not until 1963, past his own seventy-fifth year, did Duchamp have an institutional retrospective, which was not in New York or Paris, but in Pasadena, California. After Duchamp died, even his aficionados were surprised to find in his studio a tableau, Ètant données, on which he had secretly worked for many years. The viewer must peer through a crack in a door to see a diorama of a nude woman with her legs apart (which must be seen firsthand at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, because photographs of it, once forbidden, are necessarily limited).

DUCHAMP LITERATURE (1913–) Perhaps because Duchamp’s works are so few in number and so initially daunting, they have generated an incomparable mound of literature. In the works of no other modern artist can sophisticated commentators find such a variety, if not a wealth, of allegedly deep meanings. (By this measure, Duchamp resembles LEONARDO DA VINCI of all artists and JAMES JOYCE among his contemporaries.) With characteristic cunning, Duchamp himself accredited the Duchamp critical industry with a passing remark made in a lecture delivered in 1957 to the American Federation of the Arts in Houston, Texas: “The spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative art.” Because new critical claims are still being made, it is appropriate to provide admittedly incomplete guidance to some Duchamp literature:

The subtitle of Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (1973, 1989), edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, suggests a completeness that is not entirely true. Affectionately, Marcel (2000) is “The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp.” Aside of what these Duchamp texts say and don’t say about his art, they are remarkable as literature. In the judgement of the British historian of modernist art Dawn Ades (1943), “Duchamp’s numerous notes, many unpublished in his lifetime, are among the richest and least classifiable of any artist’s writings. Many are highly speculative, concerning linguistic, scientific and mathematical ideas.” The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1960) is Richard Hamilton’s “typographical version” of Duchamp’s notes and sketches about his masterpiece. Ecke Bonk’s Marcel Duchamp: Box in a Valise (1989) itemizes the artist’s boxed (and thus highly alternative) visual/verbal artistic autobiography. Pierre Cabanne’s Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1971, 1988) transcribes conversations held in French just before Duchamp’s death. Here can be found this crucial critical distinction: “Since Courbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the senses. That was everyone’s error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical moral.” This book includes one of those stupendous (pre-Internet) bibliographies for which the Museum of Modern Art’s librarian at the time, Bernard Karpel (1911–86), was justly famous, here itemizing published texts, interview transcripts, and secondary literature to 1970. Duchamp’s remark valorizing the Duchamp critical industry appears in “The Creative Act” in Gregory Battcock’s anthology The New Art (1966), among other places. Robert Lebel’s Marcel Duchamp (1959) is a substantial introduction, including an early catalog raisonné and a French-centered bibliography. The paperback edition owned by me (n.d. [1967]) omits the color plates but updates the documentation to 1967. Calvin Tomkins’s The World of Marcel Duchamp (1966) is a well-illustrated introduction. So is Janis Mink’s slighter Marcel Duchamp: Art as Anti-Art (2000). Shorter on illustrations but longer on text, Marcel Duchamp (2003) by Dawn Ades + two colleagues benefits from a similar introductory purpose. Three decades after his introduction, Tomkins published Duchamp: A Biography (1997). Its principal competitor, from a smaller press (and

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thus as disadvantaged in the marketplace, as was Duchamp for most of his life), is Alice Goldfarb Marquis’s Marcel Duchamp: A Biography (2002), which succeeded her Marcel Duchamp: Eros, C’est la Vie (1981), apparently her doctoral thesis. Sarane Alexandrian’s Marcel Duchamp (1977) focuses upon his earliest art. Arturo Schwarz’s The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (1969, 1970, 2001) includes a critical catalog raisonné and an exhaustive descriptive bibliography. Incredible though it seems with an artist prominent so long and since long dead, a third, expanded edition of this book attributes 253 additional works to Duchamp who with ironic modestly produced his momentous art casually. The Mexican Nobelist Octavio Paz’s Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of Purity (1970) is an unpaginated chapbook written while its author was a diplomat in India. Paz also contributed one of the strongest essays to the catalog Duchamp edited by Anne d’Harnoncourt (1943–2008) and Kynaston McShine (1935–2017) in 1973 (reprinted 1989), along with LUCY R. LIPPARD, RICHARD HAMILTON, and Bernard Karpel, with a fuller bibliography. Paz returned to Duchamp yet again in a monograph subtitled “Appearance Stripped Bare.” Why Duchamp: An Essay on Aesthetic Impact (1985) is a short sophisticated introduction by the Italian artist Gianfranco Baruchello, thereafter put into English by Henry Martin (1942), himself an American critic-translator long resident in northern Italy. Shigeko Kubota’s Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (n.d.) includes thirty-six photos of the two subjects playing chess on an amplified board, taken only a few months before Duchamp’s death. It comes in a sleeve, accompanied by a small, plastic, long-playing recordlette. Valuable provocative reinterpretations of Duchamp appear in both American Salons (1993) by Robert Crunden (1940–99), the most accomplished intellectual historian of his American generation, and Heresies (2016) by Peter Lamborn Wilson (1945), the most original anarchist thinker of his generation. New York Dada, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli (1986), contains Craig Adcock’s “Marcel Duchamp’s Approach to New York: ‘Find an Inscription for the Woolworth Building as a ReadyMade.’” Adcock’s own book about Duchamp’s use of geometry is Marcel Duchamp’s Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis (1983). Professor Kuenzli collaborated with the gallerist Francis M. Naumann in editing Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century (1990), which contains an introduction to William A. Camfield’s spectacularly elaborate essay on “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain” (aka the infamous urinal), which, as he points out, survived

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only in a photograph that was ignored until the CONCEPTUAL assumptions of the work became relevant to esthetic issues established in the 1960s. The book concludes with a yet fuller “Selective Bibliography.” The full Camfield essay appeared as Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1989). Naumann himself curated the exhibition Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York, featuring Duchamp, in addition to editing with Beth Venn the Whitney Museum’s catalog for that exhibition (1996). Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker’s Duchamp Readymades (1978) is another exhibition catalog. Jennifer Gough-Cooper & Jacques Caumont’s Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life (1993) is a two-front publication, reading from one cover (Work) as a catalog of the exhibition held at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, and from the other (Life) as a day-by-day chronology of the artist’s life with over 3,600 items arranged by astrological signs. This tandem also produced “A Life in Pictures” in small format biography for sophisticated younger people. The originality of the catalog Inventing Marcel Duchamp (2009) comes from the close reading solely of images of him, mostly photographs, made by others. Joseph Maschek’s Marcel Duchamp in Perspective (1975) reprints some criticism unavailable elsewhere, including an interview with John Cage about Duchamp. Theirry de Duve’s anthology The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (1991) prints the proceedings of a 1987 Duchamp conference celebrating the centennial of his birth. Duchamp’s work also inspired several volumes of a thick, handsomely produced periodical Étant Donné (1999–2011) published in English and French in Paris. The Philadelphia Museum celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the installation of Duchamp’s valedictory with a spectacular catalog (2009) by Michael R. Taylor, who also introduced the Museum’s republication (also 2009) of Duchamp’s detailed instructions for the work’s installation. This museum displayed its rich lode again only a few years later with Dancing Around the Bride (2013), a remarkably rich catalog documenting Duchamp’s influence on John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. Since Duchamp’s subtle humor is easily missed, I suspect there exists a whole book about him that is as monumentally inept as, say, Anthony Tommasini’s Virgil Thomson, one colleague citing Wayne Anderson’s (in English) and perhaps Maurizio Calvesi’s (in Italian). “There are books,” he wrote me, “that one only opens and closes.” Other Duchamp scholarship includes, in chronological order (by date of publication): De Duve, Thiery. Nominalisme Pictural. Paris: Minuit, 1984.

124 • DUCHAMP, SUZANNE, RAYMOND (-VILLON), JACQUES VILLON Hulten, Pontus, ed. Marcel Duchamp: Work & Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1993. Hill, Anthony, ed. Duchamp: Passim. London: Gordon & Breach, 1994. Seigel, Jerrold. The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture. Berkeley: University of California, 1995. Nixon, Mignon, & Martha Buskirk, eds. The Duchamp Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1996. Joselit, Dave. Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910– 1941. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998. Naumann, Francis M., & Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. New York: Abrams, 1999. Tashjian, Dickran. A Boatload of Madmen. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Kachur, Lewis. Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003. Moffitt, John F. Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp. Albany, NY: SUNY, 2003. De Duve, Thierry, Dana Polan, & John Rajchman. Pictorial Nominalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2005. Parkinson, Gavin. The Duchamp Book: Tate Essential Artists Series. London, England: Tate, 2008. Naumann, Francis M. Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess. New York: Readymade, 2009. Haladyn, Julian Jason. Marcel Duchamp: Étant Donnés. London, England: Afterall, 2010. Judovitz, Dalia. Drawing on Art: Duchamp & Company. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2010. Witham, Larry. Picasso and the Chess Player: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and the Battle for the Soul of Modern Art. Hanover, NH: University of New England, 2013. Tancock, John. Duchamp and/or/in China. Beijing: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art/Hinabook/ World Publishing Company, 2014. Banz, Stefan. Marcel Duchamp: Pharmacie. Nürnberg, Germany: Kunsthalle, 2014. Molderings, Herbert, & Frederick Kiesler. Marcel Duchamp at the Age of 85: An Icon of Conceptual Photography. Köln, Germany: Walther König, 2014. Filopovic, Elena. The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2016. Ades, Dawn, & Montse Aguer. Dali/Duchamp. London, England: Royal Academy of Arts, 2017. Whew. As so much of Duchamp’s work continues to resist definitive interpretation, the container receptive to literature about Marcel Duchamp is scarcely full.

DUCHAMP, SUZANNE, RAYMOND (-VILLON), JACQUES VILLON (respectively, 20 October 1889–11 September 1963; 5 November 1876–9 October 1918, b. Pierre-MauriceRaymond D.; 31 July 1875–9 June 1963, b. Emile Méry Frédéric Gaston Duchamp) As the closest semblance of the musical Bachs in modern art, no other family included as many members contributing significantly. Aside from MARCEL, the youngest son and most prominent, his older brother Raymond produced CUBIST sculpture, reworking familiar objects into abstract shapes, most notably in Horse (1914), before his early death in World War I. Their sister Suzanne made DADA paintings before marrying JEAN CROTTI, himself a distinguished painter. Jacques the oldest redid his surname in tribute to the medieval French poet François Villon. Though Jacques’s visual art was generally more modest, his masterpiece is the abstract stained glass windows that he produced in 1967 for the magnificent Saint-Stephen Cathedral in Metz, France. (Within the same building are other windows, less distinguished, by MARC CHAGALL.) As a group initially more prominent than Marcel alone, at least until the 1960s, New York’s Guggenheim Museum exhibited them collectively in 1957. In 1967, the last surviving sibling, Marcel, curated a traveling exhibition of all four for a tour of French museums. The closest American analog would be the Stettheimer Sisters: Florine (1871–1944), a painter prominent in her time for glittering surfaces, though she rarely exhibited her work; Ettie (1875–1955), a writer; and Carrie (1869–1944), the hostess whose single major artwork was a richly detailed dollhouse 4 feet by 3 feet that is still treasured. Unlike the Duchamp siblings, the Stettheimers lived together (in midtown Manhattan) for most of their lives.

DUFRÊNE, FRANÇOIS (2 September 1930–12 December 1982) Initially an associate of LETTRISM, he developed in the 1950s “crirythmes,” as he called them. Though these word-based wails initially reflect ANTONIN ARTAUD, their style acoustically resembles the 1960s EXPRESSIONIST jazz of ORNETTE COLEMAN and ALBERT AYLER. The crirythmes were quite spectacular, whether performed live (say, at sound poetry festivals) or on a record. Given his immense skills as a stand-up performer, Dufrêne could hold an audience while reading from a telephone directory.

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At times he overdubbed his voice, creating a level of declamatory intensity that, even after his premature death, remains unsurpassed. Dufrêne also published Lettristic CONCRETE POETRY and poster poems.

DUGUAY, RAÔUL (13 February 1939) Since the middle 1960s, no other French-Canadian poet has so completely reflected international avant-garde activities. As the Canadian professor Caroline Bayard (1947–2014) summarizes his “writing techniques”: The first is the breaking down of sentences and words into atomized units. The second is his use of simultaneity – words or phonemes being projected at the same time, by different voices, from different places. The third is the search for a notation system, a score – words being placed on bars with annotations which indicate measure, tonality, and length. In effect, the poem becomes a musical score, the notes being either words or phonemes. The fourth is the need for a visual presentation, one which, however, has little to do with visual concrete principles. Most of his poems present a typography similar to that of old illuminated texts. Graphic designs form the background, words the foreground. Bayard continues, “On the whole, Duguay’s contribution to international concrete theory is his exploration in the areas of sound, phonetics, and phonology.”

DUNCAN, ISADORA (27 May 1877–14 September 1927) The legend of Isadora Duncan was based upon her flamboyant lifestyle, memorialized first in her autobiography and later in a pop movie. Her initial achievement came from her artistic evocation of a “natural” style of dance performance that contradicted the ballet conventions of her time. Though Duncan had in fact received some ballet training and performed on vaudeville stages, she questioned the validity of established modes of dance movement, seeking her inspiration instead in her perceptions of nature (for example, the motions of the sea) and antiquity (Greek art and architecture). She believed all movement originates from the solar plexus and acknowledges the force of gravity (in this last respect, in particular, differing from ballet that transcends the floor).

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Her dance vocabulary included loose, graceful, flowing gestures and childlike runs, skips, and leaps, in addition to tension and relaxation, flexing and extending, and rotation with the transfer of weight. As an expressive dancer, who thought movement alone could articulate emotion, Duncan touched people through the palpable passion of her performances. She cherished great music and chose to perform to classical masterpieces (at a time when some ballet dancers were frequently performing to mediocre scores). Duncan was personally associated with some of the great artists of her time, including the innovative stage designer EDWARD GORDON CRAIG (by whom she bore a child) and the Russian poet Sergei Esenin (1895– 1925, whom she married). Although born in Oakland, California, Duncan spent most of her adult life in Europe, where she died in an unfortunate automobile accident. Before her death, she unofficially adopted younger women to do her choreography. Six became the Isadorables (1905–20). One of them, Irma Erich-Grimme (1897–1977), took the name of Irma Duncan who, once in New York in the early 1930s, assembled a large company of dancers that included my mother Ethel Cory K. (1911–2002). —with Katy Matheson

DUNCAN, ROBERT (7 January 1919–3 February 1988) Although his deservedly high reputation as a poet depends almost entirely on norm-clinging collections like his Roots and Branches, Duncan flirted with innovation throughout his career. His early repertoire included Steinianly repetitive automatic writing, Surrealism, DADA, Cummingsesque visual-poetic techniques, and his friend CHARLES OLSON’s composition; and in Letters (1953–56) he anticipated language-centered poetry with such passages as “He was one like him that in grown out cast over bearing under done far-fetched near by all most quite all ways never with out full filld part time close spaced semiliterate multi-phase of a face of him her.” In the same collection he broke the phrase “old grey matter” infra-verbally into “old greym attar” – grimness plus fragrance. Remember that it was Duncan, no one else, who made the famous selection of ARAM SAROYAN’s splendid pwoermd (i.e., one-word poem), “lighght,” a decade later for the NEA grant that RETROGRADE imbeciles in Congress (and elsewhere) have forever cited as an example of esthetic insanity. —with Bob Grumman

126 • DYMSHITS-TOLSTOYA, SOF’YA DYMSHITS-TOLSTOYA, SOF’YA (23 April 1889–30 August 1963) According to professor John Bowlt (1943), the pioneering scholar of Russian futurist art, DymshitsTolstoya made several painted glass reliefs exhibited in Tatlin’s Moscow exhibition The Store in 1916. “It was within this enterprise [of reliefs] that many of the avant-garde came together, particularly those working in three dimensions: Bromirsky, Bruni, DymshitsTolstoya, Rodchenko, Tatlin, et al.” The populous traveling exhibition, The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932 (1992–93), included a small work of hers (“c. 1920”) from the period featuring abstract shapes painted on two pieces of thick glass, securely framed. Partnered first with the novelist Aleskei Tolstoy (1883–1945) from 1907 to 1914 and then with VLADIMIR TATLIN from 1914 to 1921, both in Paris, she returned to Russia after the Revolution, becoming active in Soviet cultural

activities. In 1919 she reportedly organized the Moscow fireworks display for the second anniversary of the October Revolution. In a familiar photograph of Tatlin working on his projected Monument to the Third Communist International, she is the woman on the far left. The Great Utopia also included Compass (1920), which Jane A. Sharp regards as “undoubtedly her best work on canvas [where] string is woven into an abstract surface, the curvilinear forms of which only barely suggest the implement [the compass] that is the work’s subject.” Later Dymshits-Tolstoya retired from administrative work and produced Soviet-style graphics celebrating women in agriculture and heavy industry. Her name is so unfamiliar, even to those who should know it, that in an unfortunate caption on the wall of a 1991 KAZIMIR MALEVICH exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum she was cited as “Symshits-Tolstoya.” Late in 1976 I inadvertently discovered that she was my paternal grandmother’s sister, her fame unbeknownst to my (her) relatives in the US.

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E-ZINE (1990s) One of the hallmarks of the MICROPRESS in the 1990s has been its insistent movement away from the paper copy culture and into cyberspace. From the mid-1990s on, there has been a definite and inexorable migration of the avant-garde press from the difficulties and anonymity of the paper press to the moderate ease and the possibly greater exposure offered by the INTERNET. This change has occurred, of course, concurrent with a similar change in American culture away from printed matter towards the liquid paper screen of the computer. At the beginning of this transition, the term “e-zine” was born, meaning a zine presented over the Internet. Sometimes these zines were distributed via e-mail, but most frequently they were loaded onto the World Wide Web for viewing by the entire world. Such e-zines still flourish, but the term has been appropriated by the Internet community at large, and the term now refers merely to any electronic periodical, most of which are commercial in nature. —Geof Huth

EAMES, CHARLES AND RAY (17 June 1907–21 August 1978; 15 December 1912–21 August 1988, b. Bernice Alexandra Kaiser) In addition to being prominent industrial designers, very much for hire, the Eameses, husband and wife working with equal credit long before such acknowledgment became more frequent in art, produced for their clients several remarkable innovative films. These were composed initially not from footage but photographic stills and then made mostly not in Hollywood studios near their Southern California home but in their own workshop. Glimpses of USA (1959)

consisted of seven films, composed from still photos projected simultaneously on seven screens that were 20 by 30 feet in size. Glimpses was shown continuously for twelve-minute stretches at the Moscow World’s Fair. For Kaleidoscope Shop (1959) they filmed their own creations through lenses that increasingly abstracted them. House of Science (1962) was a six-screen film, fifteen and one-half minutes long, created for the Seattle World’s Fair. Think (1964–65), made for the New York World’s Fair, featured twenty-two screens of various shapes. A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (1968) became the preliminary version of their indubitable masterpiece Powers of Ten (1977), both of which deal concretely with questions of scale. (A later videotape produced by Charles Eames’s grandson, Eames Demetrios, reverses the sequence of the films.) Though these two shorts were made for instructional purposes (with funding from the IBM corporation, no less), the concept of enlargements (and then contractions) of a human body on a beach by powers of ten at a quick and regular speed is so original and brilliant that purposeful pedagogy attains genuine esthetic quality. After pulling back continuously from the hand of a sleeping man into the galaxies (10 to the 24th power), in every ten seconds moving ten times the distance traveled in the previous ten seconds, the camera returns at a yet faster pace, entering the man’s skin, reaching finally the structure of the atom (10 to the minus-13th power), in sum traversing the universe and the microcosm, all in less than eight minutes. On the left side of the screen in the earlier film are three chronometers measuring distance and time. This sort of conceptual tripping makes even KUBRICK’s 2001, say, seem elementary at broaching scientific exposition. The French arts historian Frank Popper credits Charles Eames alone with constructing a Do-Nothing Machine (1955) powered solely by solar energy, while several histories of contemporary architecture

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128 • EARTH ART acknowledge the originality of residential studio house that the Eames built for themselves in Santa Monica, California. At the design of large instructional exhibitions, initially of their own works and later on such grand themes as mathematics or “The World of Franklin and Jefferson” (1975), they also excelled, though all but one of these, much like theatrical performances (which they essentially were), survive only with descriptions and photographic documentation. (The exception is Mathematica [1961] long on permanent display in the Museum of Science in Boston, MA.) Working not just differently but profoundly differently, the Eames are also credited with the inventive design of chairs and the discovery of alternative materials, particularly molded plywood, for their manufacture. Awarding recognition more typical of smaller countries with greater cultural sophistication, the USPS (government postal service) in 2008 memorialized some of their designs on postage stamps.

EARTH ART (1960s, aka “earthworks” and “land art”) Perhaps as a reaction to the visual tedium and the sleek, boxy technological polish of Minimalist sculpture, or perhaps in an effort to break out of the commercial system that treated works of art as commodities, a number of artists in the late 1960s began executing enormous projects that altered the land in areas remote from civilization. Earth Art works existed primarily in situ and involved large excavations, the transferral of earth and stone to new sites in artificial configurations, and the burial of objects. These works became publicly known through exhibiting of photographic records of the projects, which often did not long survive their completion. Earth Art made its first appearance in an exhibition in 1968 at the Dwan Gallery in New York City with SOL LEWITT’s Box in a Hole (1968), in which a steel cube was, presumably, buried in the ground in the Netherlands, and WALTER DE MARIA’s Mile Long Drawing (1968), in which two parallel white lines were drawn in the desert in Nevada. Other artists involved in Earth Art were ROBERT SMITHSON, ROBERT MORRIS, MICHAEL HEIZER, RICHARD LONG, and RICHARD SERRA. Regardless of the initiating motivation, Earth Art certainly was an expression of the typical Romantic impulse to combine art and nature, and the congenitally American urge to return to the wilderness. However, Earth Art projects lacked any HuckleberryFinn deliberate naivete. They often were guided by complex, attenuated, and elusive intellectual programs,

so elusive that this form of art did not continue for long after the early death of Smithson in 1973. By the end of the 1970s, Earth Art was going out of fashion, and later artists who followed the inspiration to fuse together art and nature, like David Nash, returned to the creation and exhibition of object-based art. If there is one work by which Earth Art is primarily remembered through its photographic records, it is Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), which was a piled-up runway of basalt rock and dirt that corkscrewed its way along the surface of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. —Mark Daniel Cohen

EASTMAN, GEORGE (12 July 1854–14 March 1932) As the inventor of photographic film that could be put on a spool and rolled through a camera, he changed not only the production of visual art but everyone’s perceptual and cultural experience. Forming the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in 1884, Eastman patented film that depended upon a paper roll. In 1889, he replaced the paper roll with celluloid and, in 1924, improved his invention further with cellulose acetate. Once a camera could roll film, professional photographers could take numerous shots in quick succession, while the avoidance of cumbersome procedures encouraged amateurs to take a lot more pictures, incidentally enriching his company. Eastman’s invention enabled THOMAS EDISON to develop a camera for moving film. No dope, Eastman gave away more than $75 million to various scientific, educational, and cultural organizations, including the Rochester-based School of Music that still bears his name. The other great inventor in photography was Edwin H. Land (1909–91), who invented after World War II rolled film that could be developed, so to speak, within the camera, producing a positive print within a short time, thus enabling the photographer to decide swiftly if he or she wanted to take another shot. The last development became the precursor of digital photography, which enables to photographer to view his picture immediately after shooting it (wholly without celluloid film that became technologically obsolete).

ECO, UMBERTO (5 January 1932–19 February 2016) A protean Italian, he wrote many books, some better than others; some deliciously more remunerative than

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others; some more relevant to the new avant-gardes than others. In the last respect, the key texts appear in Opera Aperta (1962; The Open Work, 1989). Apparently echoing Joseph Frank’s notions of SPATIAL FORM, Eco regarded certain avant-garde art as formally open, rather than closed, to be best “understood as dynamic and psychologically engaged fields.” This insight defines texts so disjunctive that a prerequisite for understanding is the reader’s mentally reassembling. Relevant though this thesis is for some radical works, it’s not generally true. Additionally, his favorite example of a JACKSON POLLOCK painting seems less formally open in the 21st century than realizing its own form. In his later critical writings, Eco moved down through SEMIOTICS to other positions less substantial. At worst he was a windbag.

EDGERTON, HAROLD (6 February 1903–4 January 1990) Though by trade a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became one of photography’s greatest inventors. The development of the rapidly flashing STROBE LIGHT enabled Edgerton to freeze within a single photographic print a succession of moving postures – literally compressing MUYBRIDGE into a single image. A classic Edgerton photograph, Golf Drive by Denmore Shute (1938), artfully documents over four dozen different positions within a single golf swing. Other Edgerton photographs reveal details never seen before, such as the movements of a dancer or the flailing arms of a jazz drummer. These were pictures that no painter could make, unless, of course, he was duplicating the image of an Edgerton photograph. Nor could a filmmaker. In the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART’s 1939 retrospective, an exhibition and book both titled Art of Our Time, he was one of seven featured photographers. Edgerton also produced aerial reconnaissance photography during World War II in addition to artful photographs of the undersea and marine organisms, a bullet passing through an apple, and an atomic bomb exploding.

EDISON, THOMAS (11 February 1847–18 October 1931) If GEORGE EASTMAN belongs here, so does his near contemporary, Edison, an inventor who contributed not only to such pure technologies as the telephone, electric light, and the wireless telegraph, but

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to such artistic machines as the phonograph and the motion-picture projector. If not for Edison, modern life would have been different; likewise, modern art. Edison’s life resembles that of some avant-garde artists in that he was thought uneducable and taken out of school. At the age of twelve he took odd jobs, becoming, while a teenager, a telegraph operator whose deafness enabled him to concentrate on the telegraph’s clicks, much as some advanced artists learn to exploit personal incapacities to practical advantage (e.g., JOHN CAGE, GERTRUDE STEIN). Inventing the phonograph in 1877, Edison found it a dead end until he developed a wax-coated cylinder on which sounds could be encoded, and then a floating stylus for playing back the sounds, and finally an electroplated master recording from which copies could be pressed, completing the processes necessary for the dissemination of acoustic materials. Surrounding himself with teams of engineers and researchers, Edison founded the first industrial laboratory, incidentally establishing a corporate model that, in later hands such as BELL LABS, created other inventions with esthetic applications.

EIGHTH STREET CLUB (1949–62) Because emerging visual artists, in contrast, say, to composers and writers, learn so much from each other, they tend to meet physically, customarily in local cafés, but sometimes in informal settings, as happened in Manhattan in the late 1940s, regularly at 39 East Eighth Street, south of FOURTEENTH STREET in the eastern precincts of Greenwich Village. Open several nights a week, the premises particularly filled on Friday evenings, when a member, or sometimes a member’s guest, gave a presentation that generated later discussion. Here was the nucleus of the DOWNTOWN hothouse that spawned ARTISTS’ SOHO after 1965. It was here that the art critic HAROLD ROSENBERG developed his sense of “American Action Painters” and here as well where the composer JOHN CAGE delivered the lectures that made him a favorite of the visual artists. New noncommercial films were sometimes screened. I regret missing AD REINHARDT’s 1958 presentation of approximately two thousand slides that he’d made from a trip around the world a few years before. Ever personally challenging, he reportedly flashed them as rapidly as possible, refusing to accept interruptions, to the consternation of all who were nonetheless impressed to see that everywhere in the world that Reinhardt went he appreciated the geometric configurations more typical of his home

130 • EINSTEIN, CARL city. (Someday these images should appear as a book or a website.) This Club didn’t so much die as peter out. Later attempts to duplicate the level of cooperative enlightenment marking this gathering were never as successful, not even in DOWNTOWN Manhattan, where so many visual artists resided in the late 20th century. Similar artistic hothouses probably exist in other cities, less within a circumscribed space, as was this, than in patrons’ salons or in public venues; but few, if any, have been as consequential.

EINSTEIN, CARL (26 April 1885–5 July 1940) Trained in philosophical esthetics, Einstein published at the beginning of the 20th century a pioneering book on African sculpture that influenced both CUBISM and DADA. His novel Bebuquin (1912), subtitled “The Dilettantes of Miracles,” incorporated principles of pictorial cubism into prose narrative, broaching incoherence. “Too few people have the courage to talk complete nonsense,” he wrote. “Nonsense which is frequently repeated becomes an integrating force in our thought; at a certain level of intelligence we are not at all interested in what is correct or rational any more.” As Bebuquin became a milestone of advanced fiction, a limerick written about another German with the same surname is applicable to this writer as well: “Remarkable family Stein, there’s Ep and there’s Gert, and there’s Ein. Ep’s sculpture is junk, Gert’s poetry is bunk, and nobody understands Ein.” This (Carl) Einstein fought on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), after which he went to Paris. When it fell to the Nazis, he escaped to southern France; but, unable to emigrate to America because of his prior service against Franco, he committed suicide (as did his near contemporary and countryman in roughly the same place, WALTER BENJAMIN).

EISENSTEIN, SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH (23 January 1898–11 February 1948) His Battleship Potemkin (1925; aka, simply, Potemkin) was the first distinctly Soviet film to receive international acclaim. Exemplifying the power of montage, or the rapid cutting between scenes to portray conflict, this film showed how radically different the medium of film could be from the theatrical staging or from the filming of staged activities. His reputation established, Eisenstein became enough of a cultural celebrity for Soviet officials to worry about and thus to restrict his

subsequent activities. While the original negative of Battleship Potemkin was mutilated, his next film, October (1927), had to be reedited after Leon Trotsky’s demotion, reportedly under Joseph Stalin’s personal scrutiny. Invited to work in Hollywood in 1930, Eisenstein made several film proposals that were not accepted. With the help of the American writer Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), he began a feature film about Mexico that was not finished until decades after Eisenstein’s death, albeit in an incomplete form. Returning to the Soviet Union, Eisenstein was allowed to work on only a few of several possible projects, and then production was often halted before the films were complete. Before dying at 50, of a second heart attack, Eisenstein also wrote classic essays that have been read by everyone seriously interested in film. Decades after his death, gallerists discovered a rich collection of his remarkable drawings, many of which, as they portrayed erotic experience between men and animals, would have been suppressed by puritan Communism.

EISLER, HANNS (6 July 1898–6 September 1962) Generally ranked after Alban Berg and ANTON WEBERN among ARNOLD SCHOENBERG’s more distinguished early Viennese pupils, Eisler had a different sort of musical career. Reportedly influenced by his brother and sister, who were devout communists, he moved to BERLIN in 1925, joined the Communist party the following year, and wrote songs for party choirs and plays. By 1929, he was regularly collaborating with the communist playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). Leaving Germany in 1933, he moved first to Moscow, then to New York, where he taught at the New School from 1935 to 1942, and finally to Hollywood, where he became involved in composing for film, collaborating with Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), even coauthoring with THEODOR ADORNO a short book about film. (Meanwhile, some of Schoenberg’s Los Angeles pupils, such as Leonard Rosenman [1924–2008], were beginning to incorporate serial music into film scores, popularizing Schoenberg, so to speak, without ever making Schoenberg’s music itself more popular.) There, in the heart of capitalist culture, Eisler incidentally wrote the national anthem for East Germany – Aufstanden aus Ruinen. When their sister Ruth Fischer (1895–1961) testified against them before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Hanns and his brother Gerhart Eisler (1897–1968) both left for East Berlin, where Hanns resumed his collaboration

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with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, his music nonetheless reflecting his serial history. Because major modern composers were scarce in East Germany (and his brother headed the radio station), Hanns Eisler initially became more prominent there than he could have been in the West. However, by the mid-1950s, some DDR commissars severely criticized his work. After the death of Brecht, Eisler suffered a depression from which he never recovered. His misfortunes in the DDR are reviewed in a major documentary, Solidarity Song (1995), by the Canadian Niv Fichman (1958), who has become classical music’s greatest documentarian.

EL HANANI, JACOB (14 March 1947) Born Jewish in Casablanca, he immigrated to Israel as a child and then studied in Paris before coming to NEW YORK CITY, where he has lived since 1972, his art reflecting his final residence. Honoring the Jewish (as well as Moslem) proscription against graven images, as well as the traditions common to both cultures of microscopic writing, El Hanani has since the early 1970s made by his own hand drawings composed of tiny, delicate dots and lines. As ink on timeless paper, his drawings suggest both patterns and fields that appear visibly to recede and emerge, if not rhythmically undulate, in the tradition of OP ART. For Alphabet Grid (2002), El Hanani repeats the Hebrew alphabet from end to end in a tight grid. In Letters (2002), by contrast, Hebrew calligraphy is scattered across the page to evoke intrinsic optical rhythms. One constraint observed in his highly rigorous art is that only one kind of mark can be used in a single piece, which is to say that every mark must be similar in size.

EL TEATRO CAMPESINO (1965; Farmworkers’ Theater, aka ETC) Formed by Luis Valdez (1940), who had worked with the SAN FRANCISCO MIME TROUPE and retained the SFMT’s love of signs and songs, ETC recruited untrained, instinctive performers, initially to publicize a grape strike in California and, by extension, to organize Mexican-American itinerant farm laborers into the United Farm Workers union. Addressing Chicano audiences during the working summers, ETC presented short plays, called “actos,” in a mixture of Spanish and English, showing stereotypes of workers and bosses in the manner of commedia dell’arte. ETC staged such highly original theater that, thanks to prompt critical

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recognition, it toured American universities during the off-farm seasons. A skilled scenarist-director, Valdez subsequently produced the play Zoot Suit (1978), which transferred from Los Angeles to Broadway, in addition to feature-length films, such as La Bamba (1987), which was likewise about Chicano culture.

ELDRIDGE, AETHELRED (21 April 1930; b. James Edward Leonard E.) Working with both text and images, this eccentric American artist creates simplistic black and white images with near-biblical stylistic certitude. As an Associate Professor of art at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio from 1957 to 2014, Aethelred (a former University of Michigan footballer and a Navy officer/ pilot) self-published thousands of image/textual works with various technologies, including the hectograph, the mimeograph, and the photocopier. These selfdescribed “invective pamphlets” are both cryptically pedantic, and at times autobiographical, all within his own mythopoeia. Larger works include earlier paintings and an expansive mural-in-progress that adorns an archway of Siegfred Hall on the OU campus. The black and white mural has been repainted several times since it first appeared in 1966. Similar to the texts accompanying his images (e.g., “Were you there when your feet came out all fittingly abluted” – Golgonooza #20), his class lectures and student critiques were themselves works of art akin to a more rabid David Antin talk. Aethelred would weave playful, sometimes invective speech tapestries between hand-held images with outlandish word associations, electrically charged phonetics, and scrambled catchphrases that succeeded or failed his often-baffled listeners. He also founded The Church of William Blake on his property outside of Athens near the foot of Mt. Nebo, a spiritualist mecca since the 1830s (for the Shakers prior to the Shawnee, and much earlier, to the precontact Adena-Hopewell cultures of late BCE early CE). In the restored “Koons Cabin,” a one-room building with a spiritualist history dating back to the 1850s, Aethelred regularly hosted “happening-like” gatherings and ceremonies for nearly three decades until the cabin-turned-Blakean church, adorned with Aethelred’s art, was tragically burned down in the 1980s. —Michael Peters

ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC MUSIC See MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE.

132 • ELECTRONIC BOOKS ELECTRONIC BOOKS See HYPERTEXT.

ELECTRONIC MUSIC (c. 1910) Used accurately, Electronic Music describes not one new thing but several new developments; for music, of all the arts, has been the most constant beneficiary of recent technological developments. These inventions include not only new instruments but technically superior versions of older ones for both composers and performers, in addition to editing and structuring technologies far handier than their predecessors. Do not forget that modern technologies created new listening situations for music, beginning, of course, with the capacity to record musical sound to be played back at a later date (initially through a phonograph), and then with the capacity (initially provided by radio) to transmit in live time musical sound from one source to many outlets. Neither of those capabilities existed in the 19th century. The same American who co-invented night lights for outdoor sports arenas, Thaddeus Cahill (1867–1934), also built at the beginning of the 20th century the Telharmonium, a 200-ton machine that could synthesize musical sounds for distribution over telephone lines. The machine had to be big and loud, because Cahill did not know the later principle of acoustic amplification that became familiar. Nowadays, even a common home-audio system can radically transform an existing instrumental sound, not only making it louder but also accentuating its treble or bass, if not redefining its timbre and extending the duration of such enhanced sound to unlimited lengths. By the 1960s, microphone pickups were incorporated into a whole range of instruments – guitar, double bass, piano, saxophone, clarinet, flute – to give the natural sound of each more presence than it previously had. Whereas early electronic pop musicians performed with only single speakers, groups new to the 1960s used whole banks of huge speakers to escalate their sounds to unprecedentedly high volumes, thereby also creating such technical dysfunctions as distortion, hum, buzzing, and ear-piercing feedback. Among classical musicians, PHILIP GLASS and ANDRE KOSTELANETZ, among others, exploited the volume controls and mixing panel of a standard recording studio to radically modify the music made by live performers, so that what the audience heard – what became available on record – would be radically different from the sounds originally made.

The history of Electronic Music also includes wholly new instruments, beginning with the THEREMIN in the early 1920s. In 1928, the French inventor Maurice Martenot (1898–1980) introduced the Ondes Martenot (“Martenot’s Waves”), a keyboard that electronically produces one note at a time and can slide through its entire tonal range. In 1930 came Frederick Trautwein’s (1888–1956) Trautonium, another electronic one note generator that could be attached to a piano, requiring that the performer devote one hand to each instrument. Unlike the Ondes Martenot and the Theremin, which were designed to produce radically different sounds, the Hammond organ was invented in the 1930s to imitate electronically the familiar sounds of a pipe organ, but performers discovered the electronic organ had capabilities for sustained reverberation and tremolo that were unavailable to the traditional instrument. The original SYNTHESIZERS were essentially electronic organs designed to generate a greater range of more precisely specified (and often quite innovative) musical sounds. Synthesizers became something else when they could incorporate sounds made outside of the instrument and process them into unprecedented acoustic experiences. This tradition became the source in the 1970s for Live Electronic Music and, later, for SAMPLING. Another line of Electronic Music depended upon the development of magnetic audiotape that could be neatly edited and recomposed; audiotapes also became the preferred storage medium for electronic compositions. Sounds previously recorded in the environment could be enhanced by being played at a faster speed or a slower speed, or by being passed through filters that removed certain frequencies or added echo or reverberation. Extended echoing dependent upon tapedelay was also possible. Both Electro-Acoustic Music and MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE was based upon these techniques. The next step was to work entirely with electronically generated sounds, beginning with those from elementary sound generators, such as sawtooth, triangular, and variable rectangular waves. Among the best early endeavors in this vein was Bülent Arel’s Music for a Sacred Service (1961). One step after that involved mixing sounds that were originally live with artificial sources on a single fixed tape. Once stereophonic and then multitrack tape became available, sounds from separate sources, even recorded at separate times, could be mixed together. When played back, these acoustic compositions could be distributed to speakers that would surround the spectator with sound; materials in individual speakers could conduct pseudo-conversations with one another.

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Because wholly Electronic Music did not depend upon instruments, it eschewed conventional scoring. Indeed, if a piece were created entirely “by ear,” so to speak, there would be no score at all, initially creating a problem with the American copyright office, which would accept scores but not tapes as evidence of authorship. Partly to deal with this problem, tape composers developed all kinds of inventive timeline graphings in lieu of scores. A half-century ago, the composer VIRGIL THOMSON suggested, in the course of an article on JOHN CAGE, that any sound emerging from loudspeakers (and thus electronic at some point in its history) was fundamentally debased. Although his opinion was dismissed then and is perhaps forgotten now, can I be alone in having the experience, usually in a church, of hearing music that initially sounds funny? I know why, I must remind myself – no amplification. Since the arrival of Robert Moog’s SYNTHESIZER in the late 1960s and then the personal computer in the 1970s brought other kinds of Electronic Music, some of these are discussed separately in this book. By the 21st century, when nearly all music included electronics, this term as such became irrelevant.

ELIOT, T. S. (26 September 1888–4 January 1965; born Thomas Stearns E.) Where and when was Eliot avant-garde? Not in his pseudo-juvenile Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), or in the solemn footnotes at the end of The Waste Land (1922). One could make a case for Sweeney Agonistes (1932) as a CONCEPTUAL play, because it cannot be staged as is; but to my mind, Eliot’s greatest departure was publication, even in his initial Collected Poems (1930), of several works that are explicitly introduced as “Unfinished.” The heirs and editors of a dead poet might have inserted that qualifying term, but rarely has a living poet done it, especially in his or her early forties. The assumption is that even in an admittedly unfinished state a text such as “Coriolan” can be read on its own. His near contemporary, MARCEL DUCHAMP, around 1923 stopped work on his Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), declaring it “definitively unfinished,” although it was later counted among his principal achievements. On the critical level, this move represents a GESTURE available only to certain artistic leaders. Advocates of poems composed from words “found” in the works of others, rather than wholly created from

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within, have cited Eliot’s essay on Thomas Massinger for this rationale: Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. However, by no measure did T.S. Eliot himself produce FOUND POETRY. That visionary he wasn’t.

ÉLUARD, PAUL (14 December 1895–18 November 1952; b. EugèneEmile-Paul Grindel) Generally regarded as the second most important SURREALIST poet after ANDRÉ BRETON, whom he first met around 1920, Éluard was also a political activist who joined the Communist Party and kept reminding his literary colleagues of his radical politics. Nonetheless, his best poems portray heterosexual passion. In a translation by the American poet Michael Benedikt (1935–2007), “Ecstasy” opens: Before this feminine landscape I feel As if I were a child standing before a fireplace Full of delight with my eyes full of tears And closes: Before this feminine landscape I feel As if I were some green branch in a fire. In addition to publishing his own poems, many of which purportedly transcribed his dreams, Éluard collaborated with MAX ERNST on two pioneering visual-verbal books (1932) and with Breton in writing L’lmmaculèe conception (1930), which attempts to portray a variety of mental disturbances. The hundred and fifty castles where we were going to make love were not enough for me a hundred thousand more will be built for me tomorrow I have chased out from the boabab forests of your eyes the peacocks and panthers and lyre-birds I will shut them in my strongholds and we shall go walking together in the forests of Asia of Europe of Africa and America which

134 • EMOJIS surround our castles in the admirable forests of your eyes which are accustomed to my splendour. To some this is an authentic psychological representation; to others, it epitomizes studied affectation, either because of or despite the absence of internal punctuation. Éluard’s French reputation gained from more traditional poems collected into books published during World War II, as he, unlike Breton, chose to remain in Europe. He also collaborated with painters such as Max Ernst and PABLO PICASSO in producing not VISUAL POETRY but fields in which text and image complement each other. What should be made of the fact that his first wife Gaia went on to marry SALVADOR DALI and become the Svengali behind her new husband’s progressively more dubious career?

EMOJIS See TELEGRAPHIC WRITING.

EMSHWILLER, ED (16 February 1925–27 July 1990) Emshwiller began as an illustrator, particularly of science fiction, renowned especially for his book covers, before producing his first film, Dance Chromatic (1959), combining live action with animated abstract painting. In addition to working as an expert cameraman on numerous television documentaries and independent films, he produced Relativity (1966), which he called a “film poem.” While continuing to work with film, he pioneered video art, particularly in Scapemates (1972), which uses an animation technology partly of his own design and ranks among the earliest artistic videotapes that can still be screened without embarrassment. Independent for most of his professional life, Emshwiller became in 1979 a dean at CAL ARTS where he remained to his death. His wife, Carol E. (1921) has published several collections of scrupulously strange short fictions.

ENGLISH LITERATURE, POST-WORLD WAR II (1945–) Back in the spring of 1965, at the end of my year as a Fulbright scholar at King’s College, London, I proposed a renewal that aimed to discover what was

radically excellent in literature published initially in Britain after World War II. I noticed that most of it was produced by writers born outside of Britain. In mind were the familiar examples of GEORGE ORWELL (India) and Doris Lessing (Persia, 1919–2013), of course; but I’d already appreciated the novels of Wilson Harris (Guyana, 1921–2018); AMOS TUTUOLA’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), which was told in a “pidgin” English uniquely Nigerian, and the formally ingenious Morning at the Office (1951) by Edgar Mittelholzer (Guyana, 1909–65). The last was then, and probably still is, the most extraordinary novel isolating racial prejudice in a culture (Trinidad) where people have many hues. My assumption was that this foundation would lead me to discover additional appropriate texts. One wrinkle I needed to consider was whether writers such as SAMUEL BECKETT, DYLAN THOMAS, DOM SYLVESTER HOUÉDARD, STEFAN THEMERSON, IAN HAMILTON FINLAY, and Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915–74) were non-English by virtue of the fact that they hailed respectively from Ireland, Wales, Guernsey, Poland, Bahamas and Scotland, and New Zealand and Scotland. (The most prominent precursors with alien origins in Eng. Lit. were, of course, Joseph Conrad [1857–1924; b. Ukraine] and the American T. S. ELIOT.) Indicatively, most of the recent literary Nobelists residing mostly in England were born outside the British Isles: not only Lessing but V. S. Naipaul (in 2001), Mario Vargas Llosa (2010), and Kazuo Ishiguro (2017), their number perhaps reflecting a conscious bias among the Nobel electors. Though my renewal wasn’t funded (and I returned to New York), I learned later that my avant-garde thesis was not just true but subsequently influential, albeit in my absence and thus without any acknowledgment of me, alas.

ENO, BRIAN (15 May 1948; b. Brian Peter George E.) A prolific producer of recordings, though formally untrained in music, Eno adapted avant-garde ideas for more popular purposes; only some survive as consequential innovative art. As a sort of CULTURAL LEADER, he founded Obscure Records (1975–78), which offered only ten disks, including one JOHN CAGE, to a larger audience. Another Eno creation is “ambient music,” most famously Music for Airports (1978), which is designed to be heard continuously as background in public spaces, as a more modernist

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version of what was once called “elevator music” or, more simply, “Musak.” His biography suggests that Eno must have remarkable skills in working with so many other artists, especially musicians. The lost Eno classic is Portsmouth Sinfonia (1974), for which musically amateur art-school students were enlisted to perform such classical warhorses as The Blue Danube Waltz and the William Tell Overture. Less famous is his Oblique Strategies (1975, in collaboration with Peter Schmidt [1931–80]), which began as a box with a deck of small printed cards, each of which (reflecting perhaps John Cage’s influence) suggested challenging constraints to help artists, especially musicians, to move ahead. For examples: “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” “Try faking it.” “Work at a different speed.” “Are there sections? Consider transitions.” Much like other successful self-help books, Oblique Strategies has been translated into other languages and reprinted several times. What should be made of the fact that Eno’s surname is an anagram for ONE?

ENVIRONMENT (forever) This term describes an enclosed space that is artistically enhanced. The materials defining such space might be visual, sculptural, kinetic, or even acoustic or may contain combinations of all these elements, but the measure is that certain art gives that space a particular esthetic character it would not otherwise have. To put it differently, thanks to what the artist does, the interior space itself becomes an encompassing, surrounding work of art. Among the classic Environments are St. Peter’s Church in Rome and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. In more recent art, consider Stanley Landesman’s multiply mirrored room, WalkIn Infinity Chamber (1968), in which spectators inside the Environment see themselves infinitely reflected; the kinetic galleries mounted by the artists’ collective known only as USCO in the late 1960s; CLAES OLDENBURG’s The Store (1962), which was filled with ironic renditions of seedy objects; and JOHN CAGE’s HPSCHD, which filled a 15,000-seat basketball arena with sounds and images for several hours (but could have gone on forever). An Environment differs, on one hand, from a MIXED-MEANS theatrical piece that has a definite beginning and an end and, on the other, from an INSTALLATION, which describes art made for a particular site, theoretically to inhabit it forever or be destroyed when the exhibition is over.

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ERDMAN, JEAN (20 February 1916) As a member of MARTHA GRAHAM’s dance company in the early 1940s, Erdman collaborated with MERCE CUNNINGHAM, who also danced with Graham at the time. Later on her own, Erdman wrote, directed, and choreographed The Coach with the Six Insides (1962), which ranks among the most extraordinary theatrical productions seen in my lifetime. Initially an adaptation of JAMES JOYCE’s FINNEGANS WAKE, on which her husband, the writer/mythologist Joseph Campbell (1908–89), had incidentally coauthored the first critical book, The Coach faithfully portrays the technique of multiple reference that defines Joyce’s classic, even if a woman, Anna Livia Plurabelle, played by Erdman herself, replaces H. C. Earwicker at the center of Joyce’s five-person mythology. As the dance critic Don McDonagh (1932) remembers, At one moment she is the keening Irishwoman bemoaning the sorrows of her life and her race’s difficulties. At another moment she is Belinda the hen, who scratches and reveals a letter that no one can read, and she transforms herself into a dancing rain. The piece offered a flood of puns and striking turns of phrase that, in my experience even after several visits, were never entirely assimilated. It was magnificent; I’d see it again tomorrow.

ERNST, MAX (2 April 1891–1 April 1976; b. Maximilian E.) After six years studying philosophy, Ernst fought in World War I; soon after his demobilization, he became a leader of Cologne DADA, personally dubbed “Dadamax” by 1919. Quickly moving over to Parisian SURREALISM, Ernst is credited with having introduced the techniques of COLLAGE and PHOTOMONTAGE to Surrealist art. Surrealist collage differed from Dada in aiming not to juxtapose dissimilars but to weave from “found” pictures a coherent subconscious image. Ernst’s best collages draw upon banal engravings, some of which he incorporated into bookart narratives that I rank among his strongest works: La Femme 100 Têtes (1929) and Une semaine de bonté (1934). The latter, subtitled A Surrealist Novel in Collage, is actually a suite of separate stories that depend upon Ernst’s pasting additions onto existing illustrations. He also developed frottage, which comes from

136 • ESCHER, M. C. tracing patterns found in an object (e.g., the grain of a floorboard, the texture of sackcloth) as a technique for freeing the subconscious by relieving the author of direct control, becoming the visual analog for ANDRÉ BRETON’s automatic writing. More handsome than most, Ernst went during World War II to New York, where he married successively PEGGY GUGGENHEIM, a major patron of the avant-garde, and Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012), herself an important artist and writer; he remained in America until 1952. While in the United States, Ernst collaborated with Breton and MARCEL DUCHAMP on the periodical VVV (1942).

ESCHER, M. C. (17 June 1898–27 March 1972; b. Maurits Cornelis E.) The art cognoscenti can be divided almost evenly into those who appreciate Escher and those who think his visual art is slick kitsch. What is interesting about this particular dichotomy is that, unlike other opinionsplitters, this divisory test bears no ostensible relation to any other issue. After establishing a style of repeated symmetrical configurations of animals, Escher made profoundly ingenious geometrical illusions, such as a stairway that appears to be constantly ascending or a water sluice that is constantly descending, using images based on reason to portray what is, as a whole, not credible, which is to say that he made a rational art to portray irrationality. As these images became more familiar in the late 1960s, when they appeared on T-shirts, posters, and even coffee mugs, Escher’s work was dismissed as decorative – a kind of contemporary Dutch equivalent of Irish illuminated manuscripts (e.g., The Book of Kells [c. 8th to 9th century]). The simplest measure of Escher’s originality is the recognition of a visual style that is easily identifiable as his SIGNATURE.

ESSAYING (ALTERNATIVE) (1936) Considering other ways of documenting external realities, writers have turned away from linear prose in paragraphs to consider charts, often with lines documenting flow, as in Alfred Barr’s 1936 classic single-image history of modern art and GEORGE MACIUNAS’s more complicated and detailed visual histories of avantgarde art. JOHN CAGE’s nonsyntatic exploration of key words, especially in his Harvard Norton lectures I-VI (1990), likewise represent alternative exposition.

Perhaps the epitome of a more complicated polemical visual essays are AD REINHARDT’s “cartoons” of the ART WORLD in the 1950s. A selection of such printed alternatives appears in my anthology Essaying Essays (1975, 2013). Consider as well that documentary filmmakers and videographers are producing essays. So are photographers with many images about a single subject. Within a circular multiplex hologram titled On Holography (1975), I mounted five syntactically circular statements about holography: holos = complete; gram = message; representation in depth = hologram = the hologram creates a world of incorporeal activity that exists only within he illusion not only of depth but of equal focus to all distances are characteristics particular to holography which creates by capturing on photosensitive material the amplitude, the wave-length and, most important, the phases of light reflected off an object a hologram reconstructs a three-dimensional image As the clear cylinder containing them (and only them) turns, whenever the longest bottom statement appears once, the next appears twice, the third three times, and the top two in unison four times, making my hologram an essay about itself, “printed” in the form where it appears best.

ESTHETICS (forever) One obstacle that makes avant-garde art different from mainstream work is that the authors of the most persuasive general understandings, have not been university philosophers, who are certified professional estheticians, but practicing artists thinking philosophically. While an academic philosopher’s hypotheses might realize a certain intellectual weight based in part upon internal consistency and acknowledgment of other philosophers, they rarely offer as much useful intelligence about avant-garde art as certain writings by artists themselves. That became the theme of my anthology Esthetics Contemporary (1978), whose second revised volume appeared in 1989. Among the contributors to the first edition were ROBERT MORRIS, L. MOHOLYNAGY, MARCEL DUCHAMP, MICHAEL KIRBY, WALTER DE MARIA, ROBERT SMITHSON, and JAMES WINES. For the revised edition, I added

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BRIAN O’DOHERTY, JOHN CAGE, RICHARD FOREMAN, and AD REINAHRDT, among others. Curious I am to learn if someone, not I, could compose a comparable “esthetics” anthology mostly of artists’ philosophical writings in the 21st century.

EUROPERA (1987) For his first opera, JOHN CAGE, commissioned by the Frankfurt Oper, simply copied random pages from 19th-century European operas to produce, with the assistance of Andrew Culver (1953), an encompassing pastiche, literally a recycling, of sounds and costumes from the repertoire that is no longer protected by copyright. The title, itself a shrewd verbal invention, not only incorporates “Europe” and “opera,” but it also sounds like “your opera,” which is to say everyone’s opera. Though flutists, say, each received music previously composed for their instrument, each flutist was given different scores. Thus, motifs from various operas could be heard from the same instruments simultaneously. Noticing that operatic voices are customarily classified under nineteen categories (for sopranos alone, for instance, coloratura, lyric coloratura, lyric, lyric spinto, and dramatic), Cage requested nineteen singers, each of whom was allowed to select which public domain arias were appropriate for him or her; but only in the performance itself would each find out when, where, or if they could sing them. So several arias, each from a different opera, could be sung at once, to instrumental accompaniment(s) culled from yet other operas. The costumes were likewise drawn from disparate sources, and these clothes were assigned to individual singers without reference to what they would sing or do onstage. From a wealth of opera pictures, Cage selected various images that were then enlarged and painted, only in black and white, for the flats. These flats are mechanically brought onstage from left, right, or above with an arbitrariness reminiscent of the changing backdrops in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (1935). Once a flat or prop is no longer needed, it is simply laid to rest beside the performing area, visibly contributing to the chaotic mise en-scène. A computer program ensures that the lighting of the stage will be similarly haphazard. For the libretti offered to the audience, Cage simply extracted sentences from traditional operatic plot summaries, replacing specific names with pronouns like “he” and “she.” These sentences were scrambled to produce twelve different pseudo-summaries, each two

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paragraphs long (to coincide with the two acts), none of which has any intentional connection with what actually occurs on stage. Each program distributed at Europera’s premiere contained only one of the twelve synopses, which meant that people sitting next to each another had different guides, further contributing to the elegant chaos. What Europera is finally about, from its transcriptions of phrases and images to its libretti, is the culture of opera, at once a homage and a burlesque, offering a wealth of surprises with familiar material; its theme could be defined, simply, as the conventions of 19thcentury European opera after a 20th-century avantgarde American has processed it. Europera has two parts, subtitled I and II, the second being half the length of the former. As with his earlier HPSCHD, Cage made “chamber” versions – Europera 3 & 4 (1990) and Europera 5 (1991) – that, if only for their diminished scale, are less successful. NICOLAS SLONIMSKY, historically knowledgeable, sees them representing “a unique theatrical genre.”

EXERCICES DE STYLE (1947) A post-World War II classic initially simple but ultimately complex, this RAYMOND QUENEAU novel tells in ninety-nine different ways about a narrator getting on a Paris bus and witnessing a fight between two passengers one of whom, a man with a long neck and a funny hat, he sees again two hours later at a train station adding a button to his overcoat. So attractive has this fertile concept been to other adventurous writers that translations, some more imaginative than others, have appeared in over two dozen languages, including, no joke, Basque, Zurich German, Galician, and Esperanto. Among the distinguished translators have been UMBERTO ECO (Italian), Danilo Kiš (Serbian), and Ludwig Harig and Eugen Helmlé (German). The first in English came from Barbara Wright (1915–2009), who, more than any other translator into English, consistently favored the more avant-garde French texts. Chris Clarke’s later English translation (2012) includes twenty-eight additional Exercises written by Queneau himself. The challenge of audaciously rewriting a single nut at least ninety-nine times has inspired other writers (including myself in Declarations of Independence [2019]).

EXHAUSTION One of the great truths of MODERNISM holds that an esthetic departure has a life, eventually exhausting

138 • EXPANDED PUBLISHING itself; and although good work can be produced in the exhaust of an innovation, whatever appears too late can come to seem opportunistic, if not decadent. Most conspicuously, the innovation epitomized by COLLAGE, initially a great departure, seemed exhausted by the mid-20th century, though collages continued to appear well into the next century, not only in visual arts but, say, in literature and music. ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM had a shorter life after World War II, barely surviving into the 1960s, though art reflecting its influence, if not imitating its forms, continued to appear. Sometimes dismissed as “a myth,” exhaustion rules.

EXPANDED PUBLISHING (1959) Traditionally writers, who are essentially word-artists, provided texts for publishers to print and for actors to perform, rarely considering such alternatives for making their words public as, say, handwritten prints for exhibition or public signage. Whereas E. E. CUMMINGS, for one, worked closely with his personal typographer (S.A. Jacobs) to make uniquely different printed pages, certain more contemporary writers have become their own typographers, so to speak, drawing letters by hand or with stencils for later printing. By the 21st century, some self-designing writers were exploiting radical typefaces that were easily available via a desktop computer. In Sweden in the 1960s, published poets such as Bengt-Emil Johnson and Sten Hanson produced in electronic music studios, wholly on their own authority, audiotapes of SOUND POETRY. Other published writers produced videotapes in which their words (not themselves) appear on screen. In the 1980s, FRED TRUCK developed his “Performance Bank” that existed only as computer print-out. With his Swallows (1986), PAUL ZELEVANSKY produced on a 5¼-inch floppy disk an interactive narrative made for an Apple computer (later accessible only through an Apple II emulator). After beginning as a poet, EDUARDO KAC made reflection holograms with words as a prelude to his later high-tech art. In my own activities I’ve produced a spinning multiplex hologram of syntactically circular sentences (1978), a twosided transmission hologram of complimentary pairs of words (1985), a poem 200 feet long and a narrative 50 feet long (2004), and a computer-assisted multiscreen installation at the MIT Media Lab (2001), among other departures in formats for my writings. Whereas most Expanded Writing is necessarily self-published,

the last work initially appeared in a group show at the organization that had commissioned it. Others have made ebooks that exist only on websites, usually requiring from the reader certain cursor movements more various than flipping pages. Much as the genre of SCULPTURE, say, has expanded to include developments inconceivable before 1960, so will Literature in the coming decades continue to appear in unprecedented forms in media we can scarcely imagine now.

EXPO 67 (MONTREAL) (1967) Better than populous art exhibitions such as Documenta or the Venice Biennale, so beholden as they are to gallerists’ promotions, the world’s World’s Fairs often provide richer introductions to the new avantgarde art most likely to survive. The most distinguished in my experience was Expo 67, officially titled the Universal and International World Exhibition in Montreal. Here I had my first experience of a BUCKMINSTER FULLER architectural dome and the lightweight tensile architecture of Frei Otto (1925–2015). Beside the long escalator in the American pavilion was a very tall version of ROBERT INDIANA’s magisterial numerical sequence. An ALEXANDER CALDER ran 60 feet high. Also on the Fair’s premises was the prototype for MOSHE SAFDIE’s modular housing that survived successfully the show’s closing to become a desirable Montreal residence. The most significant education for me came from appreciating films projected on surfaces other than the standard singular rectangular screen of the familiar movie house. I recall one set-up titled In the Labyrinth/ Labyrinthe where I looked down upon a screen parallel to the floor while beside one end was another screen running perpendicularly up a wall, each 12 meters in length, their simultaneous imagery complimentary. On the other end of a mirrored maze whose winding corridors was a chamber with five screens in the shape of a cross. Elsewhere, the New York filmmakers FRANCIS THOMPSON and ALEXANDER HAMMID contributed We Are Young!, which was simultaneously projected onto six screens different in size. This echoed their three-screen film, To Be Alive, which was featured a few years before at a World’s Fair in Queens, New York, its parts likewise establishing rich cinematic counterpoint. In another venue at Expo 67 housed Canada 67, a sort of travelogue that was continuously projected on a totally surrounding horizontal screen – literally a

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360-degree circle vision. In yet another venue, a Czech theatrical magician named Josef Svoboda (1920–2002) mounted in his Polyvision a wall with 112 small moving screens, developing beyond his Polyekran with only eight screens that was featured in Brussels’ Expo 58 several years before. In Graeme Ferguson’s Polar Life eleven projectors threw images onto eleven stationary screens while a turntable moved the audience. Elsewhere at Expo 67, while A Place to Stand had a single screen 20 meters wide and 9 meters high, the film shot with 70 mm (or twice as wide as the 35 mm then standard) incorporated within its frame many smaller moving complimentary images, mostly about life in Canadian Ontario, all blessedly devoid of any narration! (That last departure is still scarce in film/video documentaries.) Never again would I witness a comparable anthology of alternative projections, which I came to admire enormously. Were the same collection offered fifty years later (e.g., 2017) it would still look fresh and revelatory. May I venture that other “World’s Fairs” around the world included at least some comparably avant-garde cinema.

EXPRESSIONISM (c. 1895) (This concept is so unsympathetic to me that I fear misrepresentation, but here goes.) The central assumption is that, through the making of a work, the artist transfers his or her emotions and feelings, customarily anguished, to the viewer/reader. Such art is judged “expressive” to the degree that these feelings and emotions are projected by it; therefore, the success of such communication often depends upon the use of images or subjects familiar to the audience, the artist thus always skirting opportunism, if not vulgarity. The social rationale was breaking down the inhibitions and repressions of bourgeois society. (The trouble is that different viewers get different messages, especially in different cultures and at different times. That difficulty perhaps accounts for why the concept of Expressionism is scarcely universal, being almost unknown in Eastern art. Another fault is that light feeling and thus comedy become unacceptable.) Arising from Romanticism that tied expression to the notion of “genius,” the term became popular

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around the turn of the 20th century, beginning with Edvard Munch’s (1863–1944) famous woodcut depicting a face proclaiming terror. Indeed, the term “Expressionistic” became an honorific, implicitly excluding whatever arts lacked such quality. It characterized work produced by disparate individuals, rather than a self-conscious group (such as DADA or SURREALISM). Responding to the examples of Munch and Vincent van Gogh in painting, as well as Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) and Egon Schiele (1890–1918) after them, critics began to confine the epithet Expressionism to art (and sometimes thought) produced in Northern and/or Teutonic European countries, in contrast to French and/or Mediterranean traditions. This last notion legitimized German Expressionism of the 1920s and 1930s, in poetry as well as visual art, and perhaps American ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM afterwards. The German dancer MARY WIGMAN appropriated Expressionist esthetics for her dance works.

EXTER, ALEXANDRA (6 January 1882–17 March 1949) Exter’s earliest distinguished paintings, from the time of the Russian Revolution, display geometric shapes in a larger field, somewhat more reflective of ITALIAN FUTURISM than other Russian Abstract Art in that period. For these planes that appear to float around one another, she favored the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. The Parisian art historian Andrei B. Nakov (1941), who published the first contemporary monograph on Exter’s work, speaks of a “centrifugal structure . . . based on a center of energy within the work. For this possibility is based not on the static weight of the mass but rather on its own dynamic potential whose principal role is to counteract the immobility of forms.” For Yakov Protazanov’s science fiction film Aelita (1924), based on an Aleksei Tolstoy story about Russians transported to Mars, Exter designed costumes that emphasized geometric asymmetry, black-and-white contrasts, and the use of shiny materials. Because Aelita was at the time the most popular Russian film in the West, Exter emigrated to Paris, where she worked mostly as a designer for stage, fashion, and architectural interiors. Her surname is sometimes spelled Ekster.

F

THE FAB FIVE (1991–93) Chris Webber (1973), Jalen Rose (1973), Juwan Howard (1973), Jimmy King (1973), and Ray Jackson (1973) were the University of Michigan Wolverines’ men’s basketball team entering in 1991. A pioneering bunch in several ways, despite never winning the annual NCAA national tournament and losing most of their accolades for what they did accomplish on that stage due to later scandals, they foregrounded a new esthetic that heralded the hip-hop era in basketball. The five freshmen uniformly dispensed with traditional short shorts and long stockings in favor of baggy shorts (in homage to the earlier basketballer Michael Jordan [1963]), black Nikes with matching socks, and even shaven heads for a time. These “street” visuals and the accompanying swagger were both expressions of identity and very deliberate esthetic choices made with the arena crowds and TV audiences in mind. They transformed the formerly staid Michigan program into the nation’s first taste of the next wave of Black American cultural production that was to spread to the professional ranks in America itself and then around the world. As so often with both young artists and athletes, they burned brightly for a time. The players put some stuffy noses out of joint and elevated both the sport and its look, before getting on with life. Webber, Howard and Rose found stardom in the National Basketball Association, Jackson and King less so, having redefined their sport’s theatricality. —Ben Piggott

FAKES (forever) In 1973, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts mounted an exhibition of artistic forgeries dating back centuries.

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Some already in museums were so clean that not only were expects hired to deauthenticate, to so speak, but some examples became touchstones of professional argument. A visually credible AUTOGRAPH is not enough, as it too can be faked, as sometimes only stray details betray false origins. Certain forgeries were so treasured that, even after they are identified as fake, their owners keep and often continued to display them, no doubt with some ironic pleasure. The status and value of such discredited visual art became a challenge for esthetic philosophers such as Nelson Goodman (1906–98). The classic hoax in English literature is a cycle of epic poems credited in 1760 to a Gaelic/Scottish poet named Ossian but actually written by the Scottish poet James Macpherson (1736–96). Little remembered is ORSON WELLES’s final feature film, F Is for Fake (1977), an imaginative documentary that focuses mostly on Elmyr de Hory (1906–76; b. Elemér Albert Hoffmann), a Hungarian painter who sold hundreds of his forgeries to galleries around the world, as he moved from country to country, always a step ahead of possible captors. To no surprise perhaps, Hory became the subject of a 1969 biography by CLIFFORD IRVING, himself a monumental faker. Recall as well as Welles himself catapulted to national fame in the wake of his deceptively credible 1938 fake newscast about an invasion from Mars. To the dissemination of fakes in art and writing there has been, is, and will be no end.

FALKENBERG, PAUL (26 October 1903–13 January 1986) Long renowned as a skilled editor of pre-video film, he was the filmmaking partner in the single most imaginative documentary film ever about a visual artist. Eschewing the common format of a talking head

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earnestly puffing work that is flashed on the screen, Falkenberg joined the photographer Hans Namuth (1915–90), who had previously shot still pictures of JACKSON POLLOCK, in filming in 1951 the American painter at work and then, in a radical move, from below as he painted on a piece of glass, all in less than one dozen minutes. “The bending of Pollock’s body,” writes the Italian critic Germano Celant (1940), “describes an extension whereby the body is a mechanism dependent on the object; it becomes a thing projected over a thing.” The truth is that the more sophisticated documentaries show, not tell (as journalism would), in this case about Pollock’s radical procedures in realizing a surface of unprecedented visual density. An earlier example of this great documentary lesson of showing, not telling, would be LENI RIEFENSTAHL’s monumental Olympia (1938).

FANTASIA (1940) Aside from what you might think of WALT DISNEY (1901–66), a schlockmeister if ever there were one, consider his most ambitious film for its virtues: especially luscious (pre-computer) animation, pioneering stereo sound, and the visualizing of classical music (the last element making it a precursor of later “rock videos”). Even though this last idea was “stolen” from OSKAR FISCHINGER, who had come to Hollywood only a few years before (and who worked on the project before resigning because he felt that his art was compromised), Disney went far beyond previous schemes for filming classical music. Remember that Fantasia has sections, each produced by a different army of Hollywood technicians, and that some sections are better than others; the original soundtrack conducted by LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI is superior to that used for the 1982 release. There has been nothing quite like Fantasia before or since (as it makes nearly all later “rock videos” seem inelegant and impatient). The only films to come close, in my considered opinion, are TEX AVERY’s The Magical Maestro (1951); Robert Clampett’s A Corny Concerto (1943) produced under the banner of Bugs Bunny, typically having a sharper edge, by the competing Warner Brothers studio; Bruno Bozzetto’s Allegro Non Troppo (1976), an Italian feature combining rather mundane live action with some clever animation (particularly to Maurice Ravel’s Bolero); and several shorts collected under the generic title Opera Imaginaire.

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Fantasia, often rereleased for movie houses, eventually became available, fortunately with the original Stokowski soundtrack, on both videotape and DVD. One thesis that I’ve cultivated for years, without ever developing, alas, holds that the greatest animated films were based upon music. (If this theme appears elsewhere in this book, consider that repetition enhances more than diminishes a superior idea.)

FANZINE (c. 1970s) With an increased availability of copying machines (1970s and ’80s), followed by the personal computer (late 1980s–90s), new technologies enabled fanatics with a passion for a circumscribed underground topic to self-publish small magazines or “fanzines.” Not to be confused with related esthetics of the MICROPRESS, which have also been called “zines,” fanzines in particular have typically (but not always) been associated with a genre or subgenre of underground popular music. They are read and distributed among the select crowd that their fanzine of choice champions, but unlike popular large-scale magazines, a fanzine is usually a oneperson operation. Although fanzine prototypes existed in the early 1970s, Sniffin’ Glue, a Londonbased photocopied punk fanzine (c.1977), displayed all the characteristics of later music-related fanzines and is usually considered to be one of the first true fanzines. As a countercultural vehicle of information, fanzines sometimes still possessed strong political connections to the historical samizdat tradition, and by the mid-90s, reached epic popularity in the underground. Some were self-published once and never heard from again. Some became full-fledged magazines. But in every case, access to new technology enabled these publishers to disseminate variously subversive content with notable speed through a music-related network. Whereas layout and graphics were a defining primitive esthetic in the early cut and paste days, the computer created a sudden increase in well-designed, attractive layouts. Some fanzine publishers started paying extra for good-looking print jobs, selling ads to small “indie” record labels, and sending their publications to largerscale distributors. In the same way that vinyl records (or “cassette culture”) has come and gone in waves of either technological nostalgia or sincere appreciation, fanzines certainly still exist, but the internet, websites, blogs, and social media have all but digitally supplanted

142 • FARBER, MANNY the underground popularity and function of the more traditional form. —Michael Peters

FARBER, MANNY (20 February 1917–18 August 2008) By reputation the most eccentric prominent film critic ever in America, he developed his reputation by writing not books but reviews, not for newspapers, natch, but for weekly magazines, successively The New Republic and The Nation from 1942 to 1954 before switching to monthlies such as Cavalier and ARTFORUM (1967–71). Given his predisposition to strong writing, while refusing to adopt a coherent position, Farber cultivated surprise with his regular readers, praising both Hollywood directors and “underground film,” which he coined. Becoming a California professor past the age of 50, he taught films differently, reportedly showing them in bits and pieces, running them backwards, and illustrating his lectures with slides and blackboard drawings. Even though his reviews in bulk made less sense than individual notices, the pseudo-canonical Library of America issued a book of them (2009). Meanwhile Farber worked as an eccentric abstract painter, especially of stained unstretched canvases. Farber adopted figuration soon after moving to California, loading his increasingly complex still lifes with references to favorite movies. To the critic PETER FRANK, “This had the effect of turning tabletop still lifes into narrative landscapes of a sort.”

FAULKNER, WILLIAM (25 September 1897–6 July 1962) Faulkner seemed so vague, in person and at times in print, while conservative critics were predisposed to overpraise his conventional virtues, that we tend to forget he wrote some of the greatest avant-garde fiction of the 20th century. I’m thinking initially of The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), both with multiple narrators, each so radically different in intelligence (and thus style) from the other, and then of Absalom, Absalom! (1936), with its inimitable prose, composed of words rushing over one another, initially with complementary adjectives, devoid of commas. From the book’s opening sentence, Faulkner offered marvelously enriched English: From a little after two o clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September

afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) become latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. No one wrote English like this before, and no one has quite done so since (though several have tried). A style so strong makes any plot, in this case about a Southern dynasty in the 19th century, seem secondary. Some comparably extraordinary prose style also appears in Faulkner’s short story “The Bear” (1940), and also from time to time elsewhere in his work.

FAUVES (1905) Taking a French name that translates as “wild beast,” the loose group of painters waving this banner in the first decade of the 20th century favored color for color’s sake – more precisely, bright, intense color for bright color’s sake, along with rougher, blatant brushwork. In liberating themselves from the demands of representation and scrupulous detailing, the Fauves were extending suggestions about the intrinsic power of color that were articulated by such predecessors as Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Vincent VAN GOGH (1853–90), and Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). Though this unanticipated departure is remembered mostly through HENRI MATISSE, other artists prominently involved included the French painters André Derain (1880–1954) and Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958). To Matisse: “One will feel my picture rather than see it.” While their aims were pictorial and spatial, weaker work seemed decorative. So quickly, in art-history time, was their position accepted (and the wild beasts tamed, so to speak) with only three group exhibitions, that the cabal, such as it was, disintegrated.

FEDERMAN, RAYMOND (15 May 1928–6 October 2009) Born in France, Federman came to the US after World War II, a survivor of distinctly modern disasters. After

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completing one of the first academic monographs about SAMUEL BECKETT, Federman published a bilingual collection of poems, some originally written in French, others initially written in English, with all translations by himself, and then Double or Nothing (1971), which is a highly inventive sequence of typewritten pages. The bilingual prose of Take It or Leave It (1976) portrays in both languages the narrator’s coming to America. Here he is in Times Square: I was on Broadway now j’arrive au bon moment in my Buickspecial which was parked illegally of course on a side street elles me parurent d’autant mieux divines ces apparitions qu’elles no semblaient point du tour but not at all s’aperçevoir que j’existais moi lá á côté tout baveux tired gâteau dumbfounded d’admiration tout éroticomystique of fatigue hunger desire ready to burst out of my fly . . . . Federman’s subsequent fiction has been less innovative. The new typeset edition (1992) of Double or Nothing is decidedly inferior to the original, apparently reflecting the aspirations of a university professor who is trying to be acceptable in spite of his wayward imagination. Federman: A Recyclopedia Narrative (1998) is a rich alphabetical compendium, written by many hands, no doubt inspired by its subject’s example, that itself represents a distinct conceptual advance in the genre of literary criticism/biography.

FEININGER, LYONEL (17 July 1871–13 January 1956) He stands to be remembered among the first artists born in America to have established a successful career not in England or France, which other American artists favored in the late 19th century, but in Germany, more specifically in BERLIN, where he first went as a teenager. Feininger began with caricatures for magazines in both Germany and America. By 1894 he was producing comics that Art Speigelman (1948), himself no slouch at that art, judges have “achieved a breathtaking formal grace unsurpassed in the history of the medium.” Soon after Feininger started producing finer art, he had an exhibition at HERWARTH WALDEN’s Strum Gallery in Berlin. He was among the first German artists to acknowledge Parisian CUBISM. After GROPIUS founded the BAUHAUS, Feininger was

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invited to head the printmaking workshop. His classic woodcut “Cathedral” graced the cover of the 1919 Bauhaus announcement. The son of a violinist, he also composed organ fugues that were publicly performed in both Germany and Switzerland. Feininger incidentally produced a large number of photographs that, curiously, he decided not to exhibit but to donate to friends some of whom later made them more public. Once the Nazis assumed power, the Lyonel Feininger family returned to his native country where he continued to teach and exhibit. His sons Andreas F. (1906–99) and T. Lux F. (1910–2011) had distinguished American careers as respectively a photographer and a painter. Their careers prompt me to recall JOHN CAGE remarking about a certain German composer, “He must have had some talent. His sons became musicians.” Among the later American-born innovative artists to have careers mostly in Germany were EMMETT WILLIAMS and the sculptor Stephan von Huene (1932–2000). Far more of ROBERT WILSON’s theater has premiered in Germany than in his native USA.

FELDMAN, MORTON (12 January 1926–3 September 1987) Initially regarded as a composer working in the wake of JOHN CAGE, Feldman eventually forged a different sort of career, first as a tenured professor (which Cage never was), mostly at SUNY-Buffalo, and eventually in his compositional style. His characteristic scores of the 1950s and ’60s are graphic notations (within fixed pagination) that merely approximate dimensions and relationships of pitches, registers, and attacks, all of which the individual performer is invited to interpret to his or her taste. Nonetheless, the sounds of Feldman’s music tend to be soft and isolated, with a consistency that is audibly different from the chaos cultivated by Cage. This aural pointillism, indebted in part to Feldman’s interest in contemporary painting, superficially sounds like ANTON WEBERN’s music, but the former’s compositional choices owe more to personal intuition and thus his claims to superior taste (which is a key word in Feldman’s vocabulary, unlike Cage’s) than either SERIAL systems or strictly Cagean indeterminate vocabulary. Once he became a professor surrounded by aspiring young musicians, Feldman composed several very long pieces, at once austere and self-indulgent, e.g., For Philip Guston [1984], which runs 265:16’, or over four hours, in its first recording or String Quartet No. 2, which clocks in at 375’ or over six hours, performed without a refreshment/bathroom

144 • FELLINI, FREDERICO break, all reflecting Feldman’s ambition to make masterpieces not big and loud, as was traditionally done, but long and soft. For this quality alone, his later music became idiosyncratic. He was incidentally a supremely provocative conversationalist whose monumental jokes were often passed among strangers. When someone in his audience screamed, “You’re full of shit,” Feldman replied, “What are you full of?” Pausing as great comedians do, he jabbed: “Ideas?” Though at least three books of his prose have appeared, his best remarks are only remembered by others, as here.

FELLINI, FREDERICO (20 January 1920–31 October 1993) Buried in the oeuvre of many essentially slick filmmakers is an avant-garde gem scarcely known to even his most devout fans. For STANLEY DONEN, it’s the multi-camera short of a pianist playing Sergei Prokofiev’s daunting Seventh Piano Sonata. For WOODY ALLEN, the gem is his first feature-length film What’s Up, Tiger Lily (1966). For Fellini, the avant-garde classic is Toby Dammit (1968), only thirty-seven minutes in length, which appeared within a feature-length triptych Spirits of the Dead (1968, beside two lesser films by other directors). Freely adapting the Edgar Allen Poe short story “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,” this Fellini short epitomizes well-financed SURREALISM in portraying an alcoholic actor making a deal with the devil to get a new car. To quote one summary, “The second half of the movie is a phantasmagoric joy ride as a crazed Dammit blasts through the streets of Rome in his new car. It’s a drive straight to a very Felliniesque hell.” How appropriate is this film for an artist who died on Halloween. Whereas I recall longer Fellini films as soporific, this wasn’t.

FEMINISM (forever) Scarcely avant-garde, as some women have tried to advance the fortunes of all women over male dominance, based upon generally greater physical presence, since the beginning of time. What’s new in recent decades is that in Western cultures more women, especially younger women, declare themselves feminists, especially in the arts, and that more women do indeed achieve success equal to their male counterparts. Likewise do representatives from other social minorities who sometimes make special

claims, on whose behalf claims for compensatory privilege are sometimes made. The risks implicit in the general success of any group previously suppressed is that favoring weaker apples in a single tree undermines the reputation of the others and, second, that the avatar can’t afford to fail because to do so would jeopardize the fortunes of others similarly disadvantaged. This last truth I credit to the American baseballer Jackie Robinson (1919–72), whose success knocked down the color barrier in all professional sports in America and perhaps elsewhere. Had Robinson failed as an athlete and become a bitter human being, far more than his memory would have been damaged. It’s not for nothing that stronger artists resist being classified with one or another moniker awarded (or just desiring) compensatory privilege; they neither need nor want false advantages.

FÉNÉON, FÉLIX (22 June 1861–29 February 1944) One of the greatest progressive figures of his time, he was at various times a journalist, a surreptitious bureaucrat (working in a French War Office), an art critic, an anarchist, a pioneering minimal fictioner, and an art collector whose accumulations sold so well after his death that an art prize was established with his name. As Fénéon the art critic was an earlier advocate of painterly pointillism, his profile is memorialized in a frequently reproduced 1890 painting by Paul Signac. As a writer of pseudo-realistic fiction, Fénéon anonymously contributed in 1906 to page 3 of a six-page newspaper, under the headline “divers incidents,” very short fake news stories about gruesome happenings. Later collected as “Nouvelles en trois lignes,” these stand as an early monument of literary MINIMALISM. Fénéon’s biographer Joan U. Halperin judged them “almost always funny.” Sparsely translated into English here and there over the years, most auspiciously in Elaine Marks’s anthology of Great French Short Stories (1960), these were mostly unavailable in English until Novels in Three Lines (2007), which is embarrassingly inept. While the translation might be superficially accurate, down to keeping daily newspaper references, too much of the humor in the originals is lost. Others can do better by Fénéon; I’ve tried. Although Fénéon did not take credit for them upon their initial publication, his friend GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE knew enough to identify Fénéon as representing avant-garde “mots en liberté.” Since Fénéon was also known as an anarchist, I am reminded

FILM SCRIPTS •

of my conjecture that, if the appropriate literary form for conservatism is tragedy, portraying what cannot or should not be done, avant-garde anarchists, such as myself, should be predisposed to comedy with its bias toward surprising possibilities.

FENOLLOSA, ERNEST (18 February 1853–21 September 1908) An American writer and scholar, he arrived in Japan in 1879 to teach at the Imperial University in Tokyo, perhaps at the apex of the westernization that followed the Meiji Restoration. Becoming an admirer of Japanese art, he persuaded Japanese intellectuals not to neglect their own heritage, and so contributed to the development of the New Nihonga movement in Japanese painting in the 1890s. Returning to America in 1890, Fenollosa helped form the oriental art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. After his death, his widow asked the young poet EZRA POUND to edit Fenollosa’s papers. One result was an essay, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” that had a great impact not only on Pound’s poetic practice but on other poets. Fenollosa contributed to the avant-garde less on his own initiative than through someone else’s channel. Inadvertently, but prophetically, he coined the epithet CONCRETE POETRY that later defined literary art beyond his imagination.

FERLINGHETTI, LAWRENCE (24 March 1919) As a poet, painter, playwright, novelist, and publisher, he redefined the concept of Person (once Man) of Letters, and thus established a new standard for the future, by adding literary bookseller, as he established in the mid-1950s in San Francisco the most consequential retailer of books that the chain stores don’t carry. His store, called City Lights, has survived for decades at the same location as incidentally a meeting place for not just San Franciscan but America’s literary deviants. Becoming a prominent local citizen thereby, Ferlinghetti also persuaded his adopted city to rename certain streets after writers who lived there (if only briefly), implicitly evoking the American writer James Jones’s simple measure of Paris’s cultural sophistication – they name streets after writers there. Ferlinghetti’s own poetry was popular in its time, much of it apparently written for declamation before sympathetic audiences, his “political” poetry especially exploiting the familiar sentiments of his audiences. His

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more innovative short plays, called “Routines,” were by contrast less successful in the cultural marketplace. Oddly perhaps, none of his publishers has ever issued a “collected” or even a “selected” poems. One patron for his visual work was Francesco Conz (1935–2010), a Verona collector who incidentally also supported my art. His Italian surname notwithstanding, Ferlinghetti grew up in Westchester (NY) precincts excluding Italians and so struck most people as a tall and thin preppy, which indeed he was, typically surviving into his nineties, which preppies who abjure cigarettes among other poisons are more predisposed to do.

FERRISS, HUGH (12 July 1889–28 January 1962) As an architectural fantasist, few Americans ever equaled him. Realizing that the obstacles in actual construction defeated him, he made drawings, great drawings, initially as renderings for other architects, later for his own pleasure. Exemplifying the great theme of urban possibilities, much like SANT’ELIA before him, Ferriss influenced later architects without ever completing a building. Comic-book artists have also acknowledged the influence of his imagery. Published during his lifetime in magazines and in the book The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929), his schemes were posthumously curated as Architectural Visions: Drawings of Hugh Ferriss (1981). One drawing, for instance, places residential apartments above the roadways on bridges spanning a NEW YORK CITY river. His skyscrapers are particularly marvelous. To me these drawings constitute a form of graphic fiction. Indicatively, his images are featured in the monumental anthology Unbuilt America (1976), while the American Society of Architectural Illustrators annually awards a Hugh Ferriss Memorial Prize.

FILM SCRIPTS (1910) This is my term for printed materials, often incorporating images along with words, that suggest a film that probably won’t be made. The classic in my memory vault is L. MOHOLY-NAGY’s Dynamic of the Metropolis (written 1921–22; completed 1924) whose 14 intricately designed pages include visual descriptions and instructions along with striking images all suggesting the subject announced in its title. The implicit theme is that these pages realize wholly on their own a certain artistic validity, and indeed they do. (First published

146 • FINCH, PETER in Hungarian, it was later translated into German and then into English.) Highly literary, strictly verbal earlier film scripts include GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE’s “Un beau film” in his L’Hérésiarque et Cie (1910) and PAUL VAN OSTAIJEN’s “De Bankroet Jazz” (1920–21, “Bankruptcy Jazz”). SERGEI EISENSEIN wrote prose notes toward an improbable film of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1927). The British playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008) published a scenario about MARCEL PROUST; Jean-Paul Sartre, another about Sigmund Freud. As such film scripts are meant to stand by themselves, much like CONCEPTUAL DANCE, printed anthologies of them ought to exist.

after the manner of POLLOCK, against a background of monochrome.” On the next page is a stunning vertical painting with black lines on a field of various shades of red. Via Google Images I found miniatures of other remarkable paintings I wish I’d owned (which is always the truest measure of appreciating visual art). Even on the Internet, biographical information about this Fink is scarce. He apparently spent most of his life in Europe. Too many other painters of desirable innovative art should be remembered, not only here but elsewhere.

FINNEGANS WAKE (1939)

FINCH, PETER (6 March 1947) Since the early 1970s, Finch has been the principal innovator in Welsh poetry, his country’s most genuine successor to DYLAN THOMAS; but instead of florid, drunken Thomasian rhetoric, Finch has favored a variety of tight sober structures, including parodies of other poets, VISUAL POEMS, TONE/SOUND POEMS, and, say, verbal imitations of PHILIP GLASS’s music. The strongest work in his Selected Poems (1987) is “Some Blats,” which is a world of interrogations, printed as individual lines without punctuation, beginning “is England green,” including “is a lawnmower an object of beauty,” continuing with “is really chum chuzz” and “is sgadsass,” and concluding “is ssssssssss,” in an implicit parody of drunken writing (and you know who). Finch also edited Second Aeon (1967–74) which was the only Welsh magazine of its time to swim with the international avant-garde, not only for what it printed but for Finch’s considered, small-print reviews of publications both straight and wayward. In the 21st century Finch revived and reworked his cassette-created sound works from the ’70s and ’80s. If not for him and the aforementioned Mr. Thomas, Wales wouldn’t appear in this book at all; for that alone (and since no living Irish or Scottish person is here), Finch deserves a Welsh knighthood.

FINK, DON (1923–2010) In MICHEL SEUPHOR’s superior Dictionary of Abstract Painting (1957) is an entry on this American painter who apparently came to Seuphor’s attention as he exhibited in Paris in the middle 1950s. In Fink’s art Seuphor found “a calligraphy of fine black lines coiled,

One reason why JAMES JOYCE’s final book remains a monumental masterpiece is that its particular inventions have never been exceeded. Unlike journalism, which tries to render complex experience in the simplest possible form, the Wake tells a simple story in an exceedingly complex form. Its subject is familial conflict – among two brothers, a sister, and their two parents. Exploiting the techniques of literary Symbolism, Joyce portrays numerous conflicts taking the same familial forms. The metaphors for the two brothers include competing writers, such as Pope and Swift, or competing countries, such as Britain and America, among other antagonistic pairs of roughly equal age and/or authority. This interpretation of human experience hardly ranks as “original” or “profound,” but thanks to the techniques of multiple reference, incorporating innumerable examples into every part of the text, the theme is extended into a broad range of experience. No other literary work rivals the Wake in allusive density; in no other piece of writing known to me are so many dimensions simultaneously articulated. Congruent with his method, Joyce coins linguistic portmanteaus that echo various familiar words; the use of many languages serves to increase the range of reference and multiplicity. He favors puns that serve a similar function of incorporating more than one meaning within a single unit – a verbal technique reflecting the theme of history repeating itself many times over. Thus, the book’s principal theme is entwined in its method. As SAMUEL BECKETT noticed, back in 1929, “Here form is content, content is form.” One implication of this method is that Finnegans Wake need not be read sequentially to be understood. A principal index of its originality is that no other major modern work is still as widely unread and persistently misunderstood, decades after its initial publication. Whether an individual reader “accepts” or “rejects” Joyce’s final masterpiece is also, in my observation,

FITZSIMMONS, JAMES A. •

a fairly reliable resonant test of his or her sympathy toward subsequent avant-garde writing. (Another similarly useful test can be carried out with the more experimental writings of Gertrude Stein.) The addition of an apostrophe to the book’s title is not just a spelling mistake, happen though it often does; it becomes a red flag reflecting literary illiteracy.

FIORILLO, DANTE

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as acknowledging such subjects forbidden elsewhere as homosexuality, androgyny, paganism, and jazz. While Thurman’s own prose featured a teenaged prostitute, his sometime lover Richard Bruce Nugent (1906–87) contributed not just a text with continuous incomplete sentences but a drawing of a black nude woman with low breasts. Prudes, even those black, disapproved both privately and publicly. No second issue ever appeared. While unsold copies of Fire!! were fittingly devoured in a blaze, Thomas Wirth (1938–2014) loved this classic enough to reprint it intact decades later.

(4 July 1905–?) What ARTHUR CRAVEN was to visual art, Fiorillo was to modern music – the touted composer who disappeared, never to be seen again. Where Cravan was a well-born radical who brazenly challenged the status quo, Fiorillo purportedly came from Italian-American slums. His tonal music was praised, though not loved. The most remarkable achievement of his career was receiving not two or three but an unparalleled four (count ‘em) fellowships from the John Simon GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION in the middle 1930s. The foundation’s chief also recommended Fiorilllo to teach at BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE, which, however, dismissed him before his time was up. He had in New York private students some of whom had compositional careers. His professional problem was plagiarizing from scores by composers both living and dead. Unlike Cravan, who visibly disappeared, so to speak, so invisible was Fiorillo’s vanishing that the date is only roughly known as the 1950s. I can recall around 1977 the composer OTTO LEUNING, long the Guggenheim Foundation’s principal music advisor, imagining that Fiorillo must still be alive and so asked a researcher to telephone everyone with that surname in the New York City telephone directories. (No score.) However, whereas Cravan is remembered decades later, even at times admired: Fiorillo, not, except here, and never.

FIRE!! (1926) Whereas the African-American writers contributing to the so-called Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s were aiming for literary and thus social acceptability, the writer Wallace Thurman (1902–34) had more avantgarde ambitions. Reflecting particularly the influence of WYNDHAM LEWIS’s BLAST, with both a provocative title and striking typography, Thurman wanted a magazine 11 inches by 8½ inches “Devoted to Younger Negro Artists,” to quote its subtitle. Fire!! included cream-colored paper and formally deviant texts, as well

FISCHINGER, OSKAR (22 June 1900–31 January 1967) Initially a painter precociously interested in abstract interpretations of music and poetry, Fischinger produced his first animated shorts in 1920 with a cutting machine of his own design. In 1926, he presented a series of shorts called “absolute film studies,” individually named Study 1, Study 2, and so on, implicitly preceding ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. With the arrival of sound, such kinetic abstractions could accompany music. While still in BERLIN, in the early 1930s, he produced animated advertisements. In 1933, Fischinger began working in color with a special process he helped to develop, and in 1935 he won an international prize for his Komposition in Blau/Composition in Blue. After emigrating to Hollywood, he made Allegretto (1936) to accompany JAZZ and later worked with WALT DISNEY on the J. S. BACH segment of FANTASIA (1940). However, as his original designs were dismissed as too abstract and were then modified against his wishes, Fischinger acquired a deserved reputation as an animator with more artistic integrity than Disney could accept. His brilliant Motion Painting No. 1, which portrays the act of painting to the accompaniment of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, won the Grand Prix at the Brussels Exhibition of 1949. Though it is customarily ranked among the greatest animated films ever made, tragic it is that Fischinger was never commissioned to do as well again. Significantly or amusingly, the pristine print of Motion Painting I at the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (NY) is a “gift of the Walt Disney Company.”

FITZSIMMONS, JAMES A. (20 December 1916–7 May 1985) As an elusive figure who did significant art and literary publishing in the mid-20th century, he becomes more

148 • FLAIR interesting because so little is known about him. After the usual sources turned up nothing, not even an obituary, I found late in 2017 on the website speedydeletion. wikia.com a detailed entry that Wikipedia apparently deleted because it “does not cite any references of sources,” though internal evidence suggests that it was written by his son writing from memory. Supplying the dates cited above, it says that James A. Fitzsimmons was born in Shanghai to an Irish-American father, he was homeschooled there and in Persia and perhaps Liberia, he married at 17 and fathered a son, that he went to Columbia College, and that he produced photography and painting before becoming an art critic, all of which is probably true. Out of Lugano in Italian Switzerland Fitzsimmons produced the large-format periodical Art International (1957–84 by him; 1987–88, by others) that was mostly in English, but sometimes in other languages, with thoughtful critical articles longer than those common in other art magazines at the time. Also in the 1960s he began The Lugano Review, which was more a literary magazine whose most monumental achievement was printing in 1965 ROBERT LAX’s great long poem “Sea & Sky” continuously in over 160 pages. Fitzsimmons served many writers very well before his strong magazines died too soon. As information about him is scarce, I’ve had to ask around. Though he published me once, I never met him. LUCY LIPPARD, who wrote for AI more often, met him only once. Michael Corris (1948), who did his doctorate on AD REINHARDT, told me that Fitzsimmons graduated from Columbia College a few years after Reinhardt and thus also Robert Lax, confirming the text rejected by Wikipedia. Another AI contributor, Henry Martin (1942), an American art critic long resident in northern Italy, knew his editor well enough to remember him as terminally ill in a hospital around 1984. Enough?

FLAIR (1950–52) By the measure of design alone, this was by far the most innovative magazine of its times. Founded by Fleur Cowles (1908–2009; b. Florence Friedman), a sometime painter who was at the time married to an heir to the Cowles family that published Look, among other slick magazines, Flair was initially a monthly that sold on newsstands for fifty cents (until killed after a year), and then a single annual that was copyrighted 1952. I knew first the latter, which is essentially a clothbound book, 10 inches wide by 14 inches high, with a rectangular

hole in its elegantly patterned cover. In the pages of the book are many sections, as in a conventional periodical; however, each is designed quite differently from all the others, sometimes on paper perceptibly different in texture and/or size from the sections around it. Just as some sections of this final Flair include pages that fold out or upwards, others have partial cutaways whose loose edges must be lifted to reveal imagery underneath. Bound into the book are small booklets, each with a single subject. No one would dispute the magazine’s one-word title, which seems, in retrospect, an understatement. As its table of contents is only minimally informative, the Flair Annual 1953, as it is called, must be read from beginning to end. Different in appearance, the short sections are likewise culturally different from one another; so that, for instance, a two-page spread about translations of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke precedes a single page announcing new recordings of the music of EDGARD VARÈSE, which is followed in turn by the score of a 19th-century musical exercise for children. Elsewhere in the Flair Annual 1953 is a reproduction of three pages of “The Great Paris Polyglot,” which is a 16th-century Bible with Genesis in parallel columns of Hebrew, Chaldean, and Greek, with separate Latin translations of all three. Tightly bound into the book’s gutter is a twelve-page booklet, 6 inches high and 9 inches wide, of Katharine Anne Porter’s prose text, “The Flower of Flowers.” Turn-of-the-century NEW YORK CITY photographs by Percy C. Byron (1878–1959) precede Saul Steinberg drawings of the same rich subject. In her introduction to a retrospective published decades later, The Best of Flair (1996), Fleur Cowles wrote of wanting to realize in her magazine “a sense of surprise instead of the rigid magazine make up.” In that sense of establishing identity through wild variety, Flair resembles (and presages) an ASSEMBLING or an ASPEN more than any standard magazine. Appearing more than four decades after Flair’s demise this large book, 34 centimeters high and 25½ centimeters wide (or 13¼ inches by 10 inches) is a spectacular self-retrospective, in the respectable tradition of a magazine remembering its strongest front, effectively epitomizing Flair’s alternative editing strategy and reproducing design departures that look forever fresh. Perhaps because of its origins in commercial publishing, Flair is rarely mentioned in the histories of significant American magazines. Indicatively, when The Best of Flair appeared, it was scarcely noticed, its legendary reputation among print designers notwithstanding. Decades later, the American literary periodical MCSWEENEY’s (1998), sometimes known as Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, continues this

FLEISCHER, DAVE AND MAX •

principle of different radical formats for successive issues, appearing as a hardcover book, a box, a deck of playing cards, a package, without ever mentioning the greater Flair.

FLAVIN, DAN (1 April 1933–29 November 1996) An undistinguished painter he was before he discovered fluorescent lamps (manufactured not by himself but by others) to produce complex arrays of illumination. Perhaps the epitome of the avant-garde MINIMAL artist, Flavin typically situates his simple means, sometimes various in color, along walls or locates them in corners of darkened spaces to induce a meditative atmosphere. His early works range in complexity from simple rows of vertical tubes with a single hue to intricate arrangements with crossing tubes of green, pink, orange, and blue on the ceiling of a long corridor in his untitled piece “(dedicated to Elizabeth and Richard Koshalek)” shown at the Castelli Gallery in New York in 1971. Not only are the fluorescent tubes in this piece set at right angles to one another and in four layers, but two of the colored lamps are placed behind their diffuser pans, so that they are seen only as reflected light. As Flavin wants viewers to appreciate not the lamps but the light they create, one theme here and elsewhere is visual qualities peculiar to pure fluorescent light (in contrast to the more familiar incandescent lamp). Though officially three-dimensional and thus sculptural, their effects are essential retinal and thus painterly. Successfully virtual in filling surrounding space without actually occupying it, they resemble ALEXANDER CALDER’s Mobiles. One curious precursor for Flavin was the prologue to the novelist Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1953), where the narrator inhabits an underground cell filled with abundant electric light. (A sculptor colleague read from it as a Flavin memorial.) A second was EL LISSITZKY’s Proun Room, which was an artistically rearticulated interior space. One peculiarity of Flavin’s practice was incorporating dedications into the titles of his pieces. T’was not for nothing that his single most ambitious work acknowledged VLADIMIR TATLIN, whose ambitions for a larger scale was a major influence. ‘Tis said that, since his lamps were publicly available, Flavin sold his works with paper certificates of his authorship. That meant first that, should a single lamp within a work of his burn out, he’d offer to replace it; but, second, that if the certificate were lost, he’d not replace it. Such were the departures required by the avant-garde art biz in the late 20th century.

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Because Flavin used his light constructions to enhance brilliantly all kinds of architectural spaces from an underground train station to the otherwise under-occupied corner walls of an art museum or gallery, he received many commissions and yet died with scores of unrealized proposals. While echoing the late paintings of BARNETT NEWMAN, who become a prominent supportive colleague, as well as the color shadings of MORRIS LOUIS and Jules Olitski (1922– 2007), Flavin’s exquisite art broaches radiant qualities more typical of such sacred forms as stained glass and religious icons.

FLEISCHER, DAVE AND MAX (14 July 1894–25 June 1979; 17 July 1883–11 September 1972) Among the principal innovators in cinematic animation, these two brothers produced films with human rather than animal characters and, in Betty Boop, creating the epitome of the sophisticated urban woman (who even today makes human sex symbols look reserved). In contrast to WALT DISNEY’s farm boys working in the bright light of Hollywood, the Fleischers were immigrants’ children, the elder born in Vienna; they worked in a studio located within NEW YORK CITY. It was the brothers’ good fortune that the censors who restricted feature films were slow to discover what was happening in short cartoons, eventually forcing the Fleischers to clean up Betty Boop’s highly erotic act. As serious animators, they developed several technical innovations, such as creating the illusion of depth by filming their protagonists on clear cells against a background diorama. What most impresses me, as a sometime dance critic, is the choreography of the Fleischers’ people, whose continuous movements are at once evocative and delicate. My own feeling is that the Fleischers’ post-censorship films, such as Gulliver’s Travels (1939), while longer and more ambitious, are less original and less consequential. Additionally, the Fleischer studio also initiated the characters of Popeye the Sailor, whose superhuman strength depends upon his eating spinach, and Grampie, who lives in a world of RUBE GOLDBERG inventions. Perhaps because I come from the culture of reading, which enables me to flip pages when the going is slow, I’ve always found conventional Hollywood films soporifically languid in ways that cartoons by the Fleischers or TEX AVERY and his associates are not. Thus, to my taste, most of the greatest commercial films are less than thirty minutes in length. The misfortune is, that while books about Disney continue to appear,

150 • FLUXUS extended appreciations of the Fleischers are comparatively scarce.

FLUXUS (1962–78) A multi-art group, both formed and deformed by GEORGE MACIUNAS, roughly on the hierarchical model of SURREALISM, though in the irreverent spirit of DADA. FIuxus included at various times DICK HIGGINS, Robert Watts (1923–88), KEN FRIEDMAN, Jean Dupuy (1926), Wolf Vostell (1932– 98), Ay-O (1931), and ALISON KNOWLES, among others. The myth of FIuxus has always had more success in Europe, whose cultural institutions are more predisposed to understand the concept of an artists’ group, than in America, even though most of its participants were Americans. The best works displayed under the FIuxus banner are audaciously comic, prompting some critics to classify it as “neo-Dada,” though some of the participants were scarcely humorous. In museum exhibitions wholly of Fluxus, individual pieces by Macuinas himself tend to stand out. Especially after Maciunas’s death, Fluxus became a badge reflecting past affiliations, much like an Ivy college diploma, rather than an esthetic category.

Born in Argentina of Italian parents, Fontana moved to Milan in 1905. He began as an abstract sculptor, prolific through the 1930s; but with World War II, he relocated to Buenos Aires, where he published his Manifesto Blanco (1946), which advocated a new art that would exploit such recent technologies as NEON light and TELEVISION. Once he returned to Italy, Fontana issued additional manifestos advocating Spazialismo. In 1947, he pioneered ENVIRONMENTAL ART with a room painted entirely black; two years later came his Ambiente Spuziale, with ultraviolet light that deliberately disoriented the viewer’s perception. In the early 1950s, he made monochromatic canvases to which by the late 1950s he added a clean slit that became his trademark, purportedly suggesting not the desecration of art but space behind the canvas. In the 1960s, he made massive sculptures that were slashed open like his paintings. Though one may disagree about the final value of his work, it is clear that Fontana anticipated many rich ideas that others developed later.

FORD, CHARLES HENRI (10 February 1908–27 September 2002)

Though his “concept art” is thought of as synonymous with CONCEPTUAL ART, it’s different. Henry Flynt originated the former in 1961 with a defining essay and a series of text-and-diagram pieces. First published in the 1963 in An Anthology edited by LAMONTE YOUNG and JACKSON MAC LOW, the text reflects Flynt’s iconoclastic interpretation of language, logic, and mathematics, all of which he later developed in his book Blueprint for a Higher Civilization (Milan, 1975). His concept art was art whose material is not absence, as in orthodox conceptual art, but concepts, ideally heavy concepts (rather than implicit attributions). When Flynt resumed making concept art in 1987, his principles were embodied in exhibited objects. Hailing from North Carolina before he passed through Harvard, Flynt also performs eccentric hillbilly music.

Born in Mississippi, in a year he had successfully kept unknown into his late eighties, Ford edited the first issues of the literary periodical Blues in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1929–30 before moving to Paris in the early thirties, in time to be noticed favorably in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). He subsequently collaborated with the film-critic-to-be Parker Tyler (1904–74) on Young and Evil (1933, in Paris), a pioneering fictional exploration of homosexuality that showed more courage in its choice of subject than in its esthetic moves. Once back in America, Ford edited from 1940 to 1947 VIEW, a journal of American SURREALISM. Ford’s most innovative literary art is to be found in his VISUAL POEMS, largely made from newspaper clippings, appearing first in the self-published and extremely colorful Spare Parts (1966), which is a masterpiece of Book-Art, and then in Silver Flower Coo (1968, printed in black and white). In mixing found texts within a single frame for an art image, they presage structurally similar but larger paintings by Barbara Kruger (1945) that “hit” sometime in the 1980s. Ford also exhibited his photographs, his paintings, and his film Johnny Minotaur (1971).

FONTANA, LUCIO

FOREGROUNDING

(19 February 1899–7 September 1968)

(1920s)

FLYNT, HENRY (1940)

FORMALISTS, RUSSIAN •

Along with DEFAMILIARIZATION, this is a key concept in RUSSIAN FORMALISM, identifying the emphasizing or making visible of a literary element customarily secondary. Examples include works that are primarily about qualities unique to language, such as the tongue-twister, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” which is not about agriculture but the plosive sound of the letter P. Acknowledging its relevance to all the arts, an unidentified scribe behind The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English writes: Rhyme foregrounds the possibilities of echoes in language, of clashes and consonances between sound and meaning; jokes foreground the role of play in interpretation; a plot full of coincidences reveals and foregrounds the controlling hand of the author. What is foregrounded – either by the writer or by the reader – is usually what was previously thought to be absent, or only a background element, or a technical support system. A film, for example, might foreground the placing of the camera; a painting may foreground the painter’s own presence in his or her work [of, in a better example, color alone in monochromic canvases]. What makes foregrounding modernist is the generally unprecedented emphasis upon elements indigenous to an artistic medium.

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building-block units, the basic cells of the perceived experience of both living and art-making. The scripts themselves read like notations of my own process of imagining a theater piece. They are the evidence of a kind of effort in which the mind’s leaps and inventions may be rendered as part of a process not unique to the artist in question (myself) but typical of the building-up which goes on through all modes of coming-into-being (human and nonhuman). I want to refocus the attention of the spectator on the internals, gaps, relations, and rhythms which saturate the objects (acts and physical props) which are the “givens” of any particular play. Perhaps because his work is not easily understood by others, Foreman in the 1970s created his own theater, which is the equivalent of literary self-publishing, nonetheless giving him greater control over performances of his texts. In addition to designing both his stage and his sound to spectacular degrees, Foreman customarily directs his texts and has, indeed, been often present for a performance. He also made the radical move of posting additional texts on his company’s website, inviting people to perform them as they wish. Kosti’s Foreman (2017) is my selection of the best writing from these remarkable texts. Though Foreman has also produced films and published unusual fiction, his genius is essentially theatrical.

FORM(S), DISTINGUISHED FOREMAN, RICHARD (10 June 1937) Because I have known Foreman since high school (and he was a few years ahead of me in college as well), I have followed his work sympathetically from its very beginnings and so feel obliged to say something special here. However, every time I begin to write anything, I find myself so impressed by his own statements that, remembering my vows never to do anything professionally that anyone else can do better and to quote someone else only when they articulate my thoughts better, I reprint one of them here: In 1968, I began to write for the theater that I wanted to see, which was radically different from any style of theater that I had seen. In brief, I imagined a theater which broke down all elements into a kind of atomic structure – and showed those elements of story, action, sound, light, composition, gesture, in terms of the smallest

(forever) What’s important in true art; what makes art Art. Everything else is something else. Simply, innovative form(s) distinguish distinguished avant-garde art. That truth informs this book.

FORMALISTS, RUSSIAN (1914–28) In the years around World War I, several Russian linguists and literary critics attempted to define rigorously the devices and conventions that distinguish literary language from common talk. The name of their group was OPOYAZ, which was an acronym for the Society for the Study of Poetic Language. According to their principal historian Victor Ehrlich (1914–2007), they represented “the first critical movement in Russia which attacked in systematic fashion the problems of rhythm and meter, of style and composition.” The

152 • FORTI, SIMONE major figures were Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984). Whereas Jakobson’s specialty was the elaborate close analysis of innovative poetry, beginning with VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV’s, Skhlovsky concentrated on prose, particularly contributing the useful concept of DEFAMILIARIZATION, which is also translated as “making strange,” which he identified as a quality distinguishing literary language from practical. Another instructive epithet is FOREGROUNDING. The historian Ehrlich wrote: “The Formalist movement had ever since its inception made common cause with the artistic avant-garde. In their early writing, Shklovsky and Jakobson sought to elevate the Futurist experiments into general laws of poetics.” In their disregard of biography and history, the Russian Formalists resembled the New Critics, who became prominent in America in the 1930s. Because of their emphasis on form over content, the Russian Formalists fell to the wrath of the Stalinist demand for a literature of socialist realism. While Shklovsky stayed behind in Leningrad (aka St. Petersburg), producing semiautobiographical texts that incidentally illustrated his theories, Jacobson emigrated first to Prague, where he joined the literary scholar René Wellek (1903–95), among others, in the Prague Linguistic Circle, which survived until the beginnings of World War II, when both men emigrated to America. Wellek became at Yale the principal English-language historian of literary criticism, while Jakobson, eventually at Harvard, became the de facto dean of American Slavic Professors, applying some of his Russian avant-garde experience to many linguistic and literary problems. Meanwhile, Wellek joined an American New Critic, Austin Warren (1899–1986), in writing Theory of Literature (1949, subsequently revised), for many years a popular textbook that advocated the autonomy of the literary work and critical analysis based on “intrinsic” or “specifically literary” qualities. My recollection is that the professors teaching the Theory of Literature to me some six decades ago said nothing about the book’s conceptual origins in Russian Formalism and Russian Futurism, which I had to discover on my own. Perhaps the reason for such neglect is that American New Criticism was more predisposed to irrational religious literature.

FORTI, SIMONE (25 March 1935) Italian-born, American-raised, this dancer/choreographer studied with ANNA HALPRIN and

collaborated with her husbands, successively ROBERT MORRIS and ROBERT WHITMAN, in their MIXED-MEANS performances. Some of her dances reflect MINIMALISM in their simple organizational structures and their use of everyday movements to accomplish particular tasks (thereby meriting the term “task dances”). In Slant-Board (1961), for instance, dancers maneuver on a slanted board by holding onto ropes to prevent total slippage. Huddle (1961) involves dancers huddling in a mass to form a base for members to emerge from and climb over. While continuing to work with improvisational forms, Forti became increasingly interested in childlike and animal movements as a basic vocabulary for her dance. —with Katy Matheson

FOSBURY, DICK (6 March 1947; b. Richard Douglas F.) As an athletic choreographer, he revolutionized the challenge of jumping cleanly over a thin horizontal bar precariously perched above the level of his head. In the 1950s, when the track-team coach taught me competitive high-jumping, I ran toward the high bar from an angle almost parallel and threw my forward leg as high as I could while pushing off the back leg and then, as my body reached the level of the bar, turning my body over it, so that my stomach safely scaled over the bar as I fell to the ground, sometimes landing on my feet in a sawdust pit on ground level. This technique was called a Forward Roll or a Scissors Straddle. In the mid-1960s, Fosbury, while still officially a student, approached the bar, by contrast, from roughly a 25-degree angle and stepped away from the bar before leaping off his outside foot with his back to the bar. As first his shoulders and then his bottom scaled safely over the horizontal bar, he kicked his legs upward before landing on his back on a soft surface a few feet higher than the ground. Even as I write appreciatively about it, decades after first observing it, the technique seems to me counterintuitive. At 6 feet 4 inches in height, Fosbury was able to cross over a bar much taller than he was, winning a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics before eventually establishing a temporary world record at 2.24 meters (or 7 feet 4¼ inches), which is a whole foot higher than he was. So influential was the Fosbury Flop, as it was initially called, that nearly all world-class high jumpers have used his innovative choreography since, especially if they are skinny gals and guys with flatish butts.

THE FOUR HORSEMEN •

FOUND ART (c. 1910s) One of the principal innovations of avant-garde visual arts in the century’s teens was the introduction of real objects into an artistic context. In America, while CHARLES IVES incorporated hymn tunes into classical music, MARCEL DUCHAMP insisted through his “readymades” that a Bicycle Wheel (1913), a Bottle Rack (1914), and even a urinal he called Fountain (1917) be regarded as art. Back in Europe, painters introduced ticket stubs and newspaper clippings into collages that were exhibited as paintings. Not until the 1960s did visual artists become so concerned with estheticizing mundane objects that GEORGE MACIUNAS for one coined the term “Concretism,” which he defined as “the opposite of abstraction.” He continued: The realistic painting is not realistic; it’s illusionistic. You can have illusionistic music; you can have abstract music, you can have concrete music. In music, let’s say if you have an orchestra play, that’s abstract music, because the sounds are all done artificially by musical instruments. But if that orchestra is trying to imitate a storm, say, like Debussy or Ravel do it, that’s illusionistic; it’s still not realistic. But if you’re going to use noises like the clapping of the audience or farting or whatever, now that’s concrete. Or street car sounds, or a whole bunch of dishes falling from the shelf. That’s concrete – nothing illusionist or abstract about it. By the 1980s, found sculptural objects became an overpublicized movement that, at least to those who knew history, seemed derivative. On the other hand, appropriation of another composer’s music, which was a minor development in modernism, became more feasible in the 1990s with computer-assisted SAMPLING.

FOUND POETRY For the poet wishing to discover poetry in language not her or his own, the simplest strategy is to break apart prose into lines, with appropriately sensitive linebreaks. William Butler Yeats took Walter Pater’s prose evocation of the Mona Lisa and, retyping it into free verse, made it the initial poem in his The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). Some of the COMTE DE LAUTRÉAMONT’s Les Chants de Maldoror (posthumously published in 1890) were, scholars later discovered, direct quotations from an 1853 encyclopedia

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of natural history. With this likewise posthumous discovery in mind, consider this rationale for poetic plagiarism found elsewhere in Lautréamont’s writings: “It stays close to the words of an author; it uses his expressions, erasing a false idea and replacing it with a correct one.” The Times Literary Supplement in 1965 published a serial debate over the Scottish poet HUGH MacDIARMID’s authoring of a poem that begins with a verse arrangement of words from another poet’s short story. In introducing MacDiarmid’s Selected Poems (1993), the critic and translator Eliot Weinberger (1949) finds that much of MacDiarmid’s Cornish Heroic Songs for Valda Trevlyn (1937–38) was drawn from “long passages from obscure travel and science books, reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, HERMAN MELVILLE’s letters, the writings of Martin Buber, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger.” JOHN ASHBERY acknowledged that his major early long poem “Europe” contains phrases lifted (and translated) randomly from a 1917 children’s book by William LeQueux, Beryl of the Biplane. The Canadian found poetry advocate JOHN ROBERT COLOMBO identifies the first book wholly composed of found poetry as John S. Barnes’s A Stone, A Leaf, A Door (1945), which consists entirely of the novelist Thomas Wolfe’s prose, broken apart to look like poetry. BERN PORTER composed his “founds” from words in advertising, appropriating typography as well as language, while JOHN CAGE has drawn on Henry David Thoreau and JAMES JOYCE, among others, for his shrewdly chosen source texts. RICHARD KOSTELANETZ has scrambled the opening pages of literary classics in his prose-looking Aftertexts (1987) and the opening pages of his own essays in Recyclings (1973, 1984), which he considers to be implicitly a kind of “literary autobiography.” Though recent developments in the visual arts have given to “appropriation” a new authority that has, curiously, scarcely extended into literary appreciation, writers continue to remember T. S. ELIOT’s succinct advice: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

THE FOUR HORSEMEN (1970–89) They were four Canadians with independent literary reputations who came together to jam, much as freelance jazz musicians do: BP NICHOL; Paul Dutton (1943), who has worked solo in various experimental

154 • FOURTEENTH STREET modes; Rafael Barreto-Rivera (1944), born in Puerto Rico, who has likewise published both texts and tapes; and Steve McCaffery (1948), a London-born writer who deserves a separate entry here, if I could figure out how to summarize his difficult, perhaps excessively obscure work (and so refer curious readers to Marjorie Perloff’s 1991 book, Radical Artifice). The Horsemen’s initial TEXT-SOUND works were collected on a record called CaNADAda (1972), in which the strongest piece is a fugue (“Allegro 108”) that opens, “Ben den hen ken len men pen ken fen men yet,” with one voice chanting alone on a single note. Then a second voice enters, at first chanting nonsynchronously, but then in unison with the initial voice, as a third voice enters, chanting along on a single note. “Allegro 108” develops a steady, emphatic rhythm typical of voices clearly accustomed to working with one another, all devoid of instrumental accompaniment. Other Horsemen collaborations incorporate sentences and fully written texts. After Nichol’s sudden death, the Horsemen fulfilled prior commitments as a trio and then disbanded.

FOURTEENTH STREET (20th century) Within every city hospitable to a large number of working artists is a boundary commonly acknowledged as separating artists from the larger world; and just as artists are reluctant to venture to the other side of this line, so residents of the greater city acknowledge difference. In Manhattan for most of the 20th century a dividing line was 14th Street that stretched from the East River to the Hudson River in lower Manhattan. Below 14th Street was Greenwich Village to the west and then the scruffy East Village to the East. As streets with a higher number were uptown, each side regarded as the other as “unsafe,” albeit differently. After 1970 or so, when an industrial slum further south (and downtown) was renovated into ARTISTS’ SOHO, while apartment houses were built in the middle parts of Greenwich Village, the dividing line shifted one kilometer south (and parallel) to Houston Street, where it roughly remained to the end of the century. In other cities hospitable to communities of artists are similar dividing lines, perhaps less definite, sometimes only barely acknowledged.

FRACTAL GEOMETRY (1975)

Examining what he memorably called “the art of roughness,” the Polish-French-American polymathic mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–2010) showed that what initially appeared disordered, such as the curved lines of a seacoast, actually showed some regularity that he called “fractals.” This discovery prompted certain ambitious artists to work backwards, so to speak, creating a fractal art. As most of it so far resembles psychedelic mandalas or OP ART, one artist with an individual entry here amusingly judges, “It was always rigorously boring to me.” That is to measure that its LEONARDO(a)s either haven’t yet appeared or made their work known. As is said about one’s favorite team at the end of a baseball season, “Wait ’til next year.”

FRAMING (1913) This is perhaps the most appropriate epithet for the modernist practice of taking a common object and giving it a title that poses artistic challenge. The classics, of course, were MARCEL DUCHAMP’s offering to art exhibitions a store-bought bicycle wheel mounted upside down on a wooden stool, a snow shovel titled “From Marcel Duchamp” (1915, and later retitled “In Advance of a Broken Arm”), and a porcelain urinal that he titled Fountain (1917). No doubt reflecting Duchamp’s seminal influence, FRANCIS PICABIA in 1920 published in the initial number of the DADA magazine Cannibale a page titled at its bottom “Natures Morte.” Around three sides of the image of an ugly toy monkey were the words “Portrait de” followed by the hallowed names of Cezanne, Renoir, and Rembrandt. MAN RAY’s Gift (1921) is a common household iron with a row of tacks protruding from its flat surface. As much of the significance of these moves have depended upon the reputation of the artist at the time they were offered to the public, few similar framings since have embodied so much weight.

FRANCIS, LINDA (8 January 1943) In the AGNES MARTIN tradition of subtle abstract drawing, Linda Francis has worked on various surfaces (mostly paper, including fiberglass) with various chalks and charcoal for diverse visual effects. Initially using grids, she turned to circular imagery, particularly spirals derived from photographs of the stars, often intersected with curving lines. Another theme of her work

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT •

is different sizes that require different physical movements. As she told an interviewer: When I draw the small notes with, a paintbrush, the relationship I have with the page is that of writing. The movements are at the scale of the brush (the quantity of ink it can hold) as well as that of my hand, or even that of my fingers holding it, for the whole hand need not move. The wrist is the center of my arcs. For the middle-size drawings, on the contrary, the movement I have to make requires the whole arm. The scale is different, and the pastel, chalk, or charcoal require more energy . . . . Finally, when I use the large format, my whole body must move, and the way the chalk is used becomes an extension of the body. Needless to say perhaps, Francis’s drawings reflect these unusual sensitivities about physicality and scale.

FRANK, PETER (3 July 1950) The JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER of his generation, Frank is a polymathic critic, stronger at enthusiasm than discrimination, who has written about all the arts. More skilled at writing reviews than books, he should have become an interdepartmental newspaper critic; but, since this has not occurred, there is reason to believe that newspaper executives today are not as culturally sophisticated as they were in Huneker’s times. Thus, at various times, Frank has written for innumerable art and music magazines. In the late 1980s, this native New Yorker moved to California, writing for local journals and curating exhibitions for local museums. Peter Frank’s books include an intelligently annotated bibliography of the Something Else Press and a less intelligent survey of visual arts in the problematic 1980s.

FRANKENTHALER, HELEN (12 December 1928–27 December 2011) Her genuine innovation was saturating a large unprimed canvas set not on a wall but on the floor with oil paint heavily diluted with turpentine. After several applications that she dubbed “soak stain” she realized an unprecedentedly rich translucent surface that resembled watercolor but needed a frame to be Art rather than just color. Onto such qualitatively different painterly surfaces she placed images that appear to

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float. Mountains and Sea (1952) launched her presence soon after her graduation from college. As other painters took up her departure, their results were called “Color Field.” Pretentious titling (e.g., Greek myths, Biblical references) gave her canvases the illusion of more depth. As too often happens to an artist whose youthful successes aren’t duplicated, falling below fashion made a hot painter cooler.

FRECON, SUZAN (12 February 1941) The distinguishing mark of her visual art is deeply saturated monochromic geometric shapes variously placed within a larger canvas. Pure traditional colors, which she favors, thus become reductive and expressive without alluding to anything outside themselves. In a larger painting purchased by me, 70 inches by 84 inches (c. 1980), a large black rectangle, if observed from an appropriate distance, will shimmer away from its larger surrounding white field. To put it differently, what initially appeared as empty space becomes very full space. Not until the 21st century were Frecon’s highly unique paintings, often composed decades before, prominently exhibited.

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT (1967) This extraordinary American legal innovation entitles every American citizen to have a copy of any government document including his or her name. Passed by Congress and signed by the president Lyndon B. Johnson, the FOIA has enabled artists such as the painter Arnold Mesches (1923–2016) to get authentic documents and even exhibit them in galleries and/or reprint them in books as higher examples of FOUND ART. When I in 1982 told the German-American-East German novelist Stefan Heym (1913–2001), then living in Communist East BERLIN about the FOIA, he recalled that he’d been an American citizen and thus qualified, even though he no longer paid American taxes. So the New York Times reported a few years later that a large package had come directly to his DDR home from Washington, DC, with information that he probably incorporated into his autobiographical writings. Thanks to the FOIA, I was able to document how an NEA top grant to me for BOOK-ART in 1985 was surreptitiously killed only to be partially restored. Though the names of individual speakers were “redacted” (i.e., blacked out), anyone could tell from the document’s

156 • FREUD, SIGMUND list of names participating in the mugging who was speaking what. None of these artistic and literary moves could have been done before the FOIA. Consider the fact that it still stands, though forever disrespected by government functionaries, to be a tribute to the avant-garde American principles of uncovering secrets and respecting freedoms.

FREUD, SIGMUND (6 May 1856–23 September 1939; b. Sigismund Schlomo F.) As a false messiah who could not deliver what he promised, he misled generations of artists and writers not only in the creation of art but in understanding art made by others. Huge amounts of bad art and bad criticism paraded his influence. By the 21st century, Freud is seen as epitomizing a stubborn fashion that has finally gone out of fashion. Failing the tests of science, psychoanalysis wasn’t particularly effective treating individuals with therapeutic needs. Some biographers note that for himself Freud preferred cocaine. What kept his personal reputation going was his own effectiveness as a writer. This last truth was brilliantly documented by the American literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman (1919–70) in The Tangled Bank (1962), which incidentally includes a companion literary appreciation of Karl Marx (1818–83), another mischievous writer whose deleterious influence was less upon the destruction of minds than the killing of bodies.

FREUNDLICH, OTTO (10 July 1878–9 March 1943) An early abstract painter, he made a style of swatches of pure color that still look distinctive. Starting late as an artist in his native Prussia, he didn’t begin sculpting until his late twenties; yet by 1908 he was in Paris, befriending PICASSO, among others. Later in Köln, he helped organize the first DADA exhibition there in 1919. Back in Paris in 1929, he exhibited with CERCLE ET CARRÉ and then Abstraction-Création. Nazi authorities condemned his work as “degenerate,” destroying some that remained in Germany, particularly a monumental sculpture Der Neue Mensch (The New Man) that was featured in a notorious “Degenerate Art” exhibition. Initially interned by the French during World War II until released, reportedly after Picasso’s intervention, Freundlich was arrested and deported to a concentration camp where, already

in his mid-sixties, he died the day he arrived. (Though no other individual featured in this book ended so miserably, another notable painter dying in the Holocaust was Rudolf Levy [1875–1944].) For his utopian writings Freundlich should also be remembered: “Ours will for the first time accomplish the union of man with the whole earth and will thus change nostalgia and desire for far-away things into something else, certainly much greater, although everywhere within our reach.” Gabi Heleen Bollinger’s film, Das Geht Nur Langsam (2012, It Takes Time), recalls his dream “to build streets of sculpture running through Europe symbolizing his Utopian vision of a World Society.”

FREYTAG-LORINGHOVEN, ELSA VAN (12 July 1874–15 December 1927; b. Else Hildegard Plötz) Born in eastern Germany, the daughter of a contractor, she married a baron whose hyphenated family name she appropriated. Arriving in the New York art world before the beginning of World War I, she became known as the “Baroness,” producing new art and writing in her second language, English – the most hysterical, Expressionist poetry to appear in avant-garde magazines at that time. A typical title is “MineselfMinesoul-and-Mine-Cast-lron Lover,” which includes such lines as this: “Heia! ja-hoho! hisses mine starryeyed soul in her own language.” (She also wrote German poems that remain untranslated.) Freytag-Loringhoven collaborated with the American artist Morton Schamberg (1881–1918) in his classic sculpture God (1916), made out of a plumbing trap and miter, perhaps, as some suggest, selecting the object herself, while Schamberg only took the legendary photograph. Though she had not participated in any European DADA, Freytag-Loringhoven became a center of its New York incarnation, curiously realizing a celebrity there that was unavailable to her back home. Though scarcely young when she came to America, the Baroness’s displays of her nude self became legendary among her contemporaries (and incidentally make subsequent artist-exhibitionists seem esthetically slight). In his Life Among the Surrealists (1962), Matthew Josephson remembers: She decorated her own person in a mechanistic style of her own device, shaving her head and painting it purple; wearing an inverted scuttle for a hat, a vegetable grater as a brooch, long ice-cream

FRYE, NORTHROP •

spoons for earrings, and metal teaballs attached to her pendulant breasts. Thus adorned and clad in an old fur coat, or simply a Mexican blanket, and very little underneath, Freytag-Loringhoven would saunter forth to serve as one of the truly curious sights of the ‘Village’ forty years ago. In An American Artist’s Story (1939), George Biddle recalls: Having asked me in her high-pitched German stridency, whether I required a model, I told her I should like to see her in the nude. With a royal gesture she swept apart the folds of a scarlet raincoat. She stood before me quite naked – or nearly so. Over the nipples of her breasts were two tin tomato cans, fastened with a green string around her back. Between the tomato cans hung a very small bird cage and within it a crestfallen canary. One arm was covered from wrist to shoulder with celluloid curtain rings, pilfered from a furniture display in Wanamaker’s. She removed her hat, trimmed with gilded carrots, beets, and other vegetables. Her hair was close-cropped and dyed vermillion. Decades later, someone not too swift coined the term “Body Art” for self-decoration of this sort. She is sometimes credited with finding the actual urinal that Marcel Duchamp exhibited under his own name in the monumental ARMORY SHOW. In the 21st century have appeared novels and films about her.

FRIEDMAN, KEN (19 November 1949) Few artists ever involved with avant-garde arts ever had a career similar to his – a career that might define possibilities or be a dead-end. Connecting while still a teenager to GEORGE MACIUNAS, he became (by far) the youngest participant in official FLUXUS, producing mostly texts that are remembered only in its history. Unlike his artist colleagues, Friedman got advanced degrees, including a doctorate from United States International University, as well as a suit and tie, and so began a remarkable academic career not in his native country but, no joke, at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo and then the Danish Design School in Copenhagen. From these he moved to Melbourne, Australia, where he became Dean of the Faculty at the Swinburne University of Technology. By 2017 he was Chair Professor of Design

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Innovation Studies at Tongji University in Shanghai, China. Institutional positions aren’t often mentioned in this dictionary, because avant-garde artists rarely score them; but with Friedman, his peripatetic career through institutions around the world represents an American artist’s unique work of art, sort of. Perhaps the closest semblance is Peter Weibel (1944), a media artist and bookmaker born in Odessa (USSR) and educated in Austria and France, who assumed positions in Canada, America, and Austria, before becoming in 1999 the chief of the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.

FROGTHINK (1970s) This has been my coinage for purportedly critical writing that is more concerned with spouting a highfalutin rhetoric and self-consistent thinking than in defining worldly realities. It is scarcely new. In his classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852), the Scottish author Charles Mackay (1814–89) speaks in passing of a French philosopher who “had constructed a very satisfactory theory on some subject or other, and was not a little proud of it.” “But the facts, my dear fellow,” said his friend, “the facts do not agree with your theory. Don’t they?” replied the philosopher, shrugging his shoulders, “then, tant pis pour le faits”; – so much the worse for the facts. It would be mistake to think that only French speakers practice frogthink. Germans have done it for decades, but some Americans only recently. If only because frogthinkers think their style avant-garde, they often choose genuinely avant-garde art to be the subjects, or victims, of their discourse. The epitome of narcissistic writing, frogthink is meant to impress immediate superiors without aspiring, pretenses to the contrary, to any lasting value.

FRYE, NORTHROP (14 July 1912–23 January 1991; b. Herman N. F.) A loyal Canadian, Frye spent nearly his entire life in the country where he was born and mostly educated, even though he became for a time the most influential literary theorist in the entire English-speaking world.

158 • FULLER, BUCKMINSTER Perhaps because his first major book dealt with WILLIAM BLAKE, Frye had a broad conception of literary possibility. Thanks to an extraordinary memory for literary detail, as well as a capacity to view the largest cultural terrain from a great Olympian distance, he could make generalizations appropriate to many examples. He belongs in this book less for his major theories, which remain influential, than for passing insights into avant-garde writing that remain freshly persuasive. More than once have I quoted this nugget: Literature seems to be intermediate between music and painting: its words form rhythms which approach a musical sequence of sounds at one of its boundaries, and form patterns which approach the hieroglyphic or pictorial image at the other. The attempt to get as near to these boundaries as possible forms the main body of what is called experimental writing. One virtue of these sentences is accurately placing not only VISUAL POETRY but TEXT-SOUND in the largest artistic context. Respecting Frye’s extraordinary talents for aphorisms, JOHN ROBERT COLOMBO, himself an accomplished aphorist, edited The Northrop Frye Quote Book (2014).

Figure 3 Biosphere from Expo 67, Montreal. Geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. Photo by Minja Kim.

FULLER, BUCKMINSTER (12 July 1895–1 July 1983; Richard Buckminster F.) The architectural historian Wayne Andrews (1913–87) identified, in his Architecture, Ambition, and Americans (1955), two indigenous architectural traditions,

producing buildings as fundamentally different as their rationales. One, typified in American thought by William James (1842–1910), holds that a beautiful building will enhance the lives of all who dwell within and around it, as elegant architecture supposedly doth elegant people make. The second tradition, from Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), holds that, because a building’s usefulness as a human habitat is primary, technical efficiency and human considerations create architectural quality and perhaps a certain kind of beauty. The most original and profound Veblenian was Fuller, who based his architecture upon the “dymaxion” principle (the maximalization of dynamic performance), which he related to industrial ephemeralization: the achievement of increasingly more production from increasingly fewer materials; the practical advantages of mass production; and the universal applicability of architectural solutions. Because Fuller came to architecture from an education in engineering and experience in a business selling construction materials, his designs lack discernible stylistic antecedents. Fuller’s Dymaxion House (1927) is a circular multiroom area 50 feet in diameter, suspended by cable from a central unit, 40 feet high, that can be set into the ground anywhere on earth. The living space is partitioned into several rooms, while the volume between its floor and the ground can be curtained and filled to the owner’s taste – its most likely use being an indoor parking place. Above the living space is an open-air landing partially shaded from the sun by a suspended roof. A later version, built closer to the ground, was the Wichita House, a circular aluminum shell-plus-utilitycore that Fuller tried to mass-produce after World War II. The dymaxion principle also informed the Kleenex House, a 15-foot surrogate tent designed for the US Marine Corps. Fuller claimed it would be “one-third the weight of a tent, cost one-fifteenth as much, use less than ten dollars’ worth of materials, and be packed into a small box,” in sum exemplifying his three principles. Extending his bias for doing more with less, Fuller suggested that distances commonly bridged by cables or girders should instead be spanned by a network of three-dimensional triangles (actually, tetrahedrons) often built up into larger networks; for Fuller’s innovative truth, strangely not recognized by earlier builders, was that the triangular tetrahedron more effectively distributes weight and tension than the rectangular shapes traditionally favored. The most effective overarching form for these tetrahedrons was the geodesic dome, which could span spaces of theoretically unlimited diameters with an unprecedentedly lightweight structure, demonstrating the dymaxion principle of high performance per pound. The first full realization of this last innovation was the 93-foot rotunda for a

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Ford plant in Detroit (1953); the most successful is the nearly complete sphere, over 200 feet in diameter, that Fuller built for EXPO 67 in Montreal. This had a grandeur that, in my experience, was implicitly Jamesian, particularly since several interior levels made its tetrahedrons visible from various angles and the Lucite skin changed color in response to the outside climate. Because other structures were as large as 384 feet in diameter, enclosing two-and-a-half acres, Fuller proposed constructing domes miles in diameter over whole cities or neighborhoods. One proposal for a dome over midtown Manhattan would have weighed 80,000 tons and cost 200 million dollars. Don’t forget Fuller’s writings, which are in their coinages and complex sentences as stylistically original as his thinking: Living upon the threshold between yesterday and tomorrow, which threshold we reflexively assumed in some long ago yesterday to constitute an eternal now, we are aware of the daily occurring, vast multiplication of experience-generated information by which we potentially may improve our understanding of our yesterday’s experiences and therefrom derive our most farsighted preparedness for successive tomorrows. It is not surprising that PETR KOTIK, who had previously composed an extended choral piece to a difficult GERTRUDE STEIN text, Many Many Women (1978/80), did likewise with selected passages from Fuller’s two-volume Synergetics (1976, 1979).

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to quote a contemporaneous reviewer. Her recent biographers Richard and Maria Ewing Current credit Fuller with “another invention[:] an arrangement of mirrors set at an angle to one another, with a row of incandescent bulbs along each of the joined edges, so as to reflect a ‘bewildering maze of dancers, skirts, and colors.’” Fuller was so popular that Parisian couturiers sold dresses based on her costumes. Although she apparently had little dance training, improvised movement became an important element in her performances. Portraying herself as tall and lovely, the master illusionist was actually short and stumpy, her features, plain. She billed herself as “Le Loïe Fuller,” adding an umlaut to an unfamiliar place, because, according to the Currents, “without those two dots above the ‘ï’ [her name] would be ‘Lwah’ in French and the word ‘the goose,’ or ‘law.’” Notwithstanding all her years and fame abroad, Fuller retained her American citizenship. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) wrote: When Loïe Fuller’s Chinese Dances unwound A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth, It seemed that a dragon of air Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round. Because many other leading artistic figures found Fuller’s work enchanting – among them Anatole France (1844–1964), Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), and STEPHANE MALLARMÉ – and more than seventy artists in ten countries portrayed her in lithographs, pastels, and sculptures, her performances were remembered long after she ceased presenting them. The Italian arts historian Giovanni Lista (1943) has reportedly written the fullest reconstructions of her performances. —with Katy Matheson

(22 January 1862–2 January 1928; b. Mary Louise F.) An American dancer and theater artist, Fuller achieved great fame in Europe, especially in France, where she made her debut at the Folies-Bergere in 1892 and where, at the 1900 Paris World Fair, a special theater was built to house her performances (much as theaters were later built especially for CIRQUE DE SOLEIL). Fuller was renowned for spectacular stage effects that she accomplished through the use of colored lights, diaphanous cloth (such as silk), and mechanical devices (such as the use of wooden sticks to extend the lines of her arms). For her popular Fire Dance, she reportedly required fourteen electricians who, responding to her taps and gestures as she danced on glass, would change the light emanating from below, creating the illusion of smoke and flame. She put her performers on pedestals with glass tops so that, when illuminated from underneath, they “would appear to be mysteriously suspended in air,”

FURNITURE MUSIC See AMBIENT MUSIC.

FURNIVAL, JOHN (29 May 1933) Trained as a visual artist and for many years a professor at the Bath Academy in western England, Furnival in the early 1960s developed a highly original and indubitably personal style of building up layers of words, usually chosen with taste and literacy, into architecturally representational structures, done not on small sheets of paper but on pieces of wood (doors, actually), 6 feet high and a few feet wide. In the words

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Figure 4 Section of John Furnival’s Tours de Babel Changées en Ponts, 1964. Photo by Minja Kim.

that make the shape of La Tour Eiffel (1964) are, for instance, the puns “eye full” and “Evefall.” The word “lift” turns into “ascenseur” where the elevator is, and among other representational markings is “echafaudage” (or “scaffolding”) on the other leg. If only for its scale and scope of reference, Tours de Babel Changées en Ponts (1964) is Furnival’s greatest work, if not the masterpiece of its kind. Onto six panels, each originally a wooden door onto which Furnival drew and stamped words in ink, all together 12 feet in length and 6½” feet high (and usually displayed in a semicircular form), this work tells of the evolution of language. A key image is a succession of word bridges (with here and there the names of the great 19th-century bridge builders) connecting the otherwise isolated towers. The panels can be read from left to right as well as from right to left, and from top to bottom and back again. As they contain more secrets than anyone can count, Furnival’s visually arranged words must be read as closely and completely as those of any modern poet.

Italian Futurism began with the poet F. T. MARINETTI publishing in, of all places, the prominent Parisian newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909 a manifesto that, in bombastically provocative language, proclaimed the birth of a new literary and social movement purportedly of the young. In what remains a masterpiece of manifesto writing (apart from its impact), Marinetti exalted movement and change, in addition to appealing to Italian pride (in French!). “Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry” is his second tenet. “A racing car” is portrayed as “more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” What began in literature had more currency in visual art, with the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters signed the following year by the painters GIACOMO BALLA, UMBERTO BOCCIONI, Carlo D. Carrà (1881–1966), GINO SEVERINI, and LUIGI RUSSOLO. While his associates continued to publish manifestos with titles like Futurist Photodynamism (1911), Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1912), Chromophony – The Colors of Sounds (1913), The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells (1913), and Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing (1913), Marinetti’s subsequent declarations focused upon literature: Destruction of Syntax – Imagination without Strings – Words in Freedom (1913), The Variety Theatre (1913), The Futurist Synthetic Theater (1915), and The Futurist Cinema (1916, with others). Apart from what one might think of individual Futurist artists and works, it is hard to dispute the opinion that no other group published so many brilliant manifestos, filled as they are with provocations that remain no less radical today than more than a century ago. Needing devices for portraying movement within two-dimensional frames, the Futurist painters turned to CUBISM for the structure of overlapping planes that, since Cubism was new at the time, contributed to Futurism’s avant-garde image. However, Futurism distinguished itself from Cubism by a visual agitation that was perceived to represent heightened expression. Among the masterpieces of Futurist painting are Boccioni’s The Forces of a Street (1911), Severini’s NordSud (1912), and Carrà’s Interventional Demonstration (1914); on the highest level is Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms in Space (1913). Energized by one another, these Futurist painters developed so rapidly that, by 1915, they gained individual identities, united only by memories of the initial manifestos. It is commonly said that the highest phase

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of Italian Futurism ended in 1916 with the death of Boccioni (who fell from a horse). Nonetheless, thanks to frequent translations of those manifestos, Futurist ideas had a discernible influence, especially upon artists in Russia, but also upon those in England, Germany, and America. In the small Italian city of Bassano del Grappa, the Galleria Dieda in 1997 mounted an exhibition titled Da Pagina a Spazio of creditable visual and visual-verbal works by women involved with Italian Futurism, among them Marietta Angelini (1868–1942), Emma Marpillero (1896–1985), Irma Valeria (1897–1988), Rosa Rosa (1884–1978), Benedetta (Cappa Marinetti) (1897–1977), Alzira Braga (1900–30), and Regina (1894–1974), all of whose names were previously unknown, at least to me. Such feminist exhibitions implicitly remind us that in every modernist movement were women, often wives or lovers, whose work was unjustifiably neglected during macho times, who remain to be discovered, albeit decades later. Indeed, in a large 2014 Italian Futurism retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, Ms. Marinetti’s visual art, then exhibited under her married name, looked particularly strong.

FUTURISM (RUSSIAN) (1909–17) The premier avant-garde movement in Russian literature, Futurism was in part a reaction to Symbolism, which nonetheless shared the latter’s interest in the sound texture of the word and in the work’s suggestive power beyond its denotative meaning. Russian Futurism is customarily divided into two wings. Ego-Futurism, centered in St. Petersburg, focused upon romantic hyperbolization of the poet-ego. Its chief figures were Igor Severyanin (1887–1941, who gave the movement its name in 1911), Konstantin Olimpov (1889–1940), and Ivan Ignatyev (1892–1914). The last was particularly important as a publisher of a series of Futurist miscellanies. While the Ego-Futurists’ imagery could be extravagant, they were verbally less experimental than the second group, the CUBO-FUTURISTS, centered in Moscow. This group numbered among its members three of the most important and innovative poets of the 20th century: VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV, ALEKSEI KRUCHONYKH, and Vladimir MAYAKOVSKY. Vasilisk Gnedov (1890–1978), nominally associated with the Ego-Futurists, demonstrated some of the same verbal inventiveness as the Cubo-Futurists. While both groups had been active since 1909 and were to some extent familiar with the activities of the Italian Futurists, they developed independently of

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the Italian movement and did not share its militaristic aspirations. What finally caught the attention of the Russian public was “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912), signed by Kruchonykh, Khlebnikov, and Mayakovsky, along with David Burliuk (1882–1967), if only for this oft-quoted line: “Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc. etc., overboard from the Ship of Modernity.” Other statements in the manifesto argued for the poet’s right to create “arbitrary and derivative words (word-novelty)” and for the “self-sufficient word.” This soon led to the rise of ZAUM (translational language), the most radical development in 20th-century poetry. Kruchonykh’s “dyr bul shchyl” (1913) and his opera Victory Over the Sun (1913) epitomize early Zaum. The Cubo-Futurists were also innovative in introducing visual effects into Russian literature, ranging from primitive manuscript books to floridly typographed works. The year 1913 was the high point of Russian Futurism, the most important events and publications all occurring in that year, which ended with a well-publicized tour of the provinces. By 1917, a new center had formed in the Georgian capital of Tiflis with ILIA ZDANEVICH (AKA ILIAZD), Kruchonykh, and Igor Terentiev (1892–1937) as the core of a group called 41°. This group produced particularly radical examples of Zaum and innovative visual effects in their texts. In 1921, Kruchonykh joined forces once again in Moscow with Mayakovsky, around whom the group Left Front of the Arts (LEF) formed; they published a journal of the same name. They propagandized for the role of Futurism as the truly revolutionary art most appropriate for the new socialist society. However, neither the Bolshevik government nor proletarian writers and critics were sympathetic. By the later 1920s, the movement had disappeared, its members succumbing to the demand to produce less radical and politically more acceptable writing. Futurism is credited with having a strong impact on the development of RUSSIAN FORMALISM, CONSTRUCTIVISM, and OBERIU, an acronym for a group of writers formed in the late 1920s. Futurism’s achievements are still being discovered by a new generation of Russian avant-gardists who were ignorant of the movement until the liberalization under glasnost. —Gerald Janecek

FUTURIST MUSIC FUTURISM is a modern movement in the arts that emerged in Italy early in the 20th century, under the aegis of the Italian poet F. T MARINETTI. Its

162 • FUTURIST MUSIC musical credo was formulated by Balilla Pratella (1880–1955) in his Manifesto of Futurist Musicians issued in Milan on 11 October 1910 and supplemented by a Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music of 11 March 1911. On 11 March 1913 Luigi Russolo published his own Futurist Manifesto. In these declarations the Italian Futurists proclaimed their complete disassociation from classical, romantic, and IMPRESSIONIST music and announced their aim to build an entirely new music inspired by the reality of life in the new century, with the machine as the source of inspiration. And since modern machines were most conspicuous by the noise they made, Pratella and Russolo created a new art of noises, Arte dei Rumori. Russolo designed special noise instruments and subdivided them into six categories. His instruments were rudimentary and crude, with amplification obtained by megaphones, but there is no denying that the Futurists provided a prophetic vision of the

electronic future of fifty years later. It is interesting to note that most Futurist musicians and poets were also painters. Their pictures, notably those of Luigi Russolo, emphasized color rather than machinelike abstractions, and generally approximated the manner of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. In the music by Pratella and others we find a profusion of modern devices of their Futurist day, with a foremost place given to the Whole-Tone Scale. The Futurists gave monody preference over polyphony, and steady rhythm over asymmetry. The future of the Futurists appears passé, but they opened the gates to the experimenters of the actual chronological future, which none of them lived to witness. The Italian pianist/composer/visual artist Daniele Lombardi (1946–2018) produced many respectful recordings of this music in the 21st century. —with Nicolas Slonimsky

G

GABO, NAUM (5 August 1890–23 August 1977; b. Naum Neemia Pevsner) Born in Russia, Gabo studied medicine and engineering in Germany before returning to his homeland in 1920. Back in Russia, he joined his older brother Antoine Pevsner (1886–1962) in drafting a Realistic Manifesto (1920) that established the principles of what became European Constructivism, in contrast to the CONSTRUCTIVISM that VLADIMIR TATUN, among others, advocated in Russia. While in Russia, Gabo made Virtual Kinetic Volume (1920, also known as Kinetic Sculpture), a vibrating strip of steel that is customarily identified as the first artwork to incorporate a motor. Taking transparency to a higher level, his later sculptures defined space not with volumes but by a frame of uniquely curved lines that became his SIGNATURE. Objecting to the Soviet government’s regimentation of artistic activities, Gabo moved west, first to BERLIN, then to Paris and to England, until he came to the United States in 1946, becoming an American citizen in 1952. Once in America, Gabo worked inventively with strings strung within a frame in a series titled Linear Construction (1942–43), while specializing in monuments, which often remained proposals, and monumental sculptures for new buildings.

GALTON, FRANCIS (16 February 1822–17 January 1911) One of the most fecund inventors of the late 19th century, he incidentally discovered in the 1880s the departure of composite photography by taking several exposures of the same person and then printing them superimposed, their eyes becoming the constant peg, to make an image unavailable not only to normal vision but also to ordinary photography. During his

long life Galton also explored meteorology (inventing the first weather map), psychology (identifying SYNAESTHESIA), acoustics, anthropology, statistics, and genetics. While most of Galton’s work was readily acceptable, as honors including a British knighthood were bestowed on him, the proto-utopian novel that he wrote in the last year of his life went unpublished for a century. Though a niece reportedly destroyed parts that she found objectionable, Kantsaywhere has since appeared, much like other lost literature, online (2011), to be recognized as precursor to a certain strain of science fiction.

GANCE, ABEL (25 October 1889–10 November 1981) Initially an actor, Gance made unsuccessful short silent films before returning to the stage. Resuming his film career during World War I, he experimented with close-ups and tracking shots, which were at the time thought to be confusing techniques. By 1917, according to the film lexicographer Ephraim Katz (1932–92), “He was considered important enough as a director for his picture to appear ahead of the stars in a film’s title sequence. This was to become a personal trademark of all Gance’s silent films.” He made the first major film about the horrors of the Great War, J’accuse/I Accuse (1919) with footage he shot with real soldiers in real battles, for successful release just after Armistice Day. His technique of quickly cutting from scene to scene, from horror to horror, influenced filmmakers coming of age at that time. After the commercial failure of La Roue (1923), which began as thirty-two reels (over five hours) before being abridged to twelve, he made his most stupendous film, Napoleon (1927), which remains a monumental masterpiece. Initially an epic on the scale of D. W. GRIFFITH’s Intolerance (1918), it is also technically innovative. The concluding sections of the film

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164 • GANGEMI, KENNETH were shot by three synchronized cameras to be shown simultaneously on three screens, in a technique resembling CINERAMA, which came thirty years later. When these additional images appear, toward the end of the film, they produce a gasp of awe, even decades later. Other parts were shot in two-camera 3-D and in color, but not used. Unfortunately, this Gance film failed commercially. One source reports that the threescreen format was seen in only eight European cities. The version shown at the time in America was so drastically butchered it was incomprehensible. Several years later, Gance recorded stereophonic sound effects that he wanted to add to the master print. Beginning in the 1930s, he made melodramas on familiar historical subjects (e.g., Lucrezia Borga, Beethoven, Cyrano, and D’Artagnan). Only in the 1970s, thanks to the culturally responsible Hollywood director Francis Ford Coppola (1939), was the original three-screen version of Napoleon made available to American audiences. When I saw it at Manhattan’s immense Radio City Music Hall, it knocked me out. Though Gance lived long enough to see his innovations exploited elsewhere, he was never again encouraged to make innovative film.

GANGEMI, KENNETH (23 November 1937) An early MINIMALIST writer, Gangemi published a “novel” called Olt (1969) that was only sixty pages long. It was written not as a sequence of paragraphs but as a collection of highly resonant sentences, all about a man with minimal emotional affect. His next book, Lydia (1970), has even more severe fictions, some of them merely listings of elements in a narrative; certain poems consist of only a single word. He has also published prose poems, a novel in the form of an unrealized film script (The Interceptor Pilot, 1980), and a memoir of traveling in Mexico (Volcanoes from Puebla, 1979). A friend of mine for a half-century, he has worked for decades on a mammoth novel about a single day in New York City in the late 1990s, implicitly acknowledging the precedence of JAMES JOYCE’s ULYSSES.

of truly eccentric literature, beginning with his elaborately annotated and introduced editions of Lewis Carroll: The Annotated Alice (1960) and The Annotated Snark (1962), the latter dealing with the more daunting Carroll text. Furthermore, some of Gardner’s appreciations of OULIPO, among other avant-garde writers mentioned here, appeared in his regular column in Scientific American, illustrating the instructive principle that literacy about advanced science might be good preparation for understanding advanced literature, and vice versa. Otherwise, Gardner’s The New Ambidextrous Universe (1964) influenced, among others, VLADIMIR NABOKOV, who mentions the book on page 542 of his novel Ada (1969). In 1992, when JOHN ROBERT COLOMBO edited an anthology of stories less than fifty words long, he sent copies to several like-minded enthusiasts, asking in part for suggestions for a future edition. In reply the most nominations came from Martin Gardner. On the other hand, his The Night Is Large (1996), erroneously subtitled “Collected Essays,” demonstrates the breadth and depth of Gardner’s intellectual concerns. Much like other widely published magazine writers, he wrote clearly and cleanly. Only H. L. MENCKEN, among modern essayists, ever published as many books that are essentially collections of essays. As no one else on such a variety of daunting subjects, his intellectual range was perhaps unrivaled. Don’t be surprised to find that no other book about contemporary art or writing honors his name.

GARDNER, MARTIN (21 October 1914–22 May 2010) A truly independent writer for most of his life, noted mostly for his books about science and pseudoscience, Gardner also became incidentally a primary scholar

Figure 5 Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló. Photo by Rob Tallia.

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One Gaudi assumption, made particularly clear in his later years, was that, whereas the straight line belonged to man, the curved line was God’s. Because Gaudi’s style is so eccentric, it had scarce acceptance and scattered influence. Curiously, the later masterpiece most resembling Gaudi’s esthetic is the Los Angeles Watts Towers of SIMON RODIA, an ItalianAmerican handyman who may or may not have known of Gaudi’s work. Too bad he didn’t survive long enough to work in LAS VEGAS.

GENDER Figure 6 Casa Batlló Roof. Photo by Rob Tallia.

GAUDÍ, ANTONI (25 June 1852–10 June 1926) By the measure of images alone, Gaudi was the most original architect of early modern times. Influenced by Catalonian philosophers who glorified earlier Spanish arts and crafts, Gaudi developed a taste for undulating lines, ornamental details, ornate additions, compelling materials, and colorful paint – all in sharp contrast to the austere esthetic that later informed the streamlined International Style. For instance, Gaudi’s Church of the Sagrada Familia (1883–1926, Sacred Family) has three open doorways leading to four towers intertwined at their bases, their diagonal spires rising to a height over 100 meters. At the top of each tower is an ornate echo of a flower. Though Gaudi worked on it for four decades, this church was unfinished at his death and thus more interesting for suggesting what additionally he might have done. Established in the Catalonian city of Barcelona, Gaudi distributed his buildings all over the city to give it a personal architectural definition perhaps unique in the Western world. Literally, his architecture is everywhere – not only in the famous church but in apartment houses, private mansions, a municipal park, and other buildings. Striking in pictures, his buildings are even more impressive before your eyes, especially in Barcelona where I saw them in the 21st century. Also important in Gaudi’s history are his proposals that weren’t accepted. Especially suggestive is one from 1908 for a New York hotel that, had it been completed, would have looked different from every other hotel there, not to mention other buildings, even more than a century later. Visionary he was, to a higher degree.

Along with the general acceptance of homosexuality and bisexuality (among other behaviors previously regarded as “deviant”), the avant-garde has long stretched the notion of gender. Famous female avantgarde artists have adopted male attire (GERTRUDE STEIN, for one), while others, both male and female, have created their own unisexual image (ANDY WARHOL). This has degenerated in pop culture into “gender-bender” fashions – from the “moptop” longhaired male rock stars of the 1960s to the shavedhead look of the popular female Irish singer Sinead O’Connor (1966). The visual assault of gender-bending is meant to make the viewer question his or her own sexual preconceptions while expanding social acceptance for alternative ways of interhuman relating. In the best sense, these artists transform themselves into living artistic statements, to shock, to amuse, or to befuddle the general public. In the worst sense, as in the case of commercial celebrities like Madonna (1958; b. M. Ciccone), outre sex is used as the ultimate tool to sell a bill of goods. —Richard Carlin In contrast to my sometime loyal publisher, usually a smart guy, I think gender one of many current (recent?) categories that really don’t belong in this book, because its terms relate to journalism, which by definition lasts only a day, rather than to books, which are meant to last for years. Only the innocent and very young find revelation in the notion that femininity and masculinity are not biological truths but cultural constructs visible to different degrees in different people. My own opinion is that understandings based on gender have become (became?) the great heresy of a recent generation, just as intelligence based on psychotropic drugs was the great heresy of my contemporaries and alcoholic unintelligence sabotaged the best minds of a previous generation, all of which provide the illusion of insight only to those who indulge.

166 • GERSHWIN, GEORGE While preparing this third edition, I discovered the initially attractive notion of “gender surfing” whose definition I reprint sooner than appropriate: “The confusing game with sexual roles whose point is to mix them up, to humorous effect.” One problem is that such fantastic comedy in art can be easily missed, as often by those predisposed as by those opposed.

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made some striking BOOK-ART. From here he moved into one-person performances, presented nearly entirely in Europe, which depend upon a striking narrative. A recurring motif involves burying something in the earth, so that only a memory of the piece survives. Gerz has made photographs and videotapes, both distinguished more for their conceptual/documentary resonance than for their mediumistic artistry.

GESAMTKUNSTWERK

(26 September 1898–11 July 1937) His greatest innovation was inventing a distinctly American opera in Porgy and Bess (1934). Not only is it set in America, but more distinctly in African-America, but it also favors American musical departures and American musicians. The test for the latter is syncopation, which comes from hitting a note slightly before or after what’s annotated. Europeans can’t do it without years of discovery and then practice. For instance, the song “It Ain’t Necessarily So” is best sung with an offbeat pause before the second word. Critically deprecated on its premiere, Porgy survived, notwithstanding a depressing (so “Russian”?) plot, in part because it contains such classic songs as “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “My Man’s Done Gone,” and the immortal “Summertime.” Gershwin’s other masterpiece is the distinctly American symphony, Rhapsody in Blue (1924) that opens with a short clarinet solo. I once heard this performed by a prominent European orchestra whose lead clarinetist missed the syncopation possible in that opening phrase. For me that performance ran downhill from there. Conducting around 2015 an email symposium among colleagues asked to identify the five Greatest American Operas, I found that nearly all of us put Porgy near the on the top of our lists, which measures that just as nothing before was in the same league, so little since has been.

GERZ, JOCHEN (4 April 1940) Though Gerz has been a colleague of mine for nearly a half-century, I barely understand his work and career, perhaps because we live in different cities, mostly because we have pursued drastically different directions from similar beginnings. Born in BERLIN and raised in Dusseldorf, Gerz began as a VISUAL POET whose first exhibition (1968) was held in conjunction with JEAN-FRANCOIS BORY; and, like Bory, Gerz

See WAGNER, Richard.

GESTURES, SIGNIFICANT (20th century) As a prophet of what later became known as Conceptual Art, MARCEL DUCHAMP offered a storebought urinal to a contemporary art exhibition. This exemplified a gesture that gained significance from its appearance in a populous art exhibition, rather than in a hardware store. So did Duchamp’s refusal afterwards to make art; likewise later prominent artists’ refusal(s) differ, say, from an art student’s. Another significant gesture was JOHN CAGE’s positioning silence in a concert where music was expected. So established is the custom of identifying value wholly by an artist’s personal history and/or ART WORLD situations that, especially in the 21st century, comparable purported anti-art artists’ moves often seem, especially if insufficiently based in some flimsy context, to be exploiting trivially some “artistic” privilege. Significant gestures are, needless to say perhaps, different from dancers’ or painters’ physical movements and also from artists’ personal gifts.

GIANAKOS, CRISTOS (4 January 1934) Influenced on one hand by the broad lines of the American painter FRANZ KLINE and, on another side, by the sculptures of VLADIMIR TATLIN, Gianakos has produced unadorned ramps that cut across spaces both indoors and out with a sure elegance. They typically reveal their scaffolding, whose crosshatched braces have visual charm. The Maroussi Ramp (1995), over 100 feet long and made from painted steel, is perhaps the most spectacular, permanently crossing a ravine in the Emfietzoglou Art Center in Athens. Another interesting, original move in his work involves

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imposing geometric shapes on photographs or drawings of classic Greek architecture and sculpture. As an American of Greek descent, Gianakos has done more major work in his parents’ native country than in his own. His brother Steve G. (1938) is also an artist, working mostly in two dimensions in entirely different ways.

GIEDIONS (Carola G.-Welcker, 1893–1979; Sigfried, 1888–1968) While many very young critical historians love and marry with the hope of abetting each other’s careers, few couples produced the achievements of the Giedions. Becoming the more prominent, Siegfried produced Space, Time, and Architecture (1941), which became for decades the seminal book for understanding modernist architecture. His other sweeping masterpiece, Mechanization Takes Command (1948), portrays technological development as “Anonymous History.” She wrote a biography of PAUL KLEE (1961) and Modern Sculpture (1977), among other books of art history, in addition to editing two taste-making anthologies – Poètes à l’Écart/ anthologie der abseitigen (1946, Offside Poetry) and Fonts 1926–1971 (1973). In the late 1920s their Zurich home welcomed many artists and writers residing there including HANS ARP and JAMES JOYCE. Without the Giedions’ efforts, together and later apart, modernist understanding would have been less.

GILBERT AND GEORGE (G. Proesch, 17 September 1943; and G. Passmore, 8 January 1942) Meeting as sculpture students at the St. Martin’s School of Art in 1967, these two men, billed only with their first names, have worked together ever since. Their initial innovation was to exhibit themselves as “living sculptures,” cleanly dressed in identical gray suits, their faces and hands usually painted silver, one bespectacled and the other not. In vaudeville-like, scheduled performances that had announced beginnings, they would typically sing “Underneath the Arches,” a British music hall passé tune, again and again. Or they would pose on a museum’s stairway for several hours straight, earning newspaper articles with titles like “Living Sculptures” or “They Keep Stiff for Hours.” They issued resonant statements: “Being living Sculpture is our life blood.” They’ve insisted upon being regarded as not a duet or a partnership but a single artist.

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In the early 1970s, Gilbert and George were ubiquitous, illustrating how rapidly and internationally a truly original idea can find acceptance in visual-arts venues. In 1970 alone, they had over a dozen solo exhibitions in venues as various as museums in Dusseldorf, Krefeld, Oxford, Copenhagen, Stuttgart, Turin, and Oslo, and private galleries in Milan, London, BERLIN, Cologne, and Amsterdam. Not unlike celebrities in other cultural domains, they exploited their fame to produce book-art, videotapes, drawings, and, especially large photographs arrayed in photogrids, most of which portrayed them in various posed circumstances, some of which portray naked young males including themseves. Hellish (1980), among the strongest (appearing on the cover of a 1980 exhibition catalog) has one man in profile, colored yellow, sticking his tongue out toward the other, in contrary profile, his face evenly red, with his mouth open only inches away, as though he would soon receive his colleague’s tongue. The work measures 240 centimeters by 300 centimeters (or roughly 8 feet by 11 feet), in twenty-four separate panels. Gilbert and George’s “book as a sculpture,” Dark Shadow (1974), portrays in photographs and texts a decadent world that seems to lie behind their self-consciously neat appearance. Catalogs about Gilbert and George resemble hagiography in glorifying what would normally seem trivial, in part because nearly all featured pictures of themselves. (As photographers, they were curiously far less successful than ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE at making nude bodies appear sculptural in a two-dimensional medium.) Though neither was born in English, they have become British artists, even if untypical in producing a decidedly urban art that ignores the countrysides. Their names together echo a British twosome renowned a century before for their charming operettas.

GILLESPIE, ABRAHAM LINCOLN (11 June 1895–10 September 1950) Commonly regarded as the most eccentric of the literary Americans gathered in Paris in the 1920s, Gillespie produced prose so unique it must be read to be believed; excerpts are not sufficient. He made VISUAL POETRY; he worked with neologisms in a piece/poem characteristically titled “A Purplexicon of Dissynthegrations (Tdevelop abut Earfluxsatisvie-thruHeypersieving),” which typically tells almost everything that need be known about Gillespie in an introductory entry. It is indicative that no book of his writings appeared until thirty years after his death. Few literary histories even mention him.

168 • GINS, MADELINE GINS, MADELINE (7 November 1941–8 January 2014) It is hard to explain how Gins’s first novel Word Rain found a commercial publisher in 1969, because its theme is the epistemological opacity of language itself. The first sign of the book’s unusual concerns is its subtitle: “(or a Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigations to G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,0, It Says)”; a second is the incorporation of several signs of new fiction: special languages, expressive design, extrinsically imposed form – most of these devices reiterating, in one way or another, the book’s theme. What distinguishes Word Rain are numerous inventive displays of printed material: lists of unrelated words with dots between them, entire pages filled mostly with dashes, where words might otherwise be, pseudo-logical proofs, passages in which the more mundane expressions are crossed out, an appendix of “some of the words (temporary definitions) not included,” even a photographed hand holding both sides of a printed page, and a concluding page of dense print-over-print that reads at its bottom: “This page contains every word in the book.” I’ve found Gins’s later books comparably obscure, though perhaps less ambitious, even when her subject is presidential politics; but because no one else risks writing about her work, let alone reading it critically, there is no one other than yourself, my dear reader, with whom you can compare my impression. It may or may not be important that she was married for over three decades to the painter (Shusaku) ARAKAWA, with whom Gins has collaborated on an extremely opaque, large format visual/verbal book that has gone through three significantly different editions, The Mechanism of Meaning (1971, 1979, 1988), much like this Dictionary.

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dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke nope/ nope nope nope.” Especially when I heard Ginsberg perform this, I wished he produced more poems like it.

GLARNER, FRITZ (20 July 1899–18 September 1972) Escaping from Europe in 1936, he came to New York, where he was able to greet PIET MONDRIAN, later exiled there. In the succinct summary of KATHERINE S. DREIER: It was fortunate for the art world that MONDRIAN came to New York, and that during the few years that Mondrian lived here he was able to introduce the philosophy underlying his work to both [Burgoyne] DILLER and Glarner. There were others who were fascinated by Mondrian’s approach to art, but they never seemed to have absorbed his philosophy, and without the philosophy there is no continuity of thought and work. However, Diller and Glarner have absorbed Mondrian’s philosophy without becoming imitators but have instead returned their own individuality. One difference was that whereas Mondrian insisted upon the integrity of a rectangle, Glarner painted on other geometric shapes, insisting upon “the slant and oblique.” With many rectangles various in shape, his paintings reflected his master’s late American work more than the classic European Mondrian. Concrete Art, rather than the more familiar NEOPLASTICISIM, was Glarner’s own favorite epithet for his work. Perhaps because he was born and died in Switzerland, his posthumous reputation has been stronger there than in America (and a superficial bio note for him might suggest that nothing happened in between).

(3 June 1926–5 April 1997) The avant-garde Ginsberg is the author not of postWhitmanian lines that survive in the head of every literate American but of certain sound poems that he published without musical notation. (He also published, as well as sang, many conventionally configured songs.) One of them, “Fie My Fum,” appears in his Collected Poems (1984), while most do not. An example is “Put Down Yr Cigarette Rag,” whose verses conclude with variations on the refrain “dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke dont smoke”: “Nine billion bucks for dope/ approved by Time & Life/ America’s lost hope/ The President smokes his wife/ Dont Smoke dont smoke

GLASS, PHILIP (31 January 1937) Traditionally trained, not only at the Juilliard conservatory but with the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) in Paris, Glass began as a conventional composer before creating music of distinction: a sequence of pieces that included Strung Out (1967), Music in Similar Motion (1969), Music in Contrary Motion (1969), and Music in Fifths (1969). Essentially monophonic, these compositions have lines of

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individual notes, with neither harmonies nor counterpoint; they are tonal without offering melodies, accessible without being seductive. What made this music seem radical in the 1960s was its avoidance of all the principal issues that preoccupied nearly all contemporary composers at that time – issues such as chance and control, serialism, and atonality, improvisation and spontaneity. It is scarcely surprising that before his music was performed in concert halls it was heard in art galleries and in art museums. Though this music was frequently characterized as MINIMAL, the epithet MODULAR is more appropriate for Glass (as well as STEVE REICH and TERRY RILEY, among others) in that severely circumscribed bits of musical material are repeated in various ways. One minor innovation is that even in live concerts Glass’s music would usually be heard through amplifiers, the man at the electronic mixing board (Kurt Munkasci) becoming one of the acknowledged “musicians.” Within Music with Changing Parts (1970), Glass moved progressively from monophony, in its opening moments, to a greater polyphonic complexity and then, toward its end, into the kinds of modulations that would inform his next major work, Music in Twelve Parts (1974), an exhaustive four-hour piece that epitomizes Glass’s compositional ideas at that time and remains, in my opinion, the zenith of his avant-garde art. Glass subsequently moved into operatic collaborations, beginning with Einstein on the Beach (1976, with ROBERT WILSON) and then SATYAGRAHA (1980, based upon Mahatma Gandhi’s early years), among other operas. The requirements of music theater, as he prefers to call it, made his music more accessible and his name more familiar, as it did for AARON COPLAND before him. Glass’s composing in the 1980s became more lyrical and more charming, which is to say devoid of those earlier challenging characteristics that might make it problematic to his new, larger audience.

GLAUGNEA (c. 1971) An artificial language that is both hermetic and allencompassing, Glaugnea is an invention of the poet Michael Helsem (1958). The language grew out of Helsem’s teenage experimentation with language invention. Starting with the concept that everything had one true name (the concept that drove some of the earliest inventors of artificial languages), Helsem eventually transformed his language into one where every word in any language, any character in any

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script, any sound in any tongue was part of Glaugnea. This bizarre fact might make it appear that Glaugnea is not a language at all, but merely a concept. However, the tongue comes complete with pronunciations, grammatical rules, with, in short, the structure that makes language a possible means of communication. Glaugnea has a complete set of pronouns – and all persons and genders of those pronouns exist in singular, plural, and (the rare) dual forms. Glaugnea has an intricate set of “answer-words” (yes, no, maybe, and combinations of these), a detailed set of suffixes denoting negation (including “no longer,” and “opposite of” as well as “not”), and an almost runic alphabet, the members of which look suspiciously like Christograms. An interesting feature of the tongue is that Helsem designed it with the dictionary in mind, for his precise and often poetic definitions are part of the gestalt of the language. Take these examples from his Giyorbicon (which roughly translates as “A Dictionary of Hitherto-Unarticulated Nuance”): oolongphaeic: dusky as the taste of oolong tea; peguc: the joy of precision; hooth: a chance happening which becomes meaningful in retrospect. —Geof Huth

GOBER, ROBERT (12 September 1954) The installations of Gober are the most consistently recognizable examples of the theme of abjection: the conception and rendition of the human body as the site of poisons and morbid excretions, making the body emblematic of death and marking the physical person as repulsive to society and an outcast. Gober evokes the theme by creating stiff and partial figures that he punctures with holes and frequently metal sink drains and then lays on the floor in hallucinatory environments. In an untitled 1991 installation at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, he embedded a male figure into the wall so that it was visible only from the waist down. The wall was painted with a lush forest scene, and candles were placed into holes in the trousers. Gober’s damaged figures – open to the poisons of the environment and sometimes, as in the Jeu de Paume exhibition, portrayed in a self-memorializing state – are clearly images of a deeply emotional response to the AIDS crisis. Even so, from the point of view of formal innovation and expressive articulation of the human form, his figures add nothing to the artistic language of human gesture. Gober does not render the figure; he cites it as a point of reference. —Mark Daniel Cohen

170 • GODARD, JEAN-LUC GODARD, JEAN-LUC (3 December 1930) While working toward a Certificate in Ethnology at the Sorbonne, Jean-Luc Godard regularly attended meetings and screenings at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin. By all accounts, the young Godard was obsessed by movies, developing a taste for American films that struggled against the Hollywood system (the cigar-munching Samuel Fuller appears in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou [1965] as himself and defines “movies”). Godard also developed an immediate dislike and, more importantly, distrust of overt commercial cinema, particularly of French origins. Godard’s contribution to the New Wave was always the most experimental, most confrontational, and most political of those of the directors connected to him. His New Wave films attacked the very grammar of traditional cinema. His first film was a shock to the system of movies: À Bout de Souffle (Breathless) (1960) is a “gangster” film that reshapes the language of the commercial film through technical experimentation – jump cuts, a shaky camera, a wild pace – at the same time that it questions the form. All of Godard’s films of the 1960s work in this manner because a Godard film is always an essay on film. Between the years 1960–67, Godard produced a staggering fifteen films, including some of the classics of the New Wave: Vivre sa Vie (1962), Les Carabiniers (1963), Une Femme Mariée (1964), and Alphaville (1965). His films were also political critiques, exemplified by the examination of the war in Le Petit Soldat (1960), which was banned by the French government until 1963, and La Chinoise (1967). Weekend (1967) ended the first phase of Godard’s career at the same time that it depicted the end of Western civilization. Denouncing cinema as “bourgeois,” Godard made the art “disappear” as he turned to a new form: “revolutionary films for revolutionary people.” From 1968 to 1973 Godard made films as a part of the Marxist filmmaking collective known as the DzigaVertov group. If Bertolt Brecht had been an influence on Godard’s “alienation” of traditional cinema, then it was Brecht’s political example that pushed Godard into making films such as One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil) (1968) and See You at Mao (1969). The former work featured factory noise so excruciating that it is difficult to listen to. One Plus One (Sympathy for the Devil) was famous for featuring the Rolling Stones working on a record album; it was also an infamous film for the fight Godard waged with the film’s producer over the final cut. Godard’s cut had the Stones working on a set of songs without any conclusion to their efforts – the revolution is not complete.

The early 1970s marked Godard’s break with the Marxist group, although he still kept his confrontational politics. He began experiments with mixing film and video in works entitled Numeró deux (1975), which he said was a “remake” of Breathless, and Comment ça va? (1975). This mixture of film and video led to his first feature film in almost eight years: Sauve qui peut (1980). The main character of this return to film is a Godard alter ego who teaches a class on cinema. Critical awareness of the evolution of film Godard brought to the films that follow, most notably the controversial retelling of the immaculate conception in Je vous salue, Marie (Hail Mary) (1984), and the story of a God in a man’s body that is Hélas pour moi (1993). Godard’s next project was a video work begun in 1989 called Histoire(s) du cinéma. A history of film, Godard’s ongoing video, whose latest segments were completed in 1997, combines images from painting, film, and sculpture to form a collage of ideas and impressions. It is an unfinished essay on watching film by someone who destroyed movies before breathing avant-garde life back into them. —John Rocco

GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON (28 August 1749–22 March 1832) Aside from appreciating the quality of his various works, he should be remembered as the first writer to amplify the frame of what a writer could do. Remembered as the author of classic plays in both verse and prose, he wrote a first novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774, 1787, The Sorrows of Young Werther), that established his fame. Afterwards came other fiction, poetry, literary criticism, polemics on esthetics, jurisprudence, texts about botany and anatomy, a treatise on color, memoirs, and a classic autobiography. In addition, he left behind a wealth of resonant unfinished texts worth study and nearly 3,000 drawings. Simply, he exploited fame not to redo his earlier success, as a commercial hack might, but as a springboard for his expansive cultural imagination. Less a polymath (like LEONARDO DA VINCI) than a writer whose career exemplified what we later call POLYARTISTRY, Goethe would stand as a model. One curiosity is that, notwithstanding his sophistication and success, he chose to reside not in a major cultural center but in a small city, Weimar, where for decades he stood as king (“von”) of a low hill.

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GOFF, BRUCE (8 June 1904–4 August 1982) Influenced by FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, Goff built numerous houses in the Middle and far West that blend structure into the environment. His masterpiece, the Bavinger House (1955) in Norman, Oklahoma, has a 96-foot wall that follows a logarithmic spiral into the living space and ultimately around a steel pole, from which the entire roof, interior stairway, and living areas are suspended. Plants inside the structure duplicate those outside, so that the environment seemingly flows into the home, or vice versa. “They wanted a large open space, and liked the idea of living on different levels,” Goff told an interviewer. “They wanted many interior plants, and preferred natural rather than synthetic materials.” In his Bizarre Architecture (1979), the critical historian Charles Jencks (1939) locates Goff in a “Pantheon,” particularly praising the Joe Price House (1956) in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where windows are hidden behind a facade of “triangular and hexagonal shapes [that] explode into copper roofs, a sun-screen of white stars, green-blue crystal and strange yellow spikes.”

GOFFMAN, ERVING (11 June 1922–19 November 1982) In his first book, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1959), the most original academic sociologist of his times suggested that social life is a kind of theater and thus that human beings are always performing for audiences, playing different roles, or projecting different selves, in various situations. Pursuing his theme to disturbing implications, he even suggested that even alone a person imagines performance in his own head and that self-conscious sincerity is “merely being taken in by one’s own art.” Doing his field work in exotic situations, including a hotel in the Shetland Islands and a gambling casino, Goffman generated a wealth of original and largely persuasive sociological insights into the minutiae of interactions. He also wrote sensitively about stigmatized people because he was short in stature. From the Italian writer UMBERTO ECO (1932–2016): “The genius and penetration with which he could identify infinitely small aspects of behaviour that had previously eluded everyone else.” Some of his ideas were relevant to art, particularly to PERFORMANCE art, particularly to ALLAN KAPROW, who wrote this appreciation of Goffman:

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In this book and subsequent ones, he describes greetings, relations between office workers and bosses, front-of-the-store and back-of-the store behavior, civilities and discourtesies in private and public, the maintenance of small social units on streets and in crowded gatherings, and so forth as if each situation had a prescribed scenario. Human beings participate in these scenarios, spontaneously or after elaborate preparations, like actors without stage or audience, watching and cuing one another. If all life were theater, then mundane activities could be considered theatrical. “Intentionally performing everyday life is bound to create curious kinds of awareness.” This last thought became the foundation of Kaprow’s own explorations after 1970.

GOLBERG, MÉCISLAS (21 October 1869–28 December 1907; b. Mieczyslaw Goldberg) Born in Poland, he came to Paris in 1891 and soon afterwards wrote in French for both art magazines and anarchist journals, becoming much like his contemporary FÉLIX FÉNÉON, one of the few advocates of avant-garde art who was also politically anarchist. In the second respect, he advocated a libertarian Zionism as early as 1899. The culmination of his art criticism was a book La morale des lignes (1907, The Morality of Lines), which is customarily honored as an early examination of the relationship between art and art geometry as well as pre-CUBIST esthetics. Among these classic summaries: Precise definition of the planes by the minimum effort of line; a tendency toward polygons and towards curves closer to the ellipse than to the circle; suggestion by means of points or strokes; and, lastly, distribution of light by reference to the inclination of the planes and not in accordance with their convexity or concavity; this is modern design, the product of the modern soul. —trans. Jonathan Griffin Though Golberg died early of tuberculosis, his last book, not forgotten, was reprinted intact (in French) a full century later by a publisher in India, exemplifying the rule, not to be forgotten: as long as someone somewhere is keeping earlier writing or art alive, it has survived. Credit the superior American art historian/ curator Edward Fry (1936–92) with remembering this Golberg in his Cubism (1966).

172 • GOLDBERG, RUBE GOLDBERG, RUBE (4 July 1883–7 December 1970; b. Reuben Lucius G.) Do not dismiss Goldberg as a mere cartoonist, because his stylistically unique pictures tell within single frames complicated stories leading his readers mostly with words through narrative steps that are filled with unobvious moves sometimes defying reality. His theme becomes the ironic relation between effort and result. By making a simple move needlessly complex they satirize a certain modern predisposition. By no measure are they “cartoons” whose point can be understood instantly, which is to say that, for all their resemblance to popular art, they approach more serious work by requiring of their readers time merely to go back and forth between the verbal and the visual. As visual literature, they tell within a single frame stories with a protagonist who must overcome obstacles. It is not for nothing that his influence can be observed in the kinetic sculpture of GEORGE RHOADS and the poetic art of DAVID MORICE, among others. Remember that, much like ALEXANDER CALDER and certain other idiosyncratic artists, Goldberg earned a degree in engineering, from the University of California at Berkeley no less. And that he published for sixty-five years and, finally, might be the only individual featured in this book ever to earn a Pulitzer Prize.

GOLDSWORTHY, ANDY (26 July 1956) Like DAVID NASH, Goldsworthy has helped to reorient recent British sculpture to natural materials and forms. What distinguishes Goldsworthy’s works in the late 1980s and 1990s is his expansion of the range of craft and his mixing of natural materials and natural forms that do not belong together. Working with elements of nature such as twigs, stones, leaves, even snow, Goldsworthy makes intimate observations of natural processes, which he then duplicates as he fashions objects that his chosen materials never generated on their own, such as a bee’s nest woven together from leaves. Goldsworthy works in the wild rather than the studio, creating his works while wandering about, in a manner similar to that of RICHARD LONG. However, he has a heavier touch than Long, and a tendency to impose artificial appearances on the terrain, covering stones with autumn leaves of garish colors, or cutting concentric circles into slabs of frozen snow. Such practices seem an imposition on – rather than a response to – the land, and a direct contradiction of the

initial impulses of Earth Art. In the end, Goldsworthy can be credited with expanding the range of techniques available to sculptors and with giving new emphasis to working by hand. —Mark Daniel Cohen

GOLL, IWAN (29 March 1891–27 February 1950; b. Herbert [or Isaac] Lang) An Alasatian who spoke French at home and German at school, he wrote poetry and dramas as well as criticism in both languages. As an early EXPRESSIONIST he published a volume of poems in 1912, The Panama Canal, which celebrated the linking of two oceans through the collaboration of workers of all races and classes. Iron sluices grow with every push and pull Every inch nailed in with the tiniest of hammers Huge wings carried by small steel structures As if by Prometheus into the deep And when these soon finally do open when two enemy oceans embrace O, then will weep All the nations on earth. Later in his life, Goll rewrote his most famous poem, reflecting his discovery that workers in Panama’s excessive humidity were scarcely ecstatic. A typical example of his expressionist prose appeared in 1921, the stylistic abruptness, epitomized by bursts of language, becoming a representation of unselfconscious communication: Demand. Manifesto. Appeal. Accusation. Oath, Ecstasy. Struggle. Man screams. We are. One another. Passion. After abandoning EXPRESSIONISM, he and his wife Clair Studer (b. 1891 as Claire Aischmann) moved to Paris before, as he was Jewish, they fled to America in 1939. While residing in Brooklyn, Goll edited from 1943 to 1946 the magazine Hemispheres that published both French and American poets, incidentally becoming perhaps the first major New York literary magazine published outside Manhattan. Perhaps because Goll published in several countries, in different forms and different languages, his work has never received the recognition it deserves. Among his additional literary pseudonyms were Iwan Lassang, Tristan Torsi, and Tristan Thor. His widow

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published in 1962 The Lost Paradise, a memoir of an angry childhood.

GOMBRICH, E. H. (30 March 1909–3 November 2001; b. Ernst Hans Josef G.) Born in Vienna, he immigrated to England in the 1930s and learned to write in English several major books that placed him among the towering figures in 20thcentury art history. One theme important to him was establishing that new art comes mostly out of previous art and thus that it gains value from contributing to previous acknowledged achievements, also thus implicitly minimizing claims to superior personal experience. Though he was in his own tastes no fan of any avant-garde, this principle becomes useful in recognizing the value of various developments, including CONCEPTUAL ART. Attending Gombrich’s graduate seminar at the Warburg Institute, London, in the spring of 1965, I was initially puzzled by what appeared to be contrary strong opinions, praising as he did the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and Karl Popper (1902–94), along with SIGMUND FREUD! I had to be told that the key to his loyalties was Gombrich’s native city in the 1920s, when all three of his masters resided there. Thus, by contrast, people or ideas that he could identify as contributing to Vienna’s later decline were deprecated. Amazed I was that an intellectual with such profound ideas could favor such a simplistic principle in his specific judgments. Nevertheless, he died Sir Ernest.

GÓMEZ DE LA SERNA, RAMÓN (3 July 1888–12 January 1963) A Spanish writer whose specialty was a fictional aphorism (as distinct from a philosophical one) that he called greguería, Gómez de la Serna was the most original author of his generation in Spain (whose writer contemporaries included José Ortega y Gasset [1883–1955] and Miguel de Unamuno [1864– 1936]). Though he published essays, short stories, plays, novels, biographies, memoirs, and even chronicles of the gatherings at his favorite literary café in Madrid – in sum, more than eighty books before turning 40 – Gómez de la Serna is best remembered for his thousands of greguerías, which he claimed to have invented around 1910: “The little girl wants to dance because she wants to fly”; “Moon and sand are

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mad for each other”; “Tigers of somnambulists and they cross rivers of sleep over bridges of leaps”; “We should take more time to forget; thus we would have a longer life.” (No one would ever confuse these with philosophical aphorisms.) His radio plays were also pioneering. As an arts critic Gómez de la Serna wrote a monograph on Salvador Dali and another on Movieland (1930) before ever visiting America. Through his intelligence about film, he preceded NATHANAEL WEST in appreciating its outrageously eclectic scenery: From the distance Movieland looks like Constantinople combined with a little Tokyo, a touch of Florence and a hint of New York . . . . It is like a Noah’s Ark of architecture, a Florentine palace seized with a salaciousness which exotic buildings produce, looks longingly at a Grand Pagoda. Even in translation, that’s classic. I wish I knew enough Spanish to read an autobiography marvelously titled Automoribundia (1948), which is often identified as “one of the most interesting, original and renewing works of Spanish autobiography of the 20th century.” Professor Miguel González-Gerth (1926–2017) notes, “He opposed esthetic hierarchies, advocating instead that the artist should have complete freedom and start with everything at zero level.” Though Gómez thought of greguería as a combination of “metaphor + humor,” Spanish-English dictionaries translate his key word as “irritating noise, gibberish, or hubbub,” which is less nonsense than a kind of inspired ridiculousness. Much as Apollinaire was known to his friends mostly as Kostro, GdlS was more commonly “Ramón.” Not unlike other Spanish writers of his generation, he left his native country during the 1930s Civil War for Buenos Aires, where he died decades later.

GOMRINGER, EUGEN (20 January 1925) A Swiss-German born in Bolivia, Gomringer pioneered the idea of CONCRETE POETRY, publishing early examples and writing the most visible early manifesto. His key idea was the “constellation,” or words in standard typography connected by qualities apart from syntax, freely distributed within the space of the printed page. Given his polyglot background, Gomringer was able to write his poems in Spanish,

174 • GONZÁLEZ, JULIO French, English, and German. For instance, down a single page are widely spaced three words: “berg land see,” or “mountain,” “land” (i.e., territory, ground), “sea,” preceding by several years comparable MINIMAL poems. The English texts reprinted in Gomringer’s 1969 retrospective include “butterfly,” nine lines divided into three stanzas, which would be striking in any American poetry magazine even today: mist mountain butterfly mountain butterfly missed butterfly meets mountain. Perhaps because the initial American anthologies of Concrete Poetry were not as good as they should have been, Gomringer failed to have as much presence as he deserved in the English-speaking world.

GONZÁLEZ, JULIO (21 September 1876–27 March 1942) Born into a family of Barcelona metal artisans, González learned techniques that, after a decade of painting, he put to esthetic use in sculpture, beginning with masks. He first forged sculpture in iron in 1927, and, the following year, though already in his early fifties, he decided to devote himself exclusively to sculpture whose innovations depend upon the use of welding. Gonzalez was a close friend of his countryman PABLO PICASSO, to whom he introduced the possibility of metal sculpture, and González’s works initially reflected the influence of CUBISM. Later assimilating the radical example of ALEXANDER CALDER, the Spaniard made open works defined less by solidity than by an assembling of rods and ribbons of metal. All subsequent welded sculpture, including DAVID SMITH’s, implicitly acknowledges González’s pioneering influence.

GOREY, EDWARD (22 February 1925–15 April 2000) Gorey became the master of visual fiction, which is to say images, generally composed of pictures mixed with words, whose sequences suggest narrative. Superficially

similar to comic books in their use of successive panels, Gorey’s stories are generally more profound in theme and more serious in subject, with an adult use of language and more detailed pictures. In an extreme Gorey work, like “The West Wing,” the images appear without words; for “The Wuggly Ump,” he added color. Gorey also produced literary ballets or scenarios for dance. His works look superficially similar as well to the work of FRANS MASEREEL, who likewise produced successive panels suggesting narrative; but Gorey is a far superior craftsman with a superior narrative imagination. Though Gorey’s SIGNATURE is well known, thanks to his distinctive book covers and their publication in prominent magazines, his visual narratives are not acknowledged in histories or encyclopedias of American fiction. Curiously, Gorey is probably the most prominent visual artist ever to graduate from Harvard College, his work reflecting in its literacy an Ivy League education.

GORGEOUS GEORGE (24 March 1915–26 December 1963; b. George Raymond Wagner) Within the theatrical universe of “professional wrestling,” he was the innovative figure who starred not with his martial skills but through his extravagant appearance that broke established proscriptions. Less than 6 feet tall, weighing slightly over 200 pounds, George Wagner dominated the roped stage by dying his hair platinum blonde and letting it grow long enough to need gold bobby pins. Audaciously renaming himself, he appeared with a sequined robe, smelling of perfume, and appearing effeminate (though long-married). His elaborate entrance included a factotum who laid down a red carpet and carried a silver mirror while spreading rose petals at George’s feet. Especially in the 1950s, he became a television star whom fans loved to love or to hate, also drawing an appreciative audience that paid money simply to see him live. Able to negotiate for 50 percent of the ticket receipts, George became for a while the highest paid “athlete” in the world. His extravagant theatrical style influenced not only sportsmen such as MUHAMMED ALI, who actually met George when he was still Cassius Clay, and later exhibition wrestlers (athletic clowns) but pop singers such as Elvis Presley (1935–77) and James Brown (1933–2006). The latter once told his biographer that he donned costumes even to venture outside his house because he needed to appear like someone whom “people paid to see.”

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GORMLEY, ANTONY (3 August 1950) The British artist Gormley and ROBERT GOBER have been the two principal young sculptors to focus on figurative work through the 1980s and 1990s, a period in which sculptors have largely moved away from representation of the human form and experimented with found materials arranged in large installations. Whereas Gober builds tableaux that frequently, but not always, include the figure, Gormley works almost exclusively with the human form. By casting in lead, he creates life-sized figures that are usually stiffly upright, almost mummified, and softly defined. The gray, characterless images wear a grid work of highly visible horizontal and vertical white seams where the parts have been assembled, and Gormley distributes them in odd positions around the exhibition space. They lie flat on their backs, float horizontally with feet against the wall, hang with their heads embedded in the ceiling. On occasion, they roll up in a ball, lie spreadeagled with arms and legs thrown out, or sit on their haunches. And sometimes Gormley turns to other images: airplanes, fish, enormous spheres. But these works stand apart from his principal thrust. Gormley has observed that he is interested in “materializing perhaps for the first time, the space within the body. . . . To realize embodiment, without really worrying too much about mimesis, about representation in a traditional way.” His purpose is to instigate a sense of the body’s inner cavity as the focus of a meditative state. The evident seams on his figures give them the appearance of being hollow, vessels containing something within. Their lack of animation makes them seem less like living beings and more like shells of life, and their frequent hovering suggests an otherworldliness. —Mark Daniel Cohen

GOULD, GLENN (25 September 1932–4 October 1982) While Gould’s piano performances represented a stunning departure from standard classical interpretation, especially in his recordings of J. S. BACH, they gained immediate acceptability that was not bestowed upon his creative works, which were audiotape compositions of speech and sound done mostly for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The first three portray isolation in Canada: The Idea of North (1967) focuses on individuals who live near the Arctic Circle; The Latecomers (1969) depicts Newfoundland; and Quiet

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in the Land (1973) portrays religious fundamentalists. A second trilogy deals with the musicians ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI, and Richard Strauss (1864–1949), again incorporating interviews into an audio montage that gives the illusion of a live symposium with ingeniously appropriate musical backgrounds. Gould also collaborated with the French musician Bruno Monsaingeon (1943) in producing what remains, in my judgment, the most exquisite and unaffected film/video ever of musical performance, The Goldberg Variations (1981). Otherwise, Gould was a brilliant and witty writer, especially about the revolution implicit in recordings. In his highly imaginative reinterpretations of certain classical piano music, Gould successfully made familiar repertoire unfamiliar until, thanks to recordings, his performances gained increasing acceptance. Measuring his greatness, these recordings are treasured decades after they were initially issued. His closest competitor as a profoundly radical pianist, often favoring a different repertoire, was the Russian Sviatoslav Richter (1915–97), who incidentally honored Gould, who extended to Richter great respect in return.

GOULD, JOE (12 September 1889–18 August 1957; b. Joseph Ferdinand G.) As an undergraduate at Harvard around the same time as T. S. ELIOT, among other budding literati, Gould developed a literary reputation before moving to New York, more precisely to Greenwich Village, where he became a familiar figure, often homeless, sometimes begging, his Ivy League degree giving him credibility among those predisposed. Joe Gould claimed to be writing an “Oral History of the Contemporary World,” parts of which appeared in such literary magazines as The Dial and Broom. He reviewed books for The New Republic, among other periodicals. A 1942 profile in The New Yorker gave Gould and his purported project a certain celebrity, especially by quoting literary colleagues who claimed to have seen large manuscripts. Nonetheless, when Gould died, after some holidays in mental hospitals, nothing was found, raising the question of what ever existed. What initially seemed a harmless hoax with an ambitious title can now, thanks to the influence of CONCEPTUAL ART, be ranked as a masterpiece in absentia, which is to say an inspiring framing vision of a great book that ought to exist, even if it didn’t, or doesn’t (yet). Consider that decades later someone else could write this “Oral History,” even publishing it under Joe Gould’s name. As such, his

176 • GRAHAM, DAN myth stands for me in the same class as the D. Fict (or fictitious doctorate) from Oxford University that the highly imaginative American artist James Lee Byars (1932–97) awarded himself. Just imagining such possibilities offers its own reward(s).

GRAHAM, DAN (31 March 1942; b. Daniel Henry G.) Though I have known him most of my adult life and followed his activities as often as I could, my sense of his achievement remains incomplete. As a critical writer, Graham published some of the most insightful essays about ’60s avant-garde sculpture; as the director in the mid-’60s of a New York gallery bearing his name in part (John Daniels), he exhibited work so advanced that memory of it survives decades later. (In visual art, especially in America, more especially in New York, don’t forget, most galleries’ visibility is very temporary.) As a creator of original language structures, Graham published highly unprecedented conceptual poems that were anthologized in my Possibilities of Poetry (1970). The art historian Thomas Crow (1948), in his book on the 1960s, credits Graham with exhibiting his art in a magazine’s pages “as conveniently as an art gallery,” which is a curious distinction. His best performances are remembered long after their premieres. According to the historian RoseLee Goldberg (1947): Dan Graham explored Bertolt Brecht’s principles of alienation, connecting performer and viewer by designing situations that had discomfort built into the work. In Performance, Audience, Mirror (1977), the audience, seated on chairs in front of a large mirror, were forced to become witness to their own movements and to read each other’s self-conscious body language. To increase their unease, Graham walked back and forth in front of them, scrutinizing their actions and commenting into a microphone on what he saw. Graham was early into video, with pieces in which he taped himself taking a picture of himself. Video-Architecture-Television (1979) documents his individual moves without becoming as generally edifying as his best writing about others. One difference between the world of visual art and that of literature is that the former is far more receptive to genuine eccentrics such as Graham.

GRAHAM, MARTHA (11 May 1894–1 April 1991) Initially noted for her dynamic performing presence, this American modern dance pioneer also developed a unique technique for movement. Trained with the Denishawn company, she broke from its style, which was indebted to ballet and François Delsarte (1811– 71), to explore deep motions of the torso, especially “contraction and release.” A barefoot modern to the end (despite an occasional sandal), she nonetheless increasingly encouraged performing virtuosity in her dancers. In her long, sustained career as a choreographer, Graham created over 200 works, including such early ABSTRACT and EXPRESSIONIST pieces as Lamentation (1930), in which, enshrouded in fabric and poised on a bench, she enacted grief distilled through her movements and gestures. She explored American forms and themes in Primitive Mysteries (1931), inspired by Native American ritual, and in Letter to the World (1950), which was based on Emily Dickinson’s poetry and life. Graham developed narrative dances exploring Jungian theory and Greek mythology in works such as Cave of the Heart (1946) and the evening-length Clytemnestra (1958). She explored alternative narrative devices such as flashback in Seraphic Dialogue (1955). Although the predominant feeling of her work was dark and serious, notable exceptions include the joyous Diversion of Angels (1948) and her last work, the surprising Maple Leaf Rag (1990) to music by Scott Joplin, which poked fun at her own stylistic conventions. For her set designs she invited many notable artists, including ISAMU NOGUCHI. Due to her significance, longevity, and relative accessibility, more has been written about her than anyone else in American modern dance. —Katy Matheson

GRAHN, JUDY (28 July 1940) Of the women writers acknowledging the influence of GERTRUDE STEIN, Grahn has been the most courageous, understanding as she does the literary possibilities offered by Stein’s more radical work, coupled with Grahn’s personal identification with Stein’s Lesbian sexuality. Grahn’s Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology (1989) ranks among the best for favoring the more challenging texts, even competing with three Stein books edited by me. A favorite subject

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of Grahn’s own poetry is deeper truths about uniquely Lesbian experience. Metaphormic Consciousness is her own coinage. Many writers have received prizes with donors’ names and sometimes money attached, to be noticed in newspapers (but not in history books). More unique perhaps and thus worth noticing here, is the Judy Grahn Award established during her lifetime (1997) to be bestowed upon others.

GRAPHIC NARRATIVE (1919) This, along with graphic novel, has become the accepted term for sequences of visual panels, sometimes including words, that for “reading” depend upon readers’ moving eyes from one frame to another, often by turning printed pages, but also sometimes from upper-left frames across to upper right, and then down eventually to lower right. I prefer Narrative to “Novel,” because many are shorter than book-length, while some aren’t fictional at all. (For early non-fictional graphic narrative, consider James Reid’s The Life of Christ in Woodcuts [1930], which lacks words, and Charles Turzak’s Abraham Lincoln: A Biography in Woodcuts [1933], which accompany short paragraphs.) Among the first, with one wordless panel to a page, were FRANS MASEREEL’s oft-reprinted Passionate Journey (1919) and, in America, Hearts of Gold: The Great American Novel (and Not a Word in It – No Music too) (1930), by MILT GROSS otherwise known for his comic strips, this second book in particular suggesting that Graphic Narratives are highbrow comics. In my anthology Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973) are “Process Poems” by two Brazilians, Moacy Cirne (1943–2014) and Alvaro da Sá (1935–2001), who put within a single page many tiny panels that in sequence suggest a narrative, much as comic strips do when reprinted in books. For me (though not some others) this epithet would include at one extreme certain narratives that are composed entirely of photos (e.g., DUANE MICHALS) and, on another edge, books only of words where “reading” depends entirely upon turning pages, such as EMMETT WILLIAMS’s Sweethearts. Online must be graphic narratives requiring the viewer to hit a key to move from one image to the next, which is the equivalent of turning the page. By avant-garde standards, ABSTRACT GRAPHIC FICTON represents a higher form. The category Graphic Narratives should not include “narrative painting” that customarily within a single image suggests a moment within an ongoing story.

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GRAPHIC NOTATION (1920s) Ever since 1000 A.D., when Guido d’Arezzo drew a line to mark the arbitrary height of pitch, musical notation has been geometric in its symbolism. The horizontal coordinate of the music staff still represents the temporal succession of melodic notes, and the vertical axis indicates the simultaneous use of two or more notes in a chord. Duration values have, through the centuries of evolution, been indicated by the color and shape of notes and stems to which they were attached. The composers of the avant-garde eager to reestablish the mathematical correlation between the coordinates of the musical axes have written scores in which the duration was indicated by proportional distance between the notes. Undoubtedly such geometrical precision contributes to the audio-visual clarity of notation, but it is impractical in actual usage. A passage in whole-notes or half-notes followed by a section in rapid rhythms would be more difficult to read than the imprecise notation inherited from the past. In orchestral scores, there is an increasing tendency to cut off the inactive instrumental parts in the middle of the page rather than to strew such vacuums with a rash of rests. A graphic system of tablature notation was launched in Holland under the name Klavarskribo, an Esperanto word meaning keyboard writing. It has been adopted in many schools in Holland. New sounds demanded new notational symbols. HENRY COWELL, who invented tone-clusters, notated them by drawing thick vertical lines attached to a stem. Similar notation was used for similar effects by the Russian composer Vladimir Rebikov. In his book New Musical Resources, Cowell tackled the problem of non-binary rhythmic division and outlined a plausible system that would satisfy this need by using square, triangular, and rhomboid shapes of notes. Alois Haba of Czechoslovakia, a pioneer in microtonal music, devised special notation for quarter-tones, thirdtones, and sixth-tones. As long as the elements of pitch, duration, intervallic extension, and polyphonic simultaneity remain in force, the musical staff can accommodate these elements more or less adequately. Then noises were introduced by the Italian Futurists into their works. In his compositions, the Futurist LUIGI RUSSOLO drew a network of curves, thick lines, and zigzags to represent each particular noise. But still the measure and the proportional lengths of duration retained their validity. The situation changed dramatically with the introduction of ALEATORY processes and the notion of INDETERMINACY of musical elements. The visual

178 • GRAY, EILEEN appearance of aleatory scores assumes the aspect of ideograms. JOHN CAGE, in particular, remodeled the old musical notation so as to give improvisatory latitude to the performer. The score of his Variations I suggests the track of cosmic rays in a cloud chamber. His Cartridge Music looks like an exploding supernova, and his Fontana Mix is a projection of irregular curves upon a strip of graph paper. The Polish avant-garde composer KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI uses various graphic symbols to designate such effects as the highest possible sound on a given instrument, free improvisation within a certain limited range of chromatic notes, or icositetraphonic tone-clusters. In music for mixed media, notation ceases to function per se, giving way to pictorial representation of the actions or psychological factors involved. Indeed, the modern Greek composer Jani Christo introduces the Greek letter psi to indicate the psychology of the musical action, with geometric ideograms and masks symbolizing changing mental states ranging from complete passivity to panic. The score of Passion According to Marquis de Sade by Sylvano Bussotti looks like a surrealistic painting with musical notes strewn across its path. The British avant-garde composer CORNELIUS CARDEW draws black and white circles, triangles, and rectangles to indicate musical action. IANNIS XENAKIS prefers to use numbers and letters, indicating the specific tape recordings to be used in his musical structures. Some composers abandon the problem of notation entirely, recording their inspirations on tape. The attractiveness of a visual pattern is a decisive factor. The American avant-garde composer EARLE BROWN draws linear abstractions of singular geometric excellence. KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN often supplements his analytical charts by elucidatory (or tantalizingly obscurative) annotations. The chess grandmaster Tarrasch said of a problematical chess move: “If it is ugly, it is bad.” Mutatis mutandis, the same criterion applies to a composer’s musical graph. —Nicolas Slonimsky

GRAY, EILEEN (9 August 1978–31 October 1976; b. Katherine E. Moray Smith) Whereas some distinguished artists design objects (for subsequent reproduction/manufacture), some veteran designers produce fine art, often inadvertently. In the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (NY) is a remarkable Screen (1922) more than 6 feet high and more than 4 feet across with seven rows of lacquered wood panels on thin vertical metal rods. As the panels centered on

the rods take various angles, the Screen resembles an elegant Cubist sculpture. However, the panels can be moved on their axes to be flush with each other and thus make a nearly continuous wall. A masterwork of its kind, this MoMA work is reportedly based upon a larger sculpture made for a grand Paris apartment. Either way, preferring WHITE & BLACK art, I’d love to have one in my house. Though born in Ireland, Gray lived for most of her years in Paris where she was known primarily as a textile designer and, incidentally, as an architect, especially of her own home in Menton, France. In February 2009, a “Dragons” armchair (1917–19) designed by Gray sold at auction in Paris for 21.9 million euros, reportedly setting a record for a work of art initially regarded as decorative.

GREEN, PAUL (17 March 1894–4 May 1981) One truth about American culture is that the commercial operations drop nearly everyone. What’s true about Hollywood studios or book publishers is also true about mainstream theater. The playwright Paul Green, born in North Carolina, had a good run on Broadway through the 1920s, culminating with a Pulitzer Prize. He published three collections of one-act plays. However, by the 1930s, his work was dropped; so he went to Hollywood, which disappointed him. What to do? Just as RICHARD FOREMAN created his own theater not in Broadway or even off-Broadway, as it was known in the 1970s, but within ARTISTS’ SOHO where he incidentally lived, so Green returned south before venturing where no major American playwright had gone before – into the provinces, inventing a new form of “symphonic dramas,” as he called them, for PERFORMANCE, mostly outdoors, in various states. From 1937 forward, he wrote and saw produced nearly a dozen of them, mostly recreating historical events through pageantry in settings sometimes near the historic site. Though simple in some respects, they were ambitious in others. More people witnessed them than attended the plays of more canonical American dramatists; likewise more people performed in them. My friend his niece Avery Russell recalls that her uncle would spend his last thirty summers touring among them in his Cadillac, routinely scaring chickens on back-country roads; it was the sort of working trip that no other American writer could make. Perhaps because theater critics rarely looked so far outside New York City, critical literature about Green is sadly slight. May I venture that this appreciation of Paul Green in a canonical book such this might be unique.

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GREENBERG, CLEMENT (16 January 1909–7 May 1994) By common consent, Greenberg was the principal American art critic of the middle 20th century, the one whose essays on the ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST painting of the post-war decade seem as smart decades later as they did then (as does his 1939 classic on “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”). As a younger critic Sanford Schwartz (1946) correctly judged in 1987, “Perception for perception, Clement Greenberg is the greatest American art critic.” Whereas his colleague (and competitor) HAROLD ROSENBERG emphasized the process of freely applying paint to canvas (as a surrogate revolution for failed Marxism), Greenberg focused on formally “all-over” imagery extending evenly to the edges of the painting. Though Greenberg presented himself as a rational, dispassionate observer, some of his particular judgments seem, especially in retrospect, highly subjective. In subsequent decades, he advocated painterly painting, not necessarily abstract, especially against those who preferred painting that incorporated performance, philosophy, or something else. “I regard flatness and the inclosing of flatness not just as the limiting conditions of pictorial art, but as criteria of aesthetic quality in pictorial art,” he wrote succinctly. “The further a work advances the self-definition of an art, the better that work is bound to be.” Simply. Though Greenberg scarcely published after the mid-1970s, he remained influential, not only as an occasional lecturer but as the touchstone that his successors were continually citing, either inflating or rejecting. Though he resisted accepting an academic appointment, he influenced art history professors emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, though none ever equaled him for literary cogency or esthetic insight.

GREENFIELD, AMY (8 July 1940) Elementary actions like spinning, falling, and rising to one’s feet are laden with meaning in Greenfield’s cinema. Greenfield believes such physical movements can evoke primal experiences recalled by individuals and cultural memories held by generations. Her Element (1973) is a glistening meditation on a solitary female figure struggling through a sea of total mud, but also a metaphor for perseverance and survival. Coming to film from modern dance, Greenfield understands the latent meanings of simple gestures. Though her cinema draws energy from dance, it does not resemble theater. In Element, mud spatters onto the camera

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lens, reminding us of its presence. In Dervish (1974), a real-time spinning ritual-dance that was videotaped with two cameras, images of the whirling figure dissolve into each other, building a picture that is unique to video. Greenfield consistently tailors the subjects of her films, videotapes, or HOLOGRAMS to the special characteristics of each medium. In her 1979 Videotape for a Woman and a Man, a couple whirls at the end of the work, freezing into immobility and then rushing back to life in shared moments that are electronic and ecstatic. Greenfield’s short film Tides (1980) and her feature-length Antigone (1989) continue the concerns of her earlier works: ordeal; human movement registered and magnified by an active camera; and a fluid treatment of narrative that retroactively upsets our sense of space and time. Quite remarkably, in a 1968 essay for Filmmakers’ Newsletter, Greenfield outlined an artistic agenda very similar to what she would actually do, from Encounter (1969), which echoes STAN BRAKHAGE, to all of her other films. In 2010, YouTube removed two of her videos until anti-censorship advocates successfully had their presence restored. —Robert Haller

GRIFFITH, D. W. (22 January 1875–23 July 1948; b. David Llewelyn Wark G.) Initially among the most prolific directors of early silent films, Griffith belongs here less for his general achievement than for a single film, Intolerance (1916), which in crucial respects transcended everything made before it. Among the film’s innovations was its structure of telling four separate but interwoven stories (“The Modern Story,” “The Judean Story,” “The French Story,” and “The Babylonian Story”) that were linked by the common theme announced in its title and explained in an opening statement. The technical departure of interweaving four stories (more than a decade before WILLIAM FAULKNER’s structurally similar The Sound and the Fury, 1929) gives the film a fugal form, a grand scope, and a historical resonance previously unknown and subsequently rare. As the independent film scholar Seymour Stern (1908–78) pointed out, Griffith worked without a script, even editing from memory, meaning there was nothing for his corporate bosses to approve prior to his making the film. The spectacle is a reflection, in Stern’s luminous phrases, of a creative titan’s hand, moving puppet-forces, but moving them in a resplendent esthetic of

180 • GRIFFITHS, PAUL coordinated masses, counterpoised rhythms, orchestrated tempos, parallel movements, structured multiple movement-forces, configurations both static and dynamic, visual confluences of timeless space, imagistic symphonies of people, objects, and light: the filmic architecture of history and tragedy beyond emotion and beyond criticism. The surviving print has occasional verbal frames, contrary to Griffith’s original intention of making a purely visual film with the integrity of a Beethoven string quartet. Griffith also varied the size and shape of the screen, forecasting images of alternative projection, including circular screens and the ratios of CINEMASCOPE. Perhaps because of the commercial failure of Intolerance, only more modest films would follow. Much of his energies were then devoted to finding better ways for serious directors to fund their films, first by cofounding the collaborative United Artists Corporation (with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks), later by legally incorporating himself, all without sufficient success to permit him to control his subsequent filmmaking. He died alone and forgotten in a Hollywood hotel room.

GRIFFITHS, PAUL (24 November 1947) In addition to writing several of the best books about modern (classical) music, this prodigious British writer has produced a modest body of highly imaginative writing, initially in librettos for operas by ELLIOTT CARTER and Tan Dun (1957), among other composers, and then in texts that stand alone. Among the latter is a sort-of novel, let me tell you (2008) composed from only the words spoken by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The Danish composer HANS ABRAHAMSEN also drew on this Griffiths text for a composition similarly named. Not unlike other experimental writers, even those who publish other kinds of texts widely, Griffiths has much unpublished. He also worked as a staff music reviewer for prominent periodicals in both New York and London; the New York Times surprisingly published his authoritative obituaries of major composers long after Griffiths had left. Rare among the individuals featured here, he was rewarded by his Queen with an O.B.E., which is a sort of minor-league knighthood.

GRÖGEROVÁ, BOHUMILA (7 August 1921–21 August 2014), and Josef Hiršal (24 July 1920–15 September 2003)

They edited the anthology experimentaální poezie (1967), which (even though it was published in Czechoslovakia) ranks among the best anthologies of CONCRETE POETRY. It included the strongest works not only from their contemporaries, such as EUGEN GOMRINGER, JEAN-FRANÇOIS BORY, and JOHN FURNIVAL, but from earlier writers, including MICHEL SEUPHOR, RAOUL HAUSMANN, and PIERRE-ALBERT BIROT, only some of which they translated into Czech. Grögerová also produced poetic objects and drawings, in addition to experimental prose, radio plays, and cycles of diaries in the form of literary montages. Hiršal published several books of poetry. Not unlike other prominent writers in minority languages, they both translated literature from the major Western tongues.

GROSS, MILT (4 March 1895–28 November 1953) Gross was a cartoonist, famous in his time, with sufficient literary ambition to write a book-length narrative that had, as its title page boasted, “not a word in it – no music, too.” In a series of finely drawn pictures various in size (and thus structurally different from a standard cartoon strip), He Done Her Wrong (reprinted as Hearts of Gold) tells of a frontier trapper going into the woods to earn enough money to marry his girlfriend who, while he is gone, succumbs to a city slicker who cons the woman into believing the trapper has died. (JOHN BARTH once quoted the Latin poet Horace saying that if an experimental writer wants to use an unfamiliar form, he or she would be wise to choose a familiar plot, which is what Gross did.) As representational images devoid of words, this Gross novel is very much the precursor of, among other books, several marvelous, strictly visual narratives of Martin Vaughn-James (1943–2009), whose books Elephant (1970) and The Projector (1971) were published in Canada in the early 1970s. After he moved to Paris, later special Vaughn-James fictions (which need not be translated) appeared in the French literary periodical Minuit. Another Gross classic is “Hiawatta: Witt No Odder Poems” (1926), which retells in forty pages a familiar Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem with images accompanied by his Yiddish-English. Gross continued such delicious American irony in De Night in de Front from Chreesmas, Dunt Esk (1927) and Famous Fimmales witt Odder Ewents from Heestory (1928).

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GROTOWSKI, JERZY (11 August 1933–14 January 1999) From modest professional beginnings directing a theatrical company in the small Polish city of Opole (formerly Oppeln) and then another in Wroclav (formerly Breslau), Grotowski quickly became known for radical stagings. He put the audience for Calderon de la Barca’s The Constant Prince on a four-sided shelf behind a high wooden fence, so that spectators had to stand and peer like voyeurs over the barrier. His production of Stanislaw Wyspiański’s (1869–1907) Akropolis (1904) required performers to build structures through the audience. He also cut and transposed texts, resetting their action. Grotowski was so successful that, when he returned to America the following year, he gave lectures titled “Misconceptions in the United States about the Grotowski Method.” He wrote provocatively: “The actors can play among the spectators, directly contacting the audience and giving it a passive role in the drama.” For his 1969 New York productions of several plays, he limited attendance to one hundred people and the duration of the PERFORMANCE to only one hour. In his Theatre Trip (1969), the sometime theater critic Michael Smith (1935) describes a laying area “roughly fifteen feet by twenty-five feet” for Grotowski’s The Constant Prince. The actors are often within arm’s reach, they play continuously at an ecstatic level of energy, they are sometimes all but naked, their concentration is perfect. The sound and movements they make are indescribably extravagant, and their extravagance is given force by impeccable discipline and control. One looks down upon them from a very close range. One might be examining them under a microscope – but they are full size, human, alive. Grotowski says that the spectator must see the beads of sweat on the actor’s face. The experience is absolutely enthralling, altogether too much to take in. The theme of Grotowski’s book Towards a Poor Theater (1970) was that performance could exist without lights, music, or scenery. All it required was one performer and one spectator. Grotowski also developed an innovative program for training actors for extraordinary, almost superhuman (e.g. trancelike) performances and inhuman sounds. Much of the influence of the pedagogy depended at the time upon the extraordinary actor Ryszard (Richard) Cieślak (1937–90). Sometime in the 1970s, Grotowski became, no joke, a Southern California academic, before resettling in Pontedera, Italy, where he died. He was also one of the

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few individuals featured in this book to get a MacArthur “genius” grant, perhaps because avant-garde stars are more acceptable to certain American funders if they are foreign-born.

GRUMMAN, BOB (2 February 1941–2 April 2015) With his regular contributions to the periodical SmallPress Review and his book Manywhere-at-Once (1990), Grumman became a major critic of avant-garde American poetry. His strengths were, first, relating new developments to the high modernist tradition and, then, penetrating close readings of texts that would strike most readers as initially impenetrable. For instance, looking at George Swede’s “graveyarduskilldeer,” Grumman notices, Here three words are spelled together not only to produce the richly resonant “double-haiku,” graveyard/dusk/killdeer//graveyard/us/killdeer, but strikingly to suggest the enclosure (like letters by a word) of two or more people (a couple – or, perhaps a// of us) by an evening – or some greater darkening. Very keen on distinctions, Grumman coined useful discriminatory categories where previous commentators saw only chaos: “infra-verbal” and “alphaconceptual” are two examples. Others appear in this book. He also published many books of poetry, some of them featuring poems that mix words and numbers, which, with typical readiness for inventive coinage, he called “alphanumeric.” Not only did his MICROPRESS Runaway Spoon rank among the most active publishers of the best experimental writing but his press’s printed catalog demonstrated how witty the stolid convention of a publisher’s book list can be.

GUERILLA THEATER See SAN FRANCISCO MIME TROUPE.

GUERRILLA GIRLS (1985) The specialty of this scrupulously anonymous collective is the provocative poster, customarily realized with considerable irony and wit. Such posters appear wherever they can be placed, beginning with the walls of

182 • GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION New York’s SOHO but including other venues, such as pages of magazines. The posters customarily have a large-type headline over a series of short assertions. My favorite is headlined “Relax Senator Helms, the Art World Is Your Kind of Place” (1989). Among the assertions, each preceded by a bullet, in ironic reference to advertising styles, are: “Museums are separate but equal. No female black painter or sculptor has been in a Whitney Biennial since 1973. Instead, they can show at the Studio Museum in Harlem or the Women’s Museum in Washington”; “The majority of exposed penises in major museums belong to the Baby Jesus.” These statements are not just true, but stylishly presented; and when radicals are appealing to people receptive to art, that last quality helps. Surprised may I be that decades later no individual has broken the commitment to collective anonymity. Could they all pass without historians ever identifying who they were?

GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION (1925) It was an extraordinary move, really, for an independent entity to give modest sums to artists (and scholars) applying to do whatever they wished for a year or two, and in this respect the Foundation established by the Guggenheim family, in memory of a son who died young, set a good example. Based on private money, rather than state money (or royal money), the Guggenheim Foundation was accountable only to itself. This differed from private patronage, such as PEGGY GUGGENHEIM’s (from the same family), wherein rich people support someone they know, whose work or company pleases them personally, for several years at least. Rather than rely on their own tastes or a single trusted advisor, as most private patrons do, the Guggenheim Foundation established selection committees that would review applications in which supplicants propose the projects that each wishes to pursue. Over the years, thanks largely to the genuine leadership of its initial principal administrator, Henry Allen Moe (1894–1975), the Guggenheim Foundation differed from less distinguished funders by including genuinely avant-garde artists, including many featured in this book. Of course, it missed opportunities, as when ARNOLD SCHOENBERG applied in the mid-1940s to complete the third act of his opera Moses und Aron; and it wasted profligately, as in awarding four fellowships in the 1930s to a middling composer named DANTE FIORELLO, who vanished physically in the early 1950s.

Whereas Guggenheim grants at the beginning funded those who were young and barely known, it was widely thought in the 1960s and 1970s that the Guggenheim Foundation, less secure in its decision making, would fund only people whose work had already been recognized elsewhere, the Foundation in effect putting its rubber stamp on someone, probably in mid-career, already approved (in implicit exchange for their subsequently acknowledging the Guggenheim tag in their biographies). Like all arts funders, this patron should get credit for what it actually does, not what it says it wants to do. The best that can be said is that the Guggenheim Foundation has made culture happen that would not otherwise have happened; since much of this new culture was good, the beneficiaries ultimately included a public larger than the initial artist. Of the later independent foundations, few have equaled the Pollock-Krasner, established by JACKSON POLLOCK’s widow in the 1980s (with money earned from art, not commerce), in supporting a large number of needy artists (mostly painters and sculptors). Too many other funding programs, by contrast, support remarkably few people, often of indistinct quality, with too much fanfare (aka “publicity”), so that a skeptic observing results inevitably questions why and thus how it selected its beneficiaries, rather than others more deserving, whose work is demonstrably superior.

GUGGENHEIM, PEGGY (26 August 1898–23 December 1979; b. Marguerite G.) In spite of her personal extravagances and absurdities, she ranks among the great patrons of avant-garde painting. In addition to purchasing works by emerging artists, she also gave them stipends and even for a while sponsored a gallery that showed their work. The historical measure of her success as a patron was that many of those early receiving her beneficence later earned greater recognition. Indeed, good wagering is finally the truest measure for patronage, whether by private individuals, public institutions like universities, or state cultural agencies, most of whom have a record of unsuccessful judgment at the service of good intentions. In Alvin Toffler’s classic warning, “Patrons who were stupid enough or uncultivated enough to support the mediocrities of their period fade into richly deserved obscurity. Only those who guessed right are remembered. The history of patronage is thus biased and selective.” As a family, the De Menils, mostly of Houston, TX, rank among the best. One theme of

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the museum established in Peggy Guggenheim’s villa in Venice is that she was among those who “guessed right.” Her cousin, Solomon R. Guggenheim (1861– 1949), likewise a good guesser, established the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

GUTAI ART ASSOCIATION (1954–72) A group of Japanese artists, trained in various disciplines including law and literature, founded in Osaka by Jiro Yoshihara (1905–72), who incidentally also headed a large cooking oil business, they produced collective paintings and PERFORMANCE pieces, some of them quite spectacular. They favored materials odd to art, such as smoke, colored water, mud, chemicals; they explored time. The first Gutai exhibition in Tokyo, October 1955, included Saburo Murakami’s Paper Tearing and Kazuo Shiraga’s Challenging Mud, both of which were influential. Yoshihara founded a journal named Gutai that lasted a decade (1955–65) and issued The Gutai Manifesto in 1956. Among the other participants were Atsuko Tanaka (1932–2005), Sadamasa Motonaga (1922–2011), Kazuo Shiraga (1924–2008), and Minuru Yoshida (1935–2010). The theatricist MICHAEL KIRBY describes them as expanding the means used in the action of painting. One artist tied a paintbrush to a toy tank and exhibited the marks it left on the canvas; others painted with their feet, with boxing gloves made of rags and dipped in paint, or by throwing bottles filled with paint at a canvas with rocks under it.

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Kirby continues: In 1957 the Gutai presented more formal theater works for an audience. A large plastic bag filled with red smoke was pushed through a hole at the back of the stage and inflated. Smoke puffed out through holes in the side. Another presentation employed a large box with three transparent plastic walls and one opaque white wall. Performers inside the box dropped balls of paper into buckets of paint and threw them against the white wall, coloring the surface. Then colored water was thrown against the plastic walls that separated the spectators from the performers. The critic Udo Kultermann (1927–2013) writes, The Gutai artists built huge figures after designs by Atsuko Tanaka and lighted them from the inside with strings of colored lamps. The lamps flashed rhythmically, suggesting such disparate effects as outdoor advertising and blood circulation. A moving strip covered with footprints snaked across the forest floor and up a tree. There were also spatial constructions that could be entered, traffic signs, jellyfish-shaped mounds of mud, plastic, and rope, stuffed sacks hanging from trees tied with ribbons. Shiraga thrashed around for twenty minutes in clay that he had piled in a courtyard. I’ve seen a photo of Ms. Tanaka’s face barely visible behind an abundance of fluorescent tubes mostly in color. As far as I can tell, this major avant-garde group mostly disbanded by the middle 1960s, the individual members pursuing separate, less consequential careers. Yoshihara’s death in 1972 ended it. The name Gutai could be translated into English as “embodiment” or “concrete.”

H

HAACKE, HANS (12 August 1936) Born in Germany, Haacke came to America as an artschool teacher, eventually becoming a professor at New York’s Cooper Union, by common consent long consistently among the USA’s most regal art colleges. His principal esthetic achievement has been getting galleries to display artworks that emphasize deceits caused by corporate funding of the visual arts or the shady activities of certain art patrons. Descending from CONCEPTUAL ART, Haacke began in the early 1970s exhibiting maps with highlighted neighborhoods along with photographs of buildings held by Manhattan slumlords he viewed as particularly unctuous. (This prompted the cancellation of an announced exhibition of his work at the Guggenheim Museum and the firing of its curator Edward Fry [1935– 92] in a scandal that decades later is not forgotten.) Subsequent Haacke often uses the slogans from artsupporting corporations for ironic ends, such as a single horizontal aluminum plaque on which are polished letters with Alcoa’s president’s declaration, “Business could hold art exhibitions to tell its own story.” In addition to naming names, Haacke has been skilled at satirical retitling, such as calling PBS the “Petroleum Broadcasting Service.” His recurring theme is exposing the connections between corporate bullies and art institutions. Though some Haacke admirers claim he made “unacceptable art,” his work is exhibited and discussed respectfully while he remains professionally employed, perhaps because exposé exhibitions – in contrast, say, to publication in newspapers – epitomize the finally safe enterprise of preaching to the converted.

HÁBA, ALOIS (21 June 1893–18 November 1973) Discovering sounds between the familiar twelve tones to a scale, he explored quarter tones, as he called them,

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in his Suite for String Orchestra (1917) and then in a large body of works incorporating not just quarter tones but fifth and sixth tones, for ensembles ranging from pianos to string quartets to operas. His theoretical treatises are available only through excerpts quoted here and there. In the mysterious politics informing modern-music performance, this innovative Czech’s works are largely more forgotten than those by his contemporaries: Americans such as Charles Ives and Henry Cowell, and certain Viennese.

HALDEMAN-JULIUS, E. (30 July 1889–31 July 1951; b. Emanuel Julius) By common consent the most influential alternative chapbook publisher ever in America, he established in Girard, Kansas, a unique business that printed miniature vest-pocket books 3½ inches by 5 inches, “Little Blue Books,” with uniform typographic covers on cheap pulp paper, stapled at their spines. Generally left-socialist in their orientation, these books he sold initially for twenty-five cents apiece before falling to ten cents and sometimes five cents mostly on newsstands, circumventing the censorship forever implicit in the more daunting economics of commercial hardback book publishing. These chapbooks were also sent through the US Mail when postage costs were still minimal. Starting with classic texts in the public domain, such as Shakespeare’s plays, EHJ eventually commissioned prominent serious writers to write simply on their favorite subjects – among them, G. B. Shaw, Will Durant, Bernard Russell, and Clarence Darrow. In sum EHJ issued some three thousand different titles and, knowing what many Americans wanted to read, sold innumerable millions of these chapbooks. Think of him as a sort of HENRY FORD of serious/literary book publishing, as no one since has been as successful at distributing so much “progressive”

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literature so cheaply in any Western country. Though born in Philadelphia, EHJ moved to a Kansas town where his Bryn Mawr-educated wife and mother-inlaw owned a local bank. My maternal grandfather (b. 1885), an immigrant from Asia Minor whose English was his fourth language, treasured them, while I own a few hundred of them. Politically active as well, EHJ ran as the Socialist Party candidate for the US Senate in 1932. Ahead of his time in other ways, Emanuel Julius added his first wife’s surname to his own for both himself and his eponymous publishing.

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participant – than how it looks to an audience. In 1980, she began a community workshop called Search for Living Myths with her husband, LAWRENCE HALPRIN. She became committed to creating modernday rituals – in exploring collective power, archetypal forms that emerge from groups, and the possibility for concrete results from the process of creation and performance. One such ritual – a performance of Planetary Dance (19 April 1987) – involved seventy-five groups in thirty-five countries. Not unlike other modern dancers who took good care of themselves, Anna Halprin performed into her nineties. —with Katy Matheson

HALLEY, PETER (24 September 1953)

HALPRIN, LAWRENCE

Among those working in the wake of a previous generation’s discovery of CONCEPTUAL ART none wrote as well or as literately. The question then becomes whether Halley’s visual art embodies the high intelligence evident in his writings? Though he has exhibited and been reviewed for more than three decades, judgment remains inconclusive. These works tend to be at once obscure and allusive to higher degrees, less “ABSTRACT” than diagrammatic. Another question is whether art informed by European professors’ THEORY is therefore “academic,” even if realized by younger artists who aren’t tenured professors? In his intellectual sophistication, Halley falls into the esoteric tradition of visual artists Graduating From at Ivy League undergraduate colleges, thus including, among his predecessors, AD REINHARDT, EDWARD GOREY, PAUL LAFOLLEY, and FRANK STELLA. Halley also published the magazine Index from 1996 to 2005, later coediting a book culled from its pages (2014).

(1 July 1916–25 October 2009)

HALPRIN, ANNA

Halprin’s ideas reflected, as they continually quoted, such artists as BUCKMINSTER FULLER and JOHN CAGE, among others featured in this Dictionary.

(13 July 1920; b. Anna Schuman) After studying with Margaret H’Doubler (1889–1982), a pioneer dance educator at the University of Wisconsin, Halprin emphasized nondance “natural” movements, improvisation, and process in both workshops and performances beginning in the late 1950s. Though she lived and worked around San Francisco, Halprin’s work was first recognized in European festivals in the early 1960s. Her stagings of Parades and Changes (1965), a complex and ever-varying piece, caused a scandal in the mid-1960s for its total nudity. Halprin later became more interested in the therapeutic aspects of dance – in how it feels to the

The husband since 1940 of ANNA HALPRIN, he studied conventional architecture before taking his advanced degree in landscape design. Commonly credited with helping develop “the California garden concept,” Larry Halprin subsequently expanded his range to, to quote his succinct summary of his career: Group housing, suburban villages, shopping centers. Gradually these issues have aggregated into larger ones – how people, in regions, can live together in towns and villages without raping the land and destroying the very environment they live in. This led to concerns about transportation, both freeways for cars and mass transportation (BART), with particular concern for how these mammoth constructions could do more than just function as carriers, but go further and become forms of sculpture (as well as sociology) in the landscape.

HAMILTON, RICHARD (24 February 1922–12 September 2011) A supremely adventurous and persistent British artist, he worked in several areas, some more successfully than others. Interpreting less than imagining, he drew often upon public information and images. In 1960, while MARCEL DUCHAMP was still alive, Hamilton produced a typographic version of the older artist’s original notes for the design and construction for

186 • HAMILTON FINLAY, IAN The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors. Hamilton later made copies of his master’s often fragile oeuvre for exhibitions, including the legendary Large Glass long at London’s Tate Modern. His appropriation of images from advertising, particularly a body-builder in 1956, marked him as a precursor of POP ART, notwithstanding a COLLAGE less than one foot square. Among Hamilton’s more ambitious projects, in progress for decades, were illustrations for JAMES JOYCE’s ULYSSES. His collaboration with DIETER ROTH was fecund and strong enough to be remembered in a solo book. As Hamilton aged, his unusually long face with a long nose became his principal SIGNATURE. “A maddeningly difficult artist to place,” to the British critic David Sylvester (1924–2001), this British treasure earned not one or two but a whopping three retrospectives at the august Tate Museum, not in its provincial branches, but in London itself, each exhibition significantly different from the others.

HAMILTON FINLAY, IAN (28 October 1925–27 March 2006) Would that I liked his work more, because he is among the few contemporaries to be honored in the histories of both contemporary poetry and contemporary visual art. He began as a conventional Scottish poet whose first book, The Dancers Inherit the Party (1960), contained traditional rhymed sentiments about people in the Scottish outlands. Within a few years, he had become the principal Scottish participant in international CONCRETE POETRY, often writing poems that were just collections of nouns. An example is “Little Calendar”: april light light light light may light trees light trees June trees light trees light July trees trees trees trees august trees light trees light September lights trees lights trees His next development was VISUAL POEMS that transcended the limitations of the printed page, some of them created in collaboration with professional craftsmen and visual artists. Many of these pieces began as additions to his home garden in Lanarkshire, a remote area he rarely left because he regarded it (and thus the works collected there) as a refuge from the cruel modern world. As Hamilton Finlay’s work assumed more political themes in the 1980s (and he came into conflict with cultural officials over one issue or another), his pieces have often been included in thematic exhibitions that

were installed outdoors. His five-acre home garden, Little Sparta in Lanarkshire, Scotland, became his masterwork. In the British tradition, his surname properly opens with the letter H.

HAMMID, ALEXANDER (17 December 1907–26 July 2004; b. A. Hackenschmied) Born in Austria, he grew up in Prague, making his first silent experimental film, Bezúčelná Procházka/Aimless Walk in 1930. After working as a cinematographer for the leftist American documentarian Herbert Kline (1909– 99), he fled Czechoslovakia in 1939 to the US where he met and married Eleonora Derenkowskaya who took the name of MAYA DEREN, much as he too took a new name. In collaboration they produced the classic avantgarde film Meshes in the Afternoon (1943) that established her reputation that survived their divorce. In the 1960s, Hammid began collaborating with the sometime painter FRANCIS THOMPSON on multiscreen films: To Be Alive (1964) and We Are Young (1967), which knocked me out at the Montreal EXPO 67, which remains in my mind as a masterpiece of the under-developed multi-screen cinema genre. Later Hammid and Thompson, among the great collaborations in expanded cinema, produced To Fly! (1976), which still stands the pioneering classic in the IMAX technology.

HANDICAPS/DISADVANTAGES One of the hidden truths informing avant-garde creation is that many major figures overcame severe professional limitations that would have defeated less determined people. After JOHN CAGE’s teacher judged that the aspiring composer had no talent for harmony, the younger man composed musics independent of harmony. As GERTRUDE STEIN lacked competence with conventional sentences, she wrote something else. As MERCE CUNNINGHAM was born too tight-jointed to make the flexible extensions favored by most dancers, he developed other movements as both a dancer and choreographer. As JACKSON POLLOCK was limited at his easel, he developed another way to apply painting to canvas. Many distinguished modern visual artists couldn’t pass an elementary class on “drawing.” My own juvenile efforts at linear prose fiction were dismissed by a novelist once prominent well before I produced radical narratives barely dependent upon imaginative “prose.” One conclusion behind this observation is that certain major avant-garde artists courageously transcended a genuine lack of innate “talent,” sometimes because they develop a strong esthetic idea that

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incorporated an intelligence of its own. As the great Dutch footballer JOHAN CRUYFF understood: “Every disadvantage has its advantage.” Such achievement should be neither disrespected nor discouraged.

HAPPENING (1958) Coined by ALLAN KAPROW, a gifted wordsmith as well as an innovative artist, for his particular kind of nonverbal, MIXED-MEANS theatrical piece, this term came, in the late ’60s, to characterize any and every chaotic event, particularly if it wasn’t immediately definable. Especially because the epithet had been vulgarized elsewhere, it became, within the community of visual performance, exclusively the property of Kaprow, who defined it thus: An assemblage of events performed or perceived in more than one time and place. Its material environments may be constructed, taken over directly from what is available, or altered slightly, just as its activities may be invented or commonplace. A Happening, unlike a stage play, may occur at a supermarket, driving along a highway, under a pile of rags, and in a friend’s kitchen, either at once or sequentially. If sequential, time may extend to more than a year. The Happening is performed according to a plan without rehearsal, audience, or repetition. Like all good definitions, this excludes more than it encompasses, beginning with some examples that one might think belong.

HARD-EDGE ABSTRACTION See COLOR-FIELD PAINTING

HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS (1926) Long the greatest comedians in “sports,” they gave their first PERFORMANCE not in a sports arena but in a night club, indeed a legendary ballroom, incidentally initiating an African-American basketball tradition not necessarily to win but to display athletic virtuosity, not only with individual stars but as a team. At a time when the professional basketball teams were lily white and visibly graceless, these African-Americans invented

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their own more theatrical style with witty ball-handling and delicate dribbling, including such awesome acrobatic moves as the above-the-rim dunks that DARYL DAWKINS later displayed in the National Basketball League. After the NBA color bar went down, white basketballers adopted some Globetrotter moves, playing “blackface,” so to speak, while “honest” basketballers, including certain NBA stars, joined the touring team from time to time. Later recruits to the Globetrotters have included women and very short players. One defining individual in establishing theatrical excellence was Reese “Goose” Tatum (1921–67), famous as a long-armed “clown prince,” whom I first saw around 1955 and whose unique antics I have remembered ever since. Once Tatum retired, his crown was assumed by Meadow Lemon III (1932–2015), known as Meadowlark L. Collectively the Harlem Globetrotters developed delicious routines that could be performed over and over again without failure. Over the decades they have toured around the world, reportedly playing over 25,000 “games” that don’t require translation, pleasing adults as well as children, in tandem with mostly Caucasian opponents, who are fated to lose. While imitators have come and gone, the HG’s virtuosic comedy survives. Odd it is perhaps that nothing comparable has succeeded in other team sports.

HARTLEY, MARSDEN (4 January 1877–September 1943; b. Edmund H.) Even through few prominent American painters of his generation wrote as well and no writer publishing both so much poetry and criticism painted, his professional and personal life required endless struggles. Hartley moved frequently not only through the eastern United States but also in Paris and BERLIN, rarely establishing permanent residence let alone permanent relationships. So impoverished was he in 1935 that he sadly burned many earlier paintings sooner than pay storage costs. Nonetheless, among Hartley’s poems “Diabolo” (1920) is particularly memorable, and few critics of his time wrote as well, if selectively, about art, literature, and American PERFORMANCE. As his strongest paintings reflect homosexual desires that would be less problematic a century later, it could be said that Hartley came and went too soon. After ROBERT INDIANA relocated from New York City to Maine, where he purchased property that Hartley previously inhabited, the artist younger by a half-century produced Hartley Elegies (1989–94) that channel as they implicitly enhance his predecessor. Sadly, the last major traveling (semi)retrospective of Hartley’s work, initiated in 1980 by New York Whitney Museum, acknowledged his substantial writings only in

188 • HARTMANN, SADAKICHI the catalog’s concluding pages (pp. 209–211), implicitly diminishing his achievements.

HARTMANN, SADAKICHI

paper, a hardback classic of a classic, by a small press in Texas. Nothing comparably spectacular has appeared since, not even in NEW YORK CITY; even for Alfred Leslie, doing as well again would have been daunting.

(8 November 1867–22 November 1944; b. Carl S. H.)

HAUSMANN, RAOUL

Given how much immigrant intellectuals have always contributed to American arts history, it is scarcely surprising that the first major critic of photography, among other arts, should have been born in Japan of a German father and raised in Germany before arriving in Philadelphia as a teenager. An adventurer in the arts, Hartmann was an accomplished dancer who looked like no one else. Working in live theater, he introduced perfumes into his staged performances (that received negative notices); he was a DOWNTOWN Manhattan art celebrity whom GUIDO BRUNO crowed “The King of the Bohemians.” Though largely self-educated, Hartmann was for several years a prolific reviewer of new art for American newspapers. He founded a periodical called The Art Critic (1893) that survived only four issues; he published in 1910 an early full-length book on James McNeil Whistler (1834–1903). Unique by several measures, he also wrote poetry and plays about Jesus Christ, Buddha, and Confucius, a trilogy that was reprinted as late as 1971. Once Hartmann moved to Hollywood, he appeared in films, most memorably as the Court Magician in The Thief of Bagdad (1924). Hartmann’s best extended photography criticism, from the beginning of the 20th century, is remembered on PCCA (Photography Criticism CyberArchive) sponsored by A. D. Coleman (1943), a major independent American photography critic of a later generation.

(12 July 1886–1 February 1971)

THE HASTY PAPERS (1960) A great American one-shot literary/art magazine/ anthology, this appeared in a large format, 11 inches by 14 inches, on newsprint; its publisher was Alfred Leslie (1927), nominally a painter. Its contents included “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” which remains for me KENNETH KOCH’s greatest single poem, actually written several years before; fresh contributions from PONTUS HULTÉN, W.C. WILLIAMS, JOHN ASHBERY, ALLEN GINSBERG, JACK KEROUAC, in addition to two curious texts whose inclusion later seems reflective of the time: Fidel Castro’s 1960 speech to the United Nations and the complete 19th-century American classic, Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater (1857). Though reflective of DOWNTOWN Manhattan, The Hasty Papers was reprinted intact in 2000, on better

Born in Vienna, Hausmann spent his teen years in BERLIN, where as a young man he met Johannes Baader (1875–1955), who joined him and RICHARD HUELSENBECK in founding the DADA Club in 1918. Already in his thirties, Hausmann soon afterwards became, in MARC DACHY’s summary, “painter, craftsman, photographer, creator of photomontages, visual concrete poet, sound poet, theoretician, prose writer, technician, journalist, historian, magazine editor, dancer, and performer,” which is to say a POLYARTIST. In 1919, Hausmann started the periodical Der Dada and organized the first Dada exhibition in Berlin. Politically radical, he allied with Baader in placing fictitious articles in Berlin daily newspapers and in proposing a Dada Republic in the Berlin suburb of Nikolassee, announcing their political activities through eyecatching posters. Hausmann invented the Optophone, which was a photoelectric machine for translating kaleidoscopic forms into sound, and also created the Dada “phonetic poem” before KURT SCHWITTERS took the idea to a higher level, the former’s performance in 1921 of his “FMSBW” reportedly influencing the latter. “The sound poem,” according to Hausmann, “is an art consisting of respiratory and auditive combinations. In order to express these elements typographically, I use letters of different sizes to give them the character of musical notation.” Hausmann probably invented PHOTOMONTAGE before MOHOLY-NAGY and JOHN HEARTFIELD. His polyartistic career is best defined by an English epithet more popular in Europe than America: “multiple researches.”

HEARTFIELD, JOHN (19 June 1891–26 April 1968; b. Helmut Herzfeld) The son of a socialist poet, he anglicized both his names in 1916 as a protest against forced military service in World War I and, under this new moniker, produced advanced art. As a founding member of BERLIN Dada, calling himself Monteurdada, he joined Rudolf Schlichter (1890– 1955), in hanging from the ceiling Prussian Archangel (1920), a shop-window dummy dressed in a German officer’s uniform and fitted with a pig’s head. Heartfield

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differed from his politically dissenting colleagues by actually joining the Communist party, inadvertently inviting some antagonistic journalists to equate Dada with Bolshevism, which otherwise wasn’t generally true. Later an early adventurer in PHOTOMONTAGE, Heartfield specialized in visually seamless cutups that ridiculed Fascist politicians. These were published as cartoons, posters, illustrations, and book covers (a format that he particularly revolutionized) – wherever he could, in his aspiration to be a popular political artist. Heartfield’s most famous image is Adolf, Der Übermensch: Schluckt Gold und redet Blech (1932), depicting Hitler swallowing large coins and spewing junk. Once Hitler took power, Heartfield fled to Prague and then to London (while his brother, Wieland Herzfelde [1896–1988], a prominent publisher, escaped to New York City). After settling in East Germany in 1950, John Heartfield, his name still English, received all the benefits and privileges that a communist state could offer.

HEIDSIECK, BERNARD (30 November 1928–22 November 2014) A pioneering sound poet, whose spoken work realized a propulsive voice instantly identifiable as his, Heidsieck pursued from the early 1950s a singular path focused upon French language and French history, usually with identifiable subjects, producing many tapes and records as well as books that include 7-inch records and even films. He coined the epithets “poésie sonore” in 1955 and “poésie action” in 1962, the first an approximation of SOUND POETRY, the second of performance poetry. He began to work with audiotape recorders as early as 1959. He was credited with organizing the first international festival of sound poetry in 1976. Heidsieck was one of the few writers mentioned in this book ever to win a major prize from his own government (in his case, the Grand Prix National de la Poésie [1991]); one explanation held that the literary judges, initially divided over more conservative candidates, picked Heidsieck to take revenge on one another. Such fortuitous accidents happen in the history of rewarding the avant-gardes.

HEILIG, MORTON

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a multi-sensory enveloping experience, offering the viewer not only images and stereo sound but breezes and even smells. Heilig’s classic short film/projection, vividly recalled in Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality (1991), took the viewer on a highly sensuous motorcycle ride through Brooklyn including the experience of headwind and exhaust fumes. (A comparable later development, done by others and called The Sensorium and prophetically billed as a “4D film,” was screened in a Baltimore amusement park in 1984.) Whole books of modern film history have appeared without Heilig’s name.

HEISS, ALANNA (13 May 1943) A visionary servant of art, she discovered in DOWNTOWN Manhattan spacious empty spaces, usually in city-owned buildings, that, thanks to her passion and negotiating skills, could be made available to artists to use as working studios. She began in 1972 with upper floors of a building on the corner of Leonard Street and Broadway, famed for its rooftop clocktower whose dial was stuck, and so officially incorporated Clocktower Productions as a nonprofit. On floors below, all visitors remember, were New York City offices like parole boards. Heiss identified other empty spaces, some of them only temporarily available, and then a whole empty school in the outer borough of Queens, the original P.S. (Public School) # 1 that, permanently available, offered larger exhibition spaces in addition to production studios in former classrooms, initially for local artists, later for beneficiaries from around the world. With a sure sense of herself as an ART WORLD star, Heiss ran this PS 1, as it was commonly called, from 1976 to 2008 as the most visible ALTERNATIVE SPACE. (I had at the beginning there a BOOK-ART exhibition in a smaller corner ground-floor room that had obviously been a principal’s office. On the wall was still a box for controlling the ringing of bells within the school.) From its modest origins P.S.1 eventually became an official outpost of MoMA just across New York’s East River.

HEISSENBÜTTEL, HELMUT (21 June 1921–19 September 1996)

(22 December 1926–14 May 1997) A cinematographer/documentarian famously way too far ahead, he published in 1955 an extraordinarily visionary proposal for “The Cinema of the Future” whose images would surround the spectator. More practically, he developed in the 1960s a patented projection technology that he called Sensorama to create for spectators

Initially a student of architecture, art history, and “Germanistik,” he was regarded as one of the foremost exponents of post-World War II German avant-garde writing. An influence upon the new poets of the 1960s (Peter Handke [1942] and FRANZ MON, among others), he approached poetry, as well as his prose, from, in his words, a linguistically “an-anarchic” point of view.

190 • HEIZER, MICHAEL His poems are calculated, experimental, and carefully crafted, occasionally including lines in English or French. He called them “texts,” and thus his collections, literally, “textbooks.” His writings often deal with trivia, with thoughts anyone could have in the course of a day, in a language as ungrammatical as everyday language can be; once spelled out, such thoughts become generalized and yet are alienating. His novels, usually called “projects,” are mostly parodies of historical events. In Wenn Adolf Hitler den Krieg nicht gewonnen hätte (If Adolf Hitler Had Not Won the War), Hitler and Stalin have triumphed, and Europe has become a socialist computer society whose totalitarian government lets superfluous people die for the sake of economic advantage. Triangular relationships among Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Rée, and Lou von Salomé become the center of 1882. Eine historische Novelle (1882, an Historical Novella). Das Ende der Alternative, Fast eine einfache Geschichte (The End of the Alternative, Almost a Simple Story) tells about a beautiful, tall woman, the “alternative,” who commits suicide by drowning herself in the ocean after several attempts to kill her have failed. Heissenbuttel also worked from 1959 to 1981 as the director of “RadioEssays” at the Stuttgart radio station. —with Michal Ulrike Dorda

HEIZER, MICHAEL (4 November 1944) Count this American artist Heizer, along with ROBERT SMITHSON and RICHARD LONG, the principal proponents and practitioners of Earth Art. He shares with Smithson a taste for executing projects on a grand scale. What distinguishes his work from that of Smithson is the paradigm from which it proceeds. Smithson’s projects accompanied a complex intellectual program built on sophisticated esthetic and scientific ideas. Heizer’s alterations of the landscape are designed to reinvigorate the traditional sensibility of the sublime, invoking the breathless and expansive sense of awe instigated by the monumentality of mountain vistas. The shortcoming of his method is that, as with most works of Earth Art, his projects are generally seen through photographs in gallery exhibitions, and there they have the dryness of documentary records. In Heizer’s Displaced/Replaced Mass (1969), three boulders were dynamited 9,000 feet up in the Sierra Mountains, and the pieces were carted down to a desert plain and loaded into prepared holes. For the typical viewer, the project is just an idea, and the photographs convey an experience others have had. His Double Negative (1969), in which two deep trenches

were cut into a desert cliff, might well induce a sense of natural wonder in the face of its towering walls, but only if one were actually there. Unlike many Earth Artists, Heizer continued to execute his large-scale projects into the 1980s, most notably in Effigy Tumuli (1983–85) and City: Complex Two (1980–88). Since that time, he has focused on object-based sculptures presented in gallery spaces. They have been, for the most part, works in stone and in steel, large and simple forms such as large, smooth boulders and enormous biomorphic shapes perforated with holes. —Mark Daniel Cohen

HELD, AL (12 October 1928–27 July 2005; b. Alvin Jacob H.) Because he painted in various ways, persistently unfashionable, he was never an art star but a major minor player, indeed a persistently major minor player, in a competitive world with few seats available for widely acknowledged stars. Some of his earlier painting had ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST fields within geometric pigeonholes, implicitly synthesizing JACKSON POLLOCK with PIET MONDRIAN. For one innovative move, in series titled C60 (1960), Held applied black ink with a thick brush producing on paper images reminiscent of FRANZ KLINE but different in texture, thanks to Held’s preference for ink over paint. His masterpiece is the Alphabet Paintings (1961–67) that are letters drawn large, very large, with sharp edges on huge canvases. The I (1965), for instance, is 9 feet high and nearly 6½ feet across. Circle and Triangle (1964), from the same period, is 12 feet high by 28 feet wide, its black image both protruding and receding against a white background. In the parlance of boxing, they knock-out.

HELMS, HANS G. (8 June 1932–11 March 2012) Around 1969, I met in New York this German writer who, in the course of discussing something else in my East Village living room, claimed to have written a polylingual novel. Skeptical, I replied, “not bilingual, like Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange [1961].” His response was in an awesome number of languages. This book, Fa:m’ Ahniesgwow (1959), comes in a box with a 10-inch record on which the author reads selected pages. Some pages are predominantly German, others predominantly English. My own sense is that, like JAMES JOYCE before him, Helms made linguistic decisions based on sound and rhythm. The

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disk reveals that in his Sprach-Musik-Kompositionen (language-music compositions) Helms hears white space as silence. The book concludes with extensive notes (in German only, alas) by his colleague Gottfried Michael Koenig (1926), himself a noted German composer, who sees the book’s title, for instance, ingeniously combining English, Danish, Swedish, South American Spanish, and North American slang. Around the same time, Helms produced Golem, a speech PERFORMANCE that he characterizes as “polemics for nine solo vocalists.” His Text for Bruno Maderna (1959), an Italian composer, consists entirely of phonemes, while later Helms speech-music incorporates SERIAL organizing principles to phonemes and morphemes. A prodigious adventurous figure, Helms also worked as a jazz saxophonist in Sweden in the early 1950s, published Marxist social criticism, produced extended features for both radio and television stations in Germany (including memorable conversations with JOHN CAGE), and, in his last years, reportedly investigated the history of Jews in Eastern Europe.

HENRY, PIERRE (9 December 1927–5 July 2007, pronounced EN-ree) Pierre Henry specialized in MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE for several decades, producing many of its classics remarkable for their liveliness and originality. Born in Paris, he grew up in the countryside, then studied composition with Nadia Boulanger and OLIVIER MESSIAEN at the Paris Conservatoire (1938–48), where he also trained as a pianist and percussionist. From the beginning his interests turned toward rhythm and “noise” – placing him in the tradition of LUIGI

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RUSSOLO and EDGARD VARÈSE. Henry experimented not only with percussion instruments, but also with preparing the piano, which he began doing in the late 1940s, initially without any knowledge of JOHN CAGE. Henry’s approach to preparing the piano was quite different from Cage’s, as his preparations were more extreme and deliberately crude, and incorporated larger objects; the result was not the delicate, controlled gamelan-like effects of Cage’s prepared piano, but sounds that were clattering, chaotic, and noisy. This distinctive element recurred in Henry’s compositional universe; it was centrally featured, for example, in his homage to Russolo, Futuristie (1975). In 1949 Henry met Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95), a radio engineer who the year before had produced the earliest examples of musique concrète – short studies created out of manipulated recordings of environmental or instrumental sounds. Schaeffer invited Henry – who in the end proved a far more fertile composer – to join him at his studio, and together they produced the first masterpiece of ELECTRONIC MUSIC in general: Symphonie pour un homme seul (1949–50). This title, which translates as Symphony for a Man Alone, is not intended to suggest the isolation of man in modern times, but refers, rather, to the fact that a single person could “perform” all the parts of this new kind of symphony. From its relatively modest beginnings in the late 1940s, Henry’s musique concrète – or, as the genre is now usually referred to, electroacoustic music – grew in complexity and power. In Henry’s large body of work there is great variety, but also a certain recurring atmosphere of ritual and incantation. It is no accident that several of his pieces are secular masses, i.e., the Messe de Liverpool (1967– 70) and the Messe pour le temps présent (1967). There is also an underlying physicality, expressed in strong rhythms and reflecting the origin of much of Henry’s electroacoustic music in recordings of his own instrumental performances. This has led him to create scores for many ballets (notably for choreographer Maurice Béjart) and theatrical events, the latter sometimes conceived in their entirety by himself. He has also shown great open-mindedness in his collaborations with rock and pop musicians, which are sometimes successful (Messe pour le temps présent, or Paradise Lost [1982]), and sometimes not (Cérémonie [1969]). —Tony Coulter

HEPWORTH, BARBARA (10 January 1903–20 May 1975) Figure 7 Pierre Henry’s home studio in Paris. Photo by Sarah Bastin. © Sarah Bastin/Red Bull Music.

Along with HENRY MOORE, Hepworth was one of the two premier British sculptors of the middle of the

192 • HERRIMAN, GEORGE 20th century. Their works were very similar: smooth, simple, biomorphic shapes that both artists frequently pierced through. Hepworth often ran parallel lines of strings through the center hole, giving her sculpture a further similarity to the works of NAUM GABO. The closeness to Moore is the most evident, but what Moore was to the figure, Hepworth was to landscape. Moore almost always abstracted the human form, leaving it sufficiently evident that his subject matter is unmistakable. Hepworth dealt in pure abstraction, developed out of her experience in nature. She extracted the properties of topography: open shapes, enveloping curves, cavernous concavities, the stretching arms of a coastline. Re-creating these properties as pure form, Hepworth aestheticized the landscape mode, which was an accomplishment utterly different from Moore’s. —Mark Daniel Cohen

HERSCHKOWITZ, FILIPP MOISEEVICH (7 September 1906–5 January 1989) Born in Rumania, he lived from 1927 to 1938 in Austria, where he studied with ARNOLD SCHOENBERG’s pupils – Alban Berg and ANTON WEBERN. When the Nazis occupied Austria, he returned to Rumania and from there immigrated to Russia, where the composer lived, stuck mostly in Moscow, from 1939 to 1987. Forbidden to teach serial composition in Stalinist Russia, he nonetheless had private students and personal contact with a younger generation that became more prominent in the post-Soviet years, including Edison Denisov (1929–96), Alfred Schnittke (1934–98), and Sofia Gubaidulina (1931). Finally allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1987, Herschkowitz spent the last two years of his life preparing Alban Berg’s works for publication. He is the epitome of a brilliant modern outsider unfortunately stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time, thus forbidden to realize his professional potential.

HERRIMAN, GEORGE HERTZBERG, HENDRIK

(22 August 1880–25 April 1944) Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip is the zenith of the form. Krazy Kat (sometimes male, but more frequently female) loved Ignatz Mouse, and the scatterbrained Krazy always believed that a brick thrown at her head by Ignatz was a sign of his love. The newspaper-reading public did not eat this up. All of the adventures of Krazy Kat took place in the mythical Kokonino Kounty, a desert decorated with weird geological and botanical forms. Herriman’s genius, however, accounted for more than the strangeness of the physical landscape he developed or the emotional landscape of his characters. His experiments with the form of the comic strip were what made his work remarkable. Panels were inserted into panels, overlaid upon panels that served as establishing shots, or laid askew of the defining grid. Colors were used not logically but brashly. The fiction of the comic strip was laid bare by visual puns that broke through the wall of the newspaper and made clear the other reality that the characters lived within. Herriman explored, as fully as anyone has, the esthetic possibilities of the comic strip through design, language, color, and characterization. The sense that no one has ever surpassed his work indicates how confining the modern strip format is – remember that Herriman had a whole newspaper page to work with, and occasionally only one panel filled that space – and how conservative the comic strip syndicates have become. —Geof Huth

See O’ROURKE, P. J.

HESSE, EVA (11 January 1936–29 May 1970) Born in Hamburg, Hesse fled in 1939 to New York with her educated and cultured family. In her brief career as a sculptor, cut terribly short by terminal brain cancer, Hesse discovered the feasibility of using several materials previously unknown to three-dimensional visual art. After dark gouaches of 1960–61, whose motifs presage later sculptures, she made reliefs and sculptures in grays and blacks. The classic Hesse work, Expanded Expansion (1969), has vertical fiberglass poles, several feet high, with treated cheesecloth suspended horizontally across them; her rubberizing and resin treatment gives cloth a density and tension previously unavailable to it. Given the essential softness of her materials, the sculpture would necessarily assume a different look each time this work was exhibited. Though Expanded Expansion is already several feet across, there is a suggestion, which the artist acknowledged, that it could have been extended to surrounding, thus ENVIRONMENTAL, length. Reportedly destroyed, the work may never be exhibited again, its mythic status notwithstanding. Hesse also used latex. In part because she was, along with LEE BONTECOU (1931), among the first American women sculptors to be generally acclaimed, Hesse also became, posthumously alas, a feminist heroine.

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HICKS, EDWARD (4 April 1780–23 August 1849) This early American artist becomes inadvertently interesting for painting roughly the same scene with the same title for at least sixty-two paintings, none of them otherwise identical. The theme of The Peaceable Kingdom was the world’s creatures living harmoniously, as Hicks apparently presumed they could, at least in the New World; for he was a devout Quaker. Mostly medium-sized and made on an easel, sometimes framed with a text, these SIGNATURE paintings were initially gifts for his family and friends, while Hicks earned money mostly from painting decorative images that are not remembered. Nearly two centuries later, his achievement is at once respected and disparaged, as he stands as a precursor to later obsessive painters, such as ON KAWARA.

HICKS, MICHAEL (1956) Curious it is that a strong academic scholar of 20thcentury American avant-garde music has taught for decades not as an institution customarily hospitable to innovative art but at Brigham Young University in high Utah. His books on Henry Cowell, Bohemian (2003) and Christian Wolff (2012) demonstrate why his deeply researched articles on JOHN CAGE especially should also appear as a book. His Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic and Other Satisfactions (1999) is likewise exemplary scholarship featuring musical analysis. As an LDS member, Hicks also published Mormonism and Music: A History (1989) and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography (2015). Additionally a composer of chamber and solo musics, he should not be confused with Michael R. Hicks who writes a sort of science fiction. Among the other professors writing expertly about new music count Kyle Gann (1955) at Bard College (US) and Steven Johnson (1951), Christian Asplund (1964), and Jeremy Grimshaw (1973), all also (surprise?) at BYU.

HIGGINS, DICK (15 March 1938–25 October 1998) As a precocious person of arts, Higgins was producing original adult art while still a teenager, some of which was collected in Selected Early Works 1955–64 (1982). In his mid-twenties, Higgins wrote mature arts criticism

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and founded a major avant-garde publishing house, SOMETHING ELSE PRESS. Though this work had little academic or commercial success (and typically earned more recognition in Germany and Italy than in his native country), it should not be forgotten. Even if his abundant output may be conventionally divided into such categories as writing, theater, music, film, criticism, and book publishing, it is best to regard Higgins not as a specialized practitioner of one or another of these arts, but as a true POLYARTIST – a master of several nonadjacent arts, subservient to none. In over forty years, he produced a wealth of work, both large and small, permanent and ephemeral, resonant and trivial – uneven, to be sure, as no two people familiar with his activities agree on which are best. (No one trick pony was he.) In my judgment, his greatest contributions are the critical term INTERMEDIA to describe art that incorporates within itself several traditional arts not normally linked together (as in opera or GESAMTKUNSTWERK) and his book publishing, as his Something Else Press was the most substantial avant-garde publisher ever in America. As COLLAGE was a fertile esthetic idea for the first two-thirds of the 20th century, so Intermedia informed much avantgarde art in the third. (Simply, where visual poetry and book-art are Intermedia, another new epithet, Multimedia, by contrast, has come to describe presentations customarily including electronics.) All of his diversity notwithstanding, Higgins reveals five fundamental ways of dealing with the materials of each art he explores. These procedures are COLLAGE, representation, permutation, ALEATORY, and EXPRESSIONISM. In nearly all his works, one or two of these procedures are dominant. Briefly, collage is the juxtaposition of dissimilars; representation is the accurate portrayal of extrinsic reality; permutation is the systematic manipulation of limited materials; aleatory depends upon chance; and Expressionism reflects personality or personal experience. Among Higgins’s many works are 7.7.73 (1973), a series of 899 unique prints of various visual images, both abstract and representational, with forms repeated from one print to the next. Amigo (1972) is a book-length poetic memoir of Higgins’s love for a young man. “Danger Music #17 (May 1962)” reads in its entirety: “Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream!” Postface (1962) is a percipient and prophetic critical essay about advanced arts in the early 1960s. Saint Joan at Beaurevoir (1959) is a complicated, long scenario that includes such incongruities as Dr. Johnson and Saint Joan appearing on the same stage. Men & Women & Bells (1959) is a short film that incorporates footage made by both his father and his grandfather.

194 • HIGH RED CENTER Higgins’s Five Methods COLLAGE

REPRESENTATION

Visual Arts 7.7.79 (1973) Some Poetry Intermedia Writing Foew&ombwhnw (1969) Postface (1962)

Theater Music

St. Joan at Beaurevoir (1959) In Memoriam (1961)

Film

Men & Women & Bells (1969) Publishing Emmett William’s An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967)

PERMUTATION

ALEATORY

Graphis (1957 to present) Modular A Book About Poems(1975) Love & War & Death (1965, 1969, 1972) Act (1969) The Freedom Riders Stacked Deck (1962) (1958) To Everything its Graphic Sources Season (1958) Glasslass (a text-soundpiece, 1970) Flaming City (1962) Hank Mary without Men & Women & Apologies (1969) Bells (1969) Henry Cowell’s Gertrude Stein’s John Cage’s New Musical The Making Notations (1968) Resources (1930, of Americans Merce Cunning1962) (1926, 1965) ham’s Changes (1969)

Foew&ombwhnw (1969) – pronounced F, O, E, W, for short – is a book with four vertical columns across every two-page horizontal spread. One column continuously reprints critical essays, a second column his poetry, a third his theatrical scenarios (including Saint Joan at Beaurevoir), a fourth drawings. Though the experience of reading Foew is that of collage, the book as a whole is an appropriate representation of a multifaceted man. Higgins also published a historical study of Pattern Poetry (1987) which is, by common consent, the definitive book on its multicultural subject. He died in action, so to speak, soon after performing to exhaustion his “Danger Music #17,” whose text is entirety: “Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream!” In four decades Higgins had realized one of the great artistic lives in America – the rich experience of which book-length biographies are made.

HIGH RED CENTER (1962–64) Formed by Genpei Akasegawa (1937–2014), Jirō Takamatsu (1936–98), and Natsuyuki Nakanishi (1935–2016), they specialized in brazen public demonstrations. Inviting guests to a banquet, 15 August 1962 (the seventeenth anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II), the artists ate, drank, danced, and even brushed their teeth – in the summary of the historian Thomas Havens (1939), “using vision to daunt, and

7.7.73 (1973)

EXPRESSIONISM A Thousand Symphonies Amigo (1972)

Death and the Nickel Cigar (1973) “Danger Music No. 17” (May 1962)

Flaming City Geoff Hendricks’s Ring Piece (1973)

thwart unslakable [sic] desire and turning impulses to consume inside out.” In another provocation, Nakanishi, recalls Havens, rode a train in whiteface and spilled paint on a station platform, then licked and broke open an egg-shaped object containing ordinary items: hair, an old watch, a mirror, a spoon – a satire on the daily hurly-burly faced by harried commuters. In February 1963, Akasegawa, for instance, showed fake thousand-yen bills etched on one side in a single color. He printed and distributed a flyer on the back of these pieces of paper. The show included a wall hanging on which a large number of these thousand-yen notes were mounted. As well they covered sliding doors and wrapped a briefcase. One result was an indictment for violating the Currency and Securities Counterfeit Control Law. Giving themselves an English moniker was in Japan at the time an outlaw act.

HIGHWATER, JAMAKE (14 February 1931–1 June 2001; b. Jackie Marks) He was a colleague and East Village neighbor whom I knew and personally liked around 1970, because he produced major BOOK-ART, but also curious friend because early I marked him as a chronic fibber. When I first met him, around 1970, he claimed to be younger

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than I. This I accepted, as he felt contemporaneous, until I discovered in his own house a document with an earlier date (which said 1932, rather than 1931 claimed elsewhere) and an earlier career as a West Coast choreographer. I knew him as J (no period) Marks, which he claimed was Greek, shortened from Markropolous, which seemed credible to me, whose maternal ancestors came from Asia Minor. After all, his skin looked darker than mine. He told me about sisters named just L and M, which was a story unique enough for me to remember a few decades later. Sometime later, the writer I knew as “J” began to produce books and even television features about Native American art and culture, claiming that his real name at birth was Jamake Highwater and his ancestry as mostly Cherokee. Needless to say, certain Native American critics questioned this. As did in 1986 even the prominent investigative journalist Jack Anderson (1922–2005) in his syndicated newspaper column. More recent researchers have uncovered a birth certificate for one “Jackie Marks” whose father was buried beneath a gravestone with a Star of David. ??? Having already recognized my colleague’s propensity for fibbing, which incidentally also afflicted my otherwise lovely and brilliant partner at the time, I believed the doubters without dismissing his earlier genuine achievements. All the flurry about “identity” that was so serious then seems amusing and dated now, implicitly discounting his real personal achievement, avant-garde in its way, as a masterful re-self-inventor who stuck to his stories even after others dismissed them as fake. Nonetheless, J Marks produced Rock and Other Four-Letter Words (1970), which probably ranks as the most remarkable example of inventive book-art ever to appear within the restrictive format of a mass paperback sized 7 inches by 4 inches. Given commercial publishers’ unashamed limitations, that is no small achievement. One qualitative measure is, simply, the amount of information and images compressed into its small two-page spreads whose consistently inventive designs scarcely resemble each other. This book appeared after an LP record of the same title (1968), a rich audio pastiche composed with Shipen Lebzelter (1942–86) that was strong enough to be reissued in 2012 on vinyl. As I recall seeing spreads of Rock’s pages in my colleague’s studio, I thought he did this book by himself; but as nothing else by “Marks” resembles it, perhaps my conclusion is false. Highwater’s quasi-autobiography, Shadow Show (1986), has a reasonable chapter about me who tends to keep friends, rather than dismissing them. As for the possible quality of Jamake’s presentations about Native American culture I’ve no

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opinion worth sharing. No doubt an informative biography of him will be written.

HIJIKATA, TATSUMI (9 March 1928–21 January 1986) The leading figure and principal founder of the Japanese dance-theater form called BUTOH, Hijikata determined that established dance forms did not satisfy the concerns of his generation or survivors of the shock and horror of Hiroshima. He evolved his Butoh from a wide variety of influences, including his own extensive readings and studies of European avant-garde writers, artists, and performers. His presentation of Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors, 1959), based on a novel by Yukio Mishima (1925–70), at the time one of Japan’s most famous authors, is considered to be the founding event in the development of Butoh. Here a dancer appears to have sexual relations with a chicken and is subjected to sexual advances from another man. Both subject matter and tone shocked the Japanese establishment. In 1960, Hijikata applied the term “ankoku buyo” (darkness dance) to the evolving form only in 1963 to rename it “Butoh” (based on a nearly obsolete term for dance that connotes something more basic than “buyo”). His Rebellion of the Flesh (1968) was another milestone that was also shocking because he killed a chicken as part of the PERFORMANCE. He collaborated with KAZUO OHNO, who was his student (though more than twenty years his senior), and taught and worked with almost all the younger performers who are now continuing the Butoh movement. —Katy Matheson

HIRSAL, JOSEF See GRÖGEROVÁ, Bohumila.

HIRSCH, SIDNEY MTTRON (3 January 1884–7 April 1962) Memoirs and histories of the Southern WASP writers known as The Fugitives (John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, et al.) scarcely mention the slightly older Jewish literary agent who became in 1923 their first president, who proposed that they publish an eponymous literary magazine (1922–25), in whose sister’s Nashville house the aspiring writers regularly met. Remembered initially as the human model for classic

196 • HISTORIES (OF AVANT-GARDE ARTS) sculptures by both Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and GERTRUDE VANDERFIL WHITNEY and then a playwright, a fictioner, and an arts critic, Sidney Mttron Hirsch was early in taking an interest in the Kabbalah (where he found his striking middle name), astrology, numerology, Rosicrucianism, and much other radical esoterica. How much influence Hirsch had upon the subsequently more visible American writers seems unknown and thus worth further research. In a memoir of a gathering by the Southern writer Donald Davidson (1893– 1968) is this vivid glimpse: [Hirsch] picked out some words – most likely a proper name like Odysseus or Hamlet or Parsifal – and then, turning from dictionary to dictionary in various languages, proceeded to unroll a chain of veiled meanings that could be understood only through the system of etymologies to which he had the key. This, he assured us, was the wisdom of the ages – a palimpsest underlying all great poetry, all great art, all religion, in all eras, in all lands. All true poets possessed this wisdom, he told us, solemnly, repeatedly. Wow. Would that I could have attended such a marvelous private performance. Little is remembered about the last three decades of Hirsch’s life.

HISTORIES (OF AVANT-GARDE ARTS) (1946) One quality common to the greatest histories of radical MODERNISM is discussing all the arts together, whether in appreciating a single institution, such as Mary Emma Harris (1943) on The Arts at Black Mountain College or Hans Maria Wingler’s The Bauhaus (1969), or the most innovative work in several arts, as in L. MOHOLY-NAGY’s remarkably percipient Vision in Motion (1946). One critical departure, epitomized by Roger Shattuck in The Banquet Years (1958), is representing the period between 1885 and World War I with four artists working in music composition, painting, theater and fiction, and poetry and criticism. Among the mono-art critical histories of the avant-gardes, few can rival GUILLERMO DE TORRE on literature, PAUL GRIFFITHS on music, or SIEGFRIED GIEDION on architecture, all of whose books remained relevant decades after their original publication. The avant-garde usually dominates in memorable books by discriminating historians, as, by contrast, those favoring traditional work in

the 20th century tend to be paltry, if not embarrassing. Q. E. D.

HÖCH, HANNAH (1 November 1889–31 May 1978; b. Anna Therese Johanne H.) If PAUL CITROEN made the single most classic photomontage and JOHN HEARTFIELD more famous political recompositions, Hoch was the more adventurous, not only in her art but in her life. As early as 1915 she joined both RAOUL HAUSMANN and then BERLIN DADA, soon creating from photo snippets rectangular montages with richly various imagery often personal. In her Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Beer-Belly on the Weimar Republic (1919), often reproduced, she pasted papers with images of people both familiar and unfamiliar, industrial tools, words, letters, and bric-a-brac, all equally present in non-centered space within a frame roughly 5 feet by 3 feet. Similar tastes inform Da-Dandy (1919), which is much smaller at 12 inches by 9½ inches. Otherwise, Hoch was the only woman artist whom the other prominent Berlin Dadaists, all male, treated as an equal. As Hoch left Hausmann for a nine-year relationship with a Dutch woman before marrying a German man for several years, same-sex couples, switch-hitting (as is said in baseball), and androgyny became recurring subjects in her later photomontages such as Dompteuse (tamer) (1930), which depicts a decidedly female face above crossed muscular hairy arms. Surviving World War II in suburban Berlin, Hoch languished afterwards, unfortunately not surviving long enough to see her work revived and her heroic feminism recognized. A prominent Berlin art prize is named after her; among its recipients, as Berlin is Berlin, are individuals with entries in this book.

HOCKNEY, DAVID (9 July 1937) For me he’s always epitomized the artist who knew how to navigate the ART WORLD without ever producing indubitably major work. Curiously, I first heard about him in the spring of 1965, when I met students from London’s ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART (whose magazine Ark was publishing me), because they had already regarded him, then a slightly older recent alumnus, as not necessarily a better painter but as someone far more skilled at getting exhibitions and newspaper coverage than other recent students at England’s most

HOFFMAN, ABBIE •

prestigious visual arts college. And indeed he was, relocating to Paris before moving to Los Angeles, establishing close alliances with a prominent curator among other powermen, remaining in America long enough to become an American artist as well as a British, etc. Some identify his photography as superior; another colleague likes his Los Angeles landscapes. (Likewise a daily swimmer, I don’t find his swimming-pool pictures enticing.) As I write this entry, a 2017 retrospective previously at London’s Tate Gallery is moving to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. For a living Anglo-American artist, no doubleplay can be greater.

HODDIS, JACOB VAN (16 May 1887–after 30 April 1942; b. Hans Davidsohn) One of the more inspired crazy poets, he studied law and published poems before he was in 1912 interned in a BERLIN lunatic asylum. Escaping by jumping out a window in December, he moved to Heidelberg and Paris before returning to Berlin following year. Accepting his schizophrenia, he received private care before being institutionalized in 1933. On 30 April 1942, he was taken away by the Nazis to be killed as both a lunatic and a Jew. His most memorable poems appeared from 1910 to 1914 in Expressionist magazines. Sixteen of them appeared in a small booklet published as The End of the World (1918). Here is the title poem with an interlinear English translation: Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut, The citizens fly from the tip of the hat head, in allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei. in all airing it echoes like screaming. Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei Roofers crash and go in two und an den Küsten – liest man – steigt die Flut. and on the coasts – it reads – the tide rises. Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hüpfen The storm has arrived, the wild seas bounce an Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken. on land, to crush big dams. Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen. Most people have a cold. Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken. The railways are falling from the bridge. Quickly epitomized as the ultimate urban doomsday poem, his Weltende (1911) was often translated. When Kurt Pinthus placed the Hoddis classic at the beginning of his pioneering anthology of expressionist

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poetry, Menschheits Dammerung (1920, The Twilight of Mankind), he guaranteed the poet’s immortality. His pseudo-aristocratic invented surname was an anagram of Davidsohn.

HOFFMAN, ABBIE (30 November 1936–12 April 1989; b. Abbot Howard H.) His politics aside, Abbie Hoffman was a courageous radical performer whose best shows were always recognized for their theatrical qualities. It was a brilliant move to go to the observation balcony of the New York Stock Exchange and toss handfuls of dollar bills onto the floor below. He led protestors in trying to levitate the Pentagon, which didn’t happen, though this effort too nonetheless made a strong show. Subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he wore buckskin pants and a shirt with an American flag. Likewise sensational was his decision, when he didn’t want to be filmed for evening television news, to write the word “Fuck” in lipstick on his forehead. He could also be a brilliant writer (or talker, whose words were sometimes committed to print), as in this memoir of being Jewish in a traditional Christian prep school in the 1950s: My favorite hymn was “Onward Christian Soldiers.” You know the part that goes, “With the Cross of Jesus, going as to war.” Jewish kids weren’t supposed to say the name of Christ out loud, so we all had to sing “with the cross of Hum, going as to war.” I did a two-year stretch at Worcester Academy, and by the second year Hum was giving Jesus a run for his money. When Judge Julius Hoffman fined him five thousand dollars for contempt of court, Abbie replied to another Jew, “That’s a lot of money, Julie. Can you make it three and one-half?” ALLAN KAPROW appreciates Abbie Hoffman, attuned to avant-garde art, for working the intermedium between radical agitation and stand-up comedy. “It makes no difference whether what Hoffman did is called activism, criticism, pranksterism, selfadvertisement, or art. The term intermedia implies fluidity and simultaneity of roles.” So entertaining was Hoffman as a performer that, in comparison, nearly all his radical colleagues seem like earnest schoolteachers. Realizing that writing could be a form of radical action, he published several books other than memoirs. My own opinion is that Steal This Book (1971) ranks

198 • HOFMANN, MARK among the most unrestrained incendiary texts ever published in this country. As the commercial publisher commissioning it wanted to censor some of it (under the glib grounds of “editing”), Hoffman self-published it, reportedly selling over 250,000 copies in 1971 alone, thus epitomizing free-enterprise revenge. Like all true classics, Steal was reprinted more than once after his death.

HOFMANN, MARK (7 December 1954) What HAN VAN MEEGEREN has represented for art forgery, Hoffman stands for literary forgery, both men taking fakery to higher (or lower) levels. However, whereas the Dutchman fabricated paintings allegedly by historic Dutch artists, Mark Hofmann forged documents allegedly made by historic Americans such as George Washington, Paul Revere, Mark Twain, and Abraham Lincoln. Literarily ambitious, he even produced an Emily Dickinson poem previously unknown. Eventually focusing upon the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as Mormon, Hofmann used authentically 19th-century paper in fabricating handwritten pseudo-manuscripts that he successfully sold to Mormon individuals and institutions. Hoffman’s most ingenious move was creating a document purportedly by a historic Mormon previously known only for fragments. This document he placed in the stock of a classy Manhattan antiquariat that sold it to a Mormon institution. Once that forged document was accepted as authentic, Hoffman could produce and sell more documents purportedly written by this long-dead individual. When his treachery began to unravel, he constructed bombs that killed two people before a third exploded in his own car, injuring him seriously, eventually leading to his arrest and imprisonment not for uncommon forgery but common murder. At the artful forgery of not just historic manuscripts but the œuvre of an historic figure, Hoffman’s achievement has never been duplicated. Were Van Meegeren as fictively imaginative, he would have resurrected some lost Dutch painter with a considerable body of pseudo-authentic work.

HOLOGRAPHY (c. 1947) A technology new to the 1960s, drawing upon scientific discoveries of the late 1940s, holography superficially resembles photography in representing an image on

two-dimensional photoemulsion (film), but it differs in capturing an image in different situations (and thus, at least implicitly, at different times) and then in situating that image in illusory space. That is to say that the principal feature of holography is creating the illusion that things are located spatially where they are not. (A variant, called a multiplex or stereogram, is created by shooting an image with motion-picture film that is then compressed anamorphically into vertical slivers that, once illuminated from below, create within a frame the illusion of an image suspended in space.) Holograms differ from stereoscopic photography and 3-D films in that the former can be viewed without special glasses. Exploiting a laser split-beam process to register information on a photographic plate, holography is also a far more recalcitrant medium than either photography before it, or video, which arrived around the same time. The fundamental measure of the former’s recalcitrance is this statistic: Whereas there are millions of photographers and millions of video users, nearly all of them amateur, there are only a few dozen holographers, nearly all of them professional. Incidentally, what they make is a hologram, which is not the same as a “holograph.” That word, at least in English, refers to a document wholly written, usually by hand, by the person who is its author. Among the most distinguished hologram artists are Margaret Benyon (1940–2016), Rudie Berkhout (1946–2008), Arthur David Fonari (1949), Dieter Jung (1941), Sam Moree (1946), Dan Schweitzer (1946–2001), Fred Unterseher (1945), and Doris Vila (1950).

HOLZER, JENNY (29 July 1950) Holzer is included here only because some readers might expect to find information and insight into her work here; by no known measure is it avant-garde. Her use of language is prosaic, bordering on dull; there is no invention in either syntax or diction. Holzer’s departures, scarcely significant, are to make her words large (without the afterimage resonance gained by, say, ROBERT INDIANA), and then to use signage technologies that are scarcely unfamiliar. Holzer’s language style descends from slogans; her sentences are designed to impress not for any linguistic excellence but as counter-adages for the cognoscenti whose prejudices, for another measure of kitschiness, are assuaged rather than challenged. By literary measures, “she can’t write” and perhaps doesn’t wish to do so. Invariably as dumb and unoriginal as possible, her art cons an audience predisposed to the obvious,

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becoming thereby the litmus test for identifying people who are unsophisticated, which is the inadvertent but beneficial “political” function of her work. If you see a Jenny Holzer in a gallery, in a museum, in a private collection, or illustrated in a magazine, you know a dummy is lurking somewhere. Do not dismiss the social value of such art, for every profession needs an idiot-identifier if it is to remain a profession.

HOME, STEWART (24 March 1962; b. Kevin Llewellyn Callan) . . . The epitome of a British activist of alternative letters, also very much a radical South Londoner (which is its DOWNTOWN), Home has engaged his immediate culture widely: playing in a punk band, founding periodicals, editing books, making films, publicizing Parisian Situationism, in addition to publishing fiction both linear and scrambled, fiction criticism, arts history, anarchist critiques, and much else often personal and/or unclassifiable. The apex of Home’s fiction is probably 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002) which idiosyncratically mixes explicit sex with book reviews and philosophical discussions while playing off his birth name and a recent royal (Royal?) death. As an ironist and a humorist, Home has invented protest movements whose only member was himself. In the 21st century, he has contributed to various blogs. For his writing, Stewart Home favors smaller obscure publishers, so most of his books are hard to find, even in libraries that should have them, at least until an enlightened publisher rescues them or all become available on his eponymous website. Though Home never earned much money, he’s created much of value both socially and intellectually. If he lives long enough, his name will someday grace the Honors List. About his unique life at least one biography will surely be written.

HOME THEATER (1990s) This new epithet describes the possibility for the homeowner to purchase enough audio and video equipment to simulate the experience of a moviehouse. This requires not a monitor, like traditional television, but a screen that receives a projected video image (either from in front or from behind), in addition to several loudspeakers of varying capabilities distributed over the seating area. Designed principally for watching movies, such a system also enhances the

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sound of compact disks, to the degree that six speakers are better than two. Fans of science fiction movies or movies with many stereophonic effects (such as airplanes swooping across the sound field) are particularly enamored of the sound quality available through having a subwoofer and more speakers spread around the room. My own experience of a large video screen (6 feet at the diagonal, taking three projections from an old Kloss perpendicularly in front of it) is that it works best for sports events and old movies. It is less successful at reproducing television produced in a studio or films produced since the mass dissemination of television, which favor closeups designed eventually to be seen on small screens. As film theaters housed within a “cineplex” become smaller and smaller, the home theater maven will go to the moviehouse not for superior reproduction but only to see new films not yet available via DVD or Internet streaming – or perhaps to make new friends.

HÖRSPIEL See RADIO ART.

HOUDINI, HARRY (24 March 1874–31 October 1926; b. Erik Weisz) Commonly acknowledged among the great performers in an era of great American popular PERFORMANCE, he became a master magician particularly renowned for his escapes from seemingly impenetrable constraints. He began modestly as a traveling vaudeville performer doing as many as a dozen shows in a single day. Professionally struggling in America, he went to Europe, much as other major American artists did a century ago, to win fame and fortune previously unavailable at home. During his tours around the world, Houdini escaped from handcuffs, straitjackets, jails, underwater containers, and much else daunting. His stage name remains synonymous with higher conjuring a full century later. Were he still alive today, Houdini would probably have his own theater in LAS VEGAS.

HOUÉDARD, DOM SYLVESTER (16 February 1924–15 January 1992) Born in Britain’s Channel Islands, Dom Sylvester, as he was commonly known, became in 1949 a Benedictine monk, thereafter residing in Prinknash Abbey

200 • HOUSE OF WAX in Gloucester, England. A leading English-language theorist of Concrete Poetry in the 1960s, he published and exhibited elaborate, typewriter-composed visual poems that his colleague EDWIN MORGAN called typestracts, speaking of them as “ikons for contemplation, topological tantric forms linked to language or ‘poetry’ only by the lingering literary hookup anything typewritten still tends to retain.” Modestly he signed his works only as “dsh,” wholly in lower-case letters. Because Dom Sylvester’s poetry was scattered through numerous chapbooks, among them Kinkon (1965) and Tantric Poems Perhaps (1966), while his religious humility deflected his innate idiosyncrasy, his work has benefitted from posthumous exhibitions. Houédard published a good deal of criticism, often as eccentric in its typography as his learning, for instance succinctly defining his personal poetic tradition as: benedictine baroque as contrasted with the Jesuit – & poetmonks in the west [who] have always cultivated what [Cardinal] newman calls “the alliance of Benedict & Virgil,” eg: s-abbo s-adelhard agobard b-alcuin s-adlhelm (the concretist) s-angilbert s-bede s-bertharius (caedmon) s-dunstan (another concretist) flaws fridoard gerbert (sylvester II) heiric hepidamnthenewsallust herimann v-hildebert hincmar b-hrabanusmaurus (concrete). Houédard also wrote commentaries on the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart and collaborated in editing the Jerusalem Bible (1961).

HOUSE OF WAX (1953) To compete with the increasingly popularity of television, which had by the early 1950s halved the American film-going audience, the Hollywood studios developed several kinds of alternative projection to transcend the TV screen. One was CINERAMA with its three contiguous screens; a second was CINEMASCOPE with its broader image. Another development was 3-D films, as they are called, because, if viewed through appropriate disposable glasses, they do indeed suggest greater depth than normal film. Of the first, House of Wax, whose plot was trivial, I remember best a sequence in which a male character wields a paddle with a ball attached to its base with an elastic band. As he bounced the ball directly in front of him toward the camera, it seemed to emerge from the screen to various spots

around me, intimidating me with its illusion of dimensionality. House of Wax was also the first Hollywood film to offer stereophonic sound that was then likewise unavailable on television. Hollywood produced and/or distributed many later films that could be viewed with 3-D glasses; but if any of them had a scene as strong as that bouncing ball, I don’t remember it.

HOWE, ANTHONY (1956) The distinctive mark of his kinetic sculptures is that, physically huge, they are designed to be moved by wind that customarily makes them produce roughly kaleidoscopic imagery. Unlike kinetic sculptures in the tradition of ALEXANDER CALDER, POL BURY, and GEORGE RICKEY, which are designed to move delicately, Howe’s become propulsive, its parts moving rapidly in a kind of militaristic grandeur. Necessarily taller and larger – as much as 40 feet in diameter – they become quite imposingly visible in public. My associate Shoshana E. Stone describes Lucea (2016) in Dallas, TX, as appearing to be “symbolically broadcasting an important, inspiring message from another universe that awaits our response.” Perhaps the most prominent was Howe’s cauldron created for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

HPSCHD (1969) One of JOHN CAGE’s most spectacular pieces, created in collaboration with the pioneering computer composer Lejaren Hiller (1924–94), HPSCHD was premiered at Assembly Hall, essentially a humongous basketball arena at the University of lllinois’s Urbana campus, 16 May 1969, for five hours. The venue’s name is appropriate, because Cage assembled an immense amount of visual and acoustic materials. On the outside walls were an endless number of slides projected by fifty-two projectors. In the middle of the circular sports arena were suspended several parallel sheets of Visquine, each 100 by 40 feet, and from both sides were projected numerous films and slides whose collaged imagery passed through several sheets. Running around a circular ceiling rim was a continuous 340foot screen on which appeared a variety of smaller images, both representational and abstract. Beams of light spun around the upper reaches, both rearticulating the concrete supports and hitting mirrored balls that reflected dots of light in all directions. Lights

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shining directly down upon the asphalt floor also changed color from time to time. Complementing the abundance of images was a sea of sounds that had no distinct relation to one another – an atonal and astructural chaos so continuously in flux that one could hear nothing more specific than a few seconds of repetition. Most of this came from fifty-two tape recorders, each playing a computer-generated tape composed to a different scale, divided at every integer between five and fifty-six tones to an octave. Fading in and out through the mix were snatches of harpsichord music that sounded more like Mozart than anything else. These sounds came from seven harpsichordists on platforms raised above the floor in the center of Assembly Hall. Around these islands were flowing several thousand people. HPSCHD was an incomparably abundant visual/aural uninflected ENVIRONMENT, really the most extravagant of its kind ever presented. A few years later, Cage mounted a “chamber version,” with far fewer resources, at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music. Literally abridged, this slighter HPSCHD did not have a comparable impact.

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HUGHES, PATRICK (20 October 1939) A British painter working in the tradition of RENÉ MAGRITTE and YAAKOV AGAM, he specializes in creating optical illusions on a protruding surface. Much like LENTICULARS, these paintings depend upon the viewer’s moving from side to side for his perception of the object to change radically. Simply what initially appeared closest suddenly moves further away. “Reverspective” is Hughes’s clever coinage for this work that reverses the principle of painterly perspective, which is customarily observed by a stationary viewer. These literally magical works must be seen firsthand to be believed, though certain documentations available on the Internet offer some reasonable simulations. As an intelligent artist, Hughes has also authored and coauthored brainy books about paradoxes and, in Left to Write: Collected Writings (2006), often about his own art.

HUGO, IAN HUELSENBECK, RICHARD (23 April 1892–20 April 1974; b. Carl Wilhelm Richard Hülsenbeck) Incidentally residing in Zurich in 1916, this young German doctor participated in the beginnings of DADA, which he continued to support in BERLIN in 1918. Better self-organized than his artist colleagues, Huelsenbeck wrote the first history of Dada in 1920–21 and edited the Dada Almanach (1920), an anthology so well selected it was reissued in the original German by SOMETHING ELSE PRESS in 1966. After years as a ship’s doctor cruising the world, Huelsenbeck landed in 1936 in New York, where he became a psychiatrist (taking the name Charles R. Hulbeck) and, after World War II, was the only first-rank participant in Dada based in New York. His 1916 poem “End of the World” resembles GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE’s “Zone” in its disconnected lines, universal scope, and lack of punctuation. Huelsenbeck’s Memoirs of a Dada Drummer (1969) is very candid, not only about his colleagues but about his success as a New York shrink who, as he boasts, maintained an office at 88 Central Park West and sent his children to the best schools. “As a doctor I was a success and as a Dadaist (the thing closest to my heart) I was a failure,” he reportedly declared. Given the scant rewards for avant-garde art in New York, it is always gratifying to learn that its creators can find other vehicles of patronage.

(15 February 1898–7 January 1985; b. Hugh Parker Guiler) Odd it is that he should be remembered mostly as the husband and patron of the writer Anaïs Nin (1903–77) and the financier of her fabled independence, thus earning him distinction as the most generous male spouse in modern letters. (Yes, they do exist.) Odder still it is because as Guiler he was an artist whose SURREALIST etchings appeared, among other places, in the earliest editions of Nin’s books. Learning while in his fifties independent filmmaking from ALEXANDER HAMMID, Guiler took the name Ian Hugo to produce Bells of Atlantis (1952) with visually indefinite footage to a soundtrack of Nin reading her own prose against a background of early ELECTRONIC MUSIC. Far superior, as well as more inventive than any Nin writing, is Hugo’s second film Jazz of Lights (1954) featuring NEW YORK CITY’s incomparable Times Square.

HULTÉN, PONTUS (21 June 1924–25 October 2006; b. Karl Gunnar Vougt P. H.) Of the many impresarios of modern visual art, he ranked among the more prodigious, as he moved from institution to institution, from country to country, always as a chief who apparently understood early that

202 • HUNEKER, JAMES GIBBONS he’d better speak several languages fluently and own a big suitcase. After directing the Moderna Museet in his native Stockholm for a dozen years, he became in 1973 the founding director of the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris. By 1980 he was in Los Angeles establishing there the Museum of Contemporary Art, commonly called MoCA there. In between Hultén guest-curated large exhibitions often memorialized in big books on The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (MoMA, 1968), PICABIA (1976), MALEVITCH (1978), Paris-New York (1977), Paris-Moscow (1979), ÖYVIND FAHLSTRÖM (1982), FUTURISM (1986), The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the 16th to the 20th Century (1987), BRANCUSI (1987), Paris-Berlin (1992), Paris-Paris (1992), etc. Whew. Less successful (and perhaps curatorially undone) in California, he returned to Europe, assuming positions, if less influential. He took charge of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Italy in 1984 and in 1985 joined others in founding an art college in Paris. From 1991 to 1995 he directed a Museum in Bonn, Germany, and later the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland. Just before his death, Hultén gave his private collection of several hundred art objects, many no doubt acquired as gifts directly from artists, to his original launching pad, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, with the stipulation that they be exhibited not within the museum itself but in a separate warehouse. What a great career move. MM also published a book titled Pontus Hulten Collection. Meeting him once, I recall a big guy who could have been a general in a country that, unlike his native Sweden, had a serious army.

HUNEKER, JAMES GIBBONS (31 January 1857–9 February 1921) Educated in music in Paris, initially a music critic for Philadelphia and New York newspapers, Huneker became a distinguished commentator on all of the arts, the polyartistic critic who popularized European avant-gardes for Americans from the 1880s until his premature death. Huneker produced books about music, literature, and drama, in addition to publishing short fictions and a novel. The theme of his two-volume autobiography, Steeplejack (1920), is his enthusiastic living with all the arts around the turn of the century. He became an immediate model for the next generation of polyartistic American critics, such as GILBERT SELDES. There are few like Huneker today.

HUTCHINS, ROBERT MAYNARD (17 January 1899–17 May 1977) A legendary academic superstar, he became successively the dean of Yale Law School while still in his twenties and then at 30 the president of the University of Chicago, which he ran for more than two decades. As an academic chief, he took initiative then judged “progressive” by abolishing compulsory courses and conventional grading long before anyone else in a comparable position did. His undergraduate college oneupped other first-rank institutions by admitting bright kids who hadn’t completed high school, including, most familiarly, PHILIP GLASS and SUSAN SONTAG. In his spare time apparently. Hutchins wrote a brilliant illustrated book, scarcely known, called Zukerkandl! (1968). Resembling a children’s book with a large format, a large typeface, and few pages, this book, as a profile of an academic philosopher named in its title, incorporates sophisticated parodies of academic writing: Zuckerkandlism demands that communication be reduced to a minimum, and this effort is immensely facilitated by the selection of a medium of communication through which communication is made almost impossible. The accompanying drawings by the film animators John and Faith Hubley (1914–77, 1924–2001) either undermine the prose or contribute to the parody with a superficially frivolous appearance. The Hubleys also produced an animated film narrated by Hutchins. Though a remarkable performance, a classic of its kind, Zukerkandl! isn’t mentioned in any history of literature or book-art known to me (or in Milton Mayer 546-page biography of RMH), even though its author’s tripartite name has not been forgotten. The bio note says the author “now lives near Hollywood studying Zuckerkandlism and its oriental counterpart, Sen-Sen Buddhism, the Creed That Sweetens Your Breath AS It Empties Your Mind.” Curiously, his wife Maude Hutchins (1899–1991) authored fictions only moderately experimental.

HUTH, GEOF (25 May 1960) As a poet and sometime small publisher long in and around Schenectady, New York, Huth has produced an abundance of work based upon linguistic invention by

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himself and others, as well as radically unusual formats, including SEMI-OBJECTS as he calls them. Rather than quote examples, why don’t I simply mention that his periodicals are called Alabama Dogshoe Moustache, A Voice Without Sides, and, most indicatively, The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage. His imprint, “dbqp,” which is a pseudoacronym for “goodbooqpres” (and also is identical if inverted), specializes in “language, visual, and conceptual poetry, comics, prose, and other artistic investigations into language and meaning.” For its 101st publication, Huth produced an anecdotal history that came in a plastic box slightly less than 4 inches square. Huth the poet focuses, as he puts it, “on the smallest units of language – words or letters,” sometimes discovering “how little a bit of a word can have some extractable meaning,” extending the range of classic CONCRETE POETRY. This poem from Perisyle (1989) recalls ancestors who came to live in Swansea, Massachusetts: Swansea seaswan swamsea seeswan swansee seeswam swarmss sswarms warmsss ssswarm swarsms seawarm warmsea sowarms warmsss seaworn wormsea swarmss seaworm sswarms seawarm warnsee Swansea beswans swanbee beeswam swamsee beswarm swarm be beswand swarmbs

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His multimedia The Dreams of the Fishwife (1990) appeared in three formats: as a long multi-part visual poem; as an aural poem (as the text is a score for the spoken word); and as a combined visual/ aural poem published in the CD-ROM issue of The Little Magazine by the Department of English at SUNY-Albany.

HYPERTEXT Coined by researcher THEODOR HOLM NELSON, this term defines writing done in the nonlinear or consequential verbal structures made possible by the computer, for a true computer exposition – whether an essay or a story – offers multiple paths of alternate routes in linking segments. In his radical redefinition, Nelson characterizes literature as “a system of interconnecting documents.” “With its network of alternate routes (as opposed to print’s fixed unidirectional page-turning),” writes the novelist Robert Coover (1934) (a fan but not a practitioner), “hypertext presents a radically divergent technology, interactive, and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author.” Though multipath fiction appeared before in Hopscotch (1963) by JULIO CORTÁZAR and Charles Platt’s “Norman vs. America,” which was reprinted in my anthology Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973), as well as in a new kind of juvenile adventure story available through the 1980s, it becomes more feasible with the development of computers. (Hypertext also enables scholars to find linkages through tracing key words, not just through single books, but through whole bodies of scholarship, better illustrating Nelson’s redefinition.) In his introductory survey, Coover credits MICHAEL JOYCE’s Afternoon (1987) as the “granddaddy of full-length hypertext fictions” (though the year before, PAUL ZELEVANSKY published on disk his Swallows, which is a mostly visual fiction of immeasurable length). Hypertext literature frequently appears in literary periodicals that are published on computer disks, such as Postmodern Culture (1990) in Raleigh, North Carolina (Box 8105, 27695), and Richard Freeman’s PBW (1990) in Yellow Springs, Ohio (130 W. Limestone, 45387). The Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) that is connected to the WELL (Whole Earth Lectronic Link) has made works by FRED TRUCK and JOHN CAGE, among others, available gratis through the Internet.

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IANNONE, DOROTHY (1933) An American from Boston with an advanced degree in literature, she became a European artist renowned for pictures with images and handwritten words, usually in English (which became the ART WORLD’s lingua franca after 1960), sometimes elegantly phrased, often about a female body, usually hers with uniquely stylized genitals, sometimes remembering her own ecstatic experiences with men. Extending this theme, thanks to superior European support of innovative American-German artists, Iannone has produced video and audio, in addition to distinguished BOOK ART, that looks and feels distinctly hers. In more ways than one, Iannone benefitted from residing mostly in BERLIN after invited there in 1976 as a guest of the DAAD KUNSTLERPROGRAMM.

ICELAND This is the closest semblance of a country as a work of unique art, much as LAS VEGAS is a unique city; but if the latter’s originality was man-(corporation-)made, Iceland is a natural rock promontory in the upper north Atlantic. Its gray barren terrain is uniquely beautiful; as are its sky and natural ice sculptures, all changing with the seasons and visibly different in winter from summer, though always awesome. Because of underground “geothermal” heat, complimented by the Gulf Stream, land so close to the Arctic Circle is surprisingly temperate the year-round; its ocean air bracingly fresh and its ground warm. As nearly every town has a swimming pool with welcoming warm water, some additionally have outdoor hot tubs, often in groups with different temperatures. Such physical amenities represent, at least to me, a highly civilized society. So culturally classy are Icelanders that a population of only a

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few hundred thousand, the size of a small America city, supports a world-class symphony orchestra, more than one newspaper, book publishers, printings plants, all in a palpably mellow society. No place elsewhere looks and feels like this art work that no human beings could have made, even with unlimited funds.

IDENTITY/BIOGRAPHY Any artist or work promoted with details about the author/artist’s putatively special background is ipso facto revealing her/him/itself as inferior. Probably not genuinely avant-garde either. The truth is, fads notwithstanding, that neither identity nor biography make art excellent or formally innovative; nor, say, does one or another old school tie or (un)fashionable personal experience, though any of these tags may be waved to attract some audience(s) that might otherwise ignore certain favored work. Similarly, allusions to whatever “theory” or “school” is currently familiar, if not fashionable, serve the same advertising inflation of what might otherwise go unnoticed. As in engaging any other competitive marketplace plagued by hype, caveat emptor.

ILIAZD (21 April 1894–25 December 1975; b. Ilia Mikhailovich Zdanevich) One of the most radical of Russian CUBO-FUTURISTS, lliazd grew up in Tiflis on the Caucasus, the son of a professor of French, and by 1911, while still a teenager, became an active proponent of ITALIAN FUTURISM. While studying law in St. Petersburg, he became especially close to the painters Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964), Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962), and Mikhail Le-Dantiu (1891–1917) and wrote the first

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monograph on Larionov and Goncharova in 1913 under the pseudonym Eli Eganbuh. He developed the theory of “Everythingism,” an early manifestation of postmodernism, which declared “all forms of art past and present, here and elsewhere, are contemporary for us” – thus an artist was free to use them as desired. Beginning in 1913, he composed a series of five oneact “dras” called “Dunkeeness” that use ZAUM (transrational language) as an important ingredient. The action of these plays is satirical-absurdist, in the style of ALEKSEI KRUCHONYKH’s VICTORY OVER THE SUN (1913) and ALFRED JARRY’s Ubu Roi (1896). They feature a donkey as a character, either explicitly or metaphorically. Themes range from political power to the role of free artistic creativity. In contrast to other Russian poets who used Zaum, lliazd adopted phonetic spelling to facilitate correct pronunciation of his invented words. He arranged them in quasi-musical ensembles, such as duets, trios, and choruses of increasing complexity, concluding the fifth dra, Le-Dantiu as a Beacon (Paris, 1923), with an ensemble of eleven separate simultaneous voice lines. Collectively, lliazd’s dras constitute the largest work of Zaum yet composed. For Le-Dantiu alone, he coined over 1,600 new words. As lliazd was also an expert typographer, these works, Le-Dantiu in particular, are also noteworthy for their visual elaborateness. Instead of pursuing a law career in St. Petersburg, lliazd in 1917 returned to Tiflis where, with Kruchonykh and Igor Terentyev (1892–1937), he formed the group 41° and created the Fantastic Little Inn cabaret, which became a focal point for Futurist- and Dada-style evenings and lectures. The first four dras were performed in Tiflis and lliazd’s typographical creativity was applied to publishing his own works and those of his colleagues, the most spectacular being his 1919 anthology dedicated to the local actress Sofia Melnikova. In 1921, lliazd moved to Paris and for several years led the Russian avant-garde there, giving lectures publicizing the achievements of the RUSSIAN FUTURISTS and allying with the Paris Dadaists. He organized the famous “Coeur à barbe,” a ball at which the split between Dada and SURREALISM erupted. Thereafter he led a quieter life, writing several innovative novels, only one of which was published during his lifetime, and cycles of poems that were formally conservative, if unusual in content and style. He devoted the later part of his life to the creation of elegantly designed limited editions of rare literary works with original illustrations by artists such as PABLO PICASSO, MAX ERNST, and Joan Miró (1893–1983). —Gerald Janecek

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IMAX (1970) This registered pseudo-acronym, written entirely in capitals, means “Maximum Image” offered by a projection technology that the Canadian Graeme Ferguson (1929) developed in the wake of the brilliantly successful multiscreen films shown at EXPO 67 in Montreal. Using special cameras (and thus special projectors as well), a 70-mm film runs sideways through the camera, so that the equivalent space of three frames is shot at once. Producing a negative image several times the size of the standard 35-mm frame, such footage offers far finer detail on large screens than the prior expanded projection techniques of CINERAMA and CINEMA-SCOPE. In specially installed theaters around the world, IMAX films are customarily screened with six-channel sound. The paradox is that, in this age of ever smaller public motion picture theaters, certain developments exploit the possibilities of bigger screens. OMNIMAX is a derivative technology for smaller spaces, with a wide, deeply dished, concave, almost spherical screen. The IMAX company also developed threedimensional film projection more popular than the cumbersome system briefly popular in the 1950s, and IMAX HD, which doubles the speed at which its film passes through the camera.

IMPRESSIONISM (MUSICAL) (1874) The innovations introduced by Impressionist techniques are as significant in the negation of old formulas as in the affirmation of the novelties. They may be summarized in the following categories: MELODY 1. Extreme brevity of substantive thematic statements. (2) Cultivation of monothematism and the elimination of all auxiliary notes, ornaments, melodic excrescences, and rhythmic protuberances. (3) Introduction of simulacra of old Grecian and ecclesiastical modes calculated to evoke the spirit of serene antiquity in stately motion of rhythmic units. (4) Thematic employment of pentatonic scales to conjure up imitative sonorities and tintinnisonant Orientalistic effects. (5) Coloristic use of the scale of whole tones for exotic ambience. (6) Rapid iteration of single notes to simulate the rhythms of primitive drums.

206 • IMPRESSIONISM (MUSICAL) HARMONY 1. Extension of tertian chord formations into chords of the eleventh, or raised eleventh, and chords of the thirteenth. (2) Modulatory schemes in root progressions of intervals derived from the equal division of the octave into 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12 parts in preference to the traditional modulations following the order of the cycle of fourths and fifths. (3) Motion by block harmonies without transitions. (4) Preferential use of plagal cadences, either in triadic harmonies or extended chordal formations. (5) Quartal harmonies used as harmonic entities which move in parallel formations. (6) Modal harmonization in root positions of perfect triads within a given mode, with the intervallic relationships between the melody notes and the bass following the formula 8, 3, 5, 8, etc. when harmonizing an ascending scale or mode, and the reverse numerical progression 8, 5, 3, 8, etc. when harmonizing a descending scale or mode, excluding the incidence of the diminished fifth between the melody and the bass; the reverse numerical progression, 8, 5, 3, 8, 5, etc. for an ascending scale results in a common harmonization in tonic, dominant, and subdominant triads in root position; the same common harmonization results when the formula 8, 3, 5, 8, 3, etc. is applied to the harmonization of a descending scale; this reciprocal relationship between a modal and a tonal harmonization is indeed magical in its precise numerical formula. (7) Intertonal harmonization in major triads, in which no more than two successive chords belong to any given tonality, with the melody moving in contrary motion to the bass; since only root positions of major triads are used, the intervals between the melody and the bass can be only a major third, a perfect fifth, and an octave. In harmonizing an ascending scale, whether diatonic, chromatic, or partly chromatic, the formula is limited to the numerical intervallic progression 3, 5, 8, 3, 5, etc., and the reverse in harmonizing a descending scale, i.e., 8, 5, 3, 8, 5, 3, etc. Cadential formulas of pre-Baroque music are often intertonal in their exclusive application of major triads in root positions. A remarkable instance of the literal application of the formula of intertonal harmonization is found in the scene of Gregory’s prophetic vision in Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov, in which the ascending melodic progression, itself intertonal in its peculiar modality, B, C-sharp, E, F-sharp, G, is harmonized successively in the major triads in root positions, E major, C-sharp major, A major, F-sharp major, E-flat major. Another instance of intertonal harmonization occurs in the second act of Puccini’s

opera Tosca, in which the motto of the chief of police, a descending whole-tone scale in the bass, is harmonized in ascending major triads in root positions, in contrary motion; the intervallic relationship between the melody and the bass follows the formula 8, 3, 5, 8, 3, 5, 8. (8) Parallel progressions of inversions of triads, particularly second inversions of major triads, with the root progression ascending or descending in minor thirds, so that the basses outline a diminished seventh chord. (9) Parallel progressions of major ninth chords, also with a bass moving by minor thirds. (10) Parallel progressions of inverted dominant-seventh chords, particularly 6/5/3 chords. (11) Free use of unattached and unresolved dissonant chords, particularly suspensions of major sevenths over diminished-seventh chords. (12) Cadential formulas with the added major sixth over major triads in close harmony. COUNTERPOINT 1. A virtual abandonment of Baroque procedures; abolition of tonal sequences and of strict canonic imitation. (2) Reduction of fugal processes to adumbrative thematic echoes, memos, and mementos. (3) Cultivation of parallel motion of voices, particularly consecutive fourths andorganum-like perfect fifths. FORM 1. Desuetude of sectional symphonies of the classical or romantic type, and their replacement by coloristic tone poems of a rhapsodic genre. (2) Virtual disappearance of thematic development, its function being taken over by dynamic elements. (3) Cessation in the practice of traditional variations, discontinuance of auxiliary embellishing ments, melodic and harmonic figurations whether above, below, or around the thematic notes and the concomitant cultivation of instrumental variations in which the alteration of tone color becomes the means of variegation. A theme may be subjected to augmentation or diminution, and in some cases to topological dislocations of the intervallic parameters. Thus, the tonal theme of Debussy’s La Mer is extended in the climax into a series of whole tones. (4) Homeological imitation of melorhythmic formulas of old dance forms, often with pandiatonic amplification of the harmony. (5) A general tendency towards miniaturization of nominally classical forms, such as sonata or prelude. —Nicolas Slonimsky

INCOMPREHENSIBLE CRITICAL PROSE •

IMPROVISATION See JAZZ.

INAUDIBLE MUSIC (1918) Since electronic instruments are capable of generating any frequency, it is possible to reproduce sounds below and above the audible range. The first work for infrasonic and ultrasonic wavelengths was the inaudible symphony entitled Symphonie Humaine by the French composer Michel Magne, conducted by him in Paris on 26 May 1955. Its movements were entitled Epileptic Dance, Thanatological Berceuse, and Interior View of an Assassin. The inaudible version was unheard first, followed by a hearing of an audible transcription. The mystical Russian composer Nicolas ObouhovNikolai Obukhov devised in 1918 an inaudible instrument which he named Ether, theoretically capable of producing infrasonic and ultrasonic sounds ranging from five octaves below the lowest audible tone to five octaves above the highest audible tone. But Obouhov’s instrument was never constructed. Avant-garde composers working in mixed media often compose visual music, which can be seen but not heard. A poetic example is the act of releasing a jar full of butterflies “composed” by LA MONTE YOUNG. Imagination plays a crucial part in the appreciation of inaudible music. An interviewer on a broadcast of the British Broadcasting Corporation was sent a defective copy of John and Yoko’s Wedding Album in which two sides were blank except for an engineer’s line-up tone. The broadcaster gave it a warmly favorable review, noting that the pitches differed only by microtones, and that “this oscillation produces an almost subliminal uneven beat which maintains interest on a more basic level,” and further observing that the listener could improvise an Indian raga, plainsong, or Gaelic mouth music against the drone. John and his Japanese bride Yoko sent him a congratulatory telegram, announcing their intention to release the blank sides for their next album. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” —Nicolas Slonimsky

INCOMPREHENSIBLE CRITICAL PROSE (forever) Always with us, alas, incomprehensible writing about culture and the arts became more frequent, if not more

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acceptable, in the wake of intellectual invasions from France, beginning in the 1970s, continuing into the 1980s and perhaps later. Examples became so plentiful, not only in books but pretentious magazines, that I fear singling out examples, because readers might think I picked one or another whopper out of revenge or personal distaste. The theme of incomprehensible critical prose is pride in privilege, no matter what its writer is trying or pretending to say (including her or his exposure of privilege in others); its implicit purpose is demonstrating that its author can brazenly write (or talk) as you and I can’t, for fear we might be criticized, demoted, dismissed, or simply ignored. Incomprehensible authors customarily benefit from belonging (or aspiring) to one or another exclusive social class, to which compensatory intellectual privileges are extended – whether female, hued, or third-world-born (or, ideally, at least two of the three, if not a triple play) – the recital of which can be turned into a shield against obvious criticism. Rest assured, dear reader, that the following excerpts come from people I don’t know and, in truth, would rather not know, thinking, as I do, that incomprehensible prose is a symptom of more serious intellectual and moral defects. If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate efforts to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality. (In this context, a book titled Locations of Culture [1994], Homi Bhabha’s final phrase packs a particularly mighty fluff punch.) Consider this about the German-American Dada baroness ELSA VAN FREYTAG-LORINGHOVEN, who reportedly made a plaster cast of a penis (since lost), and the French American MARCEL DUCHAMP: It was imperative that the New Woman, per Picabia, be contained within the anxiety-reducing mechanomorphic forms of the facetious machine image, not parading freely through the streets wielding a penis clearly disattached from its conventional role as guarantor of male privilege. The baroness’ per-formative (rather than biological) penis, along with Marcel’s erotically invested gargonne-esque eros/rose-as-commodity, were the ultimate weapons against the bourgeois norms

208 • INDETERMINACY that Dada in general is thought of as radically antagonizing. I also suspect that anyone who reads widely has his or her favorite bête-noirs perhaps mounted on walls that accept darts. Incidentally, the best antidote for such contagiously bad medicine is reading or rereading GEORGE ORWELL’s concise and classic Politics and the English Language” (1946), whose clearly expressed insights into peculiar language are more prophetically true than he could have foreseen.

INDETERMINACY (c. 1954) Incidentally the title of JOHN CAGE’s first solo record (1957), this term refers to music composed with the assistance of chance operations – such as throwing dice in order to make decisions, observing the imperfections in paper to discover notes on staves, or using random tables – and to musical instructions likely to produce radically unpredictable results. In the latter case, the composer may provide only generalized directions; or collections of notes that may be played in any order, at any speed, in any combination, etc.; or allow for a surprise that, if observed, will necessarily redirect the performance. Indeterminate performance differs from improvisation in providing ground rules that will prevent its performers from seeking familiar solutions. Indeterminacy differs as well from ALEATORY MUSIC, which was an alternative popularized by PIERRE BOULEZ in the 1960s, with compromises typical of him, purportedly to represent a saner avantgarde. In my experience, indeterminacy, aka “chance,” functioned as a divisive issue in talking, say, about John Cage’s music until the late 1970s, when everyone both opposed and predisposed realized that the issue wasn’t as important as it once seemed.

INDIANA, ROBERT (13 September 1928–19 May 2018; b. R. Clarke) Initially classified among the POP artists, Indiana is actually a word painter, at his best among the best of its kind, which is to say that the innovation of his strongest paintings comes from making them mostly, if not exclusively, of language. Using bold letters and sometimes numerals, rendered in the clean-edge tradition of American commercial sign painting, Indiana exposed

very short Americanisms to art, or vice versa, establishing himself as a master of color, shape, and craftsmanship (though repetitiously favoring Roman letters and numerals within circles, as well as circles within circles) well before JENNY HOLZER, among others. Indiana’s single most famous work, Love (1966), depends upon tilting the letter O, which in this heavy Roman style evokes the sexuality embodied in its shape, and then upon the fact that all four letters are literally touching each of their adjacent letters. One version is a painting, since reproduced on a USA postage stamp, with the red, blue, and green so even in value that the foreground does not protrude from the background. Four of these LOVE shapes, each 5 by 5 feet, were grouped into a magisterial LoveWall (1966), 10 feet by 10 feet of rearrangeable panels, each deployed perpendicularly to its companions, all of which can be rotated so that different common letters meet at the center of the field. My favorite numerical Indiana is Cardinal Numbers, an extended vertical progression from zero to nine that was displayed at EXPO 67. I rank Indiana’s design for the basketball court at the Milwaukee Mecca (1977, since destroyed) as the best floor done by an American artist in recent memory.

INFRAVERBAL POETRY (1990) Another taxonomical poetic term of mine, this one has to do with poetry in which what is done inside words becomes significant. I divide the class into the following four subclasses: (1) fissional poetry (e.g., RICHARD KOSTELANETZ’s “TheRapist”); fusional poetry (e.g., GEOF HUTH’s “shadowl”); microherent poetry (e.g., Michael Basinski’s “cedkwmeyme”); and alphaconceptual poetry (e.g., ARAM SAROYAN’s “lighght,” which exploits the concept of silent letters). The intentional misspelling of words for poetic effect probably began with LEWIS CARROLL’s portmanteau words in the latter part of the 19th century, though he was probably aiming more for comedy than poetry (e.g., “slithy toves” to suggest slimy/slippery/lithe toads/cloves/coves/groves). The first genuine genius of the art was JAMES JOYCE, particularly in FINNEGANS WAKE (1939) where he used such coinages as “cropse,” “trwth,” “pftjschute,” and “sylble.” Some twenty years later Aram Saroyan took the simpleseeming but crucial step of making poems, one to a page, of single infraverbally enhanced words, like his famous “lighght” and “blod.” Since then, many have followed his example, among them Kostelanetz (an inventor of such bilingual pwoermds as the “Spanglish”

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY •

“dmionneeryo,” in which the fusion of “money” and “dinero” glistens with appropriate connotations), KARL KEMPTON and Huth– Huth, among several, expanding to longer lyrics in which infraverbalisms are embedded naturally, as simply one kind of the many devices available for use, as it was for Joyce, albeit in prose rather than lyric poetry. —Bob Grumman

INSTALLATION (c. 1980) The term “installation” has come to identify art made for a particular space, which need not be a gallery. Such art theoretically exploits certain qualities of that space that the work of art will inhabit forever or will be destroyed when the exhibition is terminated. The category arose in the 1980s as an open and yet debased term for what had previously been called “site-specific art,” as exemplified by the sculptors Nancy Holt (1938) and Mary Miss (1944), among others. Examples include WALTER DE MARIA’s Earth Room (1968), which, in its third incarnation (or installation), has been permanently on display in SOHO since the late 1970s. One theme of a major retrospective of Installation Art, Blurring the Boundaries (1997, San Diego) is that many of the best received support from the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS when it was last supportive of avant-garde art. Both installations and site-specific art differ from an ENVIRONMENT, which is an artistically enhanced circumscribed space.

INSTITUTE FOR ELECTRONIC ARTS (IEA) (1997) After 1970 or so, certain American advanced universities developed semi-autonomous tech-art entities called variously Lab or Institute to serve not only their faculty and students but also unaffiliated artists in production residencies. (Since they’ve not yet gotten a collective name, only one of its kind names this entry.) Customarily accepting gifts of obsolete functioning machinery from sympathetic hi-tech corporations, these facilities have offered ambitious artists not only machines but technicians unavailable in their home studios. The first to invite me was Synapse at Syracuse University, where graduate students helped me produce in 1975 my first cameraless videotapes. A decade later I worked on electroacoustic composition with a single staff technician at the Brooklyn College Center for

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Computer Music that was housed within two rooms above a campus performance center. By 2001, I was a guest of the larger and more renowned Media Lab at MIT where a team lead by a graduate student produced a multiscreen installation for a traveling exhibition. Much like other operations at MIT, the Media Lab accepted commercial work. None were as various, as least for me, as the Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA) at Alfred University, in the middle of western New York State, where, thanks to available machines and technicians who knew how to use them, I produced not only large inkjet prints but a poem 200’ (that’s feet) long and a novel 50 feet long, among other indubitably unprecedented departures impossible before (and perhaps elsewhere). One of the Alfred students subsequently interned with me. Incidentally, these institutions differ in their support from other production facilities inviting me. WBGH (Boston), WXXI (Rochester), and WDR (Köln) were all radio broadcast studios enabling me to produce electroacoustic music. Hart Perry’s Cabin Creek Center for Work and Environmental Studies collaborated with me in 1975 in producing my first hologram. My second hologram was made at the Dennis Gabor Laboratory (at the Museum of Holography). These, along with the Public Access Synthesizer Studio (NY) and EMS (Stockholm), where I worked as well, were all independent foundations receiving government grants. By contrast yet again, The Experimental Television Center (Owego, NY) began as a university facility before going independent and soliciting grants in its own name; and yet again, the more prodigious (and prominent) Media Lab at MIT remains connected to its initial host. At each of these venues, may I testify, I made important works that wouldn’t have otherwise happened – some acknowledged as avant-garde, some even credited in history books. Indispensable such production facilities no doubt also were for other artists.

INTEGRITY Though rarely discussed as such, it always honored not only in appreciating artists’ careers but especially in measuring critics. To recall a baseball metaphor, higher integrity distinguishes major league players from minor. Those lacking it, or failing to recognize it, customarily don’t know what they’re missing.

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY As intellectual history records the best that is thought and thus most likely to be remembered on the largest

210 • INTENTIONS stage, all widely conceived arts history is a species of intellectual history. It has come to differ from Cultural History, which records the art and thought of one or another circumscribed group. Most of this Dictionary aims to be Intellectual History.

INTENTIONS So what? Trust the tale, not the teller, no matter what an artist claims he is doing or what his or her audience should think. Art can’t pretend to be what it isn’t, though, especially with innovative art, some third-party guidance (as in this book) might help.

INTELLIGENCE A quality hard to measure, not as respected as it used to be, particularly not just in creating innovative art but also in understanding it. The truth is that a strong esthetic idea can enable a person to make work more intelligent than he is. Decades ago a theater director told me that a true actor can play a person more intelligent than he or she is because they’ve worked to master the forms of appearing intelligent. Likewise with a mastery of profound forms or certain creative procedures can a good artist make work that is more intelligent than he or she is. For examples, consider, say, JACKSON POLLOCK or ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG. One informal test of autonomous esthetic intelligence comes from judging that only a few, if not just one, of a certain artist’s work is superior to others. Another favorite story about actors’ mastery tells of a star who arrived for the performance quite drunk. Pushed onto the stage, he performed roughly as well as he usually did; but once off stage, he was still indisputably drunk. The truth was that in his body, not his woozy mind, was sufficient intelligence to redo his role.

INTERMEDIA (1966) This term was recoined by DICK HIGGINS to define new genres of art that combined the aspects of two heretofore separate types of art. Intermedia differs from “multimedia,” which implies something much less unified – the inclusion of various art media, such as different kinds of material, within one work, usually

a performance, thus in the tradition of a Gesamtkunstwerk epitomized by a RICHARD WAGNER opera. One frequently cited example of intermedia is VISUAL POETRY, which results from an underrecognized combination of literary and visual arts. Although there is a long (and mostly unknown) tradition of visual literature, the modern fusion of the two arts becomes a distinct intermedium that is not conventional literature and not exclusively visual art. During the 20th century, experimentation with intermedia became more common as artists searched for radically alternative modes of expression. Other genres of intermedia are artistic machines (combining sculpture with technology), SOUND POETRY (combining music and literature), and artistically enclosed spaces (combining architecture with music, sculpture, or painting). It is possible, however, that sometime in the future such intermedia will be considered perfectly usual forms of art and that other intermedia will appear on the continuum of art forms. My own (RK’s) considered opinion holds that, just as COLLAGE was the great fertile interart esthetic invention of the early 20th century, so will intermedia in its various forms came to represent retrospectively the end of that century. My own sense of the larger history of the past seventy years is that the radical developments in art came either from purifying the materials of a traditional form (whether printing or music) or from mixing forms. As COLORFIELD painters, say, represented purification, so ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG explored miscegenation; as MILTON BABBITT and ELLIOTT CARTER purified, so JOHN CAGE pushed his initially musical ideas into other arts.

INTERNATIONAL STYLE (c. 1920) Born in Germany, mostly at the BAUHAUS, this kind of architecture was popularized in America, first with the publication of Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s and Philip Johnson’s book The International Style (1932), and then with exhibitions at MoMA, which became its principal publicist. To quote the cultural historian Russell Lynes (1910–91), “If few people liked the International Style when it first appeared in America, it was the MoMA that did more than any other institution to bring about its acceptance.” With the immigration to the US of Walter Gropius (1883–1969) and MIES VAN DER ROHE, both masters of the mode, the International Style became the dominant architectural fashion, particularly in office buildings, in the 1950s.

INTERNET ART •

Also known as the Functional Style and the Machine Style, this International Style stood for six general principles: the marriage of art and the latest technology; geometric CONSTRUCTIVIST forms whose “streamlining” symbolized the spirit of the machine more than intrinsic technological quality; the building as a volume rather than a mass (thus the penchant for glass walls that visually denied a building’s massive weight); a rejection of axial symmetry typical of classic cathedrals, in favor of noncentered, asymmetrical regularity, as epitomized by, say, rows of glass walls; the practice of making opposite sides, if not all four sides, resemble one another so that, formally at least, the building has no obvious “front” or “back”; and, finally, a scrupulous absence of surface ornament. For these reasons, buildings cast in the International Style suggest no-nonsense efficiency and economy, if not a physical environment consonant with both modern technology and bureaucratic ideals, all tempered by geometric grandeur and numerous subtle visual effects produced, for instance, by colors in the glass or intersecting lines and planes. What was initially called “POSTMODERN” in architecture represented various conscious reactions against the purported sterility of this International Style that has, in my opinion, nonetheless survived stronger than its antagonists.

INTERNET (1969) The secret truth is that the Internet began its existence as ARPAnet, a computer network developed for the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a prototype of a computer network that couldn’t be bombed out of existence. The original idea was that the network would be so large and robust that it could function even after some of its important nodes were destroyed. But the Internet could not stay true to its intended nature. By the late 1980s and then dramatically so in the early 1990s, the Internet became a network for outsiders on the fringe of society. At that time, the prevalent “netiquette” was that the Internet was for ideas and fun, not for financial gain. But that brief pioneering fling with the fringe was quickly overwhelmed by the peddlers, and now our concept of the Internet is primarily that of a giant multi-territorial mall with a quirky little automated encyclopedia thrown into the mix. Regardless, the Internet remains a multifarious presence, providing for both commerce and art. For some types of art, including kinetic poetry, it provides an easy and cheap method of distribution. By the late 1990s, there was a real and

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perceptible move of North American MICROPRESS away from print media and onto the Internet, which includes Facebook and other social media new to the 21st century. We have yet to see what long-term effects this will have on the art that is produced. —Geof Huth

INTERNET ART (1980s) Since the first edition of this Dictionary in 1991, much on Internet Art has changed. For one, Internet Art has developed a history. For another, while artists have come and gone, some academic institutions are now teaching the practice of Internet Art, and museums are taking a cautious role in displaying Internet Art works. Support is not widespread, but is there. Most of the support has come from the artists themselves who’ve made the platforms for showing their work. Finally, the development of social media such as Facebook has provided a meeting place as well as a place to show work or links to new work. It is interactive, and easily accessible. Simply, Internet art makes use of the Internet, not only as a means of distribution but as a virtual space for art to appear in. The space is defined by all the connections that make up a given computer network. For the sake of clarity in the following article, early Internet Art will fall into the realm of historical artifacts, up to about 2005. After that, from 2005 to the present, Internet Art will be considered contemporary. By 2005, browsers such as Safari for the Macintosh and Internet Explorer for the PC were in common use. These browsers are the basic means of connecting to the Internet and cyberspace and Internet Art. The history of Internet Art has been difficult to find until recently when MIT Press published Judy Malloy’s Social Media Archaeology and Poetics in August of 2016. This book covers work on the Internet done from 1973 with the development of ARPANET to the mid-1990s, when the World Wide Web was firmly established. Malloy’s genius in placing the arts in social media has been to include everyone working with microcomputers at that time in a creative way, including engineers, scientists, and military researchers and entrepreneurs along with artists, writers, and musicians to show the incredibly rich panoply that existed then, and how information flowed from one group to another enriching everyone. Social Media Archeology and Poetics is the source for the period. Much contemporary Internet Art had its roots in the ’80s and ’90s because that was the time when artists working on the Internet set down fundamental notions

212 • INTERNET POETRY of what made Internet Art. Key to this experience was breaking down the barriers between all that could be art and the necessity to program the computer to control the platform. Perhaps the most famous of all was JOHN CAGE’s The First Meeting of the Satie Society, which was carried on the Art Com Electronic Network. This long mesostic poem was not simply a long text displayed on a monitor. Satie had an intricate UNIX driver that displayed the poem in 15-line chunks. Then delivery of the poem paused, while the user read. Delivery continued when the user pressed the space bar. However, it is no longer online. Judith Malloy, who began her writing in the Internet Art mode with her Uncle Roger in 1986 is still active today, creating extremely intricate texts that extend stream of consciousness writing pioneered by Virginia Woolf in the early years of the 20th century. In The Whole Room (work in progress) parts of which have appeared on Facebook, she merges stream of consciousness techniques with computer coding to generate new and unimagined texts that expand awareness. The animation in Fred Truck’s The Milk Bottle Reliquary in 2016, connects his virtual sculptures with his real-space objects in an artist’s museum form through a unique but practical video index. In this work, Truck created 3D models of all his sculptures in a wide variety of modeling programs, and then ran them through an animation program. The animation program wrote the code, responding to movements he orchestrated as he placed the models in the scene. www.fredtruck.com/reliquary/ The resources listed below, kindly provided by Judy Malloy are light and playful, and are a joy to experience. These works are Internet-based: Phillipe Bootz, petite brosse à dépoussiérer la fiction www.bootz.fr/brosse/brosse.html JR Carpenter, “Along the Briny Beach” http://luckysoap.com/alongthebrinybeach/index.html Sharif Ezzat, “Like Stars in a Clear Night Sky” http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/ezzat__ like_stars_in_a_clear_night_sky.html Bill Harris, “Fireflies” http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/HyperPoetry/fireflies.html Rob Kendell, Soothcircuit http://logozoa.com/soothcircuit/ Judy Malloy, The Roar of Destiny www.well.com/user/jmalloy/control.html Mark Marino, a show of hands http://hands.literatronica.net/src/initium.aspx Maria Mencia, Birds Singing Other Birds Songs – http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/mencia__ birds_singing_other_birds_songs/index.html Emily Short, Bronze

www.well.com/user/jmalloy/elit/emily_short_bronze. html Nanette Wylde: Storyland –http://collection.eliterature. org/1/works/wylde__storyland/storyland2.swf Many thanks to Judy Malloy (1942) for the URLs for these Internet works. —Fred Truck

INTERNET POETRY (1990s–) As the most common name for a brand of visual poetry that expresses itself over the Internet, rather than on the page, on film or across the air, Internet poetry came into its own as of the mid-1990s. Examples existed before that time, but without the development of HTML, the regularization of the Internet, and the mass ingress of people to that venue, little occurred. Internet poetry may take many shapes. Some are kinetic poems that extend the experiments with kinetic object poems in the 1960s. Sometimes, Internet poetry consists of text found on the Internet, massaged, and then recontextualized. Much of the work of the Flarf school of poets was based on collecting weirdly bad writing from the Web to create a pastiche of awful yet sometimes hauntingly human poetry. Internet poetry also includes small animated movies with text floating through the mise-en-scene. To some degree, any poetry presented on the Internet, whether taking advantage of the affordances of that creative platform or not, is considered Internet poetry by some – the means of presentation becoming just as important as the means of production to the definition of the term. —Geof Huth

IONESCO, EUGENE (26 November 1912–28 March 1994) Born in Rumania of a French mother, Ionesco grew up in both his parents’ countries before moving permanently to France in 1938. Most famous for his plays, he also wrote fiction and criticism. Ionesco’s play The Chairs (1952) is the epitome of the THEATER OF THE ABSURD. Ionesco had a keen ear for authoritarian lingo that, for all its fashionable propriety, does not make sense. This example comes from The Lesson (1951): That which distinguishes them, I repeat, is their striking resemblance which makes it so hard to

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distinguish them from each other – I’m speaking of the neo-Spanish languages which one is able to distinguish from one another, however, only thanks to their distinctive characteristics, absolutely indisputable proofs of their extraordinary resemblance, which renders indisputable their common origin, and which, at the same time, differentiates them profoundly – through the continuation of the distinctive traits which I’ve just cited. And, of course, the student responds: “Oooh! Ye-e-ee-ss-s. Professor!” The tragedy of his career was that nothing Ionesco wrote after the early 1950s, in any genre, equaled those few short plays for satirical edge and weighty originality.

IRCAM See BOULEZ, PIERRE.

IRELAND, PATRICK See O’DOHERTY, BRIAN.

IRONY (EXTREME) Traditionally identifying a literary move that reveals the presence of a second, often contradictory meaning, comic irony becomes more radical in avant-garde art, if not so original that it shocks and/or blows blithely by allegedly knowledgeable people. When MARCEL DUCHAMP submitted to an officially curated art exhibition a common urinal that he titled Fountain, his move exemplified extreme irony. (No wonder it was “rejected,” though not forgotten.) Recall as well how many years it took for musiclovers to accept that the ironic theme of JOHN CAGE’s so-called silent piece (of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of a prominent pianist stationary at a keyboard in a concert venue) was that the noise within that time-space frame constituted its Art. One strictly painterly classic in this mode is KOMAR & MELAMID’s Double Self-Portrait (1972) of their own profiles posed to resemble Lenin’s and Stalin’s. When artists appropriate historic texts or images under their own names, the result can epitomize extreme irony (e.g., RICHARD PRINCE’s pilfering of J. D. Salinger). Avant-garde irony at is best is so serious it’s funny. (Wouldn’t pilfering devoid of comedy be plagiarism?) Since most ironists proceed instinctively, rather than with premeditation, consider that some entries in this book unintentionally might realize such extreme irony.

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IRVING, CLIFFORD (5 November 1930) MARK HOFMANN’s departure as a mad literary forger was not just penning holographs (manuscripts) by historic figures but then creating pseudo-documents by an historic Mormon whose holographs were previously unknown. Once these initial samples were accepted as authentic, Hofmann was empowered to forge some more paper with this man’s name. By contrast, Clifford Irving’s subversive achievement around 1970 was getting a commercial publisher to commission his “Autobiography of Howard Hughes,” allegedly “as told to” Irving, while the American entrepreneur was still alive. To score a lucrative advance from a gullible publisher, Irving initially forged letters purportedly from Hughes himself, with whom Irving fictitiously claimed to have a personal relationship. Irving’s assumption must have been that Hughes, a notorious recluse, wouldn’t come out of hiding once the manuscript was published, or perhaps Hughes would die before its appearance. Allegedly on Hughes’s behalf, Irving even accepted his gullible publisher’s check (for several hundred thousand dollars) that his wife deposited in a Swiss bank. The level of invention in the Irvings’ project was quite audacious. Though the Irvings miscalculated, went to jail, and reportedly returned the ill-gotten money, his manuscript had enough intrinsic interest and putative credibility to appear from another commercial publisher. (So, recall, did MEEGEREN’s acknowledged forgeries have some value.) Disinclined to censor himself, Irving also published his confessional Hoax (1981), which became a Hollywood movie (2007), as well as writing other books, often as ebooks. In 2014 Irving sold his literary archive (including several boxes of his Howard Hughes research) to the University of Texas, his literary immortality assured. All these secondary successes notwithstanding, no aspiring forger since has dared duplicate Clifford Irving’s particular stunt.

IRWIN, ROBERT (12 September 1928) The initial Robert Irwin work for me, first seen at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, was an untitled white circular disk 5 feet in diameter, painted white with automobile laquer, centrally mounted from behind to stand 18 inches away from the background wall. When illuminated by four foodlights distributed to the corners of a rectangle in front of the disk, an illusion is formed on the background wall of four overlapping disks, creating

214 • ITTEN, JOHANNES a three-dimensional tension between the original disk (that initially appears nearly flush with the wall) and its shadows, as well as faint concentric bands of color on the real disc’s face. The supporting wall, the surrounding space, and the quality of the light all become as crucial to esthetic experience as the disk. Because Irwin regarded visual perception as the principal subject of his art, he favored objects with little physical substance. “Inquiry” is a favorite epithet for his own activity. Ever articulate, Irwin once declared, “To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings and objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perceptions.” In 1992 at New York’s Pace Gallery, Irwin made an untitled installation where one initially sees a black rectangle behind several layers of rectangular gauze. As the illumination in the spaces between the gauze changes color, so does the black. Because the spectator is allowed to go between the layers, he or she can look back on the piece in different ways. In discussing Irwin, as well as his colleague JAMES TURRELL, simple descriptions scarcely convey the remarkable experience of his light transformations, apart from any object. For obvious reasons, photographs of Irwin’s art are rarely sufficient.

ITTEN, JOHANNES (11 November 1888–25 March 1967) As a Swiss eccentric among eccentrics at the original BAUHAUS, where he developed the basic painting course from 1919 to 1922, he taught not just color but several kinds of color contrasts. His Chromatic Squares (c. 1919) precede visibly similar paintings by JOSEPH ALBERS that are more familiar. Solid though this was esthetically, Itten’s passionate interests in esoteric philosophies became problematic. A Wikipedia scribe noted in 2017 that Itten’s work “is also said to be an inspiration for seasonal color analysis. Itten had been the first to associate color palettes with four types of people.” Even a century later, his highly unusual thinking may not be fully understood.

IVES, CHARLES (20 October 1874–19 May 1954) It is perhaps typically American that an avant-garde composer so neglected in his own time should be so widely acclaimed by later generations. Though Ives’s works were so rarely played during his lifetime that he never heard some of his major pieces, nearly all

of his music is currently available on disk. Though he taught no pupils and founded no school, Ives is generally considered the progenitor of nearly everything distinctly American in American music. He was not an intentional avant-gardist, conscientiously aiming for innovation, but a modest spare-time composer (who spent most of his adult days as an insurance salesman and then as a long-term convalescent). A well-trained musician’s well-trained son, who worked as a church organist upon graduating from college, Ives was essentially a great inventor with several major musical patents to his name. While still in his teens, he developed his own system of polytonality – the technique of writing for two or more keys simultaneously. In a piece composed when he was twenty (Song for Harvest Season), he assigned four different keys to four instruments. Ives was the first modern composer who consistently didn’t resolve his dissonances. Many contemporary composers have followed Ives’s The Unanswered Question (1908) in strategically distributing musicians over a physical space, so that the acoustic source of the music affects not only PERFORMANCE but the sounds actually heard. For the Concord Sonata, composed between 1909 and 1915 (and arguably his masterpiece), Ives invented the tone cluster, where the pianist uses either his or her forearm or a block of wood to sound simultaneously whole groups, if not octaves, of notes. He originated the esthetics of POP ART, for Ives, like CLAES OLDENBURG and ROBERT INDIANA after him, drew quotations from mundane culture – hymn tunes, patriotic ditties, etc. – and stitched them into his modernist artistic fabric. Though other composers had incorporated “found” sounds prior to Ives, he was probably the first to allow a quotation to stand out dissonantly from the context, as well as the first, like the Pop Artists after him, to distort a popular quotation into a comic semblance of the original. Just as Claes Oldenburg’s famous Giant Hamburger (1962) – 7 feet in diameter, made of canvas, and stuffed with kapok – creates a comic tension with our memory of the original model, so Ives, decades before, evoked a similar effect in his Variations on a National Hymn [“America”] (1891, composed when he was seventeen!). In juxtaposing popular tunes like “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” in the same musical field with allusions to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Ives employed another Pop strategy to create a distinctly American style suggesting that both classical music and popular, both formal and informal cultures, are equally immediate and perhaps equally relevant. Other Ivesian musical innovations include polyrhythms – where various sections of the orchestra play in wholly different meters, often under the batons

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of separate conductors, all to create multiple crossrhythms of great intricacy. In his rhythmic freedom, as well as his unashamed atonality, Ives clearly fathered the chaotic language of modern music, a tradition that runs through HENRY COWELL and early EDGARD VARÈSE to John Cage. Indeed, Ives anticipated Cage by inventing INDETERMINANCY – where the scripts offered the musicians are so indefinite at crucial points that they could not possibly play exactly the same sounds in successive performances. In The Unanswered Question, Ives further discouraged musical unanimity by placing three separate groups of musicians in such ways that one could not necessarily see the others. As one of the first modern composers to develop a distinctly eccentric music notation, Ives anticipated contemporary use of graphs, charts, and abstract patterns – manuscripts that resemble everything but traditional musical scores – to make their works available to others. He also scored what he knew could not be played, such as a 1/1,024 note in the Concord Sonata, followed by the words “Play as fast as you can.” Indeed, Ives’s scripts were so unusually written, as well as misplaced and scrambled in big notebooks, that editors have labored valiantly to reconstruct definitive versions of his major pieces, some of which had their debuts long after his death. The independent scholar Maynard Solomon (1930), among others, has questioned the dates commonly attributed to some Ives compositions. There is a remarkable intellectual similarity between Ives and GERTRUDE STEIN, who, born in America in the same year, was as radically original in her art as Ives was in his. While we can now identify what each of them did quite precisely, given our awareness of the

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avant-garde traditions to which they significantly contributed, it is not so clear to us now what either of them thought they were doing – what exactly was on their minds when they made their most radical moves – so different was their art from even innovative work that was done before or around them.

IWERKS, UB (24 March 1901–7 July 1971; b. Ubbe Eert I.) Befriending WALT DISNEY when both were teenage art students in Kansas City, Iwerks moved with his buddy to Los Angeles and, as the initial genius behind a genius, collaborated in the development of film animation. Some historians identify Iwerks as particularly responsible for the distinctive visual style of the earliest Disney shorts, which were at the time the best of their kind, as well as for the first sound animation. Wholly on his own perhaps, Iwerks developed the character of the iconic character of Mickey Mouse. Once he quit Disney Iwerks produced animations made only with his own name, the more marvelous cartoons featuring his later creation of Flip the Frog. (Whereas the FLEISCHER brothers as city boys animated people, these midwesterners created anthropomorphic animals. Another Kansas City boy working early with Iwerks and thus Disney was Friz Freleng [1905–95], who later at Warner Brothers produced classic animations under his own name.) As these were less successful financially, Iwerks returned in the early 1940s to Disney’s burgeoning operation, working mostly on advanced technical effects. His odd name comes from Ostfriesland (East Frisia).

J

JACKSON, MARTHA K.

artists likewise thrive, so is the business of selling new art ferociously selectively competitive.

(1907–69) Prior to LEO CASTELLI, only a few years her junior, she was during their time together the most successful sophisticated dealer in avant-garde American art. Born in Buffalo, she studied art history at John Hopkins before, divorced, relocating to Manhattan after World War II, opening in 1952 an eponymous gallery on East 66th Street. Initially a collector with a modest trust fund, she regularly visited artists’ studios customarily purchasing two works – one to keep, the other to sell. Later she moved to 57th Street, which became for two decades the principal venue for galleries exhibiting new art and incidentally sponsoring openings where aspiring artists could expect to meet each other. Much was discovered in her premises; much new learned. (Once there, I remember.) Among the artists exhibiting in her spaces were WILLEM DE KOONING, JOHN CHAMBERLAIN, ALLAN KAPROW, CHRISTO, LOUISE NEVELSON, MORRIS LOUIS (for his sole one-man show in his lifetime), GUTAI (in 1956 & 1958), and CLAES OLDENBURG. (Her 1966 exhibition of the last artist was particularly successful in establishing his preeminence.) Eclectic in her tastes, Jackson is credited with exhibiting OP ART before the successful MoMA show. In 1969, just as the retailing of new art moved DOWNTOWN, she closed her gallery, depositing her archives in Buffalo. In addition to paper documents, these include over 120,000 photographs of every work ever exhibited and gallery installations. Martha Jackson knew that her gallery was contributing to Art History. As happens too often in art, the son inheriting her gallery (who grew up in the apartment above it, later working as his mother’s assistant), renaming it after himself (David Anderson), couldn’t function as well. Just as the sons of great baseball players rarely duplicate their father’s success and the children of great

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JAKOBSON, ROMAN See FORMALISTS, RUSSIAN.

JANCO, MARCEL (24 May 1895–21 April 1984) Born Jewish in Bucharest, Janco happened to be studying architecture and painting in Zurich in 1915, at the beginnings of the DADA movement, joining HUGO BALL, RICHARD HUELSENBECK, and his fellow Rumanian, TRISTAN TZARA. A few years earlier he had cofounded a literary journal, Simbolul (The Symbol) with Tzara, its title reflecting an esthetic value popular in European literature at the time. While active in Zurich DADA, Janco made paintings and reliefs that are still regarded as his strongest visual art, as well as neo-African masks and memorable woodcut illustrations to a Tzara poem. He is honored primarily for his 1916 painting of the CABARET VOLTAIRE, the initial Dada venue. For the exhibition he designed a striking woodblock announcement with only white letters on a black field. Moving to Paris in 1919, Janco soon broke with Tzara and returned to Rumania, where he founded Contimporanul (1922–40) and worked as an architect. Meanwhile, nearly all of Janco’s Dada art disappeared, including the Café Voltaire painting mentioned above, which was last exhibited in his native Bucharest, to be remembered only in photographs or, less fortunately, exhibition catalogues and lists. By 1941 Janco was safely in Palestine, where he remained until his death, in a country sadly so inhospitable to avant-garde art (in contrast to avant-garde science, say) that its more

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remarkable creative personalities necessarily make their careers abroad, much as comparable Americans did in the 19th century.

JANECEK, GERALD (15 August 1945) One of the few full-time academics to write intelligently on avant-garde subjects, he authored The Look of Russian Literature (1984), which documents the development of visual devices mostly in FUTURIST writing of 1900–30. In contrast to previous commentators, such as Vladimir Markov (in Russian Futurism: A History, 1968), who tended to favor the poetry of VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV, Janecek concentrates upon the most radical figure, ALEKSEI KRUCHONYKH, finding more sense than anyone else previously unearthed in his innovations and extravagances. What makes Janecek’s avant-garde criticism special is his willingness to understand the most extreme: not only the most advanced individual in a group but his or her furthest departures. His principal sequel deals thoroughly with ZAUM, or “transrational language,” which Markov before him dubbed “the most extreme of all Futurist achievements.”

JARGON In critical writing, the function of jargon is not to illuminate but to suggest that its author is “verbally correct,” which is a higher (or lower) semblance of POLITICALLY CORRECT. So, should you come across a piece of criticism filled with imposing terms (such as “ambiguity,” “tension,” and “metonymy” in days gone by; “dialectical,” “signifier,” “disruption,” “confrontation,” “contradiction,” “deconstruction,” “differance” [sic], “logocentrism,” “asymptotic,” “indexical,” “decentering,” etc., recently; Lord Knows What, nowadays), to all appearances used in unfathomable ways, do not worry and, most of all, don’t be intimidated (unless you’re a student or an untenured professor, whose function in the academic hierarchy is to be predisposed to intimidation). You’re not supposed to understand anything, but merely to be impressed by the author’s modish choice of lingo, much as, in other contexts, you might be awed by his or her choice of dress, shoes, car, or something else superficial. It was the caustic American sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) who pointed out more than a century ago that inefficient expression is meant to reflect the industrial exemption of the speaker. The advantage of the accredited locutions lies in their

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reputability; they are reputable because they are cumbrous and out of date, and therefore argue waste of time and exemption from the use and the need of direct and forcible speech. That is to say, you must be economically comfortable to talk that way and, by doing so, are implicitly announcing that you are. The reason why such jargon amuses common people is that they know instantly, as a measure of their lesser economic class, what its real purpose is.

JARRY, ALFRED (8 September 1873–1 November 1907) An eccentric’s eccentric, who lived modestly and needed collegial support to make his works known, Jarry wrote plays and fiction so different from the late Victorian conventions that they are commonly regarded as having anticipated SURREALISM, DADA, the THEATER OF THE ABSURD, and much else, which is to say that Jarry was a slugger in spite of himself. His play Ubu Roi (King Ubu, 1896) opens with the word Merdre, which is customarily translated as “Shittr,” proclaiming from the start its ridicule of bourgeois false propriety. Furthermore, the freewheeling movement from line to line, and scene to scene, makes it different from any plays written before. Yet more innovative, to my mind, are Jarry’s fictions, such as Gestes et Opinions du Dr Faustroll, Pataphysicien (1911), and Le Surmâle (The Supermale, 1902), in which ridiculousness is raised to a higher level. The former begins as a satire on Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767), if that is possible, but it ends in the modern world with pseudo-mathematics in an extraordinary chapter “Concerning the Surface of God,” which concludes with this monumental IRONY: “GOD IS THE TANGENTIAL POINT BETWEEN ZERO AND INFINITY.” Though Jarry was a limited writer, the image of the man and his work had a great influence upon his avant-garde betters; in this respect, he resembles his near-contemporary compatriot, RAYMOND ROUSSEL, and his successor, ANTONIN ARTAUD. (Another useful divide within avant-garde consciousness is separating those who treasure Jarry from those who worship Artaud and thus those valuing mad invention over inventive madness.) After initiating a college du ‘PATAPHYSIQUE, Jarry died young of tubercular meningitis aggravated by alcoholism, which was in its time no more avant-garde, alas, than drug abuse was later.

218 • JAZZ

Figure 8 Alfred Jarry’s woodcut portrait of Master Ubu, 1896. Wikimedia Commons.

JAZZ (c. 1885) Arising from obscure origins in the American South, this indigenous music first became prominent in New Orleans at the beginning of the 20th century. While reflecting African and African-American concepts of alternative rhythm and group participation, early jazz initially followed black gospel music in observing European harmonies abetted by rhythmic deviance. Nonetheless, other musical strategies seem peculiar to jazz in its many forms: melodic improvisation within a predetermined harmonic range; continuous harmonies either within a solo instrument or a backup band; and certain kinds of instrumentation and thus timbre and intonation. Even when adopted by musicians other than African-Americans, such as BIX BEIDERBECKE,

a master improvising cornetist from Iowa, or Jewish Klezmer musicians, the result is called jazzy – or, in the Klezmer example, “Jewish jazz.” Though many prominent jazz musicians had compositional careers, jazz has remained essentially a performer’s music. Avant-garde jazz is the fringe that was initially unacceptable because of formal deviations, beginning historically with LOUIS ARMSTRONG’s transcending the piano-based ragtime predominant between 1900 and 1920 by featuring the trumpet as a solo instrument. This departure created the foundation for the “big bands” of the 1930s that featured brass instruments customarily played in harmonic unison. The principal alternative to this style came in the 1940s with the dissonance cultivated by CHARLIE PARKER in smaller bands. Behind him came in the next decades ORNETTE COLEMAN and ALBERT AYLER, among others, who eschewed any metronomic beat while often playing as rapidly as possible. The development of jazz is [to Richard Carlin] a paradigm for American avant-garde success. Instead of moving linearly from folk blues to Dixieland jazz through big band jazz to BEBOP and free jazz to jazz/ rock fusion to new acoustic jazz (in emulation of a European model of avant-garde development), jazz both moves forward and looks backwards. Although the heyday of New Orleans jazz was the 1920s, New Orleans jazz continues to be played today, both by musicians raised in this style and by others who emulate it. In this sense, each new style does not replace the old ways, but rather complements them. [RK disagrees with this RC formulation.] From the beginning of the 1920s, classically trained composers could hardly resist the influence of jazz, as many of them incorporated one or another jazz device (or, sometimes, a live jazz musician) into their own works. Though such fusions are sometimes hailed for representing a “third stream” between classical music and jazz, that epithet has never had much acceptance with either the jazz public or that devoted to modernist classical music. The real influence of jazz on classical avant-garde music lies in the acceptance of kinds of rhythms, beginning with syncopation, indigenous to North America. One recent myth that must be dispelled is that jazz is an African-American monopoly. Elsewhere in this book is an entry on BIX BIEDERBECKE, a Caucasian whose improvisations represented jazz at its best. NICOLAS SLONIMSKY, from the perspective of classical music, thinks that whites in the 1920s developed a modern type of jazz designed for concert performance. Among them were Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Guy Lombardo,

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and Paul Whiteman. The most important contribution to concert jazz was made by GEORGE GERSHWIN, whose Rhapsody in Blue became a modern classic. Few jazz keyboardists have been as brilliant as George Shearing (1919–2011), who was born blind in the Battersea section of London. The first great jazz guitarist was a Belgian gypsy named Django Reinhardt (1910–53). A subsidiary effect of jazz’s success was new kinds of dancing, not only between couples in social situations but on stages, beginning with percussive tap dancing that complements jazz to the same degree that classical music complements ballet. Within this general rubric of jazz dance are a wide variety of alternatives with unique names, such as Black Bottom, Shimmy, Charleston, Cakewalk, Strut Step, Hucklebuck, Mashed Potato, about which an encyclopedia could no doubt be written. Marshall and Jean Steams’ Jazz Dance (1968) includes graphic notations documenting how various parts of the body should be positioned for each dance, in addition to a list of films and kinescopes dating back to the end of the 19th century. One interesting measure of jazz’s cultural acceptance is that, since 1950, most purportedly comprehensive histories of American music acknowledge jazz. —with Richard Carlin

JEAN, MARCEL (16 December 1900–4 December 1993) Every avant-garde art group needs an associate who can write; better, someone who can write well; best, who can write irreplaceable “insider” histories. For SURREALISM that person was Marcel Jean. For his own art, one specialty was decalcomania, which for his colleagues meant not transferring images from paper onto glass or porcelain but pressing ink between sheets of paper and then separating the papers to discover a surprise that may or may not be accepted, to which some ink lines might later be added. In addition to writing Histoire De La Peinture Surrealiste (1959; The History of Surrealist Painting, 1967), Marcel Jean edited the Autobiographie du surré alisme (1968; Autobiography of Surrealism, 1980), which is a rich chronological documentary history. Jean also traveled widely, mostly lecturing about Surrealism. Around the time of the former book’s publication, he sat beside me for a New York City radio program, speaking English as fluently as mine. For the second big book, which was apparently commissioned initially in the

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US, the English commentary was mostly his own. Best at his particular role he probably was. (Had I known more about his past, I would have asked about the principal mystery of his biography: How did he manage to survive World War II working in a factory in Hungary?) For his enthusiasms Marcel Jean was the complimentary antipode to his Parisian contemporary MICHEL SEUPHOR, who comparably chronicled CONSTRUCTIVISM and ABSTRACTION.

JEWISH ART As an artist and writer born Jewish, I feel obliged to write an entry that, alas, isn’t as rich as I’d wish it to be. Given the proscriptions against graven images, Jewish art, avant-garde Jewish art truest to Judaism, should be nonrepresentational – certainly devoid of people, if not nature as well. Only with other-worldly forms can other-worldly experience be portrayed. With this principle in mind, consider that the exemplary master Jewish modern artists are not MARC CHAGAL and AMADEO MODIGLIANI, for familiar examples, but BARNETT NEWMAN, LOUISE NEVELSON, and MARK DI SUVERO, none of whom have worked much with Jewish imagery or themes. (Indeed, perhaps the most notable Newman work portrays abstractly the Stations of the Cross.) For music, few works compare with STEVE REICH’s Tehillim (1981) and Alvin Curran’s Crystal Psalms (1988), both of which incidentally began as commissions from German radio. The greatest film by Jerry Lewis (1926–2107), a truly gifted comedian, may (or may not) have been his most Jewish film about a clown in a Nazi concentration camp, The Day the Clown Died (1972), which he withdrew from public circulation soon after an initial screening. On the other hand, most of the greatest innovators in the art of printed comics were Jewish. Modern synagogue architecture I find disappointing, particularly in America, where no Jewish church known to me reaches the level of those, say, in Rome or Florence, Italy. On the other hand, at placing abstract sculptures in synagogues and other Jewish institutions, few succeed as well as Ibram Lassaw (1913–2003, b., Egypt) and my sometime SOHO neighbor Oded Halahmy (1938, b. Iraq), the latter’s penchant for irrelevantly kitschy descriptive titles notwithstanding. Certain questions remain in this admittedly openended entry: For instance, how Jewish is the art of the Rumanian DADA artists TRISTAN TZARA and MARCEL JANCO? Does the drive toward abstraction in Gertrude Stein’s prose reflect her Jewish birth? And so on?

220 • JOHNS, JASPER Whoever prepares the next edition of this Dictionary might elaborate or discard.

JOHNS, JASPER (15 May 1930) Though he was initially paired with his friend ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, who was five years his senior, Johns is a different sort of artist, concerned less with exploring unfamiliar materials than with creating objects that pose esthetic questions. In looking at his early and prototypical Target with Four Faces (1955), one cannot help but ask: Is this a replica of a target? A collection of concentric circles? Or something else? What relationship do those four sculpted bottoms of heads (noses and mouths, to be precise) have to the two-dimensional picture? Why is the target-image represented so realistically and yet the heads so surrealistically? Is there some symbolism here, or do all meanings exist within the picture? “I thought he was doing three things,” JOHN CAGE once wrote, “five things he was doing escaped my notice.” By painting a realistic image without a background, Johns followed JACKSON POLLOCK in abolishing the discrepancy between image and field that had been a core of traditional representational art, again raising the question of whether the target-image was a mechanical copy of the original target, or a nonrepresentational design (and what in this context would be the difference anyway?). Later Johns works develop this love of images and objects unfamiliar to painting, as well as displaying his taste for ambiguity, puzzle, and enigma. Given such a high level of exploratory richness, it is not surprising that the first major critic of his work should have been LEO STEINBERG, an art history professor whose forte was the exhaustive examination of significances available within a single picture. Johns’s work is generating a secondary literature approaching in size that devoted to MARCEL DUCHAMP, so that even catalogues accompanying his exhibitions physically resemble coffee-table books.

JOHNSON, B. S. (5 February 1933–13 November 1973; b. Bryan Stanley J.) The most experimental British novelist of his generation, Johnson began with Traveling People (1963), in which narrative gives way to impressionistic streamof-consciousness, and Albert Angelo (1964), which, telling of an impecunious architect working as a substitute

teacher, includes a section where spoken thoughts on the right side of the page become a counterpoint to the monologue on the left-hand side. Pages 149–53 of the latter book contain a hole that is purportedly caused by the knife that killed Christopher Marlowe (how British!). “Why do the vast majority (it must be over 95 per cent at a reasonable guess) of novelists writing now still tell stories,” Johnson asked provocatively in Books and Bookmen (1970), “still write as though Ulysses (let alone The Unnameable) had never happened?” As Johnson practiced what he preached for fiction in the late 20th century, his greatest departure was The Unfortunates (1967), which came in a box whose opening and closing chapters were fixed, while the remaining twenty-five were loose, to be read and reread in any order, purportedly reproducing the jumble in his mind on a particular Saturday afternoon when he is assigned to cover a football (soccer) match for a Sunday paper. (As this was a job that Johnson actually worked when I first met him in 1965, the inspiration was autobiographical.) Johnson published poems and stories, in addition to making a film that won several prizes, You’re Human Like the Rest of Them (1968). Of the ten books he published before his suicide, only one, his first collection of poems, was republished in America in his lifetime.

JOHNSON, RAY (16 October 1927–13 January 1995) A lightweight whom some regarded as a light-heavyweight, he produced COLLAGE too late to be innovative and too trivial to be monumental. Some of these works used words along with images in witty ways, at times with disarming simplicity. As a pioneer at MAIL ART, he publicized the mythical New York Correspondance [sic] School, its title satirizing the 1950s artsales epithet of “New York School.” Persisting with his unique integrity for decades, Ray Johnson became an artist whose work was collected and eventually exhibited in galleries, not to mention in a solo museum show. Four biographical facts: As an alumnus of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE, he befriended other artists easily, perhaps because few, if anyone, regarded him as threatening. He acquired well before his death a heavyweight art dealer. He had a long sub rosa affair with a sculptor publicly known as securely married with children. Since the Johnson I saw now and then had a sunny disposition (unlike B. S. JOHNSON, whom I also knew slightly), may I assume that he calculated that his jumping off a bridge in Eastern Long Island in his late sixties would be remembered as his final PERFORMANCE, as indeed it is.

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JOHNSON, SAMUEL (18 September 1709–13 December 1784) Aside from other contributions he made to English Literature, particularly as an exemplary essayist, this Johnson became the first master of the Art of the Entry, which is his case was stylish definitions of English words in the form of a Dictionary. Given the constraint of very few words, an entry necessarily becomes a platform for aphoristic writing that at its best lightly reflects great learning as it incorporates economy and wit. Ideally, a good entry should be remembered, if not precisely, at least credibly; if not as a whole, at least in part. Among this Johnson’s classics are: Rant: High sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought. Network: Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.

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Rust: The red desquamation of old iron. Grubstreet: Originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet. More than any other dictionary known to me Johnson’s contains rich asides. It also inspires the reader not to read continuously but to flip pages, both backwards and forwards, before putting the book down. It is commonly considered the greatest work of literature customarily kept in the “reference” section of a library. Unfortunate it is that most later dictionaries, at least in English, are written by committees and thus devoid of style. Nonetheless, among the later masters of this Entry Art are NICOLAS SLONIMSKY, AMBROSE BIERCE, and JOHN ROBERT COLOMBO whose books have likewise been produced by one learned and witty writer.

Figure 9 Sara East Johnson “Utopia” from the A Goddessey, 2017, featuring dancers Efemina Alibo, Hilary Melcher Chapman, and Molly Chanoff (left to right). Photo by Whitney Browne.

222 • JOHNSON, SARAH EAST JOHNSON, SARAH EAST (18 September 1967) A short and broadly built woman initially trained in dance, Sarah East Johnson has spoken of her early wish to “perform with MERCE CUNNINGHAM, ELIZABETH STREB, and Circus Oz.” Instead, she made PERFORMANCE that reflects not only her remarkably powerful female body but her diverse mentors: Cunningham for nonrepresentational movement, Streb for athleticism, and the circus for her use of trapeze swings and other props. Her dancers frequently perform like acrobats while hanging onto crossbars, suspended ropes, or one another, but the pacing of Johnson’s work especially honors her origins in modern dance. Some of her innovations come from slowing down circus-like movements, better to display their choreographic beauty; and in this respect, in particular, she differs from Streb, who favors speed. “Dance is my world,” she once told a reporter. “I just use a different vocabulary than most choreographers.” My single favorite Johnson move, “Hoop Diving,” involves two thick-sided hoops, stacked one atop the other, so that her dancers approaching them perpendicularly can decide to dive through either the lower or upper one, in either case the prop forcing them to move their bodies in choreographically remarkable ways. Another masterpiece is the magisterial duet Adagaio with Johnson supporting a slighter woman dancer on her shoulders, thighs, hands, and back, much as male dancers traditionally supported women, but here more acrobatically. Because her performers are nearly always women, one Johnson theme is the potentialities of female athletic strength.

JOLAS, EUGENE (26 October 1894–26 May 1952) Born in New Jersey, Jolas grew up in Lorraine, France (near Germany), before returning to the United States in 1911. Back in Paris in the 1920s, he worked for newspapers and then edited TRANSITION, which was the most distinguished avant-garde magazine of its time. It published not only episodes from James Joyce’s FINNEGANS WAKE among other literature that was avant-garde at the time, but illustrations of advanced paintings and even, in a departure rarely imitated, scores by comparably vanguard composers. Consider that in the history of American avant-garde publishing Jolas’s TRANSITION represents one line while NEW DIRECTIONS represents another with scarcely any overlap. Jolas favored the more eccentric

writers such as BOB BROWN, SAMUEL BECKETT, and GERTRUDE STEIN, as well as more eccentric works such as FINNEGANS WAKE while New Directions learned from KENNETH REXROTH, WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966), and somewhat less eccentric European writers such as Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) and DYLAN THOMAS. Once TRANSITION ceased publishing, New Directions appeared to represent the vanguard, at the expense of neglect of work further out. The most distinctive Jolas poems draw upon his multilingual background, as some like “Mountain Words” broach self-invented language: mira ool dara frim oasta grala drima os tristomeen. Others combine German, French, and English, such as this opening of “Weltangst en Chevauchant une Frontiere,” a polylingual prose poem: The earth is troubled es geistert dans les cavernes her disalogues der draklings lopent through the griefhours it is so icy in the eyes in the world of and streets are tired with waiting for kinderlieder et hymns singmourn the legends le matin is droguegrey die hirne hungern nach paradis the lonely hunting horns are tenebrating in the miserere of rooks dans la chronique de forces dans le deesert évanoui all reflecting the sensibility of a man who said he dreamt in three languages. Books of Jolas’s poetry have long been out of print, and his Man from Babel (1998) draws from autobiographical manuscripts drafted a half-century before. His daughter, Betsy J. (1926), is a distinguished American composer who, though she went to college in America, has resided mostly in France.

JONES, BILL T. (15 February 1952; b. William Tass J.) As a former track runner who became a dancer, Jones began as a spectacular performer who soon became his own choreographer, much as MERCE CUNNINGHAM did decades before him. Hailed as well as blamed for publicizing his race (black) and physical disability (HIV-positive), Jones should really be credited with a radical departure in choreographic composition.

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Though Jones himself was thin and athletic, his initial partner Arnie Zane (1948–88) was short and considerably less athletic. Objecting to “things that separate people,” Jones has included in his performance company dancers who were old as well as young, fat as well as thin, at one point even requiring them all to bare themselves on stage. It was not only an unprecedented vision of theatrical dance but a statement about humanity realized intelligently through performance. As he was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1985 and Zane died from AIDS-induced complications a few years later, Jones began in 1992 to conduct a nationwide series of “survival workshops” for people who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, cancer, AIDS, and other serious illnesses. Out of these workshops came the performance piece Still/Here (1994) that explores the experience of living and surviving under threat of death. This work prompted Arlene Croce (1934), then the veteran dance critic for The New Yorker, to write that she would not review it because it was “beyond criticism” as “victim art.” What could have been discussed, what should be remembered, was the composition of his company and thus Jones’s courageous, if exploitative, use of physiques not previously seen in formal performance. The other remarkable masterpiece in his history are the surviving pictures of his nude body painted with white hieroglyphs by Keith Haring (1958–90).

JONES, CHUCK (21 September 1912–22 February 2002; b. Charles M. J.) Coming of age in Los Angeles, just as the film industry was rapidly burgeoning, he found work not in the features but in shorter films that shot not live performers but hand-made drawings – actually sequences of drawings – and were thus called “cartoons.” Thanks to support from Warner Brothers, whose bosses wanted shorter films to precede the feature that attracted most filmgoers (some of whom might be arriving late), Jones and his colleagues worked in a corporate outpost where, under-supervised (and under-funded), they were able to make all sorts of remarkable departures, such as the discovery of anthropomorphic animals who could move through the world as people could not. Customarily only several minutes in length, these films also proceed with a speed different from longer Hollywood films, which often put me to sleep. Prolific and often profound, Jones directed Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, among other popular series; he created a character called the Roadrunner.

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He made “public service” animations during World War II and afterwards. Whereas most of his 300 cartoons were acceptable for modest purposes, he deserves credit for some of the most brilliant animations of all: Duck Amuck (1953), where the protagonist Daffy Duck must frantically improvise as everything around him rapidly changes in less than seven minutes; and What’s Opera, Doc (1957), which compresses RICHARD WAGNER’s Ring Cycle likewise into a single 35 mm reel less than seven minutes long. In both critical histories of the cartoons genre, these two are counted among the masterpieces. The great tragedy of Jones’s artistic life was that Warner Brothers shut down animation production in 1962, when he was barely 50 years old. He formed his own company as well as working for other Hollywood studios in the years immediately afterwards. Though always respected, he never again produced work as brilliant as before. For his last years Jones oversaw packages reissuing his greatest works, which are still appreciated, especially in contrast to more recent computer-generated animations that seem visually klunky in comparison. He spoke often and intelligently about his career at venues around the world. Indicatively, the most thoughtful critical appreciation of Jones was written by HUGH KENNER, a literature professor otherwise known for his books about the great modern writers. I think of Chuck and SPIKE, both Jones, born only several months apart, both from Los Angeles, to epitomize the Angelino imagination at its avant-garde best.

JONES, SPIKE (14 December 1911–1 May 1965; b. Lindley Armstrong J.) One of the greatest comic musical performers ever, a contemporary of CHUCK JONES, both born around Los Angeles within a single year apart, Spike Jones gathered in the early 1940s a group of musicians whom he called the City Slickers, who were willing to perform his extravagant comedy. Their first greater success came with a 78 rpm. recording of “Das Fuhrer’s Face” (1942) in which the semblance of a Teutonic oom-pah band regularly screams “Sieg Hiel” followed by the sound of flatulence to various lyrics deprecating Adolf Hitler. (The real Führer reportedly so hated this record that he tried to destroy every copy he could.) Over the next dozen years the City Slickers recorded prolifically and toured widely with songs and comic arrangements that were both popular and musically sophisticated. Often they began with a song or theme

224 • JOPLIN, SCOTT already popular: “Holiday for Strings,” “Hawaiian War Chant,” “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” More memorable now probably are the group’s takeoffs from more classical music, such as Franz Liszt’s Liebestgräume, which they played as fast as they could with unusual instruments; likewise Gioacchino Rossini’s William Tell Overture, played with kitchen implements. As true classics, these musical (re)arrangements remain hilarious decades later. ‘Tis said that Spike’s imagination got lost in the late 1950s wake of early rock music, which he reportedly judged already ridiculous (and thus unavailable for parody), and then the decline in his personal health exacerbated by heavy cigarette smoking. Visibly hypernervous, he ostentatiously performed with chewing gum as a kind of SIGNATURE movement. He died too young. Among the later major musical comedians reflecting his influence count Raymond Scott (1908–94), Allan Sherman (1924–73), Gerard Hoffnung (1925–59, the sole Brit here), P.D.Q. BACH, FRANK ZAPPA, and “Weird Al” Yankovic (1959). Someday an appreciative book should be written about the two Jones boys, Chuck and Spike, perhaps along with FRANK ZAPPA, as epitomizing a rich strain of Angelino art.

JOPLIN, SCOTT (24 November 1868–1 April 1917) An itinerant Midwestern pianist, Joplin is generally credited with composing the first popular piano piece to sell a million copies of sheet music, “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899). Although the term “ragtime” was meant to be semi-derogatory, Joplin’s piano pieces were as classically rigorous as Chopin’s études, with four parts, composed AA-BB-AA-CC (trio)-DD. Joplin’s music also incorporated dissonant harmonies, intuitively expanding the musical idioms of popular composition; his “Stop Time Rag” was the first sheet music to include markings for foot-tapping. One misfortune of Joplin’s life is that, not unlike GEORGE GERSHWIN, after him, Joplin thought himself worthy of more ambitious music, composing a ballet based on ragtime, and then a full-scale opera, Treemonisha (1911), which everyone wishes were better than it is. He died just short of 50, a full half-century before his music was revived, first in brilliant records in the early 1970s by the conductor-pianist-musicologistarranger Joshua Rifkin (1944), then in the popular film The Sting (1974). —with Richard Carlin

JOSHUA LIGHT SHOW (1967–72) Of all the late 1960s light shows, as they were called at the time, the Joshua Light Show, in residence at New York’s Fillmore East, a former movie palace seating 2,500 or so spectators, was the strongest. The esthetic innovation was expanding the concept of the Lumia, or the THOMAS WILFRED light box, to fill, in live time, a large translucent screen hung behind performing rock musicians. These lights were projected from several sources behind the screen, which at the Fillmore measured 30 feet by 20 and was always filled with bright and moving imagery. In the middle, usually within a circular frame (reflecting the glass bowl necessary to make it), were nonrepresentational, brilliantly colored shapes pulsating in beat to the music, changing their forms unpredictably (thanks to the fact that the colors were composed of oil, water, alcohol, glycerine, and other materials that do not mix). Around that frame was a less blatant, fairly constant pattern whose composition and color mysteriously changed through variations repeated in a regular rhythm (these coming from slides fading over one another). Across the entire screen flashed rather diaphanous white shapes that irregularly fell in and out of patterns (these coming from an individual situated apart from the others, using a collection of mirrors to reflect white light onto the screen). From time to time representational images also appeared on the screen – sometimes words, at other times people; sometimes still, at other times moving. For instance, when musicians were tuning their instruments on stage, on the screen appeared a gag image of, say, Arturo Toscanini hushing his orchestra. (Those pictures came from slides and sometimes films.) For good reason, the Joshua Light Show received a billing line directly under the musicians, for what it achieved in fact contributed enormously to the superior Fillmore theatrical experience, which wouldn’t have been the same without it.

JOYCE, JAMES (2 February 1882–13 January 1941) My job in a book like this is to distinguish the avant-garde Joyce from the more traditional writer. FINNEGANS WAKE obviously belongs and, if only to measure its extraordinary excellence, deserves a separate entry. For Joyce’s stories, Dubliners (1914), the innovation was the concept of the epiphany, which

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is the revelatory moment, customarily appearing near the end, that would give meaning to the entire fiction. “The epiphany is, in Christian terms, the ‘showing forth’ of Jesus Christ’s divinity to the Magi,” notes the British writer Martin Seymour-Smith (1928–98). “They are ‘sudden revelation[s] of the whatness of a thing,’ ‘sudden spiritual manifestation’ – in the vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” Thus the departure of a Joycean story is the form not of an arc, where events proceed to a climax before retreating to a denouement, but of continuous events that establish a flat form until the flashing epiphany. One innovation of ULYSSES (1922) is the elegant interior monologue, also called stream-of-consciousness. Retelling in many ways the story of an oafish Jew, who has as much resemblance to the classic Ulysses as a bulldog to a greyhound, this thick book incorporates a wealth of parodies, epiphanies, allusions, extended sentences, and contrary philosophies within a fairly conventional story. What also distinguishes Joyce’s career is the escalation of his art, as each new book proved ever more extraordinary than its predecessor. The culmination was the WAKE (1939). One’s mind boggles at the notion of what Joyce might have produced had he lived twenty years longer. Indeed, this sense of esthetic awe, if not incredulity, is intrinsic in our appreciation of Joyce’s continuing high reputation. Another measure of awe is the sense that decades later his greatest works still aren’t completely understood. New insights continue to appear.

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literature and computers with works in print, for galley exhibitions, and for CRT viewing.

JUDD, DONALD (3 June 1928–12 February 1994) A pioneer of MINIMALIST sculpture, Judd established his canonical reputation with the display of simple three-dimensional forms, devoid not just of any base but also of any fronts or sides. These objects were distributed in evenly measured ways, such as protruding three-dimensional rectangles up the side of a wall. Viewed from various angles, such definite forms suggest paradoxically a variety of interrelated shapes, for Judd’s point was to make one thing that could look like many things. With success, he used more expensive metals fabricated to his specifications, often with seductive monochromatic coloring, and produced many variations, only slightly different from one another, on a few ideas. As a writer, Judd contributed regular reviews to the art magazines of the early 1960s, advocating the move away from emotional EXPRESSIONISM toward more intellectual structuring, and away from an earlier sense of art, particularly sculpture, as interrelated parts toward an idea of a single “holistic” image. Forever severe, he preferred to call his three-dimensional works “specific objects,” instead of sculpture.

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(9 November 1945) He was among the first (if not the first) certified literary writer to publish a hypertext, which became the initial epithet for a literary work reflecting the opportunities offered by the new technology called a computer. His afternoon, a story (1987) was not only a disk meant to be viewed on a Cathode Ray Tube but embedded within the narrative were options offered to the reader to pursue different turns in the plot. As a professor of English with an Iowa writing degree (customarily a badge of mediocrity), Joyce also published early substantial critical guides to unprecedented literary terrains – Of two minds: hypertext pedagogy and poetics (1995) and Othermindedness: the emergence of network culture (2000). One egregious default of the second edition of this Dictionary is not including this entry that could have been written then. This Joyce (not James) has continued working at the nexus of

Out of the composition classes taught in the early 1960s by Robert Ellis Dunn (1928–96) at the MERCE CUNNINGHAM Studio came young dancers wanting to create their own pieces. As a Greenwich Village landmark (1877), which had already gained cultural fame, rare for a church at that time, by making its space available for a Poet’s Theater, The Judson Memorial Church was receptive to aspiring choreographers. The result was, in Sally Banes’s succinct summary, the first avant-garde movement in dance theater since the modern dance of the 1930s and 1940s. The choreographers of the Judson Dance Theater radically questioned dance aesthetics, both in their dances and in their weekly discussions. They rejected the codification of both ballet and modern dance. They questioned the traditional dance concert format and explored the nature of

226 • JUDSON DANCE THEATER dance performance. They also discovered a cooperative method for producing dance concerts. The result was a rich succession of choreographic experiments, some more successful than others. In addition to involving dancers who subsequently had distinguished choreographic careers, such as

YVONNE RAINER, TRISHA BROWN, and LUCINDA CHILDS, the Judson Dance Theater hosted performances authored by such predominantly visual artists as ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG and ROBERT MORRIS. New York’s MoMA mounted an exhibition remembering Judson Dance late in 2018.

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Figure 10 Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, 1986. Wikimedia Commons.

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228 • KABAKOV(S), ILYA & EMILIA KABAKOV(S), ILYA & EMILIA (30 September 1933; 1945; b. E. Lekach) The artistic couple of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are among the contemporary artists born in the USSR bestknown in the West. Beginning his artistic career in the 1950s as a children’s books illustrator, Ilya by the 1970s was creating numerous conceptual art albums based on fictional characters. These albums eventually led to the painting series that explored the widespread Soviet experience of living in communal apartments. Many critics consider Ilya Kabakov’s work “Answers of the Experimental Group” (1972) to be the foundation of Moscow Conceptualism. In lieu of visual images, it contains a grid of hand-written phrases. “Answers of the Experimental Group” parodied the omnipresent such Soviet-era visual aids as schedule boards and posters. Kabakov’s SIGNATURE approach became an overall conceptual framework, combined with a detailed attention to the most familiar signifiers of the Soviet existence. By the 1980s, as Ilya Kabakov’s output of traditional artworks diminished, he began experimenting with installations. The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1982–86) is among his most influential works of that period. One of his first “total installations,” as he calls this genre, it presents a messy room in total disarray, with a big hole in the ceiling. Posters cover the walls, red color dominates. A mysterious device is hanging from the center of the ceiling. This installation presents the ultimate dream materialization of the typical Soviet communal apartment dweller: a successful escape that is an antithesis to the apotheosis of Russian Constructivist sculpture, Letatlin (1932) by VLADIMIR TATLIN. The early Soviet utopian quest for universal expansion turns into an escape quest from the late Soviet dystopia. In 1987, Kabakov moved to Western Europe, working and exhibiting everywhere. In 1989, his “niece” Emilia, prior an art dealer and a curator in Israel and New York, became his third wife and a full artistic collaborator. Incredibly prolific and successful since then, the Kabakovs currently live on Long Island, as did, say, the émigré artist DAVID BURLIUK before them. For one testament to their popularity, consider that eBay is flooded with fake Kabakovs. —Igor Satanovsky

KAC, EDUARDO (3 July 1962) A Brazilian experimental poet since his teens, Kac was among the first writers to realize that

HOLOGRAPHY, a visual technology new to our times, could be a medium for language. In the 1980s, he created holograms in which, among other clever constructions, words from two languages meld into one another, the same letters are reorganized to create different words, a cylinder reveals a series of words, seen only in parts, that reads differently clockwise from counterclockwise (“Quando?” [When? 1987]). For art such as this Kac coined the epithet “holopoetry,” whose significance he has explained in several manifestos: “The perception of a holopoem takes place neither linearly nor simultaneously, but rather through fragments seen at random by the observer, depending upon his or her [physical] position relative to the poem.” Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Kac moved to Chicago in 1989, taking an advanced degree at its Art Institute and subsequently teaching there, in addition to editing a special issue on “New Media Poetry: Poetic Innovation and New Technologies” for the seminal magazine Visible Language (1997). Calling himself “Katz,” he has since explored various new media and technologies, most famously having a fluorescent gene implanted in a rabbit named Alba. “Transgenic art” is his preferred epithet for art that, as he says, advocates “the visionary integration of robotics, biology, and networking.” Having known him since the mid-1980s, visiting him in Rio in late 1988, just after he received an invitation to come to Chicago, I think of him as very much a 21st-century artist.

KAGEL, MAURICIO (24 December 1931–18 September 2008) A theatrical composer far better known in Europe than in the Americas, Kagel, born in Buenos Aires, moved in 1957 to Cologne where he became a prominent German composer. Possessed of a fecund imagination, he created instrumental music as well as ELECTRONIC MUSIC, produced films as well as new scores to classic silent films, and authored books and mounted gallery exhibitions. One of his specialties is music in which his own performance is key, such as a “Requiem,” wherein he is a conductor who collapses on stage while the musicians play on. Another Kagel specialty was to draw upon classical texts, as often of literature as music. Thus, Aus Deutschland (1977–80) is a “Lieder-Oper” about 19thcentury Germany; Sankt-Bach-Passion (1983–85) portrays the life of J. S. Bach as resembling that of Jesus Christ; Ensemble (1967–70), an opera without words (or orchestra) is described as “a satirical look at the

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previous history of opera”; and Ludwig van (1970) is “a Kagelian montage of Beethoven motifs.” A principal esthetic idea is metacollage which differs from earlier collage in drawing disparate materials all drawn from only a single source.

KALMAN, TIBOR (6 July 1949–2 May 1999) Initially a commercial graphic designer who could be audaciously funny, he incidentally produced a masterpiece of BOOK-ART – a strictly visual self-retrospective, literally a designer’s autopictography, with captions saved for the end, devoid of explanations, all under the deceptive title of Chairman: Rolf Fehlbaum (2001), but his own name as its author. One recurring strategy was comic replacement, so that a photo with the typical pose of Queen Elizabeth shows a woman’s face whose skin is brown and nose is broad, or a paperweight resembles crumpled desk paper. Another was disrupting a grid, say with inverting the letters within a name or turning sideways the closing credits on a screen. Otherwise, in his short prolific life Kalman terrorized, usually with some success, the design of logos, record covers, clocks, restaurant menus, calling cards, advertisements, and periodicals. The apex of his printed work was the magazine Colors (1990), sponsored by the Italian Benetton, a fashion merchandizer. In 2002 appeared a book selecting from its initial thirteen issues, its last number, like The Chairman, totally devoid of words.

KANDINSKY, WASSILY (16 December 1866–13 December 1944; b. W. Wassilyevich K.) Born in Moscow, Kandinsky studied law and social science at the local University, where he later taught law. Impressed by the first Russian exhibition of French Impressionists in 1895, he traveled in 1897 to Munich to study painting. Older than the other students, Kandinsky quickly progressed professionally, organizing exhibitions throughout Europe. By 1909, he became a founding member of Neue Künstlervereinigung (NKV), which initially represented the style of the Fauves against the German version of Art Nouveau called Jugendstil. By the following year, the NKV exhibition included a broader range of advanced European painting. By 1912, Kandinsky belonged to a dissident group that published the Blaue Reiter Almanach, which he coedited; in the same year, he authored

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Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), which still ranks among the major essays in the development of nonrepresentational painting for insisting upon the primacy of expressive and compositional elements in art. During World War I, Kandinsky returned to Russia, where he worked in arts administration, until he was invited in 1921 to teach at the BAUHAUS, remaining there until it was closed by the Nazis. He then moved to Paris, where he lived until his death. Kandinsky’s own mature paintings emphasized bright color, an intentionally flat field, and irregular abstract forms whose unfettered exuberance seems reminiscent of the art of his sometime colleague at the Bauhaus, Paul Klee (1879–1940). Perhaps because of the softness of their abstraction, both Klee and Kandinsky are now less influential than they used to be.

KAPLAN, CARTER (15 April 1960) Given the American sense of unconstrained opportunity, it is scarcely surprising that people in small places, with disadvantageous backgrounds, get big ideas about what they can do and, better, fulfill them. As a professor in a small Ohio college, thanks to a doctorate from the University of North Dakota, Kaplan founded Emanations (2011), a capacious eclectic literary annual that he wisely prints ON-DEMAND, in addition to authoring two novels, an Aristophanic comedy, and a critical book about Minippean Satire (2000), co-translating and editing The Creation of the World (2016), by Torquato Tasso (1544–95), and authoring a blog titled without apology “Highbrow.”

KAPROW, ALLAN (23 August 1927–5 April 2006) To the charge that American universities are inhospitable to avant-garde art and artists, Kaprow will always be cited as a principal counter-example, as well he should be, having taught at universities (indeed, four of the more sophisticated – Rutgers, SUNY-Stony Brook, CAL ARTS, UCSD) for forty years while inventing the HAPPENING as a form of alternative performance, all without ever obtaining a Ph.D. Beginning around 1956 with ASSEMBLAGES incorporating materials found in public places, he progressed to ENVIRONMENTS, or artistically defined enclosures, and MIXED-MEANS performance pieces he called

230 • KASPER, MICHAEL Happenings. The last typically involved people following instructions to unexpected results, initially in gallery spaces, later in public places. By the late 1960s, Kaprow’s elegantly written and masterfully designed book, Assembling, Environments & Happenings, had appeared; and his term “Happening” was being used indiscriminately by the media to define anything chaotic. Relocating in California (which can be hazardous to the artistic health of New Yorkers), Kaprow turned to more intimate situations he called successively “Work Pieces” and “Activities,” which are reportedly more psychological than spectacular in effect. Few artists are as effective in talking about their own work and esthetic purposes. Kaprow combined adventurous thinking with a broad vision, in well-turned sentences stylistically indebted to his graduate school mentor, the art historian MEYER SCHAPIRO.

KASPER, MICHAEL (7 January 1947) While working as a reference librarian at Amherst College, Kasper produced a series of tart chapbooklength visual/verbal fictions, mostly self-published, that his fellow book-artists commonly rank among the best. The third “expanded” edition of his All Cotton Briefs (1992), his biggest self-collection, contains his strongest work. A brief interview with Kasper, along with an illustration, appears in GEORGE MYERS, JR.’s Alphabets Sublime (1986). Great was the joke that the most avant-garde writer at Amherst, perhaps the most substantial as well, was working in its library.

KATUE, KITASONO (29 October 1902–6 June 1978; b. Hashimoto Kenkichi) Thanks initially to EZRA POUND’s favorably citing him in 1938 and then through scattered publication and recognition in western literary magazines, Katue (sometimes transliterated as Katsue), the pseudonym of a librarian at a dental college, became the bestknown avant-garde Japanese poet of his generation. Once a book of translations was tardily published as Oceans Beyond Monotonous Space (2007), it became apparent, at least to English readers, that Katue had produced prose poems, visual poems, picture poems, minimal poems, modular poems, poly-directional poems, poem objects, and haiku, among other experimental forms. “Tobacco of the Future” is an elaborately described short play that belongs in every

anthology of that genre. Strictly by the avant-garde measure of formal exploration, Katue belongs among the first-rank.

KAUFMAN, ANDY (17 January 1949–16 May 1984; b. Andrew G. K.) Among the most original standup performers of his time, he didn’t tell jokes or even sympathetically address his audience. Instead, he played various familiar roles badly, verging on what was called “camp,” which is an honorific characterizing art, usually live performance, that was so awful it became good. His specialty was inept impersonations, particularly of Elvis Presley. After singing a Presley song as well as duplicating the singer’s gyrations, Kaufman would toss his leather jacket into the audience but, unlike Presley, then ask that it be returned to him. While taking his bows, he would adopt another impersonation as he sounded like an eternal immigrant: “Tank you veddy much.” Kaufman also adopted such ridiculous personas as Tony Clifton, who was a lousy lounge singer, or that of a professional wrestler. Forever audacious, Kaufman once invited the audience of his Carnegie Hall performance to join him afterwards for milk and cookies, even hiring two dozen buses to transport them. When newspapers reported that he died young of lung cancer (though he didn’t smoke), some thought his death was another audacious Andy Kaufman hoax; it wasn’t. His unique performances are remembered decades after his death.

KAWARA, ON (24 December 1932–10 July 2014) An especially austere CONCEPTUAL ARTIST, Kawara spent his professional life doing (or redoing) only a few works: painting in sans-serif letters the words for the day’s date (in the language of wherever he is currently staying), sending local picture postcards on whose backsides he stamps “I got up at [at whatever time],” recording separate sheets with the names of the individuals he met that day, and posting telegrams that read “I am still alive/On Kawara.” (Editions Rene Block in BERLIN once published a book of that quoted title, consisting wholly of reproductions of such telegrams.) Out of respect for his discipline some have regarded him as a major artist. I have in the course of my life saved works from many artists, some by purchase and others as gifts, but you can imagine my surprise when the first works from

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my “collection” to tour in an international show were picture postcards that Kawara had sent me, unsolicited, for several weeks in the middle of 1970. Soon after I sold them to a private New York art dealer my cards were exhibited in the uptown Metropolitan Museum of Art, incidentally revealing my home address at an earlier time.

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Jimmy Durante. Late in his life, when his silent masterpieces were rediscovered, Keaton starred again in some wonderful short films, including a dialogue-less film portraying him traveling across Canada on a small handcar (The Railroader [1965]) and the SAMUEL BECKETT-scripted short, entitled simply Film (1965) that was incomplete at the time of Keaton’s death. —Richard Carlin

KEATON, BUSTER

KEES, WELDON

(4 October 1895–1 February 1966; b. Joseph Francis K.) Among the most innovative of all silent film directors, Keaton created a character with so little external affect that much of his comedy depends upon his deadpan reaction to the catastrophes occurring around him. Nicknamed “Stoneface,” the Keaton persona remained unchanged whether he was in the midst of a hurricane (as at the end of his classic Steamboat Bill, Jr. [1928]) or fleeing from Union troops in the Civil War (The General [1927]). Keaton’s comic conceptions often bordered on DADA, as in the famous short (One Week [1920]) in which a newly married couple struggle to build their dream house. A villain has so scrambled the directions that the house comes out resembling a wild CUBIST construction. (Because the main entry is on the second floor, one continuing gag in the film is Keaton’s pratfalls when he exits the house.) Keaton was among the first to experiment with the nature of reality and illusion in film. His 1922 short The Play House features some of the earliest trick photography, in which Keaton, through multiple exposures, portrays an entire orchestra, performing troupe, and audience. The protagonist of Sherlock, Jr. (1924), his first feature-length film, is a film projectionist who, in his dreams, leaps into the film that he is showing, becoming unwittingly involved with the action on screen. As his own director, Keaton was also a masterful film editor, often working with striking juxtapositions. In Cops (1922), he created a classic chase sequence in which gangs of police appear and disappear (almost magically) as they pursue the unwitting hero through a busy city landscape. Much of the comedy depends upon the cuts between scenes where the lone Keaton is shown running down a street and then, moments later, a sea of policemen run through the same space. With the advent of sound (and thus more expensive productions), Keaton unfortunately lost creative control of his films, appearing in a series of lame MGM features, often paired with the hopelessly overbearing

(24 February 1914–18 July 1955) One of the more adventurously ambitious figures in American arts history, he’s interesting less for what he accomplished than what he wanted to do in America, only to be thwarted at nearly every turn in his sadly short life. In his obscure Midwestern college he was a jazz pianist and an actor whose slightly older buddy named Arlington Brugh became in Hollywood “Robert Taylor” (1911–69). Earning a librarian degree Kees became director of the Bibliographical Center of Research for the Rocky Mountain Region. Before 1940 he published enough distinguished fiction to earn a book contract from Alfred Knopf who, however, rejected Kees’s novel Fall Quarter; it appeared posthumously (1990). Coming to New York Kees worked briefly as both a book reviewer and a film reviewer at Time magazine and then wrote and edited newsreel films during World War II. He became a painter who had one-man exhibitions and then succeeded CLEMENT GREENBERG as art critic at The Nation magazine for only one year. Relocating to California, Kees tried to organize a musical theater, cofounded a film production company that failed, composed music for a film by James Broughton (1913–99), wrote ballads for a nightclub singer, contributed his photographs to the book Nonverbal Communication (1956), and produced a radio program that had a short life. For much of his life Kees wrote poetry for which he is best remembered. Perhaps because his activities cannot be facilely encapsulated, he never became a professor and his name is rarely included in critical histories of contemporary arts. When his car was found empty on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, it was commonly assumed that, defeated in his various endeavors, Kees leapt into the sea. His last career move was a dead end. Just as few people before him tried to do superior work in so many domains, so fewer afterwards. Too bad Kees never tried to work in Europe. The lesson of his thwarted career was that the American sense of personal possibilities wasn’t respected in the culture of American arts.

232 • KEILTY, JAMES KEILTY, JAMES

KELLY, ROBERT

(11 November 1921–January 1978)

(24 September 1935)

By trade a city planner in San Francisco, he is best remembered by SAMUEL R. DELANY, who published his “The People of Prashad” in the periodical Quark/2 in the early 1970s:

Since Keilty had difficulty publishing his work, it is fortunate that his papers were acquired by the library at SUNY at Buffalo, whose special poetry collection ranks among the most distinguished in the world, precisely for emphasizing avant-garde work.

A tall man with a grand physical presence, albeit slighter than before, he has produced a large number of books, including both poetry and prose, that are both obscure and inclusive, which is a way of accounting for why they appear more impressive when they are opened, often to be put aside before they are finished. Conspicuously, there is remarkably little extended critical writing about his work. The last examples to come to my attention were entries in writers’ encyclopedias and articles in the single issue of an obscure literary magazine. In 2017 his Wikipedia page, supposedly compiled by his admirers, has sections on his “Teaching career” and his “Writing career,” while saying nothing particular about his work per se – not even any attempt to characterize it, say, or to identify superior efforts. Begin I dare not. Not. Even after sixty years of publishing, it’s still not clear if Kelly is an obscurantist whose work cannot be understood or an experimentalist whose particularities remain to be discovered. Staying in literary limbo for so long is in itself a remarkable achievement that perhaps makes him uniquely interesting. One professional disadvantage, not uniquely his, is his long connection to an academic institution that has an “avant-garde” reputation while employing remarkably few people of the class included in this book.

KELLY, ELLSWORTH

KEMPTON, KARL

(31 May 1923–27 December 2015)

(1 July 1943)

A veteran of US Army camouflage units, who studied in France under the GI Bill, Kelly began in the early 1950s to make paintings divided into rectangular panels that were identical in size but different in color. Because these hues were usually bright and unmodulated, they produced a shimmer along the straight edge where they touched each other. Such work customarily requires the painter to apply the paint thickly and evenly and then the viewer to find an optimal viewing distance, which the artist insists should be at least 12 feet. Because Kelly used two or more colors, this is customarily called COLOR-FIELD or hard-edge painting. (Were there only one color, the epithet “monochromic” would be more appropriate.) In the judgment of MICHEL SEUPHOR: “Kelly is one of the purest followers of MONDRIAN’s neo-plasticism.” Unlike his Dutch master, Kelly has also produced distinguished sculpture, albeit monochromic.

Since the early 1970s, Kempton has edited Kaldron, North America’s foremost and longest-lasting visual poetry publication (in print from 1976 to 1990, but later on a literary website), and has composed some of this century’s best poetry. His art ranges from all-text short lyrics to highly sophisticated visio-verbo-musicomathematical hybrids. Though particularly strong in infraverbal poetry (as in a four-liner that ends “a we/ awe” to capture near-perfectly the way “a we,” or group of people, transcendently fuses – audibly as well as visually – to form something higher), he is bestknown for his “typoglifs.” These (visually chanted) repeated-letter typewriter poems are the basis of the ongoing series of Runes Kempton has been working on since the late 1970s. On the surface they seem simple, though Kempton often gives them dimensionality and motion through op-art techniques he was among the first visual poets to exploit. Examined in depth, however, they are seen to be widely referential reworkings

Keilty went so far as to invent his own language, complete with its own grammar and vocabulary, as well as a country and a culture to go with it. He wrote stories and folk plays in his invented language, Prashad. He began a lengthy novel in the language. He even went so far as to translate classic works of world literature into Prashad, such as Hamlet and De Coté de chez Swan. In the early seventies, I got a chance to attend a performance of three of Keilty’s one-act plays in Prashad, where the actors were schooled in the meaning of the somewhat Slavic sounding lines. Prashad had been constructed with euphony uppermost in Keilty’s mind.

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of patterns found in knotted seaweed and elsewhere in Nature, and in American Indian, Celtic, and numerous other cultures all the way back to rock art. In short, they intricately as well as uniquely celebrate the final awe that, for Kempton, underlies all things. —Bob Grumman

KENNER, HUGH (7 January 1923–24 November 2003; b. William Hugh K.) From his beginnings as an audacious, independent, and prolific literary critic-scholar, Kenner has produced two kinds of books – eccentric and often oblique studies of the accepted literary modernists and less oblique books about such avant-garde figures as EZRA POUND (back in 1951, when his subject was still imprisoned and academically marginal), WYNDHAM LEWIS, and BUCKMINSTER FULLER. Thus, Kenner exhibited courage not only in his interpretations but in his choice of subjects. Among the more iconoclastic of the latter is his literate demolition of SIGMUND FREUD, a modern icon at the time, in “Tales of the Vienna Woods,” collected in Kenner’s Gnomon (1958). It is indicative that this sometime student of MARSHALL MCLUHAN, likewise born Canadian and likewise Catholic, should write sensitively in The Mechanic Muse (1987) about the computer as a successor to the typewriter, and that he should be among the first of his cultural generation to become familiar enough with computers to produce programs that were widely used. Though common opinion regards The Pound Era (1972) as Kenner’s best book, my own sense is that his essays and books on more avant-garde subjects represent his greater achievement. One quality of his criticism was his choice of the very best, and only the very best, for this subjects. Indicatively, his last monograph (1994) appreciated the films of the greatest film animator of them all – CHUCK JONES.

KENTRIDGE, WILLIAM (28 April 1955) Aside from his achievements as a purely visual artist with prints and drawings, as well as tapestries and short animated films, I want to commend his extraordinary stagecraft. No one enhances operas as strongly as he. As the stage director of the Metropolitan Opera production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s fanciful The Nose (2010), Kentridge not only designed the sets and moved the performers, but he offered a wealth of projections, both

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static and kinetic, and such unusual moves as pitching his singers on smaller platforms at various levels above the main stage. The décor became more surprising than the music. Measurably, Kentridge has taken higher than his predecessors the modernist adventure of distinguished visual artists’ enhancing operas. Otherwise, his innovative short animations depend upon charcoal drawings produced by himself on the same sheet of paper, rather than the more customary separate cells, and thus portray his incremental drawing. Collectively, nine of them were titled 9 Drawings for Projection (1989–2003). Other clever short films are shot like animation, with pauses between frames or doubling himself, to portray Kentridge making his own art or talking to himself. Some of his work reflects his continuing residence in South Africa where he was born and educated. Otherwise, in talking about his own efforts few visual artists so prominent are as articulate and thoughtful as Kentridge. Not for nothing was he a NORTON PROFESSOR at Harvard.

KEROUAC, JACK (12 March 1922–21 October 1969; b. Jean-Louis Kérouac) The avant-garde Kerouac is not the chronicler of hitchhiking through America in On the Road (1957) or the embarrassing drunk of his later years, but the author of certain abstract prose in which words are strung together not to describe a subject but for qualities indigenous to language. Visions of Cody (1972, though written many years before) and, especially, “Old Angel Midnight” are thought to be examples of “automatic writing,” Kerouac purportedly transcribing words at the forefront of his consciousness. Whether that last claim is true, the result is extraordinary writing, as in the following from the latter title: Stump – all on a stump the stump – accord yourself with a sweet declining woman one night – I mean by declining that she lays back & declines to say no – accuerdo ud. con una merveillosa – accorde tue, Ti Pousse, avec une belle fe’Tune folle pi vas, t’councer – if ya don’t understand s 11 and tish, that language, it’s because the langue just bubbles & in the babbling void I Lowsy Me I’s tihed. Like other Kerouac writing, this is about the possibilities of language and memory, but differs from most other Kerouac in being about the limitless intensities of each. Kerouac’s major experimental poems are “Sea,” which initially appeared as an appendix to Big Sur (1962), and Mexico City Blues (242 Choruses) (1959),

234 • KERVINEN, JUKKA-PEKKA which displayed linguistic leaps similar to those quoted from “Old Angel Midnight.”

KERVINEN, JUKKA-PEKKA (24 May 1961) Perhaps the closest successor to EINO RUUTSALO in their native Finland, he has composed innovative poetry CHAPBOOKS, often in English with publishers based in America; chamber music; electronic music; and much else. From “Machine Language” 3 July 2017: e p ocess liked the toug esum bly flapper artisan t of ci cul ion what th igin l value f om i self e middle. The blurriness money, at another he e ge farther screens con if sh med. as a buye w W ve ill flinch a li e barrier, then he oo f .) C pi l wants. The ci ahead, Lond., 1805, s I c n more itse e starting-point and the e £110 be spen as money sp ingy vegetation rewa e-up fjord was bon cco tch up very well yet, El d fourth the Waverill sa shed he little. When he purchase, while mids e necessary condition to i e epe i ion or enew l verill go fingers, he c pi l, and its circulati ssatisfaction p chiness ntalizingly closer, then in, held a 9b% GRd7lIs#0 r! p. 88, get the and e Thus contributing to the great avant-garde tradition of Europeans writing in English what no native Englishspeaker could write.

KHAN, NUSRAT FATEH ALI (13 October 1948–16 August 1997) Though ecstatic singers are honored in every religion supporting such sacred music, few could ever equal

the heightened spiritual musicality of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in performing Qawwali, the devotional music of Sufis. Born a Muslim Punjabi in Pakistan, the son of a musician who descended from earlier musicians, he developed a small performance ensemble that, thanks to ingenious arrangements and amplification, to the accompaniment solely of harmoniums, could sound like a male mob. More impressively, his Qawwali Party would perform for hours at a time. As their music was best heard live, they toured around the world. Since his death, a nephew Rahat Fatah Ali Khan (1974) has continued the Qawwali tradition.

KHAN, USTAD BISMILLAH (21 March 1916–21 August 2006) A virtuoso on the South Asian shehnai, a kind of oboe, in the performance of Indian music, he was the epitome of the instrumental musician who played with such originality, subtlety, and proficiency that the instrument, or in his case a double reed, never sounded so strong elsewhere. One measure of his excellence was no one after him could play any double reed as well, perhaps because he accepted few students. Other instrumental soloists approaching Khan’s level for innovation and brilliance include, in my opinion, Paul Zukofsky (1943–2107) on the violin, GLENN GOULD and Art Tatum (1909–56) on the piano, Pablo Casals (1986–73) and FRANCES-MARIE UITTI on the cello, Andrés Segovia (1893–1987) on the gutstringed guitar, and both LOUIS ARMSTRONG and Bobby McFerrin for the human voice. (Here readers can add their own favorites in this book’s margins.) Hearing only a few notes from any of these unique performers, the listener can identify the player. (None of them, incidentally, taught much.) As Ustad was an acquired honorific, this Bismillah Khan is not the prominent Pakistani cricketer born in 1990.

KHARMS, DANIIL (30 December 1905–2 February 1942; b. D. Ivanovich Yuvachov) Born into the family of a left-wing writer in St. Petersburg, the Russian poet Daniil Ivanovich Kharms (Yuvachov) in 1925 met ALEKSANDR VVEDENSKY, who, though only a year older, Kharms identified as his teacher. While Vvedensky departed from the esthetics of ZAUM in the mid-1920s, Kharms used Zaum elements in his own poetry: modifying words by vowel/consonant substitution and creating a strong

KHLEBNIKOV, VELIMIR •

effect of DEFAMILIARIZATION within a traditional rhymed poem. He also used invented words as imaginary archaisms from strange dialects/Oriental languages (“Trr ear of my hairs,” “Daughter of daughter of daughters of daughter of Peh . . .”). The poet’s early interest in children’s poetry (and poetry for children) influenced his more serious writing. The “narrator” of Kharms’s poems is often a “primitive,” a child, or a retarded person. In 1926 Kharms, Vvedensky, and several other young poets formed a group called OBERIU. Kharms’s outstanding achievement during OBERIU years (1926–31) was the play “Elizaveta Bam,” first staged in 1928. After his first arrest in 1930 and the demise of OBERIU, Kharms’s writing became more daring, venturing far out of his favorite trochee meters into irregular and even free verse. Having written most of his best poetry by 1935, he then concentrated on writing short fiction, creating what many consider to be his defining work – a series of very short stories called “Accidents.” In the summer of 1941 Kharms was arrested again and died, according to KGB archives, six months later in a Gulag mental asylum, faking madness to escape execution. The relative accessibility of Kharms’s prose, compared to the difficulties of translating his (and, for that matter, other OBERIU) poetry into English, led to his recognition in the West as a master of very short fiction. This, unfortunately, came at the expense of any appreciation of his brilliant poetics. —Igor Satanovsky

KHLEBNIKOV, VELIMIR (9 November 1885–28 June 1922; b. Viktor Vladimirovich K.) The brilliant pathfinder of RUSSIAN FUTURISM and one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century, Khlebnikov was a quiet, reclusive man who led a nomadic existence, in contrast to the brash behavior of the other CUBO-FUTURISTS. They nonetheless recognized him as the genius of the movement, one whose ceaseless innovation and great poetic achievement served as a creative stimulus in the areas of both practice and theory. His earliest poems (1906–08) already show the marks of originality and innovation that made Khlebnikov a leader of Futurism when the movement began to form in 1910. One of his most famous early poems is “Incantation on Laughter,” a series of neologisms based on the root smekh (“laughter”) and published in 1910. Khlebnikov’s major poetic quest was to uncover the

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true creative roots of language that existed in primitive times, when presumably there was a close iconic link between linguistic signs and their meaning. Many of Khlebnikov’s theoretical works are devoted to uncovering these links in the Slavic language, and many of his poems are partly illustrations of his theories. Khlebnikov was a Slavophile in his attitude toward language, and he avoided borrowings from European languages (especially from French and German, which are heard frequently in spoken and literate Russian). The goal of many of his coinages was to demonstrate the capacity of Slavic to generate all the words necessary for present and future needs, not only to replace foreign borrowings in current use but also to name new phenomena. While the term “ZAUM” was used by him and others to describe these linguistic inventions, Khlebnikov, in contrast to ALEKSEI KRUCHONYKH, intended his coinages to be clearly understood and not to be indeterminate in meaning, at least in the long run. Often he provided keys to their interpretation either explicitly by giving definitions or implicitly by providing analogies to known words within the same context. Khlebnikov’s innovations were not limited to word-creation, but covered a full linguistic range, from attempting to define the universal meanings of individual sounds and letters to new ways of creating metaphors, to rhythmic and syntactic experiments, and to new syntheses of all of these elements in larger forms called “supersagas,” one of the most noted of which is Zangezi (1922). Khlebnikov was also a significant writer of prose fiction and theater texts. His “The Radio of the Future” (1921) is filled with suggestions that still seem radical today. He preferred to depict the primitive state of man in close contact with nature, a state analogous to primitive man’s close contact with the roots of language. Slavic mythology is a notable element. Khlebnikov was not as enamored of modern technology and urban life as other Futurists. However, in addition to his principal concern of creating a perfect language for the future, he penned a number of Utopian descriptions of futuristic life. As he was a trained mathematician, his favorite project was attempting to discover the mathematical laws governing human destiny, according to which the pattern of historical events could be understood and future events predicted. Because of his nomadic existence and personal eccentricity, publications of Khlebnikov’s works during his lifetime were often to some degree faulty, filled with typographical errors, misreadings, and variant or fragmentary versions, the author’s final wishes being to varying degrees uncertain. These problems continued in posthumous editions until very recently, when more rigorously edited volumes have begun to

236 • KIENHOLZ, EDWARD appear. Khlebnikov was fortunate, however, to have had champions throughout the Soviet period when his work appeared with some regularity, though not abundantly. As the difficulty of his poetry still challenges even the most sophisticated reader, he has never been and is unlikely ever to become broadly popular; he will remain a “poet’s poet” whose work continues to inspire new generations of Russian writers. —Gerald Janecek

KIENHOLZ, EDWARD (23 October 1927–10 June 1994) A western United Statesian original, Kienholz made tableaux, usually with decrepit detritus, of people living at the margins of society – in a homely bar, in a state hospital, etc. Portraying moral ugliness as visually hideous, he typically placed life-sized maimed figures in such real settings as a double bunk bed in State Hospital (1966), a chopped-apart 1930s automobile in Back Seat Dodge ’38 (1964), and a bar counter in the mammoth Beanery (1965), where almost all the figures have clocks for heads. Because he incorporated various sub-art materials into three-dimensional constructions, Kienholz was initially classified as a master of ASSEMBLAGE; but what he really did was design static theatrical sets, sometimes as INSTALLATIONS meant for a particular location. The suggestion is that spectators could enter them, even if they are blocked off, perhaps because Kienholz’s “human” figures are customarily less lifelike than their surroundings. In State Hospital (1966), installed at the national museum in Stockholm, viewers peer through a small barred window into a room containing a doubledecker bed with two naked, emaciated men facing the window. Their hands are tied to the bed. In place of their faces are fishbowls. For its original installation, Kienholz infused a hospital smell into the scene. Often living in BERLIN since the middle 1970s, Kienholz once mounted an installation of old radios that, when activated, played raucous Wagnerian music reminiscent of a discredited era. In 1981, he decided that the name of his wife, Nancy Reddin K. (1943), should retroactively accompany his own on all works produced after 1972.

KIESLER, FREDERICK (22 September 1890–27 December 1965; b. Friedrich Jacob K.) An Austrian who came to the United States in 1926, Kiesler was a visionary architect whose proposals were mostly unrealized. His few projects that were actually

built were commonly judged to be “ahead of their time”: peripatetic scenery and a theater in the round in 1924; a long, cylindrical space for Peggy Guggenheim’s “Art of This Century” gallery in 1942; and an egg-shaped white grotto made of fabric over curved stretchers for the last major SURREALIST exhibition. His art seemed to hypothesize an INTERMEDIUM incorporating architecture and theater along with painting and sculpture. One great architectural proposal was endlessness, or infinite continuity, first conceived for a theater in 1923 and then exhibited as the Endless House at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1960: a series of concrete shells with no structural members. Others remember Galaxies (1952), also at MoMA, which Irving Sandier describes as “environmental ‘clusters’ of painting and sculpture.” Kiesler coined the term “Corealism” to acknowledge continuity of time and space, as well as the idea that artwork depends upon its environmental context. From 1933 to 1957 he worked as Scenic Director at the Juilliard School of Music.

KINETIC ART (c. 1920) Several artists between 1910 and 1920 – among them, NAUM GABO, ALEXANDER ARCHIPENKO, MARCEL DUCHAMP, and GIACOMO BALLA – came up with the idea of making art move, utilizing motors to propel their initially sculptural objects. In a famous 1920 manifesto, Gabo joined his brother Antoine Pevsner (1886–1962) in suggesting, “In place of static rhythm in the plastic arts, we announce the existence of a new element, kinetic rhythm, which is to be the basis of a new perception of real time.” In his book The Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (1969), the French critic Frank Popper (1918) distinguishes among several genres of kinetic art. One depends upon some kind of machinery (e.g., the artists already cited, POL BURY and MOHOLYNAGY). A second, called mobiles, realizes movement without motors (e.g., ALEXANDER CALDER and GEORGE RICKEY). A third depends upon moving light (e.g., THOMAS WILFRED and JOSHUA LIGHT). A fourth, such as that made by JULIO LE PARC and YAACOV AGAM, depends upon spectators shifting themselves for the illusion of movement to occur in the work of art. Certain holograms also depend upon spectator movement. A fifth is a kind of Optical Art that, if stared at fixedly, will generate the illusion of movement; the exemplars here are BRIDGET RILEY and VICTOR VASARELY. To Popper’s list I

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would add a genre of machines that respond to outside influences (such as works by James Seawright [1936] and ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG) and a second of kinetic sculptures that function autonomously. One contemporary master in the last category is GEORGE RHOADS, who uses a motor to lift a small ball to the top of a multi-route contraption that then depends upon pretechnological forces of gravity to make the artwork move. The sculptures of WEN-YING TSAI transcend Popper’s categories by incorporating both motors and changing light. Some contemporary kinetic art has been produced by collectives, such as USCO. Some examples are permanently installed (such as the George Rhoads 42nd Street Ballroom in Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal); others, such as JEAN TINQUELY’s Hommage a New York (1960), were meant to survive only for an evening. Some recent kinetic art exploits computers, at times to make the activity more various than was possible in the mechanical age, or to make it respond to viewers’ presence.

KING, KENNETH (unknown, at his request) A profoundly original mind from the beginnings of his professional career, King has worked inventively in both dance and writing. For Camouflage (1966), he jumped in place for several minutes. For the most spectacular passages of Blow-Out (1966) he dressed in dark glasses, his hands in gloves attached by elastic strings to the side walls, his feet firmly planted, his body contorting within the severely constraining frame. In M-oo-n-b-r-a-i-n with SuperLecture (1966), King emerges in the costume of an old man, which he proceeds to remove piece by piece, later putting a few items back on. Midway through this work begins an audiotape of prose written and spoken by King in a style that imitates and parodies both JAMES JOYCE and MARSHALL MCLUHAN, incidentally lamenting the impossibility of choreography in the electronic age. At one point King takes a single familiar dance step, only to return to plodding around the stage, concluding his danceless dance about the difficulties, if not the death, of modern dancing. That last theme informed Printout (1967) in which King, dressed in black from head to toe, supervised the playing of a tape on which he reads a prose essay whose Joycean words are simultaneously projected on a screen. While the SuperLecture was reprinted in my anthology The Young American Writers (1968), the text of Printout appears in my selection of Future’s Fictions (1971). Writing in Motion:

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Body—Language—Technology (2003) is a collection of his brilliant writings.

KING, PHILIP (1 May 1934) In the early 1960s, King was the leading representative of the New Generation sculptors, a group of young British artists who turned against the emotional expressiveness and the emphasis on craft, on figuration, and on truth to materials that had characterized sculpture during the previous ten years. In reaction, King developed a style of work that focused on simple unitary forms such as cones and boxes, bold colors, stability rather than implied movement, and the use of fiberglass in lieu of traditional materials. His most influential work was Rosebud (1962), a simple, wide, pink conic section, looking very much like a teepee, with a vertical slit running down the front that revealed a bright green surface behind it. The slit was curved and came to a point halfway down its length, so as to vaguely resemble the pointed edge of a rose leaf. In their geometric simplicity and stasis, such works clearly precede the Minimalist sculptures of CARL ANDRE and DONALD JUDD created later in the 1960s. But with the passage of time, the loud colors and King’s preference for the look of manufacture, instead of a sculpture of modeling and carving, make his art seem to be more the antecedent of another development of the later 1960s: POP ART. —Mark Daniel Cohen

KIPPER KIDS (9 March 1948, b. Brian Routh; b. 20 January 1949, Martin Rochus Sebastian von Haselberg) As PERFORMANCE artists who met initially in 1970, not in some art college but as students in a London acting school, they initially worked apart from other tandems in exploring that new genre. After performing in alternative art spaces, which became the preferred venue for such sophisticated vaudeville, the Kipper Kids produced programs for HBO and Cinemax. One married the more prominent performer Bette Midler (1945), which represents nice work for a vanguard artist if he (or she) can get it. Their originality came developing a seedy character named Harry Kipper whom they shared, dressing alike, as though they were twins favoring funky costumes. A favorite routine has them donning boxing gloves

238 • KIRBY, MICHAEL to pummel not each other but themselves. Performers so audacious, acknowledging raucous slapstick, VIENNA ACTIONISM, and SPIKE MILLIGAN, are memorable.

KIRBY, MICHAEL

dying young after another stroke. To his previously altered first name, he added Rahsaan (pronounced Rah-San with equal stress) around 1970. His discography includes not only solo albums but performances with such jazz legends as Quincy Jones, Jaki Bayard, and Charles Mingus. A tribute band calling itself the Vibration Society survived his death, producing an album of Kirk’s music as late as 1986.

(13 January 1931–24 February 1997) Kirby’s early critical writings include an introduction to Happenings (1965), and essays, such as his classic “The Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde,” which became The Art of Time (1969). As a sculptor, Kirby took six sets of photographs from four sides of six subjects and then printed them on cubes that, if turned in complementary ways, would show different sides of six different subjects. As a theater artist, he made MIXED-MEANS pieces that depended upon the appearance of a double for himself (his identical twin brother, E. T Kirby [1931–85], who also published books about alternative theater), and scripted plays whose principal subject is their structure, which is “played out,” as he puts it, in ways unusually rigorous for live theater. These were so original, in both writing and staging, that it is scarcely surprising that even the otherwise compendious Contemporary Dramatists (1993) lacks an entry on Michael Kirby’s theater.

KIRK (RAHSAAN), ROLAND (7 August 1935–5 December 1977; b. Ronald Theodore K.) Blinded early in life, he developed incomparable virtuosity in playing several instruments strapped to his body simultaneously or in quick succession – several grades of clarinets, saxophones, flutes, whistles, and/or even sirens, playing one melody with one hand while blowing another with his other hand, sometimes singing or speaking as well. He also mastered the technique of “circular breathing” that allowed him to produce superhuman continuous sound. As a one-man combo, so to speak, who incorporated references to earlier jazz into his improvisations, Kirk produced kinds of “Black Classical Music,” as he called it, that was simply unavailable even to groups manned by several people. One memorable testimonial comes from his widow Dorthanne: “His head should’ve just blown off his body with all the stuff he held up there.” While audio disks of his playing remain viable decades after his passing, footage of him playing live must be seen to be believed. Suffering a stroke in 1975, he taught himself to play only with his left hand until

KIRSTEIN, LINCOLN (4 May 1907–5 January 1996) As both a writer and an effective arts activist, Kirstein made several contributions to benefit American culture, beginning with the founding and editing of the literary magazine Hound and Horn (1927–34). In 1928, while an undergraduate at Harvard, he also cofounded a Society of Contemporary Art that leased a two-room suite above the Harvard Co-op Bookstore and mounted the first American exhibitions of CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, BUCKMINSTER FULLER, and ALEXANDER CALDER, among others. As the founder of the School of American Ballet, Kirstein helped bring the choreographer GEORGE BALANCHINE to America and supported his reign as Artistic Director for the New York City Ballet. Kirstein was also one of the first American dance critics (as distinct from newspaper reviewer), a writer on the visual arts, and a poet. In the first respect, his strongest text, Ballet Alphabet (1939), illustrates the principle (also informing this book) that a dictionary can be an effective format for decisive criticism. For both quality and quantity, few impresarios/ writers have equaled him since.

KITAJ, R.B. (29 October 1932-21 October 2007; b. Ronald Brooks K.) As an American slightly older than the Brits at London’s ROYAL COLLEGE in the late 1950s, he reportedly became influential among them for introducing figurative imagery at the time when ABSTRACTION seemed dominant. Then remaining in South London (where I met him as a neighbor in the spring of 1965), Kitaj became a sort of artist more British than American - a literary painter or, more specifically, a painter of literary scenes and of books. Allusions to political history, art, and literature filled his paintings and drawings. For me, as a fellow bibliomaniac, his masterpiece will always be his Covers for a Small Library (1969), a suite of screen prints in which, reflecting the fresh influence of POP ART, he painted the covers and just the covers of classic

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modern books and literary magazines, which became his version of, say, ROY LICHTENSTEIN’s comic book images estheticized. Sometime after he moved to Los Angeles, he committed suicide. The richest book about Kitaj, subtitled “Pictures and Conversations” (1994), was written by another bibliomaniac, the Spanish novelist Julian Rios (1940) long resident in London.

KLEIN, WILLIAM (19 April 1928)

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French artist purportedly made in 1946 monochromic canvases, painted from edge to edge in a single color. Though he claimed to have exhibited them privately as early as 1950, they were not publicly shown until 1956. Succès de scandale prompted him to devote his activities to “International Klein Blue,” as he called it, a distinctive hue which was applied not only to canvases but sculpted figures and even nude models, who then imprinted it onto canvases. Though his blue was lush, Klein claimed to favor metaphysical resonances. In 1958, he enhanced his reputation with a pre-CONCEPTUAL ART “exhibition” in an empty gallery painted white. He also claimed (but typically could not document) that in 1957 he mounted in Milan an exhibition entirely of identical, blue, monochrome canvases with different prices, purportedly reflecting different qualities in surface texture. Klein is commonly identified as among the first artists to exploit publicity to make himself, as well as the photograph of himself (especially flying through the air), more important than any of his works. Curious it is that the two Parisian Kleins should have been born nine days apart, though, curious again, that the younger Klein should have survived his senior by more than fifty years.

A Parisian born in New York, he served in France with the American military at the end of World War II and, thanks to a US government fellowship, stayed in Paris, initially to study painting with FERNAND LÉGER, among others. In the decades since, Klein produced a prodigious amount of various work including fashion photography for slick magazines, street photographs shot more intimately than the distance favored by his predecessors, television commercials, and films both long and short, both fictional and documentary. Among his innovative monuments are large-format photograph books of urban people not only in his native city (1956) to which he returns now and then, but in Rome (1958), Moscow (1964), Tokyo (1964), and Paris (2002). Much of his style depends upon his personal styles in both photographing people and then in book design, as his images fill the book’s page to all edges, with captions and credits appearing in an appendix. His theme (probably his constraint), valid decades later, is showing that, apart from surrounding architecture, New Yorkers look like New Yorkers, Parisians like Parisians, etc. Klein’s first film, Broadway by Light (1958), is a dense short portraying within ten minutes singularly brilliant night time urban illumination to the sound not of spoken narration but percussive jazz. Among his later film documentaries seen by me, a favorite, likewise depending upon more intimate photography, is Muhammed Ali, The Greatest (1969). Another unusual Klein move, since 1990 or so, has been painting on enlargements of his favorite photographs. William Klein ABC (2013) is a remarkably rich visual selfretrospective whose only texts are back-page credits and an introduction written by someone else (the British photography critic David Campany [1967]).

Initially a painter of urban silhouettes as shadowless forms, Kline in the 1950s developed an extremely original style of abstraction with broad brushstrokes assuming the quality of monumental calligraphy, if not ideograms. It is said that he projected an image of one of his drawings onto a wall, and in the contrast between large black and white fields saw his mature painting. Precisely because so many of Kline’s paintings are mostly black, the untainted white areas attain the status of independent images. In their avoidance of colors typical of Nature, these canvases could be regarded as an epitome of a NEW YORK CITY sensibility. As a native New Yorker, whose idea of highest Nature is the Atlantic Ocean, I once suggested that only two colors are worthy of art – black and white; all other colors are appropriate for illustrations.

KLEIN, YVES

KLUTCIS, GUSTAV

(28 April 1928–6 June 1962)

(4 January 1895–26 February 1938)

A sometime jazz musician who also wrote a book about judo (at which he earned a black belt), this

A Latvian who arrived in Moscow in 1918 as a part of a Latvian regiment assigned to guard the Kremlin,

KLINE, FRANZ (23 May 1910–13 May 1962)

240 • KNOEBEL, DAVID Klutcis became active in Soviet art, producing a lithograph called Dynamic City (1919), in which, over the background of a filled-in circle, planes appear to extend forward and backward. After making 1920 images featured V.I. Lenin as a secular savior, Klutcis focused upon innovative designs for the fifth anniversary of the October revolution in 1922. He later produced PHOTOMONTAGES for VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY’s V. I. Lenin (1925); he co-designed ALEKSEI KRUCHONYKH’s book Chetrye foneticheskikh romana (Four Phonetic Novels, 1924). Seeking, he said, “absolutely new forms, such as never existed before,” Klutcis produced, often in collaboration with his wife Valentina Kulagina (1902–87), model “Radio Announcers” designed to serve, within one structure, as both a newspaper stand and a platform for public speakers (which would still look innovative if displayed today). Some Klutcis posters were reprinted thousands of times. Though always a loyal Communist, Klutcis was arrested in 1938 and executed reportedly among other Latvians.

KNOEBEL, DAVID (19 July 1949) One of the pioneers in exploring alternative venues for the publication of poetry, David Knoebel has placed signs similar to those of politicians’ ads along a Pennsylvania road. Each sign displays one word. The first words together comprise a single poem that incorporates the space and time required to read it. Since each of the five signs is seen separately, the work must be completed in the mind of the viewer.

gigantic stage construct, through, around, and into which the performers crawl, slide, slip, hop, and bend, thus realizing as activity the many stages, psychic, and emotional, that we as readers undergo when experiencing a book. In her later Finger Book (1986), the book is imaged as a small tactile ASSEMBLAGE, composed of representative elements from all over the planet – shells, mirrors, tablets, coins, etc. – all uniting to form a book object that is covered in crystallized Braille. In collaboration with composer James Tenney, she created The House of Dust (1967), the first computergenerated poem. She composed a polytextual phrase describing a house with various features. She gave this as a theme to Tenney, who computerized it. Permutations generated aleatorily yielded roughly 10,000 quatrains; Knowles chose one – “a house of dust/on open ground/lit by natural light/inhabited by friends and enemies” – to use in an interactive sculpture on the CALARTS campus. In January 2009, she exhibited and performed in The 3rd Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860– 1989 at the Guggenheim Museum. For the duration of the exhibit she performed weekly with her Giant Bean Turner, large sheets of bean paper the artist herself made, with which, when unfurled and shaken, she produces a variety of sounds ranging from thunderclaps and roaring cars to whispers of wind. She has continued to experiment with food-related performance: her iconic Make a Salad has been restaged several times in cities around the world, including in London at Tate Modern in 2008. The event starts with live music that continues while Knowles and others toss the salad in the air in expressive gestures. When completed, the artists serve the salad to the audience as the live music continues. —Charles Doria

Knoebel has also produced “Words in Space” that are meant to be read in three dimensions, in addition to videotapes and continuously updated texts published only on Facebook and Twitter. www:clickpoetry.com is his platform.

KNOWLES, ALISON (29 April 1933) Together with husband DICK HIGGINS, she helped form FLUXUS in 1962. Her work is characterized by performance, indeterminacy, and hands-on participation. Starting in the 1960s, she introduced vegetable beans into her art, a theme she continues to employ. In her Big Book (1967) she gestalts the book as a

KOCH, KENNETH (27 February 1925–6 July 2002) Not unlike the work of his Harvard College buddy JOHN ASHBERY, Koch’s early poetry was more experimental than what he later produced. His classic avant-garde text is When the Sun Tries to Go On, which was written in 1953, first published in a one-shot magazine, The Hasty Papers (1960), and later reprinted as a book. Many pages long, it offers interminable unintelligibility in a regularly irregular meter, evenly measured lines, and consistent diction. The critic Jonathan Cott (1942) wrote long ago that it “defies explication or even persistent reading.”

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Koch also wrote plays, some considerably more experimental (and substantial) than others. At their best, such as Pericles (1960) and Bertha (1959), they include inspired parodies and nonsensical writing. In George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1962, which originated as a response to a Larry Rivers painting of the same title), Koch swiftly ridicules the myths of American history, the language of politicians, war films, military strategies, patriotism, and much else, the theme of his burlesques being that accepted familiar versions are no more credible than his comic rewritings. Also a Professor of English at Columbia University, Koch wrote popular treatises on the teaching of poetry. Though Stephen Koch (1941) is likewise a writer on avant-garde subjects and a sometime Columbia professor who also pronounces his surname “Coke” (in contrast to former New York City mayor “Kotch”), they are not related.

ˇ, JIR ˇÍ KOLÁR (24 September 1914–11 August 2002) If one’s name is one’s fate, then it was inevitable that this Czech, whose family name is pronounced like “ko-large,” should produce some of the most original COLLAGE of the past half-century. Initially a poet, who had published books as early as 1941, Kolář was progressing toward LETTRISM and CONCRETE POETRY when, during the post-World War II Soviet occupation of his country, he incorporated other materials into his works. He sought, as he wrote, the “discovery of a different way of expressing poetry.” “Screws and razor blades, nuts and bolts took the place of words, thereby creating a poetry of things,” recalls Thomas Messer (1920–2013), himself a Slovak who for many years headed the initial Guggenheim Museum in New York. By controlled crumpling of reproduced images borrowed mostly from art history he created the crumplage; by introducing into the collage composition movable parts that could be lifted, the ventilage; and through the fragmentation and reconstitution of written and printed texts (which often used occult and arcane alphabets) he created his plastic style through the Greeklettered chiasmage. In rollage, thin strips from one image are interspersed with thin strips taken from another image so that, especially if both images are familiar, one comments on the other. Eventually a fully conscious visual artist, Kolář

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has extended his compositional principles into reliefs and even three-dimensional objects. Some Kolář work is funny; all of it is indubitably clever and identifiable as his. His art also reflects urban living. Perhaps because Kolář was self-taught in visual art, he worked exclusively with texts and images that had already been printed. In 1975, the Guggenheim Museum mounted a retrospective so filled with surprises that I rank it, decades later, among the strongest one-artist museum exhibitions I have ever seen.

KOMAR & MELAMID (11 September 1943, b. Vitaly K.; 14 July 1945, b. Alexander M.) Emerging from the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s, their art had already made a strong impact in the West, in absentia, initially among Russian émigrés, who were particularly enthusiastic, later for a larger art public. Their forte were parodies of Soviet heroic imagery and Social Realist representation, beginning with a classic oil painting (1973) of themselves in overlapping profile, replicating a prominent prior image of Lenin cheek to cheek with Stalin. Later images include a “Passport from TransState” (1977), with a parody inscription about privileges granted by the fictitious document. “Don’t Babble” (1974) has a severe face with a perpendicular finger over his closed lips, but since the image is off-center, it looks less like a threat than a mistake. Double Self-Portrait as Young Pioneers (1982–83) had their adult faces in short pants blowing a bugle at a chest-up statue of Joseph Stalin. The Origin of Socialist Realism (1982–83) portrays a draped naked woman fondling Stalin’s impassive face. And so on. As Russians they were perhaps uniquely funny. Though Komar and Melamid were allowed (i.e., encouraged) to leave the Soviet Union initially for Israel and later for the United States, they continued to make Sots Art, as the critic Margarita Tupitsyn (1955) called it, through the 1980s. However, once the fearsome Soviet Union collapsed into a bumbling state, their satire lost its edge. One of the risks of basing art, even good art, upon such an unstable social circumstance is that the subject might change. (Imagine what would happen to feminist art if everyone decided that sexism had ended.) For a while, Komar and Melamid made works in several media about Bayonne, New Jersey, an industrial suburb of New York. They then worked with the American icon George Washington and his resemblances with Marcel Duchamp and Vladimir Lenin, initiating an opera titled Naked Revolution (1997)

242 • KONSTRIKTOR, BORIS about the historic trio. Though both men had wives, their partnership remained intact, along with their preference for speaking Russian, through two emigrations into the 21st century. After 2003, however, they preferred to exhibit separately.

KONSTRIKTOR, BORIS (30 October 1950; b. B. Mikhailovich Axelrod) As with the other TRANSFURISTS, Konstriktor operates in a variety of media, but places somewhat more weight on drawing and painting. He often begins with chance patterns from black washes that he then peoples with human figures in these surreal-abstract spacial settings. He has a special gift for grotesquerie and black humor in which his native St. Petersburg plays a notable role. In many instances, the influence of the Petersburg absurdist movement OBERIU is evident. His earliest poetry, written in the mid to late 1970s under the pen name of Boris Vantalov, is not formally innovative, but revives OBERIU absurdism with an additional dose of black humor and sexual imagery that remain his hallmarks. In the early 1990s he began a collaboration with the virtuoso St. Petersburg violinist Boris Kipnis resulting in a series of sound tapes in which Konstriktor recites poetry in a funerial voice while Kipnis improvises on the violin as an accompaniment. Another favorite genre of Konstriktor’s is the transformation of preprinted items such as picture postcards by overdrawing and overpainting, so as to bring out the ironies of the original. Konstriktor spent the first half of 1993 at the Schloss Solitude Academy, Stuttgart, Germany on a residency fellowship, resulting in the book Musikhochschule. 15 Grafiken (1993), which combines his drawings with a letter from Edmonton, Canada, by Kipnis. He has also written prose and essays on Russian theater. —Gerald Janecek

KOOLHAAS, REM (17 November 1944; b. Remmet Lucas K.) Aside from his activities as an architect, he has been a brilliant BOOK-ARTIST. In the great tradition of aspiring architects writing and publishing, in part to publicize their principal professional ambitions, Koolhaas has produced strong two books, the second more imaginative than the first. Whereas Delirious New York, subtitled A Retroactive Manifesto of Manhattan (1978), questioned the assumption that “form follows

function” in a traditional format of a few hundred perfect bound pages, his S, M, L, XL (1995) has 1,376 pages of essays, manifestos, travel writings, thoughts about urban life, etc. Since this brick of a book, a masterpiece of its kind, was so radically unlike anything that any architect had published before, it necessarily publicized Koolhaas’s more audacious architectural imagination. As indeed at the last purpose S, M, L, XL succeeded, as later commissions included several strikingly unusual buildings, among them the Dutch embassy in BERLIN (2003), the McCormick Tribune Campus Center in Chicago’s IIT (1997–2003), the Seattle Central Library (2004), and a theater in Dallas, TX. Admiring S, M, L, XL though I do, about his indubitably eccentric architecture I’ve nothing significant to say.

KOONS, JEFF (21 January 1955) Though he probably made more money during his lifetime than any other artist in history (and fathered several children), nothing can be said about his work. Does his work represent the apex of NOTHING art? Or less?

KOPPÁNY, MÁRTON (29 May 1953) Márton Koppány, a Hungarian who writes poetry consistently in English, is a conceptual poet, in the original sense of the term. His poems do not concern what people often believe poems are about (verbal beauty). Instead, they concern the ultimate confusion of human existence, the simple fact that we cannot explain our status on this planet. Koppány is a deconstructive writer, always building up a wall of logic that comes tumbling down. And it is in that tumble of idea that we find the beauty of his poems – pure, elemental, and intellectual, unalloyed by considerations of sound or tempo. Especially early on, his poems appeared in sequences, originally on cards and more recently as series of pages in a book or images on a screen. These may be series of often cryptic messages or a single message broken into individual lines across panels. The language is always simple and quiet. In one of these works, he employs a found routing slip (consisting of checkboxes marked “For Your Approval,” “Prepare Reply,” and “See Me Concerning”) and fills it in three different ways to create a poem. In the first panel, he draws an X within the box indicating “For Your Action” then scatters three

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other exes across the page. In the second panel, he adds three squarish checkboxes around the page, providing more choices but does not indicate any particular choice. In the third, he draws a giant checkbox on the page, fills it with the choice “Investigate and Report Back,” and then covers the text and fills the box with a large X – thereby simultaneously choosing and eliminating this choice. The poem asks us to investigate its meaning and report back on our findings just as it tells us to do no such thing. In the last decade, Koppány’s work has become much more visual, colorful, and averbal – as well as fully digital. Although words still exist in some of the poems, he works more often with the significations of punctuation marks and images that represent concepts, producing works almost in the manner of Brazilian semiotic poetry. The images he now makes remain demanding and conceptual but they are also visually radiant works of art. —Geof Huth

KOSTELANETZ, ANDRE (22 December 1901–13 January 1980; b. Abram Naumovich Kostelyanets) A classically trained musician well-educated in late Romanticism at the Conservatory in St. Petersburg in Czarist Russia, he came to America as an itinerant accompanist in the mid-1920s. In the early 1930s, when older orchestra conductors were reluctant to work in the new medium called radio, he developed an eponymous weekly network program mostly of orchestral music. Here he was among the first to discover that what was processed through microphones could, horrors of horrors, be audibly different from the initial live sound. Thus, four violins, say, could be amplified to sound like a large string section and then mixed with other instruments amplified differently to produce over home radio speakers the semblance of orchestral sound. Notwithstanding initial resistance, especially by professionals in classical music, by the last quarter of the 20th century this new compositional principle informed nearly all recorded music, pop as well as classical. Once the Kostelanetz radio program was canceled, he produced many disks first at 78 rpm and then at 33 rpm mostly of lighter classical music and recent pop music in orchestral arrangements that reflected his Russian education in late Romanticism. Though few classical musicians sold more recordings through a fifty-year career, little is available in the 21st century. He was my father’s older brother.

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KOSTELANETZ, RICHARD (14 May 1940) “The taken name of a collective composed of twelve industrious elves,” Kostelanetz has produced countless books of poetry, fiction, experimental prose, criticism, cultural history, and book-art, in addition to audiotapes, videotapes, HOLOGRAMS, and films. By his own admission less a POLYARTIST than a writer influenced by the ideal of polyartistry, he thinks of all his creative work, in every medium, as “essentially writing.” Wordsand was the title of a traveling retrospective exhibition of his art (1978–81); “Wordship” is the name of the urban castle in which he lives. His poetry, in particular, is a record of formal inventions, beginning with VISUAL POEMS, subsequently including permutational poems, recompositions of familiar words, FOUND POEMS, video poems, poetic holograms, and other alternatives not yet classifiable. Even his set of documentary films about the great Jewish Cemetery of BERLIN (with soundtracks in six different languages, made in collaboration with the Berlin film curator Martin Koerber [1956], 1984–88) is in part about the visual poetry of gravestones. One distinction of Kostelanetz’s video art is that his tapes are produced mostly without any cameras, using instead electronic sources such as computers and synthesizer. Since some of them are visual accompaniments to his electroacoustic audio compositions, he classifies them, distinctively, as AUDIO-VIDEO TAPES. Kostelanetz’s fiction favors such departures as several narratives interwoven into a single continuous text, stories in which each sentence contains one word more or one word less than its predecessor, singlesentence stories, three-word, two-word, and oneword stories, permutational prose, and sequences of ABSTRACT drawings, among many other departures. Appearing in scores of literary magazines, his fictions didn’t become available in books until the 2010s. Some Kostelanetz productions are more successful than others, but detractors as well as admirers disagree about which is which. Not unlike his heroes MOHOLY-NAGY, JOHN CAGE, and AD REINHARDT, Kostelanetz writes frequently, and accessibly, about his esthetic ambitions. Numerous anthologies, many of and about new art/literature, bear his name. One recurring concern is alternative historiography, both in forms and in content (e.g., several autobiographies, this Dictionary). Kostelanetz is no less radical in his professional politics than in his art, his single most famous critical book being an elaborate examination of literary politics in America, The End of Intelligent Writing (1974). A libertarian

244 • KOSUTH, JOSEPH anarchist in both word and deed, he even founded an annual of “otherwise unpunishable” graphic work, Assembling, whose implicit purpose was the abolition of editorial power. Kostelanetz’s devotion to the idea and subject of the avant-garde, as well as to critical standards, has survived changing fashions. Following the example of the dedicatee, NICOLAS SLONIMSKY, in his Baker’s compendiums, Richard Kostelanetz contributed this entry on himself.

KOSUTH, JOSEPH (31 January 1945) Kosuth’s principal achievement is such a unique art career it is hard to imagine anyone forecasting it. Whereas other artists had exhibited bits of language and sometimes even sentences, Kosuth in his early twenties showed whole paragraphs, not only in art magazines but, audaciously, on gallery walls. His prose reflected a dense, implicitly pretentious intellectual style derived from late writings of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), coupled with polemical disdain for nearly everyone else. Kosuth insisted, successfully, that these thoughts about art constitute his entire oeuvre. As the general response at the time was negative, there were doubts whether Kosuth would be visible as an artist a decade later. So the second miracle of Kosuth’s career is that he didn’t renounce an earlier self to survive professionally for decades. When I wrote about him for the first edition of this book, I doubted if it would appear in the second edition, when I again doubted it if would survive. How that it’s here in the third, I acknowledge miscalculation. One remarkable departure was Kosuth’s re-exhibiting the permanent collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which then published a documentary book Guide (2003).

KOTIK, PETR (27 January 1942) Born in Prague, Kotik came to America in 1969, where his composing flourished. The principal SIGNATURE of his best work is a quasi-polyphonic structure of overlapping solos, sometimes proceeding in parallel perfect intervals (i.e., fourths, fifths, and octaves). One departure was adapting his compositional style to the setting not of poetry but of prose, and then not classic prose, like the Bible, say, but high modernist prose. By this departure Kotik produced a sound wholly different from that established for the contemporary singing

of words. Perhaps his most distinctive signature comes from the use of parallel fourths and fifths for harmony. The texts he chooses are not simple, easily understood stories, but more difficult writing, sometimes prompting him to write to epic lengths. His masterpiece is Many Many Women (1976–78), to a GERTRUDE STEIN text of the same title, which in Kotik’s hands becomes polyphonic and antiphonal. His second major work in this genre is Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1978–80), to passages from BUCKMINSTER FULLER’s two-volume Synergetics (1976, 1979). Kotik’s instrumental music, performed mostly under the elastic umbrella of the S.E.M. Ensemble (its initials meaning, he says, nothing), confronts the postCagean problem of writing nonclimactic, uninflected music that nonetheless moves forward. In the 21st century, he worked mostly in his native country. His sometime wife, Carlotta K. (1940), likewise initially from Czechoslovakia, was long a distinguished staff curator of contemporary art, mostly at the Brooklyn Museum.

KOVACS, ERNIE See TELEVISION.

KRASNER, LEE (27 October 1908–19 June 1984; b. Lena Krassner; aka Lenore K.) Initially remembered as the widow of the painter JACKSON POLLOCK, by common consent a difficult husband, Krasner nonetheless produced enough distinguished paintings to merit museum retrospectives. Especially strong, in my judgment, are the Little Images with dense indefinite non-centered abstract imagery that she produced in the late 1940s. Later, her Dyptych (1977–78) epitomizes another group of visually dense canvases from that period. Objecting to the charge that her work resembled her husband’s, the indubitably opinionated sometime gallerist John Bernard Myers (1920–87) wrote in his Tracking the Marvelous (1983), “For Krasner color was somewhat more important than it was for Pollock – perhaps because Krasner was (and is) inner-directed, given to an idiosyncratic mysticism.” A profound interpretation of her art appears in Three Women (1996) by Ann Middleton Wagner (1949). Lee Krasner will also be forever remembered for establishing the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which, well-managed for three decades by Charles C. Bergman (1933–2018), has probably supported more needy

KRUCHENYKH, ALEKSEI •

better visual artists than any other entity, whether public or private, in America. A smart “career move” her eponymous Foundation no doubt was. Incidentally, Gail Levin’s sympathetic Krasner biography (2011) is remarkably rich, not only in advocating her art but also with informative asides about minor colleagues.

KRAUS, KARL (28 April 1874–12 June 1936) His life centered on a periodical he founded in 1899, when he was 25, Die Fackel (The Torch), and edited to his death. From 1912 onwards, he was its sole contributor. A monumentally severe essayist, he is remembered today for his scathing critiques, particularly of intellectual fakery: Psychoanalysis is the disease of which it claims to be the cure. People would rather catch venereal diseases than forego their cause, for it is still easier to be cured of them than of the inclination unintentionally to catch them. Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country. No ideas and the ability to express them – that’s a journalist. For independence and intellectual guts, his own competitor is the American H.L. MENCKEN, who was roughly his contemporary. Odd it is that, as far as I can count a negative, neither acknowledged the other, though both spoke the other’s language. Unfortunate his readers were that Krauss died just as Naziism was assuming power in Austria.

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racially integrate that august venue at that time. In the 1930s, Křenek adopted SERIAL music, even producing in the new musical language an historical opera Karl V (1933) that was, needless to say, less popular than his first foray. Though not Jewish, he found his music banned by the Nazis and so came to America, where he became a professor in backwoods universities, finally ending in Palm Springs, CA, which is a long way, culturally as well as geographically, from Vienna.

KRIWET, FERDINAND (3 August 1942) A precocious VISUAL POET, Kriwet made typewriter poems in 1960 and a few years later “Rundscheibe,” which are brilliantly composed lines of overlapping words put into roughly concentric circles. His book about his own early work, Leserattenfaenge (1964), includes impressively detailed analyses of those complex early word-image texts. He also produced “poempaintings” entirely of words drawn in dramatically different letters, usually to fracture familiar and recognizable words (“Beat Us”); constructed columns imprinted with words and letters in various typefaces; made films animated with words; and created audiotape collages that are still rebroadcast over German radio. Textroom (1969) extends his way with words into an entire room, whose walls, ceiling, and floor are filled with rows of metal plates, each embossed with two eleven-letter combinatory words. After decades of absence, he returned with new work in the 21st century.

KRONOS QUARTET See ARDITTI QUARTET.

ˇ ENEK, ERNST KR

KRUCHENYKH, ALEKSEI

(23 August 1900–23 December 1991)

(21 February 1886–17 June 1968; b. A. Yeliseyevich Kruchonykh)

A precocious musician in Vienna, he became prominent while still in his mid-twenties with the production in Leipzig of his opera Jonny spielt auf (1927) that portrays, in mostly atonal music, a black jazz musician pronouned “Yonny,” who became so famous he concludes the opera by sitting atop a gigantic globe. Soon afterwards, the work was reproduced around the world and translated into over a dozen languages; it was even staged in New York at the Metropolitan Opera with the protagonist as a black-faced white, sooner than

The wild man of RUSSIAN FUTURISM, notorious for his ZAUM poetry, Kruchenykh began his career as an art teacher but became associated with the Hylaea branch of the Russian Futurists and, in 1912, began publishing a series of lithographed primitivist booklets with his own and other Futurists poetry, with illustrations by Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964), Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962), KAZIMIR MALEVICH, and others. Kruchenykh’s most famous poem, “Dyr bul

246 • KRUEGER, MYRON W. shchyl,” is the first Russian poem written explicitly in an “indefinite” personal language. Although the idea of writing poetry in “unknown words” was suggested to him by David Burliuk (1882– 1967), it was Kruchenykh who developed this form of poetry in all its ramifications. His most elaborate creation was the opera Victory Over the Sun, performed in St. Petersburg in December 1913, with music by MIKHAIL MATIUSHIN and sets and costumes by Kazimir Malevich. A scandalous success, the performances were sold out. Kruchenykh continued to experiment in various ways to create indeterminacy in language on all levels from the phonetic to the narrative, until the early 1920s. Throughout this period, he was often the critical whipping boy of Russian Futurism; his works were treated as examples of the most ridiculous extremes of the movement. While VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY and VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV were sometimes granted reluctant respect, Kruchenykh was always treated as beneath serious consideration. His anti-esthetic imagery, crude eroticism, and deliberately clumsy language contributed to an impression of a lack of talent and culture. His most famous poem, when acknowledged, was (and still is) almost always misquoted. During World War I, Kruchenykh was drafted to work on the southern railroad, which brought him into contact with ILIAZD and Igor Terentyev (1892–1937) in Tiflis, and he formed with them the avant-garde group 41°. At this time his works consisted of a long series of handmade (autographic) booklets duplicated by carbon copy or hectograph; others were elegantly typographed by Iliazd. In the former, his ZAUM poetry reached a Minimalist level in sparse compositions of individual letters and lines and even blank pages. For Kruchenykh, the visual appearance of poetry was always important, as was its sound texture. In 1921, Kruchenykh moved permanently to Moscow, where he attempted to enter literary life by arguing for the usefulness of his literary experiments for the new socialist culture and producing a series of valuable theoretical texts. However, his poetry was already less adventurous. Because of his reputation and a certain residual thickness of texture, his efforts to create works that would appeal to the common reader or theatergoer were unsuccessful. Though shunned by Soviet publishers after 1930, Kruchenykh continued to write significant poetry afterward; he survived into the 1960s by collecting and trading in avant-garde and mainstream poetic materials. Kruchenykh remained the most consistent publicist for Futurist views. For some time his works were largely unknown to the Russian reader, in part because the first edition of his work appeared in Germany (1973);

only in the 1990s did his works begin to receive serious scholarly attention, initially in the West but then in Russia as well. —Gerald Janecek

KRUEGER, MYRON W. (1942) A pioneer in envisioning esthetic possibilities of computers, he took an academic doctorate in computer science in the late 1960s while working on interactive computer art. Glowflow (1969), which he developed with others, was an installation with light and sound that responded to people within it, exemplifying what I called, in my Metamorphosis in the Arts (1969, 1980), an Artistic Machine, in contrast to Machine (-assisted) Art, whose products were customarily static (e.g., computer graphics). For Psychic Space (1971) Krueger constructed a floor that responded to movements above it. His major development was Videoplace (1974), which used projectors, video cameras, and computers to place viewers within an interactive environment that lacked tactile objects. Around 1973 Krueger coined the epithet “Artificial Reality” that, apparently ahead of its time, became a precursor of VIRTUAL REALITY. His book Artificial Reality (1983) went into a second revised edition (1991).

KUBRICK, STANLEY See 2001.

KUENSTLER, FRANK (17 April 1928–11 August 1996) In 1964, from the imprint of Film Culture, a New York publisher noted for its film magazine of the same title, appeared Lens, a book so extraordinary that it was completely unnoticed at the time. It opens with a single-page “Emblem,” a sort of preface that establishes in six sections that anything might happen in the following pages, including the destruction of both sense and syntax. The last section of “Emblem” reads: “aura.Dictionary, aura.Crossword Puzzle, aura.Skeleton. aura. Poem./Once upon a time.” What follows are eighty long paragraphs so devoid of connection, from line to line, from word to word, that you realize only a human being could have made them; even the most aleatory computer program would have put together, even

KUPKA, FRANTIŠEK •

inadvertently, two words that made sense. The book concludes with the tag “New York, N.Y., 1952–64,” suggesting that Lens took a full dozen years to write. I can believe that claim, because anyone who thinks such writing easy to do should try it sometime (and send me the results). Kuenstler’s later publications include 13½ Poems (1984), which is a progression of increasingly experimental poems (though none as radical as Lens). Toward the end of his life he sold antiquarian books on the street in Manhattan, usually on Broadway north of 86th Street. To no surprise perhaps, his name rarely, if ever, appears in histories of American literature.

KUNSTHALLE (1869) Initially a Swiss-German innovation, this identifies a government-supported exhibition venue, usually within an urban setting, that is designed to accept a traveling exhibition, usually of contemporary art, customarily without “collecting” anything more substantial than enthusiastic recommendations. Various in size, these kunsthallen can be impressive free-standing structures designed by advanced architects or discrete rooms buried (or sometimes popping up) within a larger building devoted mostly to other activities. Typically, a kunsthalle needs a smaller staff than a traditional museum that must employ curators and a conservation staff to care for a permanent collection. While a Kunstverein is similar, except for private backers, a Kunsthaus in Germany is customarily a more pretentious institution. As kunsthallen, inherently flexible, can accept not only visual art but new media, they become avant-garde for other museums. The closest semblance in America would be the native invention of a gallery embedded in a university that isn’t an art school. Between them kunsthalles and university galleries probably exhibit more uncommercial visual art than all the world’s museums combined. If only because this should be an acceptable English word, it’s neither italicized nor capitalized here.

KUPFERBERG, TULI

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Kupferberg’s strongest writings are contemporary aphorisms so radical they are rarely, if ever, anthologized: Kill for Peace. When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge. Many Kupferberg classics appear in 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft (1967): Grope J. Edgar Hoover in the silent halls of Congress. Bring toy soldiers with you and play with them (by yourself). Fly to the moon and refuse to come home. Tell them that you will leap into your grave laughing. Decline the honor. Shoot a water pistol at a sergeant and say: Bang! You’re dead! Knock at least one thing off every desk you pass. Say you love the army and kiss on the lips every officer you see. Bring your own hypodermic needle and say, “Fair is fair.” Send in a replica of yourself. Wear spiked heels. Demand to see their credentials. Bring your mother and say you won’t go unless she goes with you. His innovation was making literature, no Literature, from lists – long, thoughtful, witty, cunningly organized, memorable punches. At the principal memorial for him, I was pleased to recite some of these Kupferberg classics from memory; later my presentation became available on YouTube. Kupferberg’s purported jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge is memorialized in ALLEN GINSBERG’s classic poem “Howl.” (Experienced at springboard diving, I doubt if anyone could have survived leaping from such a great height; but so what.)

KUPKA, FRANTIŠEK

(28 September 1923–12 July 2010; b. Naphtali K.) A veteran DOWNTOWN Manhattan anarchist bohemian, he founded short-lived literary magazines, published many chapbooks in small editions (that are now valuable), and collaborated with Ed Sanders (1939) in the rock-music band provocatively called The Fugs (1964–69), which he named, where he specialized in resetting English words to traditional Yiddish melodies.

(23 September 1871–24 June 1957; aka Frank or François K.) A Czech painter and graphic artist working in Paris at the beginning of the century, he is commonly credited with producing, first, one of the first paintings to emphasize color over subject and, then, an early ABSTRACTION wholly devoid of any recognizable

248 • KURTZMAN, HARVEY figure. In the first respect, it was a self-portrait (1908) that was mostly about the color yellow. In the second was Piano Keyboard/Life (1909). Early he developed original theories of color exemplified in his painting The Yellow Scale (c. 1907). Some find significance in his Riders (c. 1900) that preceded ITALIAN FUTURISM by portraying a succession of moments within a single frame. Later Kupka authored Creation in the Plastic Arts (1923, though completed a decade earlier) and became a founding member of Abstraction-Création (1931). Surviving long enough to be included in the first Documenta (1955), Kupka died in Paris.

pioneering “graphic novel,” only to suffer rejection, which happened often throughout his career. With his last personal periodical Help! (1960–65), Kurtzman also hired younger masters such as R. CRUMB and Gilbert Shelton (1940), who are likewise more subversively critical than other cartoonists. One critical question is whether Kurtzman’s work realizes visual SIGNATURE? I think not, perhaps because he spent too much of his early years working as an editor helping others. The Art of Harvey Kurtzman (2009) is a brilliant mostly visual biography benefitting from reproducing sequentially many images previously unpublished.

KURTZMAN, HARVEY

KURYOKHIN, SERGEY

(3 October 1924–21 February 1993)

(16 June 1954–9 July 1996)

By common consent, the single most innovative and influential figure in sophisticated comics, he began as a kid in the Bronx drawing in chalk on a sidewalk and then as a lowly cartoonist producing single-frame jokes before, functioning as both artist and writer, developing strips with several frames called “panels.” After establishing his youthful presence with war comics, Kurtzman participated in the founding of MAD MAGAZINE whose initial editorial director he became in 1952. Here, guiding others with both ideas and detailed layouts, he established its formula of satirizing popular culture and celebrities, producing a magazine that sold not in the hundreds or thousands but in the hundreds of thousands, mostly to disaffected young people at the time (including me), sometimes to their parents’ objections. After an impetuous break with MAD’s equally young owner/publisher, Kurtzman collaborated with competitors that didn’t succeed as well. To his rescue came the publisher of Playboy, Hugh Hefner (1926– 2017), who began as a cartoonist and so appreciated a master, even if Kurtzman at times satirized Hefner and his taste in women. Hefner hired Kurtzman to produce the plushest comic ever, prophetically titled Trump (1956–57), for only two issues, as Hefner’s company plunged into financial troubles that killed the effort. In Hefner’s famous phase, “I gave Kurtzman an unlimited budget, and he exceeded it.” Later Hefner hired Kurtzman, along with his high school buddy Will Elder (1921–2008), to produce the only comic strip appearing in his flagship magazine, “Little Annie Fanny.” One mark of Kurtzman’s drawings was elaborate research, especially in his highly detailed portraits of NYC scenes, which I regard as his masterpieces. Ahead of his time in other ways, he proposed as early as 1954 adapting Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol as a

A classically trained piano player extraordinaire, the Russian musician Sergey Kuryokhin embraced early on a global musical culture, striving for extreme eclecticism. Being instrumental in jump-starting St. Petersburg rock-n-roll and new jazz in the late 1970s, Kuryokhin in the 1980s formed his own eclectic band, Pop-Mechanics. Including both human and animal musicians, Pop-Mechanics pursued large-scale improvised neo-Dada performances, mixing classical music, rock-n-roll, jazz, and the Soviet propaganda music with the most “inappropriate” absurd theatrics. As the Cold War receded, Kuryokhin began to tour extensively in Europe, Japan, and the United States. His last recording, Friends Afar, made with KESHAVAN MASLAK, is a testament of his subversive genius. An early death cut short Kuryokhin’s brilliant career at the height of his creative powers. —Igor Satanovsky

KUZMINSKY, KONSTANTIN (16 April 1940–2 May 2015) A multilingual Russian poet, essayist, art collector/historian, visual/performance artist, and all around “enfant terrible” of contemporary Russian letters, Kuzminsky became one of the central figures in the St. Petersburg literary/artistic underground scene in the ’60s and early ’70s. His impressive organizing skills helped to integrate what could have been several groups of independently minded writers/poets/artists into a movement that rediscovered and extended the legacy of Russian Avant-garde/Russian Modernism. He was one of “five young poets from Leningrad” featured in a 1972 book by Suzanne Massie; another was his contemporary

KUZMINSKY, KONSTANTIN •

(only six weeks younger), Joseph Brodsky (1940–96), whose work is more self-consciously traditional. As a poet, Kuzminsky came to maturity in the early 1970s, with the long poem “Babylon Tower,” wherein he drew on his different influences, from 18th-century Russian poetry to RUSSIAN FUTURISM and beyond. This poem put forward not one, but several literary styles that can be identified as Russian Imagism (not to be confused with Russian Imaginism), Russian Beat, and Russian jazz poetry, serving, in effect, as a blueprint for later developments in his writing. “Babylon Tower” also showed Kuzminsky’s first forays into multilingual poetry. What started as his early interest in various Russian dialects, evolved into “writing in tongues,” transcending European languages to include exotic African and Polynesian dialects. Kuzminsky’s outstanding short work “Leopold Havelka” mixes twenty-four languages into a coherent page-long poem, demonstrating his taste for the outrageous, as well as

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his mastery of sound textures: “Welcome, You, lotry und shabery, Bielorussians mit Ukrainische geshriben das Kunstler und painter sans I’oeil. Yomkippurisch Blit monster Sie Branchen Teobaldus Grossier mit Poline zum Aliosha geschlossen – Potz und tausend Potz – meine herren und Damen, genuk.” Pushed out of his country by the K. G. B. in 1974, Kuzminsky settled in the United States. In the following fifteen years he edited and introduced (with G. Kovalev) The Blue Lagoon, a definitive nine-volume anthology of the underground Russian poetry from World War II to the 1970s. Inclusion of juicy details, conflicting accounts, anecdotes of bohemian lifestyles, and tales of literary intrigue that would be shunned by most academicians put his selections in the larger social/historic context, set a high standard yet to be matched by any academic scholar, and made The Blue Lagoon the most memorable Russian anthology of the century. —Igor Satanovsky

L

L-TRAIN (c. 2000) Within the NEW YORK CITY ART WORLD this subway route, renovated in the 21st century, became the most legitimate successor to ARTISTS’ SOHO in attracting aspirants born after 1975 or so. It differed conceptually from earlier urban ARTISTS’ COLONIES in being not a circumscribed neighborhood but stops along a subway line that ran not up and down Manhattan, like most underground lines there, but across FOURTEENTH STREET, itself an earlier cultural divide, under the East River into Williamsburg and Bushwick, both of which were sections of North Brooklyn. In these “mixed-use” neighborhoods young artists occupied old residential low-rise housing while sometimes taking larger studio space in abandoned factory buildings, preceding a younger bourgeoisie who would occupy the new tall buildings constructed along the East River. Having lived since 2010 next to the L-train well into Brooklyn I’ve more than once sat beside young artists from elsewhere who tell me that nothing like it exists in their home territories. (Indicatively, I also know older artists who insist they’ve never taken the L-train, much as older artists some fifty years before professed ignorance of SOHO). Along the L-train are new galleries as well as the outposts/storage facilities of established Manhattan galleries that implicitly foresee a future need to move.

LA GRAN SCENA OPERA CO. (1981–2001) The idea of men playing female operatic roles is not new, but never before has it been so elaborate and sustained. The effect is initially that of parody and thus of camp, which comes from being so awesome/awful it is

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good. (By the early 21st century, all 19th-century opera seems campy, while many noticed that certain divas often seemed to be a man playing a woman, or perhaps a woman playing a man playing a woman.) However, the Gran Scena PERFORMANCE transcended those effects, being lovingly done, with strong high, mostly falsetto voices that take pride in their ethereal resonance. The company’s founder and mastermind, Ira Siff (1946), by profession a vocal coach (and expert commentator for broadcast opera), realizes the best example of esthetic and vocal virtuosity. The typical Gran Scena program consists of excerpts from classic operas, usually just scenes, sometimes whole acts. The sections are framed by “Miss Sylvia Bills,” who has the verbal jokes. Precisely because it must be seen that men are playing women, their historic productions are best remembered not on audio disks but on videotape, only bits of which are visible on the Internet. The work of two all-male ballet companies, The Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet (1972) and its successor, the sumptuously named Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (1974), is esthetically similar.

LACERBA (1 January 1913–22 May 1915) The prophetic periodical of ITALIAN FUTURISM began as a fortnightly before becoming a weekly before it flamed out. Based in Florence, Italy, it had no editor until Giovanni Papini (1881–1956), perhaps the most literary, assumed editorial dominance. Among its contributors were F.T. MARINETTI, UMBERTO BOCCIONI, CARLO CARRÀ, LUIGI RUSSOLO, GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE, and ANTONIO SANT’ELIA with his legendary manifesto of Futurist Architecture. The repeated themes were artistic freedom and the anarchist exaltation of superman genius. Among the subsidiary advocacies were the energy of

LAFRANCE, NOEMIE •

young people and the modernization of Italian cities. Although original issues of Lacerba are scarce, the contents were fortunately reprinted, along with scholarly footnotes, wholly in Italian in 1961.

LAFFOLEY, PAUL (14 August 1935–16 November 2015) Trained in classics and architecture before turning to painting, Laffoley made work so eccentric it is innovative simply by virtue of its waywardness. He was essentially an erudite visionary painter, in a great American tradition, whose paintings represent both verbally and visually unseen forces, mostly cosmological and theosophical, which become their primary visual model. Some of Laffoley’s paintings have a density of words and symbols that reflect charts as they transcend charting. The Levogyre (1976), which he describes as “nested shells connected by gimbals,” is, he says: An attempt to model a photon creating light, and in turn an atom of consciousness. The structure of the Levogyre derives from the structure of the Universe proposed by Eudoxus (the astronomer pupil of Plato). Eudoxus stated that the Universe is a series of nested crystalline spheres which contained the stars as fixed, the planets which moved, down to the central nonrotating Earth. Each sphere is connected to the next by gimballike axes which are randomly distributed. Other thoughtful and thought-filled paintings portray The Orgone Motor (1981), The Astrakakiteraboat (1983), De Rerum Natura (1985), The Aetheiapolis (1987), and Thanaton III (1989). Some of Laffoley’s activities were conducted under the name of The Boston Visionary Cell, Inc. The Phenomenology of Revelation (1989), his illustrated book about his own work – more precisely, about his own imagination at the service of his learning – ranks among the richest artist’s self-expositions ever done. Laffoley’s illustrated lectures, often more than two hours in length, were dazzling in the range and density of his references. Few modern artists on their own work, among them MILTON BABBITT and BUCKMINISTER FULLER, could equal his verbal powers. The most extraordinary quality of the catalog for his 2013 exhibition at the Henry Gallery at the University of Washington, Premonitions of the Bauharoque, is reproducing for more than 200 pages Laffoley’s handwritten book from forty years before, “The Principles of Alchemy.”

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LAFRANCE, NOEMIE (22 November 1973) Emerging from French Canada, which also spawned CIRQUE DE SOLEIL, she quickly became an avatar of dance/PERFORMANCE that she called “sitespecific.” Descent (2003) was performed in the open stairwell of a lower Manhattan office building, with the spectators lined along the banisters for several floors while the dancers poked their heads over banisters above and below, their movements limited by the constraints of their “stage.” Noir (2004), less memorable, took place in a parking garage with the spectators seated in stationary automobiles while the dances moved around them. The setting for Agora (2005) was a huge abandoned outdoor swimming pool in Queens, NY, with a horde of performers doing various kinds of moves on a floor similar in scale to a three-ring circus. Home [2009], by contrast, was performed in the dining room of her own apartment with spectators seated around a large table. Fearlessly intimate, it featured LaFrance pregnant and naked. Much like ROBERT WILSON, she has commanded attention for working on larger stages, with more people, than other performance artists.

Figure 11 Noemie Lafrance, Descent, 2002. Photo by Claire Lepichon. © Sens Production.

252 • THE LAND THE LAND (1953; aka The Gate Hill Cooperative, Stony Point, NY) Artists often prefer to reside and work among other artists, especially if they regard non-artists as a hostile and worse. If located in rural settings, these collective gatherings are customarily called ARTISTS’ COLONIES. Among others in the USA, perhaps the richest, measured by arts’ quality over numbers, was a collection of thirteen houses on over one hundred rural acres atop a hill in Rockland County, New York. Commonly called The Land, this cooperative on Gate Hill Road was founded by the architect Paul Williams (1925–93), who’d been to BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE, which had been an informal artists’ colony within an official school in western North Carolina. Given his ambitions, Williams supervised construction and gave generous leases. One early resident called it: “a living experiment in integrating art, life, family, and community close to New York City.” When I first visited The Land in 1966, its permanent residents included JOHN CAGE, DAVID TUDOR, and STAN VANDERBEEK, as well as Vera Williams (1927–2015), later a distinguished author of children’s books; the potter David Weinrib (1924–2016); M. C. Richards (1916–99), a potter and author; and the veteran early-music musician La Noue Davenport (1922– 99). As Cage lived alone at the time, his own abode had a utility core between two rooms that shared a wall with a larger house – semi-detached, as realtors would say. Because self-selective artists’ colonies inspire artists to exceed themselves (and thus surpass their previous work), it’s no surprise that much of John Cage’s best work was done at the Land. Two contrasts, numerically and geographically, were ARTISTS’ SOHO and certain neighborhoods in Paris’s Left Bank, which were more populous colonies within a big city

LAND, EDWIN See EASTMAN, George.

LAS VEGAS (c. 1947) Las Vegas represents a continuing collective attempt to create a city as a unique work of art. As a 1940s frontier town in the middle of an otherwise empty desert but near the construction site that became the Hoover Dam, Las Vegas initially benefited from the absence of laws forbidding gambling. When entrepreneurs

decided to build hotels initially for southern Californians on a holiday, it began to assume its current identity. After a dormant period, construction increased rapidly in the 1990s. As the hotels were built to have unique identities, rather than restrictive uniformity, Las Vegas itself became a work of avant-garde art. The kind of extravagant eccentricity of Hollywood architecture, so aptly satirized in NATHANAEL WEST’s The Day of the Locust (1939), is in Las Vegas extended to a higher, much higher level. Simply to walk down its main tourist street, Las Vegas Boulevard, customarily called the Strip, is to experience not only impressive kinetic signage (itself a public art form insufficiently appreciated) but, on one stretch, a building styled after medieval England next to an Egyptian pyramid adjacent to another hotel meant to recreate neighborhoods within New York City. Elsewhere on the Strip, next to a hotel that has a pseudovolcano fronting the street that “erupts” every twenty minutes is another hotel that mounts a fight between two 18th-century pirate ships every ninety minutes. Even on foot, one is continually moving through different worlds (or their surrogates). Another hotel on the Strip houses an art gallery with classic sculptures and paintings. It was not for nothing that Robert Venturi (1925–2018), an academically trained architect, boosted his reputation by publishing back in 1972 an influential essay titled Learning from Las Vegas. In the hotels are, in addition to casinos devoid of clocks, spectacularly spacious theatrical venues that sponsor live entertainments ranging in quality from semipro magicians to the world-class performance troupe, CIRQUE DU SOLEIL. The surprise is that the casino corporations have become modern-day Medicis who support the traditional art of LIVE PERFORMANCE in the age of mass media. As a continuous show in itself, the Las Vegas Strip is always changing, as hotels only a few decades old are razed to make space for new ones with yet more extravagant images (northern Italy, Venice, etc.). Because no one could have imagined this by himself, Las Vegas represents a collective effort that has the character of folk art and yet differs from traditional folk art in its corporate sponsorship. Obviously, profits from gambling, which is rigged to fleece, finance this mammoth eccentricity; but don’t forget that it is possible to experience Las Vegas as an ever-changing artistic INSTALLATION without ever losing a penny to vice.

LAUTRÉAMONT, COMTE DE (4 April 1846–24 November 1870; b. Isidore-Lucian Ducasse)

LE CORBUSIER •

Born in Uruguay of French parents, Lautréamont came to Paris to prepare for the polytechnical high school. Failing in this mission, plagued by poverty, he began a prose poem, Les Chants de Maldoror (posthumously published in 1890), which, while reflecting classical literature, became recognized as a precursor of SURREALISM. As his protagonist, Maldoror, suffers gruesome misfortunes, Lautrémont’s language becomes extremely hallucinatory: Who could have realized that whenever he embraced a young child with rosy cheeks he longed to slice off those cheeks with a razor, and he would have done it many times had he not been restrained by the thought of Justice with her long funereal procession of punishments. —trans. Guy Wernham

LAWRENCE, T. E. (16 August 1888–19 May 1935; b. Thomas Edward L.) One of the most original writers in English, he excelled at rich prose, not only in his memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926, though first completed in 1922) but in his personal letters, which rank among the greatest in the language. Ostensibly about his experience as a British liaison officer siding with the Arabs in their revolt (1916–18) against the Ottoman Turks, his great book is filled with rich turns of phrase, magnificent descriptions, and high literary allusions, beginning with the title that comes from the Book of Proverbs. The Syrians had their de facto government, which endured for two years, without foreign advice, in an occupied country wasted by war, and against the will of important elements among the Allies. Lawrence’s book also inspired one of the most beautiful feature-length films (1962) ever made by a commercial company, which rarely does great literature appropriately. More than fifty years later, the film remains a classic of its kind; nearly a whole century later, the book is likewise classic.

LAX, ROBERT (30 November 1915–26 September 2000) A Columbia College chum of both AD REINHARDT and THOMAS MERTON, Lax sought linguistic purity comparable to the visual purity of the former and the spiritual purity of the latter. It is fair to say that Lax

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wrote the poetry that Merton should have written, were he a true ascetic literary artist. Lax’s poetry is extremely reductive, sometimes with only a few words arrayed in various ways. In his great long poem Black and White (1966), the total vocabulary consists of only three different words and an ampersand. He also wrote richly marvelous prose, especially in letters to Merton. Because Lax resided on a Greek island and did not actively submit his poems to publishers, they appeared sparingly, first in chapbooks from Journeyman Press (1968–76) solely owned by the legendary designer Emil Antonucci (1929–2003) in Brooklyn, NY, and then in perfectbound bilingual books from Pendo Verlag (1971) in Zurich, Switzerland. In the mid-1990s, two books from American commercial publishers were scarcely noticed. Only after his death did more complete Robert Lax collections finally appear.

LE CORBUSIER (6 October 1887–27 August 1965; b. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) Though commonly known as a prime mover behind architecture’s INTERNATIONAL STYLE, Le Corbusier made one construction so different from prevailing ideas, as well as so original, that it expands any earlier sense of his architecture: the Chapel of NotreDame-du-Haut in Ronchamp, France. Built between 1950 and 1955, it has a tower reminiscent of a grain silo, along with a sweeping roof that resembles a floppy hat, covering curved walls with rectangular apertures of various sizes and shapes, in sum reflecting le Corbusier’s taste for articulated light and reinforced concrete, as well as qualities sparse and ascetic. Because one wall is set several feet inside the edge of the roof, it is possible to be under the roof and yet open to the elements. About the interior of this chapel, the New Zealand architect/professor Russell Walden has written: “He used the east wall as a cyclorama against which the public and more private altars were set, incorporating a swiveling virgin in the reredos wall.” The forms of this building remind us that Le Corbusier began as a Cubist painter who initially signed his works “Jeanneret” and that he continued to produce two-dimensional visual art throughout his career. Marc Treib’s Space Articulation in Seconds (1997) remembers in detail Corbusier’s remarkable structure for EDGARD VARÉSE’s Poéme électronique in the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. This pioneering environment of continuously kinetic sound and images, color, and voice, in an eight-minute cycle, reportedly attracted nearly two million spectators,

254 • LEAR, EDWARD most of them no doubt passing through it as part of a larger show.

LEAR, EDWARD (12 May 1812–29 January 1888) Considering how wary contemporary editors are of any writing faintly unclear, it is amazing that this Victorian writer had such encouraging publishers, prompting him to produce several editions of A Book of Nonsense (1845), A Book of Nonsense and More Nonsense (1862), Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871), More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, Etc. (1872), and Laughing Lyrics, a Fresh Book of Nonsense Poems (1877), which, all would agree, is a ridiculous bibliography for an adult writer. The formal mark of Lear’s verse is a limerick that turns back on itself, with its last line echoing, if not repeating, the first: “There was an Old Person of Rhodes,/Who strongly objected to toads;/He paid several cousins/To catch them by dozens,/ That futile Old Person of Rhodes.” (This last bit gains from its prophetically “POLITICALLY CORRECT” gender usage, a century in advance.) Edward Lear was also a travel writer and a landscape painter.

LÉGER, FERNAND (4 February 1881–17 August 1955) A physically imposing, personally ebullient visual artist, he moved prodigiously along the edge of several avant-garde activities, beginning with Parisian CUBISM, without being fully identified with (or central to) any of them. Two visual marks of his stylistically idiosyncratic paintings were brighter, perhaps gaudy colors and semblances of human figures and machines in an abstract field. In his most avant-garde painting (1918–20), the themes are pure pictorial contrasts and dynamic dissonance. This he rejected in the 1920s for a neo-classicism comparable to a simultaneous development in classical music. Not until he returned from America after World War II did Legér, then in his late sixties, exhibit regularly in France. (Odd it is that too many avant-garde artists must also go to a second country to get recognitions that they finally deserve back home.) For his final paintings, he favored larger canvases that became more typical decades later in ARTISTS’ SOHO. Notwithstanding his professional independence, Léger collaborated at various times with choice colleagues, producing limited editions with BLAISE CENDRARS (The End of the World, 1919) and

designing sets for the premiere of Darius Milhaud’s La création du monde (1925, The Creation of the World). Léger also conceived and co-directed a classic abstract film, Ballet méchanique (1923–24), in collaboration with MAN RAY and GEORGE ANTHEIL. Professionally expansive in his own practice as well, Léger additionally produced mosaics, murals, stained-glass windows, polychrome ceramic sculptures, theatrical designs, and book illustrations. Thanks to his generous temperament, Léger was a popular colleague and teacher. Among his sometime students were many who had visible careers as visual artists. His coming to America during World War II was such an important event that, so HAROLD ROSENBERG once told me, many New York artists went down to some Hudson River pier expressly to welcome him on 12 November 1940. Once in the USA, he collaborated with HANS RICHTER on part of the latter’s film Dreams That Money Can Buy (1944–46) and at various times taught at American universities, along with such distinguished French World War II refugees as the art historian Henri Focillon (1881–1943), the essayist André Maurois (1885–1967), and the composer Darius Milhaud (1892–1974). In the classic 1942 George Platt Lynes (1907–55) photograph of 14 Artists in Exile, only Léger isn’t wearing a white shirt with a tie, looking more like a working artist than an executive, his physique also visibly broader than the others’.

LEHRER, WARREN (22 July 1955) One of the most imaginative bookartists of our time, Lehrer has produced several large-format, elegantly printed, self-published volumes filled with a wealth of images and words. The latter sometimes come from himself, at other times from collaborators such as the poet Dennis Bernstein (1950). Technically scripts, they address major cultural issues, typically in a style more intimidating than communicative. One of the thoughtful technical departures of French Fries (1984), perhaps Lehrer’s most sumptuous work, is that a summary of its obscure pages appears continuously in the upper outside corners. The Portrait Series: A Suite of Four Books About Men (1995) is a more ambitious quadrology of portraits, apparently fictitious, with language and pictures both written and designed by the author (in a striking size of 10½” inches high and 4 inches wide). His four narrators are Brother Blue, a black street poet; Claude Debs, a well-heeled adventurer; Nicky D., a retired dock-worker; and Charlie, a musician victimized by mental-health institutions. The Portrait Series

LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN •

is unique, like all art reflecting truly avant-garde ambition. (Whereas Flannery O’Connor once reportedly said that she’d put aside anything looking peculiar on a page, my own predisposition is a desire to read Literature that comes alternatively packaged.) Lehrer also works in audio, co-composing with Harvey Goldman the song cycle The Search for It & Other Pronouns (1991), a full-length compact disk that has the most intelligently and imaginatively designed (not to mention legible) accompanying CD booklet to come my way, reminding us that the secondary elements of any artifact deserve as much attention as the primary ones. Lehrer’s wife, Judith Sloan (1958), is a provocative PERFORMANCE artist.

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to side. Another lenticular appeared on the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Satanic Majesties Request (1967). At Yankee Stadium in the 2010s, the largest soda cups featured star players (until in 2016 those cups suddenly disappeared). Among the few artists working superlatively in this simple structure are YAAKOV AGAM and PATRICK HUGHES. Lenticulars differ from stereography, which it superficially resembles, in that the latter is usually representational in depth. Lenticulars also differ from holography, which customarily present a single image offering the illusion of depth if seen through two eyes. Wait ’til next year?

LEONARDO DA VINCI

LENNON, JOHN

(15 April 1452–2 May 1519) (9 October 1940–8 December 1980) At the height of the success of THE BEATLES (1962– 69), for which he initially played rhythm guitar, Lennon published two self-illustrated books of free form prose, In His Own Write (1965) and A Spaniard in the Works (1966), that reflect the influences of EDWARD LEAR, LEWIS CARROLL, and JAMES JOYCE, but these did not sell enough copies to persuade publishers to hound the celebrated singer for more. It was Lennon, no one else, who reportedly initiated THE BEATLES’s experiments with feedback (in “I Feel Fine”), backwards tape (in “Rain” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”), and AUDIO ART (“Strawberry Fields Forever” and “A Day in the Life”). Later, working in collaboration with his second wife, YOKO ONO, Lennon created less successful self-consciously experimental music beginning with the tape montage “Revolution No. 9” featured on The Beatles (1969; commonly known as “The White Album”) and the Lennon/Ono albums Two Virgins (1968) and Life with the Lions (1969). —with Richard Carlin

LENTICULAR (c. 1600) This defines a surface in which the two sides of protruding ridges have different pictures, so that when the viewer moves his or her head from side to side, he or she sees different things. These images can be complimentary, sometimes creating the illusion of animation; but they can also be disjunctive. One lenticular toy I remember from childhood portrays a dinosaur moving back and forth as I moved it in my hands from side

The prototypical avant-garde artist, he was original and innovative as a painter of masterpieces (e.g., Mona Lisa, The Last Supper), an esthetic visionary, an inventor, a writer, and much else long familiar. In particular his “notebooks” constitute in sum the richest inventory of possibilities ever conceived by a single individual. That is to say, whereas others painted nearly as well, no one else mixed writings and drawings so imaginatively, elevating the artistic and intellectual status of his initially private jottings to a level rarely attained since. So ahead of his time was Leonardo that fugitive passages in his notebooks are still admired, some five centuries later. Consider that few images from this time are reproduced as often, even on t-shirts and Euro coins, as his superimposed Vitruvian Man (1490).

LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN (1941) Drawing upon their experience at Fortune magazine (1929), in certain respect the classiest of its time for extended reportage, the writer James Agee (1909–55) and the photographer Walker Evans (1903–75) journeyed in the summer of 1936 through the Southern USA to report on impoverished farmers. The result of their collaboration was a new kind of documentary, a picture book in which text and pictures had roughly equal weight in complimenting each other. A further advantage was that Agee as a writer was more skilled than most at lush prose and Evans a great documentary photographer. Though no verbal/visual documentary so strong had appeared before (and only half of the original printing sold on publication), many comparably collaborative books have appeared since. Among

256 • LETTRISM the most notable is The Americans (1958) with photographs by the Swiss-American Robert Frank (1924) and a text by JACK KEROUAC. The classic critical appreciation of Evans/Agee is Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973) by my high school classmate William Stott (1940).

LETTRISM (mid-1940s) Founded in Paris by Isidore Isou (1925–2007; b. IoanIsidore Goldstein), himself a young refugee recently arrived from Rumania, this is perhaps the epitome of a circumscribed European literary group, with its untitled head, its insiders, its hangers-on, and, alas, its excommunications. Lettrist poetry seems based on calligraphy, initially for printed pages but also for visual art, and thus in the age of print seems quite innovative (though it might not have fared as well in preprint times). One recurring device is letters that resemble poetry, even though they are devoid of words. Later work, in the 21st century, continuing this principle called itself Asemic Writing. Jean-Louis Brau (1930–85), Gil J. Wolman (1929– 95), Maurice Lemaître (1926), Roberto Altmann (1942), Roland Sabatier (1942), and Jean-Paul Curtay (1951) were among the other prominent writer/artists based in France who were associated with Lettrism at various times. Not unlike other self-conscious agglomerations, Lettrism has been particularly skilled at the production of manifestos, which can be read with varying degrees of sense. By discounting semantic and syntactical coherence for language art, Lettrist works can be seen as precursors of CONCRETE POETRY. Among the Lettrist alumni was Guy Ernest Debord (1931–94), who, under the name Guy Debord, is commonly credited with initiating the Situationist International (c. 1958–72), which can be seen as representing artists’ most profound, courageous, and, it follows, most successful involvement in radical politics. While Situationist writings have been translated into English, Lettrist texts barely have – to our loss.

LEVINE, LES (c. 1935) He became interesting as a sometime prominent artist who survived his professional disappearance, not for a decade or two but nearly a half-century. As an immigrant to NEW YORK CITY around 1964, reportedly born in Ireland and educated in London, previously a resident of Canada, he was a METEOR initially visible as a pioneering video artist. Through the late

1960s, he exhibited often, garnered press attention, contributed his prose to art magazines, sold his work to museums around the world, and even had a (very) short-lived restaurant named after him. The hyperglossy Life magazine published in 1969 an illustrated feature solely devoted to him and his art. I can recall sitting beside him, perhaps around 1974, at a panel at the Brooklyn Museum where he was sharp. Soon afterward Levine vanished from the American art world, not even leaving behind a manifesto accounting for absence, though he reportedly continued to reside in New York City. Sometimes credited with the epithet “disposable art,” he disposed of himself, so to speak. What makes his story unusual then is the unpretentiousness of his evaporation.

LEVINE, SHERRIE (17 April 1947) Precise imitation (aka “appropriation”) was no longer new by the time she did it in the early 1980s, but her contribution to the theme of originality-&-authenticity was using works by only male artists as her models/subjects: well-known photographs by Walker Evans, Eliot Porter, ALEXANDR RODCHENKO, and Edward Weston; watercolor copies of EL LISSITZKY, Joan Miró, PIET MONDRIAN, and STUART DAVIS. Arriving with the emergence of more sophisticated feminism, her provocative moves initially attracted a lot of attention from opportunistic critics, mostly female, as raising valid art-critical questions that, for all the enthusiasm they inspired at the time, later seemed less interesting.

LEVY, JULIEN (22 January 1906–10 February 1981) An approximate Harvard classmate of LINCOLN KIRSTEIN, Everett Austin, Jr. (1900–57), and Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1902–81), all of whom became enlightened impresarios in advancing American culture, Levy had the foresight to open in midtown Manhattan in 1931 his eponymous art gallery with a retrospective not of painting or sculpture but of American photography organized by ALFRED STIEGLITZ. Situated near the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, Levy’s gallery complemented MoMA’s program on advancing American esthetic taste, later sponsoring the first American oneman shows of JOSEPH CORNELL and SALVADOR DALI, in addition to the photographers Walter Evans, Jean Eugène-Auguste Aiget, George Platt Lynes, and Henri Carter-Bresson. Levy also became the first American to publish a book on Surrealism (1936).

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On the advice of the American photographer Berenice Abbott, he purchased in 1930 the entire contents of Aiget’s studio – thousands of prints, over 10,000 plate glass negatives – preserving the Parisian photographer legacy against threatened destruction. Though Levy offered this archive to MoMA at the time, not until 1969, nearly four decades later, was it purchased. Later favoring SURREALISM, the Julien Levy Gallery began early in 1932 exhibiting avant-garde films, including FERNAND LÉGER’s Ballet Méchanique, accompanied by GEORGE ANTHIEL’s piano roll and MAN RAY’s L’Étoile de Mer. This program became a foundation for the permanent film department at the Museum of Modern Art. Levy also published the first American book on Surrealism (1936). European surrealists exiled in America during World War II patronized his premises. Don’t confuse this Levy with the New York painter JuliAn Levy (1900–82).

LEWIS, WYNDHAM (18 November 1882–7 March 1957; b. Percy W. L.) Born off the Canadian coast on his British father’s yacht, Lewis studied at the Slade School of Art in London before becoming an ABSTRACT painter and the founder of VORTICISM, a British sort of ITALIAN FUTURISM favoring geometrical recompositions and aggressive colors. In 1914, Lewis founded and edited two issues of BLAST, one of the great avant-garde magazines, distinguished not only for its content but for its expressive typography (which still looks avantgarde, a century later). Lewis later edited more modest magazines to which he was likewise also a prominent contributor, The Tyro (1921–22) and The Enemy (1927). Initially the author of plays, satires, and short stories, collected in various volumes, Lewis eventually wrote novels, beginning with Tarr (1918), which some think had an influence on JAMES JOYCE and continuing with a tetralogy, The Human Age, which the British poet/critic Martin Seymour-Smith (1928–98) for one ranks as “the greatest single imaginative prose work in English of this century.” (It includes The Childermass [1928; rev. ed.1956], Malign Fiesta, Monstre Gai [1955], and the incomplete Trial of Man.) One-Way Song (1933) is a stylistically unique anti-progressive political poem whose 2,000-plus lines were fortunately reprinted in Collected Poems and Plays (1979). In addition to writing criticism and scintillating polemics, he painted highly evocative portraits of his contemporaries, including T. S. ELIOT and EZRA POUND. Lewis spent World War II under-recognized in Canada and his postwar years in London as an art critic for the weekly Listener. Not unlike other avant-garde

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writers of his generation, he is continually being rediscovered with new editions, as well as new selections, of his works. He is not to be confused with D. B. Wyndham Lewis (1891–1969), who wrote polite biographies.

LEWITT, SOL (9 September 1928–8 April 2007) An ABSTRACT artist from his beginnings, a geometricist interested in systems, and a prolific producer with a generous collection of assistants, LeWitt is best remembered for his sculptures, his wall drawings, and his writings on CONCEPTUAL ART. The theme of the first, especially in sum, is variations on the cube, which over the years were arrayed, stacked, and left partially incomplete, among other unprecedented moves. LeWitt’s wall drawings, which were customarily executed in his absence, affix a geometric scheme – say, different sets of curved lines a few inches apart – to spaces from which they can be removed at an exhibition’s end. His was a rigorously non-referential art that is concerned with purity of both concept and execution, precisely by suggesting nothing that is not obviously perceptible. Third, LeWitt’s much-reprinted “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” rationalizes work where: All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive; it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. Two developments within LeWitt’s wall art are the addition of colors other than black and white and verbal titles that are more poetic than descriptive (if not informative). It is said that over his entire career he has never missed opening a show on time. My own alternative opinion holds that, good as his other work has been, LeWitt’s greatest works are the BOOK-ART books that he produced mostly during the 1970s. The first masterpiece is Arcs, Circles & Grids (1972), which has 195 progressively denser combinations of the linear geometric images announced in its title. Though LeWitt may have had something else in mind, I see this book as an elegantly simple narrative about increasing linear density. Autobiography (1980) has a large number of square black-and-white photographs, each 2 5/8 inches square, of every object in LeWitt’s living and working space, none of them featured over any others; and although no photograph of the author or any of his works appears, the book does indeed portray not only a life but the roots of

258 • LI YUAN-CHIA his particular imaginative sensibility. Among LeWitt’s many other books and booklets are Incomplete Open Cubes (1974), The Location of Lines (1974), Lines & Color (1975), Squares with Sides and Corners Torn Off (n.d.), Red, Blue and Yellow Lines from Sides, Corners and the Center of the Page to Points on a Grid (1975), Photogrids (1977), and Sunrise and Sunset at Praiano (1980), all of which accurately reflect their titles. Throughout the 1970s, LeWitt cleverly made it his custom to do fresh book-art in lieu of catalogs for his exhibitions.

is Fajfer’s bilingual Ten Letters/ Dwadzieścia jeden liter (2010), which has two front covers, one for each language, in addition to a DVD with letters moving ingeniously on the screen. One theme of Barzanik’s Joyce & Liberature (2011), a brilliant scholarly essay (in English), is the Irishman’s attention to typography and book design, which is to say Liberature. Though the epithet is an honorific, recognizing certain booksas-books, if not BOOK-ART, the attractive principle of inventive structural moves can also function in appreciating literature originating in new media.

LI YUAN-CHIA

LICHTENSTEIN, ROY

(1929–94)

See POP ART.

The principal MODERNIST Chinese painter of his generation, he was born on the mainland before moving to offshore Taiwan in 1949. A few years later, he formed with colleagues the Ton Fan group which is credited with initiating modern abstract art into China. Li’s early classic is a Monochrome White Painting (1963). After exhibiting in both São Paulo, Brazil, and Taipei, Taiwan, in 1967, the group disintegrated, as several colleagues emigrated. Once in England, where he lived for the rest of his life, Li extended his calligraphic style for abstract characters on a larger field. After a few years in London, he relocated to Brampton in Northwest England. Here within an abandoned farmhouse near Hadrian’s Wall (122 AD?) he established his studio and then an eponymous museum that exhibited other artists as well, thanks in part of funding from the British Arts Council, until his death there.

LIBERATURE (1999) This is a useful Polish coinage to identify literary works published within an enhancing physical structure. The classic historic examples were STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard (1897) and RAYMOND QUENEAU’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961). Later books by MARC SAPORTA and B.S. JOHNSON, among others, came in a box whose loose pages could be shuffled. The neologism comes from an English base that incorporates the Latin liber for a book and “a free one,” as well as libra for measurement. The theorists Zenon Fajfer (1970) and Katarzyna Bazarnik (1970), based in Krakow, have also produced choice examples, usually in Polish, sometimes in English. Their masterpiece

LIGETI, GYÖRGY (28 May 1923–12 June 2006) Born in Transylvania, educated at the Budapest Music Academy, Ligeti (pronounced LI-get-tee) left Hungary in 1956, reportedly walking to Cologne. Within fifteen years, he was a professor at the principal Hamburg music school. His most successful pieces incorporate clusters of closely related sounds, aggregations literally, resembling acoustic bands more than traditional separate notes, articulated with a strong sense of instrumental texture, he says to produce “acoustic motionlessness.” The most familiar is the “Kyrie” from Requiem, which incidentally appeared in the soundtrack to the Stanley Kubrick film 2001. Among Ligeti’s more eccentric pieces is Poème symphonique, its title alluding to EDGARD VARÈSE, except that Ligeti’s is for one hundred metronomes, all running at different speeds. His son, Lukas L. (1965), is a remarkably different, but similarly innovative, composer/ percussionist teaching in Southern California.

LIGHT ART (c. 1900) It seems odd, in retrospect, that visual artists were slow to realize the esthetic possibilities of electric light – that light had been around for many years before artists recognized that it could become the principal material of their work. The principal innovator of light art is commonly considered to be THOMAS WILFRED, whose specialty was projections from behind a translucent screen; among subsequent projection-light artists were the JOSHUA LIGHT SHOW, György Kepes

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(1906–2001), who founded a Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T., and Earl Reiback (1931–2006), who purchased Wilfred’s studio after the latter’s death. Subsequent light artists have used fluorescent lamps, such as DAN FLAVIN; NEON lamps, such as STEPHEN ANTONAKIS; or small bulbs so transparent that their flickering filaments are visible, such as Otto Piene (1928–2014); lamps of various colors, programmed to change constantly, such as Boyd Mefferd (1941); or lasers, as in Rockne Krebs’s (1938–2011) Aleph [squared] (1969), where intense, narrow beams, either red or green, projected over one’s head, bounce off mirrored walls in a dark room. Some light art depends upon reflecting or refracting materials, such as MOHOLY NAGY’s Light-Space Modulator (1930), which is a kinetic sculpture designed to redirect projected light in various ways, and Clyde Lynds’s use of fiber optics to make light turn corners. Though individual light artists have had major exhibitions over the past decades, I’m not aware of any recent comprehensive overview, either in books or a museum.

LINDSAY, VACHEL (10 November 1879–5 December 1931; b. Nicholas V. L.) More than any American before him, more than any of his contemporaries (except perhaps GERTRUDE STEIN, five years his senior), Lindsay discovered what we now call TEXT-SOUND in poetic onomatopoeia. You can hear it on reading the following text aloud to yourself (aside from the unfortunate racist implications): Walk with care, walk with care, /Or Mumbo Jumbo, god of the Congo, /And all of the other gods of the Congo, /Mumbo-Jumbo will hoodoo you. / Beware, beware, walk with care, /Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom, [repeated two additional times] /Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM. For a fuller experience of Lindsay’s acoustic poetry, listen to the recording that he made shortly before his suicide. Educated mostly in fine art, Lindsay also published in 1915 the first intelligent book on the esthetics of film, as distinct from stage and photography, declaring prophetically that, “The motion picture art is a great high art, not a process of commercial manufacture,” and then precipitately noting that, “The keywords of the stage are passion and character; of the photoplay, splendor and speed.” In the three-volume, posthumously gathered complete Poetry (1984) are his remarkable detailed drawings worth respecting.

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LIPPARD, LUCY R. (14 April 1937) As an independent art critic (as distinct from newspaper-based art reviewer), she produced several books, beginning with Changing (1968) and continuing perhaps through Overlay (1983), that ranked among the best at understanding new art. Her brilliant monograph on AD REINHARDT (published in 1981, but written a decade before) makes all subsequent writing on this avant-garde American seem amateur. I use the past tense, even though Lippard is still alive, because around 1975 she “got religion,” as we would say, which in her case was a leftist feminism that generated articles and books that, in my considered opinion, won’t survive those times. Mixed Blessings (1989), perhaps the most absurd, advocates artists of privileged birth, in this case females “of color,” who are introduced with their appropriate racial/ethnic/tribal tags (much like individuals in the old Social Registers were), as though these tags should compensate, in Lippard’s mind as well as the reader’s, for any persuasive appreciation of their individual art. It is unfortunate that some of these recent books have sold more copies than Lippard’s better ones, because in America that sort of success can make a writer think nothing has been lost. She also curated and elaborately annotated A Different War: Vietnam in Art (1990), a traveling exhibition whose catalog sympathetically documented all kinds of protest from paintings to performance before coming to the unfortunate conclusion that the efforts “produced no fundamentally new ways for art to oppose war.” Lippard later left New York for rural New Mexico where she became active in community organizing. One hypothesis is that, once out on a critical limb, she fell. Another holds that, alienated by an increasingly commercialized New York art world, she transferred her predisposition to activist integrity to another domain. A third explanation, closer to my experience, is that she gave up on dealing with disrespectful book publishers.

LISSITZKY, EL (23 November 1890–30 December 1941; b. Eliezer or Lazar Markovich L.) Born in Smolensk, Russia, Lissitzky studied engineering in Germany before returning to Russia during World War I. After collaborating with MARC CHAGALL on the illustration of Jewish books and with KAZIMIR MALEVICH in establishing RUSSIAN CONSTRUCTIVISM, Lissitzky moved to BERLIN, where he published The Story of Two Squares (1922),

260 • LITTLE MAGAZINES which, as its title says, is a pioneering abstract visual fiction, as well as a modest masterpiece of modern typography. Lissitzky then finished a series of Constructivist paintings that he called Proun. In 1928, for a museum in Hanover, he designed an “abstract gallery,” a protoENVIRONMENT that ALEXANDER DORNER described in The Way Beyond “Art” (1958): The walls of that room were sheathed with narrow tin strips set at right angles to the wall plane. Since these strips were painted black on one side, grey on the other, and white on the edge, the wall changed its character with every move of the spectator. The sequence of tones varied in different parts of the room. This construction thus established a supraspatial milieu of the frameless compositions [i.e., suspended paintings]. Dorner continues, “This room contained many more sensory images than could have been accommodated by a rigid room.” By current categories, this was a proto-Environment. Lissitzky also made innovative PHOTOMONTAGES and wrote about architectural possibilities (An Architecture for World Revolution, 1930) before returning in the 1930s to Russia, where he confined

himself mainly to typography and industrial design (e.g., the Soviet Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939) until his premature death. As an innovative typographer, he disrupted conventional forms with visualized typography. Lissitzky also designed Die Kunstismen/Les ismes de I’art/The Isms of Art (1925), a cunningly illustrated anthology of illustrations exemplifying CUBISM, neoplasticism, FUTURISM, CONSTRUCTIVISM, DADA, suprematism, expressionisms, simultaneity, etc., as represented by MONDRIAN, MOHOLY-NAGY, MAN RAY, MALEVITCH, KANDINSKY, TATLIN, RICHTER, PICASSO, VAN DOESBURG, VANTONGERLOO, et al. (In retrospect, we can judge that the selection of individuals reflected prescient taste.) Published in Switzerland, this is the first modern art book known to me (conceding there might have been predecessors) to have parallel texts in French, English, and German (none of which was Lissitzky’s mother tongue). Not solely an antique, this book was reprinted intact, likewise in Switzerland. So were the two issues, likewise initially in several languages, now with elaborate annotations in English, of the spectacularly prophetic magazine Gegenstand (1922) that Lissitzky co-edited with the Russian writer llya Ehrenburg (1891–1967).

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Figure 12 El Lissitzky photographic portrait of Kurt Schwitters, 1925. Wikimedia Commons.

As an initial outlet for avant-garde writing and other arts, certain periodicals with modest, if not minimal circulation, have served indispensable functions in making new innovative work available initially to other artists and then to a larger public. Among those representing avant-garde music, the classics have been Minna Lederman’s MODERN MUSIC, LARRY AUSTIN and Stanley Lunetta’s Source: Music of the Avant-Garde (1966–73) and Perspectives of New Music (1962) edited at various times by the composer Benjamin Boretz (1934), among others. For those in based in visual art, three American goldmines were Wallace Berman’s Semina (1955–64), Phyllis Johnson’s ASPEN and Willoughby Sharp’s Avalanche (1970–76). Among those in literature, EUGENE JOLAS’s TRANSITION, the early NEW DIRECTIONS annuals. In media arts, Radical Software (1970–74). In architecture, ARCHIGRAM. Some small-circulation magazines have a pointed influence and are remembered, even if only a single issue appears: Wallace Thurman’s FIRE! and POSSIBILITIES edited by JOHN CAGE and others. On the fringe was, by contrast, Ralph Ginzberg’s Avant-Garde (1968–71), which appeared in a larger square format, too slick and star-struck. Striving for more subscribers than its name could support, this periodical flamed out. Incidentally, ASPEN and Source exemplify the

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principle that departures in content create preconditions for radically alternative formats. Consider that little magazines, in sum, constitute the periodical analog of SMALL PRESSES in serving avant-gardes and their audiences. From both groups, only the strongest are remembered.

LIVING THEATRE (1947–2015) Founded by Judith Malina (1926–2015) and Julian Beck (1925–85), longtime wife and husband, the Living Theatre has forever epitomized whatever might be radical in American theater. At their beginnings, at a time when naturalistic drama predominated, their specialty was poet’s plays (e.g., GERTRUDE STEIN, KENNETH REXROTH, W. B. Yeats, Paul Goodman, et al.); that perhaps accounts for why they spelled “theater” in the British way. By the 1960s, they had assimilated The Theatre and Its Double by ANTONIN ARTAUD, creating in their productions of Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1961) and especially Kenneth Brown’s The Brig (1963) theater that moved audiences, in Artaud’s words, “with the force of the plague.” In 1963, after their home Manhattan base was seized by the Internal Revenue Service for nonpayment of withholding taxes, they moved to Europe where, in the words of the London critic Eric Mottram (1924–95), “They developed the idea of a theater company as creative political critics and emotional gurus.” They returned to the United States in 1968 with Paradise Now, which was a series of scripted provocations that succeeded in involving populous theatrical audiences like nothing before or since.

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Though Beck died in 1985, with Hanon Reznikov (1950–2008) becoming both Malina’s second husband and principal partner, the company persisted at various temporary locations, including Manhattan’s Times Square, where, in the 1990s, they performed street theater after every prison execution in America. Though new productions invariably disappointed those who remembered previous masterpieces, the Living Theatre survived longer than any other theater company of its avant-garde and politically radical kind, incidentally outliving nearly all of its imitators; for this alone, the Living Theatre deserves national honors.

LOFT LIVING (1960s) Needing large open spaces, especially in NEW YORK CITY after World War II, artists rented or purchased industrial spaces that no longer attracted tenants, such as upstairs showrooms, storage facilities, or small factories. Artists renovated these decrepit enclosures to include a residential area so that they could go straight from sleep to work (and back to sleep), in contrast, say, to the Parisian tradition of a high-floor “atelier” apart from the artist’s residence. Though the term “loft” was commonly attached to ARTISTS’ SOHO, which became the largest community of working artists in the world, similar renovations were made elsewhere in the city and later in commercial spaces around the world. Once living lofts were featured in slick magazines, people other than artists decided that they too wanted for themselves larger, more open spaces with taller ceilings than were more common in “apartments.” By the late 20th century, when the term referred to open spaces carved out of previously residential properties or even included in new suburban home designs, bohemian artists who pioneered in renovating industrial slums also influenced bourgeois interior design.

LOMBARDI, MARK (23 March 1951–22 March 2000)

Figure 13 The Living Theatre presents their play The Brig at Myfest 2008 in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Photo by Adrian Heine | Wikimedia Commons.

Before becoming a respected visual artist he’d been a museum curator, a private gallerist, a reference librarian, an archivist, a book author, and much else. His early abstract paintings were scarcely seen. In the mid1990s he began large elaborate drawings of crime and conspiracy networks that would have been penciled outlines for investigative books, had not Lombardi decided to let his drawings stand as such, as he exhibited them in galleries, particularly in one-person shows at the Pierogi Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Among

262 • LONG, RICHARD Lombardi’s subjects were the Savings and Loan scandals, the American holdings of a Saudi prince, the Bush Family, and the Mafia. Few were documenting so much, whether in print or in visual art. Perhaps overwhelmed by his discoveries, if not his precarious personal situation, Lombardi, much like Vincent van Gogh before him, sadly terminated himself. The book/exhibition catalog Mark Lombardi: Global Networks (2003) is a posthumous collection.

LONG, RICHARD (2 June 1945) The projects of British Earth Artist Richard Long are distinguished from those of ROBERT SMITHSON and MICHAEL HEIZER by the lightness of Long’s touch. Whereas Smithson and Heizer have engaged in large-scale excavation works, Long generally marks the environment tentatively, arranging sticks or rocks in geometrical patterns during his walks, gently carving out small circles and short lines in the terrain, and reporting his doings through gallery installations of documentary photographs. He is, like Heizer, cut out of the Romantic mold. But, unlike Heizer, Long is more in the English model: something of a saunterer who respectfully explores nature, à la William Wordsworth. What is more significant is that Long has devised a way of returning Earth Art to the gallery. Bringing back elements such as stones and wood from his journeys, he orders them into geometric patterns on the gallery floor, often into long rectangles that look too much like the well-tooled, highly industrial floor works of CARL ANDRE to retain the tie to nature that characterizes Earth Art. However, Long frequently arranges the natural, rough-hewn shapes of his stones into circular patterns that bear a distinct resemblance to megalithic circles. Despite their relatively small scale, the association endows them with a quality of the mythic, an effect completely foreign to the Minimalist esthetic that Andre represents. —Mark Daniel Cohen

LOUIS, MORRIS (28 November 1912–7 September 1962; b. M. L. Bernstein) Louis’s innovation was self-referential paintings that emphasized not the forms of gestural abstraction but the textures of variously applied paints, the relationships of colors within the field, and, in some cases, the possible subtle shadings of a single hue. Adapting Jackson

Pollock’s alternative way of applying paint to his own ends, Louis in the mid-1950s poured thinned-out acrylic paint directly on unprimed cottonduck canvas that was laid flat on a floor, literally soaking, rather than painting, so that colored areas appear continuously level with the canvas, rather than protruding. As his initial advocate CLEMENT GREENBERG wrote, “The fabric, being soaked in paint rather than merely covered by it, becomes paint in itself, color in itself, like dyed cloth.” For a series called Veils (1954, again in 1957–60), the thinned paints were poured in overlapping patterns that are patently beautiful. The MoMA curator-critic John Elderfield (1943) finds with Louis “the first fully autonomous abstract pictures,” adding, “He established as much a new style of painting, not merely a new process for creating paintings, but a new medium of painting.” One appropriate epithet was COLOR-FIELD PAINTING, whose later advocates included Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) and Jules Olitski (1922–2007).

LOUIS, MURRAY (4 November 1926–1 February 2016) For many years the principal male dancer in the ALWIN NIKOLAIS company, Louis became the only prominent modern dancer particularly influenced by Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), which is to say that his choreography tended to stylized movements and parody, making as much fun of its ostensible subjects as of numerous styles of dance. In his classic Junk Dances (1964), the set is a mockery of POP ART; one sequence parodies the courtship mannerisms evident in 1930s movies; another sequence, as brilliantly performed by Phyllis Lamhut (1933), satirizes the standard theatrical rendition of the busy secretary; another episode mocks Nikolais’s prop-heavy choreography. The piece closes with Louis himself draped in Christmas tinsel and a network of lights that actually illuminate as the COLLAGE tape plays the opera star Galli-Curci hitting her final high note. I saw Junk Dances perhaps a dozen times, never with decreasing pleasure.

LOVE This quality is rarely mentioned in discussions of new art, crucial though it is, not only in its creation, as most artists love what they do, but also in its dissemination as individual art-lovers tell others about what they love. More sophisticated art-lovers particularly relish recommending artists not commonly familiar. If an artist makes a work that he or she shows to someone else who genuinely (not politely) loves it, that

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work is more likely to be recommended to a third person. If it is loved again, that third person is more likely to recommend it to a fourth circle of people, and so on. The image for understanding strong art’s circulation is circles within circles; the measure of successful is voluntary acceptance by larger circles. A merchandizer may for one or another reason imagine that certain work can be sold to a larger public (say, a tenth circle). If that effort fails, then only what it loved, even if loved by a few whom the artist never knew personally, can survive. (Admiration from people other than “friends” and relatives becomes a truer measure.) Much avant-garde arts, as well as many avant-garde artists, are “hated,” often ostentatiously, by people who look smugly stupid and RETROGRADE over time, love always overcomes hate. Simply, while formerly successful artists are often forgotten, some “failed” artists, even obscure artists, are remembered, as in some entries here, because a stranger (here me) loves their work.

LOZOWICK, LOUIS (10 December 1892–9 September 1973) Odd it might seem that the great painter of NEW YORK CITY in the middle of the 20th century should have been born in the Ukraine and then lived mostly in the near suburb of South Orange, New Jersey, but perhaps he benefitted from distance. In BERLIN in 1920, he learned from MOHOLY-NAGY and EL LISSITZKY. Of his principal subject Lozowick produced a wealth of memorable images, some realistic and other fanciful, usually of constructions, sometimes of people, by rule deeper, yes deeper, than photographs of urban nature. One theme was discovering natural beauty even as he resisted seductive colors other than WHITE & BLACK. Lozowick produced lithographs because several of his pictures, seen together, are usually stronger than just one.

LUDLAM, CHARLES (12 April 1943–28 May 1987) Ludlam gladly accepted the epithet “Theater of the Ridiculous,” which represented an extension at once appropriate and ironic of the THEATER OF THE ABSURD; for, if the latter used absurd means to portray worldly absurdity, Ludlam took the satirical impulse a step further, using yet more ridiculous means to portray worldly ridiculousness. “We have passed beyond the Absurd,” wrote his colleague and sometime collaborator Ronald Travel (1936–2009), “Our position is absolutely

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preposterous.” Ludlam’s own manifesto typically emphasizes “axioms to a theater for ridicule,” including “the things one takes seriously are one’s weaknesses.” Even though most of his plays drew upon classical models, they were filled with bad taste, sexual confusion, phallic worship, and operatic extravagance. As Dana Gioia (1950) judged, “Charles Ludlum was the best parodist I’ve ever seen – unique in that he could simultaneously play pathos and farce. Success encouraged him to inflate these aberrations.” Of the plays familiar to me, the most inspired is Ring Gott Farblonjet (1977), subtitled “A Masterwork,” which it truly is. Initially a takeoff on Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas, it deflates their pomposity first with a Yiddish euphemism for getting hopelessly lost (Farblonjet, which is pronounced “far-BLAWN-jit”). The characters all have atrociously Teutonic names (the Valkyries being “Brunnhilda,” “Helmvige,” “Schwertheita,” “Valtrauta,” etc.); and, as is typical in Ludlam plays, female roles are often assumed by men. Ludlam made language work in ways ironically reminiscent of FINNEGANS WAKE, opening his Ring with: “Weia! Water! Waga! Waves of wasser! Waves of wasser! Wagalawei! Wallalla weiala weia!” True to his means, Ludlam also wrote ridiculous stage directions: “(The weaves giftoff to scrimmist sheerest parting until all is clear, clearing on a mountain’s height. Lustering Blistering tamples pinnacles of casteln hinterground.)” In Gioia’s judgment, “His legacy is probably now just Irma Vep, which is still done everywhere. Like his best plays, it works with all audiences, including children, and still satisfy the jaded intellectual.” He died prematurely of complications from AIDS, which is not avantgarde – just a deadly disease.

LYE, LEN (5 July 1901–15 May 1980) Born in New Zealand, Lye lived in the South Sea Islands in the 1920s, assimilating Polynesian art, before moving to London. Working with John Grierson’s documentary film unit at the General Post Office, Lye invented around 1934 a technique for painting directly on film, producing the short Color Box (1935). In later films, Lye developed this technique, which consequently influenced the Canadian Norman McLaren (1914–87), among others working, as he did, within the constraint of cameraless filmmaking (which is a precursor to cameraless videography, which was likewise innovative). Rarely profiting from his filmmaking, Lye abandoned that art for equally innovative, if esthetically different, work in kinetic sculpture.

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democratic Marxism added the concept of the “vanguard party.”

(12 September 1922–8 December 2004) As a poet, dramatist, and sometime composer, Mac Low favored INDETERMINANCY for the creation of his works. In his own words, “My work, especially that of 1954–80, is closely related to that of such composers as JOHN CAGE, MORTON FELDMAN, EARLE BROWN, CHRISTIAN WOLFF, and LA MONTE YOUNG.” He describes his writing from 1954 as incorporat[ing] methods, processes, and devices from modern music, including the use of chance operations in composition and/or performance, silences ranging in duration from breath pauses to several minutes, and various degrees of improvisation by performers. Many of the works are ‘simultaneities’ – works performed by several speakers and/or producers of musical sounds and noises at once. Some of these texts are based on grids whose words (both horizontally and vertically arrayed) are spoken in an order determined by chance operations. For an Art and Technology exhibition is Los Angeles in 1969, he produced his early computer poetry in collaboration with a company named Information International. Avowedly eclectic, Mac Low also wrote fairly conventional free verse and even EXPRESSIONISTIC lyrics. Mac Low stated in Talisman 8 (Spring 1992): Open to all poetries, I’m shipwrecked amid terms such as “avantgarde” and “experimental” – words largely abandoned by many who share my universe of discourse. On the superficial – that is, the most serious – level, I hate the military provenance of “avant-garde.” And to this noxious connotation the authoritarian split off from

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As a veteran anarchist who uses those epithets generously (as in this book) and has written whole books about opening the professional field, I find it odd that anyone purportedly advocating openness would want to push some positions (and thus people) off the map. It was unfortunate to see Mac Low take this abnegating position, because for some fifty years he produced genuinely experimental, avant-garde poetry and theater. As person of avant-garde letters, he also coedited the seminal anthology An Anthology of Chance Operations (1963, 1971). Posthumously Mac Low, as a person of avant-garde letters, was rewarded with an individual entry in BRITANNICA.COM, once a touchstone, which acknowledges few recent Americans who were mostly literary. —with Richard Carlin

MacDIARMID, HUGH (11 August 1892–9 September 1978; b. Christopher Murray Grieve) A monumentally truculent literary activist, he was expelled from the Scottish Nationalist Party in the 1930s for his Communism and soon afterwards bounced from the Communist Party for his Scottish Nationalism. His earliest major work, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), is frequently credited with awakening nationalistic consciousness in Scottish writers. Taking his own advice, MacDiarmid produced poems in a curious self-taught Scots that is barely comprehensible to English-speaking readers. Indeed, his synthetic literary lingo seems more indebted to his Irish contemporary JAMES JOYCE than to his Scottish predecessor Robert Burns (1759–96). Epitomizing DEFAMILIARIZATION to some and gibberish to others, the results include this stanza from “Overinzievar”:

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The pigs shoot up their gruntles here, The hens staund hullerie, And a’ the hinds glower roond about Wi’ unco dullery. Wi sook-the-bluids and switchables The grund’s fair crottled up,’ And owre’t the forkit lichtnin’ flees Like a cleisher o’ a whup. (Does it help to know that gruntles=snots; hullerie=with ruffled feathers; hinds are farmhands; sook-thebluids=little red beetles; switchables=earwigs; crottled=crumbled; owre’t=over it; cleisher=lash; and, to less surprise, whup=whip, and wi=with and perhaps we?) Especially in his longer poems, his great subject was uniquely Scottish experience. As his First Hymn to Lenin (1931) had a broader influence, the ever-challenging MacDiarmid also wrote “Epitaph on British Leftish Poetry, 1930–40,” which mocks the effete political writings of his more prominent British contemporaries: Auden, MacNeice, Day Lewis, I have read them all, Hoping against hope to hear the authentic call. When MacDiarmid later got caught appropriating someone else’s esoteric prose for his own verse, he replied more arrogantly than contritely, his reputation for higher-than-thou integrity undermined. My suspicion is that Christopher Murray Grieve, much like the man behind “Louis-Ferdinand Céline,” used a PSEUDONYM for a more audacious (more political and less responsible) part of himself. Typically perhaps, he used yet another pseudonym, “Arthur Leslie,” for his extraordinary level-headed essay on “The Politics of Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid” (1952), an audacious selfappreciation, as contrary and contradictory as the poet himself, that I rank among the best of its rare kind.

MacDONALD-WRIGHT, STANTON (8 July 1890–22 August 1973) As American painters residing in Europe in 1912, he and MORGAN RUSSELL initiated Synchronism, an early departure in modern abstract art that regarded color and sound as comparable phenomena, thus developing color scales comparable to musical scales. He typically painted amorphous abstract color shapes, with bright colors emerging and cooler colors receding, all floating around a central vortex comparable to the dominant tone in a musical chord. Intelligently he wrote: “I strive to divest my art of all anecdote and

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illustration, and to purify it into the point where the emotions of the spectator will be wholly aesthetic as when listening to good music.” Returning to America around 1916, Macdonald-Wright introduced painterly MODERNISM to Los Angeles, which hadn’t seen much of it before (and wasn’t NEW YORK). He temporarily reverted to conventional representational painting before resuming abstraction, less significantly, in the mid-1950s.

MACIUNAS, GEORGE (8 November 1931–9 May 1978) A Lithuanian-born American who spent World War II in Germany and thus seemed forever an immigrant, Maciunas (pronounced Ma-CHEW-nus) was at once the founder and sometime generalissimo of FLUXUS. He was an effective organizer who let his collaborates shine and have space in both multiple editions and artists’ performances, as his esthetic prescribing selflessness overcame his predispositions to egomania and control. His own strongest art consisted of, first, ingenious architectural proposals; second, small boxes accumulating debris similar in some way (such as excrement); and, third, audacious graphic designs. His artistic/scholarly classic is the Expanded Arts Diagram (1966), which is a complex graphic history portraying the relationships of the new arts to the old arts (aka INTERMEDIA). Using lists turned at various angles and flow-chutes, Maciunas identified the roles of DADA, Vaudeville, MARCEL DUCHAMP, church processions (“Baroque Multi-Media Spectacle”), circuses, fairs, and the BAUHAUS as precursors to such activities as “acoustic theater,” “kinesthetic theater,” “expanded cinema,” “events – neohaiku theater,” “verbal theater,” “HAPPENINGS,” etc. – all positioned in the sans-serif type that marked his graphic work. To quote KEN FRIEDMAN on Maciunas, “He saw the artists fulfilling in their work a long evolution of ideas, fluid rather than rigid, part of a millennia-long human dialogue. The chart reveals a designer with an eye for broad historical scope and a visual humor.” I own a larger, later chart, some 6 feet by 2, that Friedman says is an incomplete draft “published in Sweden after Maciunas’s death,” even though my recollection is that Maciunas gave it to me a few years before. Nonetheless, as an essay in alternative arts’ historiography it is incomparable. Astrid Schmidt-Burkhardt’s Maciunas Learning Machines (2011) is a remarkable German university art-historian’s appreciation of three dozen historical diagrams that he produced between 1953 and 1973. As the recipient of an advanced degree

266 • MacIVER, LOREN in intellectual history, from an Ivy League institution no less, may I with some authority measure Maciunas as formally a most original historian. Also the principal early developer/renovator of real-estate cooperatives in ARTSTS’ SOHO, he established, prior to his premature death, dozens of artists, many of whom he scarcely knew, to work and live (and, better, live where they worked), incidentally becoming, thanks to later unpredicted developments, property millionaires implicitly indebted to Maciunas.

MacIVER, LOREN (2 February 1909–3 May 1998; b. L. Newman) Largely self-educated as a painter, with only one year of formal training at the age of ten, Maclver developed an individual style that defies categorization within mainstream artistic currents. By the 1940s, she had become one of the best-known women artists in the United States. Her subject was the atmospheric effect of light. She portrayed commonplace objects of urban life, and on occasion cityscapes, with a luminosity that seems to emanate from them and blend together, suffusing the entire canvas with a glistening illumination. Votive candles, oil slicks, jars, bottles, bouquets of flowers, buildings, and skylines were rendered as softly defined, out of focus, and aglow with colors of gem-like intensity. Sticking to her subject, Maclver gave a poetic sense of wonder to otherwise ordinary imagery. In fact, she associated with avant-garde poets as much as with visual artists, and the poet Elizabeth Bishop (a friend of Maclver) described her work as a “divine myopia.” What distinguishes Maclver’s style is its combination of realism and ABSTRACTION. In her best work, she organizes her wavering visions in strict geometric patterns, as if a planar structure inherent in the light were replacing the details of observation. —Mark Daniel Cohen

MacKAYE, STEELE (6 June 1842–25 February 1894; b. James Morrison S. M.) The greatest American theatrical genius in the 19th century, he was an author, director, actor, theater producer, and an inventor. Initially planning to become a painter, MacKaye studied as a teenager in Paris before returning home to serve in the Civil War, which he fortunately survived. As a playwright, he broached more

realistic/naturalistic portrayals. As a producer, MacKaye had by 1885 established three theaters in NEW YORK CITY, in addition to the first American school to teach acting – the Lyceum Theatre School, which became the precursor to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Likewise consequently, MacKaye reportedly invented the flame-proof theatrical curtain, folding seats, the scrolling title box, the moving stage, overhead lighting, a machine for creating the illusion of clouds on stage, the fire standards required by law, and the greater theatrical exploitation of newly developed technology, receiving over one hundred patents for his theatrical advances. For the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, MacKaye imagined “The Spectatorium,” an indoor theater with twelve thousand seats and twenty-five moving stages. Though this last spectacular vision was never realized, some of Steele MacKaye’s proposals influenced early American filmmaking. Curiously, in the common histories of American theater, one of his sons, the playwright Percy MacKaye (1875–1956), is better remembered. For alerting me to the accomplishments of Steele M., I’m indebted to my swimming pool buddy, the actor Rocco Sisto (1953), who played Steele M. in The Light Years (2017).

MAD MAGAZINE (1952) On second thought, it is scarcely surprising that one of the most influential radical magazines in America should have begun as a sort of comic book for more skeptical teenagers. And it has remained a sort of comic book, internal improvements notwithstanding. Whenever nosy parents (and their surrogates in “law enforcement”) tried to censor it, MAD’s audience increased and its reputation gained. MAD Magazine pioneered all kinds of satire and irreverent humor, wholly without the benefit of advertisers (which made it different from most other large-circulation magazines and purportedly immune from corporate meddling), and even without advertising itself elsewhere. In addition to a periodical that appeared eight times a year, the MAD men (all male, alas) produced innumerable small-format paperback self-anthologies where, as in the source periodical, every detail, verbal as well as visual, became a platform for humor, all of which continue to educate critically. To measure seriously its subversive influence, consider an appreciation by the British scholar Nathan Abrams: “MAD’s Other New York Intellectuals” (2003).

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Even in a purportedly straight memoir by a MAD writer, such as Dick DeBartelo (1945), there are classic passages such as this, explaining how the anarchic medium should now be owned by Time Warner: [The publisher] sold EC Publications, MAD’s parent company, to Premiere Industries. They sold it to Kenney Corporation, which was originally in the rent-a-car and the rent-a-hearse business. Then Kinney merged with Warner, and became part of Amalgamated By-Products. They merged with World Wide Rust, a division of International House of Flannel. MAD was spun off into the cooking division until three years later, when it was discovered that MAD was not edible . . . . Then one morning we all woke up to find we were owned by Time Warner. I thought of writing more here about its typical art, beginning with the reincarnations of its anti-logo “Alfred E. Neuman/What – Me Worry?” Then I figured that most people reading this Dictionary already know whatever I might say, as MAD is remembered first in nearly everyone’s mental storage and then in several perpetually selling anthologies, sometimes on uncharacteristically finer book paper, of choice materials from its newsprint pages. On the other hand, in the pages of a competitor named Cracked (1958–2007) was a more sophisticated, more literate, more adult satire though never as successful or influential. The self-retrospectives from its pages, The Cracked Reader (1960) and Completely Cracked (1962), display palpable cultural difference, among other insufficiencies.

MAGRITTE, RENÉ (21 November 1898–15 August 1967; b. René-FrançoisGhislain M.) Magritte aligned himself with the Parisian SURREALISTS in the late 1920s, and subsequently became, along with SALVADOR DALI, one of the two Surrealist painters beloved by the general public. Again, like Dali, Magritte used strictly realistic imagery (which probably accounts for the shared popularity); but unlike Dali, he did not paint particularly well, and Magritte never distorted his images with a nightmare logic. He presented normal objects and figures in absurd situations: enormous boulders floating like clouds, a railroad train emerging from the back wall of a fireplace (presumably an escalation of imagined smoke with the smoke of burning wood), landscape paintings in ornate

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frames depicted as standing before “real” landscapes that continue the image within the frame, an image of a smoking pipe above the words: “This is not a pipe” (which has sent hordes of postmodern thinkers who study linguistic theory into intellectual genuflection). With his clear images but unclear meanings, Magritte does not display a visual sensibility; his imagination is literary and theoretical. He is stylistically an illustrator conveying irrational anecdotes and posing logical conundrums. And he did more than any other artist, and much more than Dali, to tone down Surrealism’s excesses and make it palatable: to make Surrealism seem intriguing, and nothing more than strange, and in no sense psychologically dangerous or disorienting. —Mark Daniel Cohen

MAIL ART Out of the reasonable assumption that the commercial gallery system is limited, many initially visual artists emerging in the 1970s and 1980s around the world decided it would be more feasible to exhibit their work not through galleries and ancillary museums but through the postal system, especially if they lived in areas where galleries and other artists were scarce. For the production of imagery, they drew often upon XEROGRAPHY and the earlier graphic technology of rubber stamps. They would also announce exhibitions in venues previously devoid of art, such as city halls in remote parts of the world, ideally accepting everything submitted and issuing a catalog with names, usually accompanied by addresses and selected reproductions. While such work had little impact upon commercial galleries (and those “art magazines” dependent upon galleries’ ads), one result was a thriving alternative culture, calling itself “The Eternal Network,” as intensely interested in itself as serious artists have always been.

MALAPARTE, CURZIO (9 June 1898–19 July 1957; b. Kurt Erich Suckert) Born in Italy of a German father and Italian mother, he took an Italian literary pseudonym, the first name being the Italian equivalent of Kurt, the adopted surname meaning “bad-part,” as he was an indeed a provocative writer on the fringe of the Italian fascist party. Imprisoned from 1933 to 1935 for defamation and slander, he was released early as a favor to Mussolini’s sonin-law. In addition to editing literary magazines, among which Prospettive (Perspectives) from 1940 through

268 • MALEVICH, KAZIMIR 1943, was the most distinguished, Malaparte published popular, stylistically conventional books that generated enough royalties to build in the early 1940s, in collaboration with a friendly architect, his avant-garde masterpiece – a house on a barely accessible rock cliff in the Mediterranean isle of Capri. So impressively distinctive is this unusual construction, roughly 30 feet by 150 feet, with water on three sides, and so successful at self-advertising is this maosuleum that a whole coffee-table book has been devoted to it, Malaparte: A House Like Me (1999), with appreciations by architects from around the world. The only writer’s comparable architectural monument known to me is Robinson Jeffers’s unusual house likewise overlooking the ocean in northern California.

As a supporter of the Soviet Revolution, he became head of the Viebsk art school. Everyone acknowledged his exceptional organizational skills, as well as his capacity to forge professional alliances. Shrewdly sensing trouble at home, he traveled in 1927 to Germany, leaving some of his more radical paintings there, to remain undiscovered until the 1970s. Back in Leningrad, Malevich returned to figurative painting, concluding his career with portraits of friends and family. Given all the rapid changes (through, in Valentine Marcade’s sweeping summary, “Impressionism, NeoPrimitivism, Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, Alogism, Suprematism, the arkhitekton constructions and then, in the 1930s, back to figurative art”), the critical question posed by all the shifts in Malevich’s career was whether he was mercurial or opportunistic.

MALEVICH, KAZIMIR (23 February 1878–15 May 1935) Malevich came to Moscow in his late twenties, initially working as an Impressionist painter. Befriending political radicals in the pre-World War I decade, Malevich produced paintings depicting rural peasants in a deliberately primitive style. Working with flat planes of unmodulated color, Malevich called his art CUBO-FUTURISM. Changing his style again, he made COLLAGES and juxtapositions of realistically rendered details in the manner of PABLO PICASSO and Georges Braque (1882–1963). In 1913, he designed stage sets and costumes for MIKHAIL MATYUSHIN’s and ALEKSEI KRUCHONYKH’s opera Victory Over the Sun, by common consent a monument of FUTURIST theater. By 1915–16, Malevich reached his most radical style of non-objective painting which he called Suprematism, best regarded as a radical development within CONSTRUCTIVISM. A 1915 oil painting titled Red Square (Painterly Realism: Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions), 53 cm square, has a large, unmodulated red square set against a white background, the title alone implying representational intentions. Indicatively, a reproduction of this crucial work became not only the cover but the opening illustration of The Great Utopia [1992], a rich exhibition of Russian avant-garde art from 1915 to 1932. Not unlike his near-contemporary PIET MONDRIAN, Malevich, in writing about his art, made claims that are hard to verify: for example, “Suprematism is pure feeling.” In their fields of unmodulated color, these works resemble monochromic paintings that became more familiar after 1960. In the 1920s, Malevich extended Suprematist principles to sculpture.

MALLARMÉ, STÉPHANE (18 March 1842–9 September 1898; b. Étienne M.) For Mallarmé’s avant-garde classic, the long poem Un Coup de Dés (1897, but not published until 1914), the radical idea was making the page a field receptive to various typographies and verbal relationships both syntactical and spatial. With this move, Mallarmé foreshadowed GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE and CHARLES OLSON, among many other poets, who developed a similar idea about the poetic centrality of the printed page. “The word image-complex,” Charles Mauron (1899–1966) wrote, “is the fundamental quality of poetry, and melody is ancillary to that.” Because the theme of Un Coup seems to be that everything perishes unless it is remembered in print, the form complements the content. Mallarmé’s short poems are so precious and obscure that they are still treasured by those who regard preciousness and obscurity as the essence of poetic art. (Not I.) As Mauron added, “This cumulative effect of the auras of words is the essential quality of the poetic act.” The fact that the standard French edition of Mallarmé’s complete works contains less than a hundred poems abets this image. A teacher of English by trade, he is frequently credited with revolutionizing French narrative and with an Olympian detachment utterly contrary to the EXPRESSIONISTS who followed him. The Anthony Hartley translations are prose footnotes to the French, while Roger Fry’s follow the structure of verse. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), who was frequently obsessed with writers profoundly unlike himself, produced an inspired monograph on Mallarmé (1953).

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MAN RAY (27 August 1890–18 November 1976; b. Emmanuel Radnitzky) A major minor POLYARTIST, Man Ray was considerably more skilled at some of his arts than others. Largely self-taught, he made COLLAGES and CUBIST paintings before World War I. In 1915, he published out of a New Jersey artists’ colony a proto-DADA magazine, The Ridgefield Gazook, and after meeting MARCEL DUCHAMP, whose mischievous spirit resembled his own, Man Ray became a principal participant in New York DADA. Moving to Paris in 1921, he joined organized SURREALISM and added an interest in film, producing in Emak Bakia (1927), his closest claim to a classic in the new medium. “Man Ray was adamant that there be no script for Emak Bakia, no discernible narrative progression,” his biographer Neil Baldwin (1947) wrote, in keeping with his belief that there generally was no progress in art. Nevertheless, there are motifs in the film, repetitions of patterns of light as Man Ray paints with light, exploring more deeply dazzling contrasts engineered to stir the viewer’s emotions . . . dark objects upon light backgrounds, light faces against dark backdrops, dark words against light paper. Man Ray challenged MOHOLY-NAGY’s claim to have invented the photogram, in which a photograph is made by placing objects directly on photographic paper and then exposing it to light; he called these works “rayographs.” He also worked, with considerable commercial success, as a fashion photographer. Indeed, Man Ray may have been the first painter-photographer whose photographs were superior – more original, more thoughtful – than his paintings, implicitly establishing in the 1920s and 1930s an esthetic legitimacy for the newer medium. Self-Portrait (1963) is Man Ray’s immodest, incomplete autobiography. Don’t forget that his nom-de-art was Man Ray, not Ray, Man – even though often mistakenly alphabetized under R, which would be, like “MOMA” or “Julliard,” a measure of authorial illiteracy.

MANZONI, PIERO (13 July 1933–6 February 1963) A sometime student of LUCIO FONTANA, Manzoni extended his mentor’s taste for radical challenges within the art world context, signing his name on the

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lower backside of a nude model (1961), purportedly to guarantee the natural beauty of the woman’s skin (which would be unlikely), producing balloons inflated with “artist’s breath” and tins containing “artist’s shit [in truth, his own]” offered for the price of its weight in gold, exhibiting “achromes,” as he called them, made of polystyrene soaked in cobalt chloride, and making “tubes containing kilometers of lines designed to mock the idea of space.” Since Manzoni’s work resembles art by others, sometimes improving upon them, his Corpo d’aria (1959, Body of air) and Flato d’artista (1960, Artist’s breath) recall Yves Klien’s Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle (Zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility), which was empty space that the artist sold; and Marcel Duchamp’s Paris Air (1919). Manzoni’s 1959 drawing with a marker on unrolling spools of paper echoes both certain Robert Rauschenberg prints and Jean Tinguely’s “métamatic” drawings. And so forth. This strain of practice made Manzoni a precursor of another Italian art world satirist/terrorist Mauricio Catellan (1960). Jes Petersen’s Piero Manzoni: Life and Work (1969) epitomizes conceptual criticism as a blank book of transparent pages. The art historian Giulio Carlo Argan (1909–92) credits Manzoni as “the first to see that Duchamp was one of the most important protagonists of the century, the first artist for whom there was no work of art that wasn’t also an idea about the essence and historical condition of art.” If you think Argan is attributing too much philosophical weight to Manzoni’s second-generation protoCONCEPTUAL gestures, you might begin to understand why remarkably few Anglo-American critics, to different degrees predisposed to the ethics of verification, have written about Manzoni’s work.

MAPPLETHORPE, ROBERT (4 November 1946–9 March 1989) A studio portrait photographer whose trick was lighting and shooting in ways that rendered his subjects sculptural, Mapplethorpe was made famous by dumb and/or devious reactionaries vociferously deploring him. Not much more can be said about him as an artist. Whereas an earlier generation of photographers kept some distance from the subcultures they portrayed (think of Walker Evans or Paul Strand in the 1930s), Mapplethorpe, like Nan Goldin (1953) after him, made no secret of his physical and emotional involvements, such admissions supposedly bestowing certain credibility upon his photographs. (Is the surest diagnostician the doctor or the person who has had all the diseases?)

270 • MARCHING BANDS (HBCU) Mapplethorpe’s subject range was limited but disparate – nude males and females, flowers, himself. Since most of his early advocates were likewise gay, the acceptance of Mapplethorpe by arts institutions and then the larger public was seen, along with the needling of the noisy thick yahoos, to reflect a surreptitious sociopolitical agenda. Meteorically successful, Mapplethorpe died young of AIDS-related diseases, leaving behind a lot of expensive prints and books, as well as a foundation that supposedly benefits from them. From such short artists’ lives are pop biographies made.

MARCHING BANDS (HBCU) (1845) If ever there was a decadent art, it was traditional PERFORMANCE of populous marching bands during the halftimes of school football games in America. While the student athletes were supposedly recuperating for the second half of a game, kids and only kids played mostly familiar music while moving in and out of simple formations. Especially at larger universities with high-ranked (i.e., competitive) teams, their acts are meant to be impressive, if not intimidating, as indeed they are, in a limited militaristic way. By contrast, certain historic black colleges (HBCU) in the American south developed a vanguard in taking the halftime show to a higher artistic level with not only zippier music but awesomely quick and intricate choreography for dozens of performers. Among these institutions are Grambling, Bethune-Cookman, North Carolina A&T, Jackson State, South Carolina State, and Florida A&M, their names scarcely known outside the southern USA. (Though adults are spurned, a prominent jazzman recalls that around 1940 the last school recruited him as a local boy then in seventh grade.) Their HBCU performances are sprightly and witty, if not the epitome of a uniquely African-American excellence in ensemble dance in the tradition of BUSBY BERKELEY. I can recall hearing one HBCU bandmaster proclaim on national television that it was harder to make his band than the college football team and then that his musicians “worked harder” than the players. No less serious than the football coach was he. The contrarily alternative American marching bands, exemplifying stunning performance in their own way, are fielded by Ivy League schools that snottily refuse to take football or their role so seriously, whose musicians visibly push each other around their field as they fumble through simple music, because they clearly disdain practice, to the laughter of all.

MARCLAY, CHRISTIAN (11 January 1955) Born in California, but raised in Geneva, Switzerland, he returned to his native country in 1977 to study sculpture. Before a decade had passed, he found his platform in records and turntables. Performing live, he would with his hands slow the record down or increase its speed irregularly. He would change records before they were reached their ends. Later he learned to cut old records apart and reassemble them in surprising configurations, echoing COLLAGE acoustically. Marclay performs not only solo but with other turntable artists no doubt influenced by him and even with more conventional musicians. I recall an improvisation with the American percussionist/vocalist DAVID MOSS that sonically suggested the end of the world more persuasively than anything else I’ve ever heard. Though Marclay has produced fixed records, his art is meant to be heard live.

MARINETTI, FILIPPO TOMMASO (22 December 1876–2 December 1944) Even if the founder of ITALIAN FUTURISM wanted to be known as a poet, fictioner, and playwright, he is remembered mostly as a generous and reportedly personable impresario/patron/publicist who authored strong sentences advocating alternative art: “Literature having up to now glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and slumber, we wish to exalt the aggressive moment, the feverish insomnia, running, the perilous leap, the cuff, and the blow.” Such writing epitomized the FUTURIST taste for extravagant manifestoes. The metaphor of the artist as a boxer became particularly influential. The principal effect of Marinetti’s rhetoric was making a few good artists famous – Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), FORTUNATO DEPERO, etc. – at least for a while. Marinetti also edited a later anthology, Nuovi Poeti futuristi (1925) that’s hard to find. His international reputation suffered from his early support of Benito Mussolini and Fascism, while some of his inflammatory remarks are embarrassing decades later, beginning with the declaration to “fight moralism, feminism [sic], every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.”

MARISOL (22 May 1930–30 April 2016; b. M. Escobar) Although a member of the artistic generation that included ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG and JASPER

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JOHNS, Marisol was less concerned with exploiting the materials of contemporary culture or posing subtle esthetic questions than with adopting the methods and materials of Latin American folk art, honoring in part her Venezuelan birth. Her wooden sculptures reflected the influence of pre-Columbian pottery, Mexican picture boxes, and Egyptian and Mayan mythology. The tall, hieratic figures have their features frequently painted on, rather than carved in, and are generally arranged in tableaux. Marisol’s intent is satiric, and she aims her biting sarcasm or gentle mockery at politicians, celebrities, and even fellow artists. Marisol’s work is notable for being highly individual and instantly recognizable, though it has had little, if any, influence on other sculptors. Marisol is one of a small handful of artists, including ROBERT ARNESON and LOUISE BOURGEOIS, whose distinction is their distinctiveness – their works look like those of no other. —Mark Daniel Cohen

MARKETING No obstacle in the history of avant-garde art is more difficult, aside from making it, than selling it, given that originality is necessarily unfamiliar, simply because cultural merchants are predisposed to sell whatever resembles what they’ve already sold. By contrast, anything radically different encounters immediate obstacles – indeed, the more different the arts, the higher and more daunting the obstacles. One central difference between marketing literature, say, and selling visual art is that the former is offered wholesale while the latter is retail. Therefore, many copies of a book must be sold before it turns a profit for its publisher or some reward for its author. While a book that “sells” must sell tens of thousands of copies, a successful artist can have as few as a dozen collectors until he or she offers cheaper multiples in some form to a larger number of customers. That difference accounts for why selling avant-garde literature is intrinsically more problematic than selling original art. Another difference is that while books are sold at a modest multiple of the cost of the physical product, art dealers are necessarily Midases at selling their wares for many, many times the cost of the object’s physical materials. Indeed, selling any art for high prices resembles selling real estate or pleasure boats or, at a more common end, automobiles in that customers must be amicably separated from rather large amounts of money. Such talents must be rare, as many aspire while few succeed.

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MARTIN, AGNES (22 March 1912–16 December 2004) Born Canadian in Saskatchewan, she immigrated to the United States in 1932 to attend college in Washington State and New York. In the early 1960s, a few years after relocating from lower Manhattan to New Mexico, Martin began producing paintings of grids composed of small white bricks, so to speak, that run from edge to edge, both vertically and horizontally, incidentally reflecting the layout of uptown Manhattan. Perhaps sensing that she had reached an ultimate image, much as her near-contemporary AD REINHARDT had, she stopped painting for several years before returning to grids that were even more subtle in making thin, straight parallel lines that shimmer, and thus evoke a spiritual experience outside of themselves. Not unlike Reinhardt again, Martin was also an assertive writer: “Art work is a representation of our devotion to life. Everyone is devoted to life with an intensity far beyond our comprehension. The slightest hint of devotion to life in art work is received by all with gratitude.” Especially within group exhibitions, in my experience her work successfully shines through the quiet strength of subtlety.

MARX BROTHERS (Chico, b. Leonard M., 22 March 1887–11 October 1961; Harpo, b. Adolph-Arthur M., 23 November 1888–28 September 1964; Groucho, b. Julius Henry M., 2 October 1980–19 August 1977) The first great triplets in comedy, they became the model for other groups of three much of whose comedy depended upon differences among them. Whereas Groucho was intelligently verbal, Chico portrayed himself as illiterate but cunning. Between them Harpo was silent. They needed each other; without any one of them, their act would have been much less. Through the 1930s, when they were already in their forties, the Marx Brothers made several great films that are still classics decades later. (The questions of which of these flicks are best and why have been debated for decades.) Their principal imitators were the Three Stooges, in fact two brothers and another guy who were active from 1922 to 1970. Their more raucous comedy, often hilariously brilliant, appealed more to children. Other comic trios included the Ritz Brothers (active from 1925 into the late 1960s) and, briefly, Chevy Chase (1943), Steve Martin (1945), and Martin Short (1950) in the film ¡Three Amigos! (1986).

272 • MASEREEL, FRANS Trios differ from duos such as (George) Burns & (Gracie) Allen or Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis whose comedy depended upon one being “straight” (or pseudo-normal) while the other was askew. Both differ from solo comedians. (In improvised music, trios are likewise different from duets.) The number three was crucial to their identity and success, as I’m unaware of any comic quads or quints. When the Marx Brothers included their much younger brother called Zeppo (b., Herbert Manfred M.; 1901–79), to some personally funnier than his older brothers, he made no contribution to the ensemble other than being a handsome straight man whose role was easily assumed by others. Those familiar with American Jewish cultural history note that the Marx Brothers were GermanJewish, actually French-German-Jewish, rather than, like nearly every other major Jew in American show business, the descendant of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European.

worked in etchings and woodcuts with images memorialized in a handsome book. She cofounded AMERICAN ABSTRACT ARTISTS and served briefly as its president. Her paintings won respect from ILYA BOLOTOWSKY and AD REINHARDT, among others abstractionists slightly her junior. The latter once famously told an audience of Manhattan colleagues, “If not for Alice Trumbull Mason we would not be here nor in such strength.” On her father’s side she descended from John Trumbull (1756–1843), whose images of the Revolutionary War have survived. Her daughter Emily Mason (1932) and granddaughter Cecily Kahn (1959) both became abstract painters. Perhaps because abstraction is beyond gender, feminist publicists rarely acknowledge ATM’s art.

MATHEMATICAL POETRY (1969)

MASEREEL, FRANS (30 July 1889–3 January 1972) Born in Flemish Belgium, Masereel began as an illustrator of books written by others. However, because his woodcut graphics were strong enough to stand apart from any texts, he drew such masterful sequences that suggested narratives as Mein Stundenbuch (1919, Passionate Journey), subtitled variously “a novel without words” or “a novel told in 165 pictures.” One quality distinguishing his visual fictions from ordinary comics was the larger narrative distances, in both place and time, between one panel and both its predecessor and successor. By this measure did Masereel become the principal precursor of such later sophisticated visual fictioners as the Americans MILT GROSS, EDWARD GOREY, LYND WARD, Giacomo Patri (1898–1978), and the British-Canadian-Parisian Martin VaughnJames (1943–2009). Greater narrative distance between images also informs such better books initially for children as likewise wordless Picnic (original edition, 1984) by my college classmate Emily McCully (1939).

MASON, ALICE TRUMBULL (1904–71) To other modern American ABSTRACT painters, she was a pioneer, who decided by 1930 to produce only abstractions. After favoring biomorphic shapes, she accepted MONDRIAN’s influence for straighter edges. More than other nonrepresentational artists she

There has been little if any scholarship done on the origins of true mathematical poetry – which is poetry that does mathematics rather than merely discusses mathematics (or uses mathematical algorithms to choose its content, as in the OULIPO movement) – but it may be that LOUIS ZUKOFSKY’s A (1969) contains the first specimen of the form, an integral symbol out of calculus with the word, “music” at its top, and “speech” at its bottom, to provide the reader with a working mathematical description of Zukofsky’s concept of poetry. In the following decade Scott Helmes (1945) experimented surrealistically with words as fractions, the square root of words, and the like, notably in his “Nonadditive Postulations.” An anthology of mathematical poems, Against Infinity, appeared (and disappeared) in 1979, though it contained as many or more poems about mathematics as poems that did mathematics, including an arresting visual poem, “Eye of History,” by Robert Stodola, in which 3.14152, etc., in the shape of a circle surrounds 3.0000, etc., in the shape of a figure that is part circle and part straight line to illustrate the history of pi. His book also had a pair of numerical rectangles by RICHARD KOSTELANETZ (a pioneer of numerical poetry as opposed to mathematical poetry) that arithmetically mirror each other in a droll manner. Since Against Infinity other poets have worked with math, notably Leroy Gorman (1949) who once defined “the birth of tragedy” as the quantity “!” plus “?” squared; KARL KEMPTON, who has done fascinating things with the square root of minus one; JAKE BERRY, in his Equations, which HARRY POLKINHORN called, “(t)he mixing of registers which purists have

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always feared [Berry] has pushed to an extreme,” and BOB GRUMMAN, with a series of poems he calls “mathemaku” under way that predominantly investigate the results of the long division of such quantities as the actual color blue by such quantities as the dictionary definition of “blue.” —Bob Grumman

MATHEWS, HARRY (14 February 1930–25 January 2017) Educated in music at Harvard and then at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, Mathews lived, not unlike other experimental American writers before and since, most of his adult life abroad, becoming for years the only active American member of OULIPO, which was based in Paris. While favoring prosaic plots, Mathews uses highly original and playful language, and, like other experimental writers, he works in more than one genre. Linguistic possibilities appear to be his principal theme, as he is predisposed to extremes. Commercially published novels include The Conversions (1962), Tlooth (1966), The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1975, once bound into a single paperback volume along with its two predecessors), and Cigarettes (1987). From smaller presses have come Selected Declarations of Independence (1977), 20 Lines a Day (1988), and Singular Discourses (1988), which honors RAYMOND QUENEAU’s EXERCISES DE STYLE (1947) by describing male masturbation in sixty-one different ways, respecting a tour de force with another tour de force. Collaborating with Alastair Brotchie (1952), otherwise known as ALFRED JARRY’s masterful biographer, Mathews co-compiled Oulipo Compendium (1998), which stands as a monumental model of rich and witty documentation.

MATISSE, HENRI (31 December 1869–3 November 1954) Aside from his achievements as a major modern colorist whose canvases also redistributed emphases within a painting away from the center, his great invention was the cutout. Physically impaired in his later years, though always eager to produce art, Matisse worked with white paper painted with gouache (opaque pigments ground in water and thickened with glue) various in color. He then placed atop a continuous field various shapes that cutout with scissors. Though the process assumed the possibility of three-dimensionality, the

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works were meant to be hung on walls, much like his earlier paintings and his few reliefs. His summa cutout is The Swimming Pool (1952, thus at 83), which is over 6 feet long and more than 2 feet high, portraying swimmers from various angles. To quote from a MoMA publication, “Matisse combines contrasting viewing angles – from above looking down into the water or sideways as if from the water – so that the different postures of the figures themselves determine the composition as a whole . . . to create an idealized environment.” Other cutout gems are The Negro Boxer (1947) and The Sorrow of the King (1952), which is a more complex large field, approximately 10 feet by 15 feet that some regard as Matisse’s final self-portrait. Jazz (1947), his BOOK-ART gem, for which he incidentally also wrote the text, was likewise composed from cutouts.

MATTA, ROBERTO (11 November 1911–23 November 2002) In Paris in 1936, after working for two years at the architectural studio of LE CORBUSIER, Matta turned to painting and associated himself with the SURREALISTS. He quickly became one of the principal practitioners of automatism, painting spontaneously and in an improvisational manner, without the intercession of conscious control, directed by deep impulses so as to render visual metaphors for the reality of inner experience. He called his early paintings “inscapes” and “psychological morphologies.” Unlike the collages, dream landscapes, and nightmare narratives of the other Surrealists, Matta’s paintings were vistas of seemingly infinite and luminescent space, filled only with small biomorphic shapes, free-floating angular surfaces, and disembodied outlines of rectangles and ovals, drawn in bright colors but signifying nothing. Despite the vast emptiness he portrayed, Matta seemed to load his expanses with vigorous movement, as if the void itself were suffering cataclysm. His spaces are at once both psychological and cosmic, depicting both the profundity of the spirit and of the universe. In 1946, Matta changed his style and began painting large canvases with images of creatures half-biological and halfmachine, engaged in inexplicable activities, indeed often engaged in violent struggles. But it is his early paintings, his “inscapes,” that are his most effective, and among the most successful works by any artist in practicing the Surrealist intent of bringing unconscious experience into consciousness. —Mark Daniel Cohen

274 • MATTA-CLARK, GORDON MATTA-CLARK, GORDON (22 June 1943–27 August 1978) Matta-Clark’s projects involved the excision of large holes from buildings in urban centers, revealing the layering of floors above and below and the vistas of surrounding buildings, along with brief moments of sky framed by the crowded and encroaching cityscape. Although at first glance it would seem otherwise, Matta-Clark’s exercise of cutting sections out of existing structures has more to do with the transformations of the natural terrain by EARTH ARTISTS such as ROBERT SMITHSON, for whom he once worked, than with the reconfigurations of institutional spaces of MICHAEL ASHER. Matta-Clark simply moved the reconfiguration procedure from the natural to the artificial environment. But where Earth Art’s exposure of previously unseen geological layers may be viewed as revelatory – as capable of instigating new sensations – Matta-Clark’s projects were exercises in social criticism. His deletions from human-made structures conveyed suggestions of the social hierarchies and the economic stratification that are represented by the tiers of floors that recede in seemingly endless repeating patterns. —Mark Daniel Cohen

MATYUSHIN, MIKHAIL (1861–14 October 1934) Matyushin was the fourth collaborator, along with ALEKSEI KRUCHONYKH, KAZIMIR MALEVICH, and VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV in the pathbreaking opera Victory Over the Sun (1913). Though Matyushin was at the time a violinist in the Court Orchestra, where he had worked for the previous twenty years, his music for Victory includes dissonances and sounds evocative of cannon shots and airplanes. Turning to writing and publishing, Matyushin in 1914 established a SMALL PRESS, The Crane, which printed audacious texts by Khlebnikov and Malevich, among others, in addition to his own translations of French theoretical writings. Because less is known about Matyushin, at least in English, I quote from Andrei B. Nakov’s history of Russian avant-garde art 1915–21: Taking off from certain presuppositions of the famous “fourth dimension,” he situated man at the center of a new cosmic image. While taking into account the interaction of the visible and the

audible, in his plastic system a very special place was reserved for psychocensorial sensation. The superseding of the synthesist theories of the symbolists led him to the conception of synthetic images, the formulation of which was carried out with the intermediary of abstract-geometrical images. Some of these findings appeared in Matyushin’s 1932 book whose title translates as “The Rules and Variability in Color Combinations,” which he thought would be applicable to various applied arts. I saw it firsthand at a great MoMA exhibition The Russian AvantGarde Book 1910–1934 (2002), where it was indeed impressive.

MAXIMAL ART (c. 1970) This was my coinage, which I’d be the first to admit has scarcely taken, for works that, in contrast to MINIMAL ART, contain more of the stuff of art than previous art. A principal literary example of maximal art is JAMES JOYCE’s FINNEGANS WAKE, which, though it relates a simple story, has a wealth of words and, by extension, a wealth of references. Another is MILTON BABBITT’s multiple SERIALIZATION, where each note contributes to several musical developments. (I remember telling Babbitt that another composer claimed his work presented several hundred “musical events” within a few minutes; as true to his esthetic as ever, Babbitt thought that number was not particularly high.) Influenced by James Joyce, the playwright CHARLES LUDLAM used “Maximal” to measure his own ambitions. The term “Maximal art” is also applicable to my very favorite JOHN CAGE pieces: Williams Mix, which likewise offers several hundred acoustic events in only a few minutes; EUROPERA, which draws upon dozens of classic operas; and HPSCHD, which comes from a large number of independent sound sources. Maximality in visual art might be harder to measure. It is certainly implied in the multiple references of JASPER JOHNS; it is explicit in the several Plexiglas levels of John Cage’s Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel (1969) and in the kinetic sculptures of GEORGE RHOADS. I find Maximality in AD REINHARDT’s cartoons about the art world (in sharp contrast to his decidedly Minimal paintings) and in MERCE CUNNINGHAM’s choreography, though others may disagree.

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MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR (19 July 1893–14 April 1930) Born in Russian Georgia, Mayakovsky studied art before turning to the poetry that made him famous, initially among the FUTURIST painters and poets before the Russian Revolution, then as one of the first avant-gardists to support the Revolution actively, and later as a favored beneficiary of the new Soviet state. He visited NEW YORK in the mid-1920s and wrote a memorable poem about it. Mayakovsky collaborated with major avant-garde artists in poster designs and, in his own poetry, broached enough visual devices to warrant an extended analysis by GERALD JANECEK in his classic book The Look of Russian Literature (1984). Among Mayakovsky’s minor formal inventions was the “stepladder poem,” since popularized by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919), among others, in which narrow lines run diagonally down a wider page. Though Mayakovsky’s poetry was never as deviant as that of VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV and, especially, ALEKSEI KRUCHONYKH, the other principals in Futurist poetry, it was popular (for reasons that remain mysterious to the reader of English translations). Precisely because he was a state-favored poet, much as Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–75) became a Sovie composer, every new work of Mayakovsky’s was subjected to excessive critical scrutiny, as often by ignorant commissars as by knowledgeable critics. After his last two plays The Bedbug (1929) and The Bath House (1930) were negatively received, Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930. (Shostakovich chain-smoked and struck Westerners as insufferably nervous.) The poet’s name, long spelled in America as I have it, is now sometimes spelled Maiakovskii.

MAYER, HANSJÖRG, EDITION (1964) Founded eponymously by German (1943) whose family owned part of a Stuttgart printing business that facilitated his producing handsome books, EHJM, as he prefers to call it, has published remarkably few volumes and then even fewer world-class artist/writers more than once: TOM PHILLIPS, EMMETT WILLIAMS, Reinhard Döhl (1934–2004), Peter Schmidt (1931–80), and especially DIETER ROTH, all of whose art its publisher patently loves. In this selectivity, EHJM is closer to an art gallery than a traditional book publisher.

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Indeed, fortunate was such a fecund artist/writer as Roth to connect to Mayer, because EHJM generously published since the 1960s over two dozen thick DR books in an edition uniform in size (how traditional), the sum of them nearly one meter long on any bookshelf. Reasonably priced on publication, before Roth’s reputation burgeoned, they have since become dear. Another unique mark of EHJM is Mayer’s favoring, from the beginning, a sans-serif Futura typeface almost as a logo for otherwise disparate contents and publications. Indeed, Futura became the title of a single-sheet poster-sized fold-out periodical that EHJM published from 1965 to 1968. Bronac Ferran’s The Smell of Ink and Soil (2017) is a bilingual appreciative history of EHJM.

MAYO See MURAYAMA, Tomoyoshi.

McCAFFERY, LARRY (13 May 1946) As a professor at a California state university, he made it his mission to interview at length the most important fiction writers of his generation; but where he differs from the folks behind the Paris Review, not to mention other RETROGRADE magazines, is in his including the more avant-garde figures. Thus, Some Other Frequency (1996), his most distinguished collection, includes chapters on LYN HEJINIAN, KENNETH GANGEMI, KATHY ACKER, and DEREK PELL, to mention several important writers rarely acknowledged elsewhere in fiction chatter. As a trained scholar, McCaffery did more homework than most literary interviewers; so that he knew, upon hearing an answer, how and where to ask the next eliciting question. Consider this last sensitivity, the inquisitive response, to distinguish stronger interviewers from weaker. Another true measure is McCaffery’s getting out of an interviewee facts and opinions not seen in print before. One editorial problem with Some Other Frequency, however, comes from McCaffery’s unfortunate decision to publish his interviews in alphabetical order by authors’ names, so that the less experimental appear beside the more experimental, creating in the mind of the reader who goes straight through the book that neither belongs with the other. A shrewder editorial intelligence would have created a more sensitive critical flow.

276 • McCAFFERY, STEVE McCAFFERY, STEVE

even local art reviewers. In drawing upon Asian culture for his California art, McLaughlin resembles, among others, the composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003) and the poet KENNETH REXROTH. The adept British guitarist John McL. (1942), also known as Mahavishnu, is another guy.

See THE FOUR HORSEMEN.

McCAY, WINSOR (26 September 1869–26 July 1934) McCay was one of printed comics’s most skillful craftsmen, producing Sunday strips so visually dazzling that they would be inconceivable in today’s remaining analog newspapers. They were filled with colorful details and experiments with visual distortion, all of which were simply the dreams of a character named Little Nemo. McCay’s strip (variously called “Little Nemo in Slumberland” and “In the Land of Wonderful Dreams,” depending upon whom he was working for at the time) exhibited serious weaknesses, including bland storylines, boring writing, and predictable conclusions (each strip ended with Nemo awaking from his dream in a little square at the bottom right corner of the page). Despite these shortcomings, McCay expanded the visual repertoire of the comic strip as no one else had (since his talents as a craftsman far outshone those of his contemporary George Herriman). One of the first people to experiment with film animation in the first decade of the 20th century, McCay did not have the advantage of background cels, so he had to redraw completely the scene for each frame of his black-and-white cartoon Gertie, the Trained Dinosaur (1909). Though lacking much of a story, the cartoon has a stunning visual reality, even as the entire background (also Gertie herself) shimmers with each slight misstep of his pen. —Geof Huth

McLAUGHLIN, JOHN (21 May 1898–22 March 1976) He differed from other American abstract painters of his generation in learning not from Europe but from Japan, where he lived in the 1930s, mastering the language well enough to work as a military interpreter during World War II. Thus are his scrupulously abstract paintings inspired by a Japanese respect for a void between things. Self-taught and thus limited in his facility with brushes, reportedly purchasing his art supplies from a local department store, McLaughlin didn’t begin making visual art until his thirties. A belated 2016 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with 52 paintings and 13 works on paper, surprised

McLUHAN, MARSHALL (21 July 1911–31 December 1980) Beginning with The Mechanical Bride (1951), McLuhan examined mass-cultural artifacts and then mass culture itself with a critical sensibility honed on the close rhetorical analysis of English literature. This approach generated a wealth of original insights, such as the perception, then original and now obvious, that the representational discontinuity distinguishing modernist painting and literature resembled the newspaper’s front page, with its discontinuous field of unrelated articles, oversized headlines, and occasional captioned pictures. One theme of Understanding Media (1964) holds that this discontinuity reflects the impact of electronic information technology and that, differences in quality notwithstanding, “the great work of a period has much in common with the poorest work.” All this insight into mass culture did not prevent McLuhan from proposing a necessary and persuasive measure for distinguishing esthetic quality from kitsch: “How heavy a demand does it make on the intelligence? How inclusive a consciousness does it focus?” The great paradox of McLuhan personally was that he had remarkably little firsthand experience of the new media that he seemed to understand so brilliantly. His sometime student HUGH KENNER wondered once if his former teacher ever sat through an entire movie. He rarely watched television. If one definition of a “genius” is someone with great insight into things he knows little about, McLuhan epitomizes that sort of higher mentality. His medium was books, which he read adventurously and which he wrote brilliantly. Not unlike other literary adventurers, McLuhan cofounded a literary magazine, Explorations (1953– 59), and then edited an anthology drawn from its pages, Explorations in Communication (1960). In the 1960s, he also collaborated with the book designer Quentin Fiore (1920) in producing imaginatively designed books that looked fresh when they were reprinted intact in the 1990s by the computer-waving magazine Wired, which incidentally listed McLuhan on its masthead as “patron saint.” Since one book McLuhan knew thoroughly was James Joyce’s FINNEGANS WAKE, he wrote insightfully about its general structure and

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operation. The Essential McLuhan (1995) is a rich recent selection of his thoughts, both heavy and light, on various subjects. His influence persisted into the 21st century, when publishers reissued his books, as well as fresh collections of his writings.

MECHANICAL THEATER See RHOADS, George; SCHLEMMER, Oskar.

MEEGEREN, HAN VAN (10 December 1889–30 December 1947) This Dutchman was the preeminent art forger of modern times, specializing in the production of fake Vermeers that initially survived detection. Meegeren used canvases manufactured in Jan Vermeer’s time (1632–75), removing the previous paint before duplicating style and signature down to the finest details. Shrewdly he calculated that he should make paintings that Vermeer might have produced at the beginning of his career, from which few originals survive. A disappointed classical painter, Meegeren initially fantasized that, if these paintings could pass for a master’s, in turn he would be regarded as Vermeer’s equal. Once successful with one semblance of Vermeer, he made more, selling them for increasingly higher prices. His downfall came after the Nazi Herman Goering purchased a Vermeer that originated with Meegeren, making the living Dutchman appear after the war to be a collaborator with the enemy. Forced to stand trial, Meegeren had, in an unexpected twist, to prove himself a forger, which, given his own ambitions and pride, he did to an excessive degree. The illusory success of Meegeren’s fraud has incidentally undermined the business of art certification to this day, while his career makes most subsequent “appropriation” artists look like superficial duffers. Meegeren subsequently became, to academic philosophers like Nelson Goodman (1906–98), the most useful example in any discussion of whether esthetic value depends upon more authentic authorship than visual experience. Though not what the artist intended, such immortality constitutes an avant-garde kind of inadvertent surprise; don’t dismiss it.

MEKAS, JONAS (24 December 1922) Aside from his achievements as a (Lithuanian) poet and personal filmmaker, he’s been a true CULTURAL

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LEADER on behalf of alternative American filmmaking from the 1950s into the 21st century, not only as a passionate reviewer long at The Village Voice weekly newspaper and the co-publisher of the indispensable periodical Film Culture (1955–96) but as a founder of the venerable Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan. In my own judgment, however, his greatest achievements are his critical chronicles of avant-garde NEW YORK CITY, fortunately collected into several books, some of which were published in the US, others in Germany in English (which was his fourth language). If not for his remembering, the result would have been absence and thus loss.

MÉLIÈS, GEORGES (8 December 1861–21 January 1938; b. Marie-GeorgesJean M.) Probably the first to decide consciously to make artful film, he discovered at the end of the 19th century how the new medium differed from live performance by cutting from one scene to another, rather than showing continuous movement, typically introducing the appearance or disappearance of a visible figure (in the tradition of theatrical magic, which he had previously practiced). Among his other cinematic discoveries were time-lapse photography, substitution splices, multiple exposures, dissolves, and hand-painted color. Between 1896 and 1913, he reportedly made hundreds of films, in length from a single minute to forty minutes. By common consent, the most substantial film were fantasies, epitomized by his A Trip to the Moon (1902). Likewise a pioneer in distribution, Méliès established his own theater, which is comparable to selfpublishing in literature. Here his letterhead promised “transformations, tricks, fairy-tales, apotheoses, artistic and fantastic scenes, comic subjects, war pictures, fantasies, and illusions.” Misfortunes contributed to the end of his filmmaking by 1912, more than two decades before his death. More than a century later, thanks to new duplication technologies, his best silent films still look marvelous.

MELVILLE, HERMAN (1 August 1819–28 September 1891) As the most experimental fiction writer in 19th-century America, Herman Melville transformed the novel and laid the foundation for 20th-century MODERNISM. The White Whale that sank the Pequod gave a future to American experimental fiction.

278 • MELVILLE, HERMAN Melville’s early life was almost a reverse Dickens novel. Born into wealth and privilege with a notable pedigree – his maternal grandfather was the “Hero of Fort Stanwix” during the American Revolution and his paternal grandfather participated in the Boston Tea Party – by the time he was thirteen his father was bankrupt and dead after a fit of madness. Left penniless, the large Melville family became dependent on the charity of their extended family to live. By the time he was 20 Melville, like many other poor American men, went to sea. During his three-and-a half years away Melville accumulated a maritime education that would fuel his writing for the next forty years. Having published five novels in as many years in his late twenties, he began his sixth, Moby-Dick (1851), as a story about whaling – a work he advised his friend Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1815–1882) would be “a strange sort of a book.” Beginning his tale about whaling using Dana’s “voice from the forecastle” that had become a staple of sea fiction, Melville lets Ishmael’s voice recede as around chapter 24 (“The Advocate”) when the novel assumes other identities: a play, a practical treatise on whaling, a lyric poem to whaling, a catalog of mythological whalers (chapter 82 “The Honor and Glory of Whaling”), an encyclopedia on whales (chapter 32 “Cetology”), a maritime art history course (chapter 55 “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales”), a mariner training guide, an adventure story, a comedy, a maritime song book, a Shakespearean revenge tragedy, and an ever-evolving allegory of Melville’s America and ours – in sum, America’s epic poem in prose. Then there is Captain Ahab, the greatest Shakespearean character outside of SHAKESPEARE and a key to reading the history of the writing of Moby-Dick. As Melville was writing it, he read a new edition of the complete SHAKESPEARE plays that he bought. He devoured the work and transformed it into the great American novel, breaking through the 19th-century mask to expose the modernist impulse for the archeology of the internal, for the deep dive into consciousness and time, history and myth. Melville published an even more experimental book a year later as Pierre; or The Ambiguities (1852), which turned the novel inward away from the sea and into the biographical depths of Melville and his family. Dark and puzzling, both gripping and alienating, Pierre is an experimental psychodrama and an intense traditional melodrama that anticipates the Modernist concerns with time and consciousness. Nonetheless, both major books failed with reviewers and in the marketplace. Though descending into obscurity Melville never stopped writing. Moving into short fiction, he published several works now considered classics including

Benito Cereno and the great novella “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In 1866 Melville published his first book of poetry called Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War. As a meditation on the events of the Civil War, it is today considered second only to Whitman’s Drum-Taps (1865) as an exploration of that war and its impact. The great work in verse that consumed him for the next decade was the epic poem, Clarel (1876). Longer than John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), if not the longest poem in the American canon, Clarel is the story of a theology student’s journey through the Holy Land. As an experiment in form rooted in traditional verse, Clarel becomes a precursor to the radical experiments in form and content practiced by EZRA POUND and T.S. ELIOT. Melville’s impact on the avant-garde is rooted in his greatest novel. The influence of Moby-Dick since the Melville revival in the 1920’s has been astounding. From the American Abstract Expressionists to science fiction films and rock music, Moby-Dick seems to be everywhere. The French New Wave film director JeanPierre Melville (1917–73; b. J.-P. Grumbach) took his surname as a nom de guerre while serving in the French Resistance during World War II; the 60’s psychedelic rock band Moby Grape (1966–) was named for the book while the German funeral doom metal band Ahab (2004) took their name from Old Thunder. In a 1927 newspaper interview WILLIAM FAULKNER memorably named Moby-Dick the book he most wished he had written. JACKSON POLLOCK had a dog named Ahab and in 1943 painted Blue (Moby-Dick). ORSON WELLES explored the dynamics of acting the novel in his experimental play Moby Dick-Rehearsed (1955) and then played Father Mapple in John Huston’s 1956 film version. The Pequod’s first mate supplied the name for the worldwide coffee chain called Starbucks. The book that publicly disappeared in 1851 has been called the Great American Novel. Though many books about Melville have appeared in the last hundred years, the unique monument, for nearly one thousand pages both detailed and various, is The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville 1819–1891 (1951, two volumes) by Jay Leyda (1910–88), otherwise known as a major film historian. —John Rocco The origins and character of Melville’s innovations in the art of fiction point to ideas that are central to an understanding of modernity in Western philosophy and literature. Beginning his career as an adventure writer (indeed an escape artist) in his first two novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), Melville anticipates the American road narrative, and in this regard surpasses JACK KEROUAC for the wildness of his adventures,

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his lawlessness, his carelessness for respectable society, and his intelligence. Melville is no stranger to mutiny, jail, running away, living with cannibals, drug use, fellatio (symbolized in a description of a woman swallowing fish whole), violent combat with sailors and South Pacific Islanders, committing enormities of prolix and facetious witticism, fraternizing with desperados and illiterates, freeloading, casually parodying venerable fields of learning, even frolicking with teenage girls. In his third novel, Mardi (1849), Melville turned to philosophical exploration, but the goal, evidently, remains escapism; and in this effort, alas, his investigations met with critical failure. A more cogent methodology and better scholarship are brought to bear in Moby-Dick, and this production, from the perspective of the 20th and 21st centuries, is one of the great achievements in the canon of world literature. Much of this success is due to the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804– 64), who provided Melville with a model of literary originality, an enthusiasm for conceptual experimentation, a sensitive touch in deploying nuanced facetiousness, an Aristophanic humor (both emotionally and philosophically), and, most significantly, a focused consideration of “post-Calvinist” concerns regarding the human condition, the nature of the state, realistic expectations for society, and the character and the limits of the individual man. Altogether, this is a collection of data points that, to the present writer, best define “early-modernism” (in the English language, John Milton is clearly the representative figure of this aesthetic). Because of Melville’s historic circumstance with Dutch Reform and Scottish Presbyterian antecedents – moreover transplanted to “practical” and “prosperous” America – these cultural-philosophical proclivities took flight. As in Hawthorne and in Milton, we can identify SURREALISM in Moby-Dick (1851), as well as artifacts of stream-of-consciousness and “cinematic” narrative (remarkably, before cinema was invented). Such narratological innovations also are exercised in Melville’s next novel The Confidence-Man (1857), which moves from the former novel’s Baconian survey of science and philosophical understanding to a more tightly-controlled linguistic overview of the problem of certainty, which is explored in a farrago of clever (and sometimes mystifying, though not irresolvable) vignettes. Something of Charles Jencks’ notion of “late-modernity” reveals the character of Melville’s experimentation in The Confidence-Man. Broadly considered, as a late-modern Melville is writing for the “professional devotees of high art.” More narrowly, Melville is exploring the role of context in bringing linguistic clarity to our philosophical understanding, so that an identification and analysis of fictitious contexts

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(and the “nearby” contexts of readers and writers) brings cogency and insight to our thinking; the similarity to Talmud is striking. In literature and philosophy, compare the activity of Jonathan Swift in A Tale of a Tub (1704), Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire (1962), or Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations (1953) and On Certainty (1969). In their work they are describing what they are doing, and vice versa. And this leads back to Milton and early-modernism. Their project is the revelation of an undergirding epistemology and philosophy of the human condition expressed in a multi-valent linguistic formulation of what is, effectively, both modern (that is, what is “new”) and wise (that is, what is “useful”) in the past 2500 years of thought from the Levant and Europe. From the Old Testament to Plato to Milton, and so on, this knowledge is elaborated through fictitious contexts – and the notion of artificiality, an awareness of “cosmic artifice,” is perhaps the signal point-of-departure in this exploration. Throughout his career Melville exercises this theme-that-is-a-method in a variety of clever ways; and his conclusions include doubts about the affluence and faux security that come with modernity, especially in the American context. Rather than rejecting modernity, however, Melville seeks to encourage it with the perspicacity that is the culmination of the Western experience. His criticisms range from an exposé of the lack of integrity and moral courage in a type conveniently labeled “middle-class conformist” (Mr. Starbuck in Moby-Dick), to tragic reflections (see the end of The Confidence-Man) upon the loss of Old Testament wisdom and virtues, and how such degeneration will destroy the American experiment in government and culture. —Carter Kaplan

MENCKEN, H. L. (12 September 1880–29 January 1956) An audaciously courageous writer, routinely willing to write what others would not, he made a monumentally unprecedented move with his A Schrimpflexicon (1928), where he published under his own name a wide variety of negative reviews of himself and his work. The epithet, derived from the German, identifies, roughly, a dictionary of vituperation. Ever the earnest editor, Mencken divided his gatherings into chapters whose titles must be sampled to be believed: Zoölogical, Genealogical, Pathological, As a TruthSeeker, As a Scoundrel, Miscellaneous Elegances, Winces of the Gailed, and Kosher or Terefah? While publishing under one’s own name a book with words

280 • MERTON, THOMAS all but entirely from other people can be a common move; a book entirely of negative notices became singular. Reflecting Mencken’s influence, I once published some of the dumbest editors’ rejection letters to come my way; but since celebrity equal to his has never come my way, negative published reviews of me or my work are scarce. One paradox of Mencken’s career is that the independent critical courage that made him famous during the 1920s became less fashionable in later decades; it’s rare today.

MERTON, THOMAS (31 January 1915–10 December 1968) A Frenchman who became an American, a Protestant who became a Roman Catholic and then a Trappist monk, Merton was also an extremely various and prolific writer whose work falls into many categories. There is a classic young man’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948); there are pacifist polemics; there are sympathetic explanations of the monastic life and Catholic faith. After his death, Merton’s principal American literary publisher issued not only a thick book of Literary Essays (1981) but also a yet thicker book of Collected Poems (1977). Merton’s avant-garde masterwork is a novel written in 1941, inspired by his friendship with two Columbia College classmates, ROBERT LAX and Edward Rice (1918–2001), not to mention the publication of FINNEGANS WAKE two years before. Likewise released after his death as My Argument with the Gestapo (1969), this novel has the subtitle A Macaronic Journal, that adjective referring to the occasional mixing of languages in the text (from p. 228): Rouse. Week. Sturz. Bekom. Gross lettercatchers is the orders of the day. Guess you no comprenny, you jigs-french. Youse of the lapin races, aside, hide in your lascivious newspapers. Faz dolor di honta rossu figure Ecartez vous, cheaps. Hoc es fe Trowel-spiel, or the Roarspiegel. Begins in the first with Latin declensions, fur monstrar la natura clasica de la fiesta. Continua mit whole speeches from imitation marble paradigms, eventually concatenating intself upwards into a durchbruch of the meistens evotive hocking and choking: it y a des scènes dance la rue, e d’autres encore dans la maison. More examples of this idiosyncratic Merton style appear in his extraordinary letters to Lax, collected as A Catch of Anti-Letters (1978), a classic of its genre

(literary correspondence), which is implicitly about the stylistic influence of 1930s experimental literature, particularly JAMES JOYCE and GERTRUDE STEIN, upon writers who were young at the time of its publication. Here is Merton acknowledging the early passing of another college buddy, the painter AD REINHARDT: Just heard today by clipping from Schwester Therese about Reinhardt. Reinhardt he daid. Reinhardt done in. He die. Last Wednesday he die with the sorrows in the studio. Just said he died in a black picture he said. The sorrows here said that he has gone into the black picture for he is dead. I would recommend, as an aside, that anyone in the vicinity of Lexington, Kentucky, visit to the Trappist monastery, Gethsemane, in which Merton spent most of his life. The place and its setting are magnificent and sacred.

MERZ (1920) This was a fertile coinage by KURT SCHWITTERS, who took it from the German word kommerziell, torn from a newspaper, that he glued into an early COLLAGE. From 1923 to 1932 Schwitters published a magazine likewise titled Merz, which then became his SIGNATURE, likewise applicable to the Merzwerbe advertising agency that he briefly ran and to the monumental ASSEMBLAGE called Merzbau that burgeoned within his own house in Hannover, Germany during the 1930s. When he left Nazi Germany first for Norway and then for the British midlands, Schwitters took the term Merzbau with him; it didn’t need translation. Now historians regard it as a subdivision of DADA.

MESSIAEN, OLIVIER (10 December 1908–27 April 1992) While Messiaen is among the most widely recorded, and highly regarded, of 20th-century composers, he is still frequently mischaracterized, particularly in the United States. Certain elements of his style – the use of repetition, the incorporation of birdsong – have been deemed banal or perverse by those who lack a proper understanding of his basic orientation. Most fundamentally, Messiaen was unconcerned with forward-moving

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harmonic development and with theme and variation – the traditional strategies of western classical music. What he sought to achieve in his music was a kind of mystical timelessness; his pieces are contemplations – of the divine, of nature, of human love – rather than narratives. Many of his most distinctive characteristics – the use of modes, of so-called non-retrogradable rhythms (symmetrical units that are the same played forwards and backwards), of massive blocks of sound, of rhythmic cycles, of repetition, of birdsong – are used precisely to prevent a sense of forward movement. At the same time, Messiaen is not the soothing new age mystic certain record labels have tried to market, as his music is far too complex for that; and while some of it is tender, it can also be frenetic and abrasive. Messiaen’s output was large, and is divisible into certain distinct phases, though each phase builds on the previous one, rather than negating it. His most avantgarde works, and the greatest as well, date from the mid-1940s to the late-1960s. While retaining SIGNATURE elements of his early mode-based, somewhat post-Debussyean style, Messiaen added rhythms and melodies derived from birdsong, adapted elements from various Asian traditions, and experimented with abstract methods of construction (as in the Mode de valeurs et d’intensités from 1950, which systematized volume, duration, and attack into the equivalent of scales, and thus greatly influenced the development of 1950s total serialism by KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN and PIERRE BOULEZ). Messiaen’s use of birdsong was far from bucolic and picturesque, in the manner of 19th-century program music. Indeed, in its purest form, as in Réveil des oiseaux (1953) and Oiseaux exotiques (1955–56), it was not embellishment, but an organizing principle, and led to music of surpassing originality – and to the evocation of an otherworldly suprareality, a hidden face of nature. Messiaen’s last phase, beginning around 1970, was one of reconciliation, in which all the most characteristic elements of earlier periods were blended together. Unfortunately, the pieces of these years often seem nothing more than pastiches of his earlier work, and there is a marked decline in quality, despite the production of some of his most large-scale works, such as the opera Saint François d’Assise (1975–82). —Tony Coulter

METEORS As very free markets, artistic communities, particularly in visual arts, are hospitable to meteors who/that make a brief appearance, earning some prominence, perhaps

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making some money, and then disappearing. In literature, they are the “one book” writers whose later efforts cannot equal earlier successes, if they appear at all. I’d list writers’ names I remember, were they not unfamiliar now, recognizing as well that others, perhaps too many others, have slipped my (and others’) mind. Short-lived success customarily reflects a fashion, some mass-media publicity, and/or the recommendation of a powerful person. Among visual artists benefitting from the last kind of leverage, perhaps the most notorious was Gandy Brodie (1924–75), whom MEYER SCHAPIRO once identified as “one of the best painters of his generation.” That encomium indicatively is remembered longer than Brodie’s art. While some art careers are meteoric, so are certain art galleries whose rise and fall should not forgotten. Among them, during my decades in NEW YORK CITY, was the Stefanotty Gallery that opened regally on 57th Street in 1973, reportedly backed by an heiress-collector. Before it closed three years later, it exhibited VITO ACCONCI, WILLIAM WEGMAN, and ALLAN KAPROW, among others, in addition to publishing a book of my fiction. At last report, however, its principal, Robert Stefanotti [sic] (1947) had become a Catholic priest. Among the artists exhibited in his space was a more spectacular meteor named LES LEVINE (1935), who went from his native Ireland through Canada to New York, arriving in the mid-1960s. More skilled than most at negotiation, he had by 1972 mounted gallery exhibitions, exhibited tapes made with a video portapak that he purchased early, and contributed his prose to both art magazines and newspapers. Such was his celebrity that a short-lived restaurant was named after him (though the inspiration might have been another Levine). However, by the late 1970s he was gone, at least from the ART WORLD, though he’s still alive decades later and perhaps, surprisingly, still residing in New York City, one hopes, off his receipts.

METRIC MODULATION (1910s) In a general sense of the word, metric modulation is a change of time signature. In special modern usage, proleptically applied by CHARLES IVES and systematically cultivated by ELLIOTT CARTER, metric modulation is a technique in which a rhythmic pattern is superposed on another, heterometrically, and then supersedes it and becomes the basic meter. Usually, such time signatures are mutually prime, e.g., 4/4 and 3/8, and so have no common divisors.

282 • METZGER, GUSTAV Thus, the change of the basic meter decisively alters the numerical content of the beat, but the minimal denominator (1/8 when 4/4 changes to 3/8; 1/16 when, e.g., 5/8 changes to 7/16, etc.) remains constant in duration. —Nicolas Slonimsky

METZGER, GUSTAV (10 April 1926–1 March 2017) Just as several of the more advanced figures in ENGLISH LITERATURE were born outside Britain, likewise in British art – not only artists like WYNDHAM LEWIS and art publishers such as HANSJORG MAYER but such art historians as E. H. GOMBRICH. Among the most radical was Metzger, born in Germany of Polish-Jewish parents. Coming to England as a teenager, he became by the 1960s the most visible advocate of anti-capitalist art. Announcing his theme of Auto-Destructive Art in a 1959 manifesto, Metzger organized groups, produced art events, and sponsored the Destruction in Art Symposium (better remembered simply as DIAS) while exhibiting works of art meant to expose capitalism. The irony was that such a ferocious threat was an elfin man, while his principal academic publicist became the tall American academic art historian Kristine Stiles (1947). In London Metzger died.

MEYERHOLD, VSEVOLOD (28 January 1874–2 February 1939; b. Karl-Theodor Kasimir M.) The more innovative of the two great early Soviet directors (the other being Constantin Stanislavsky [1863–1938]), Meyerhold was a sophisticated eclectic who drew upon sources both traditional and alternative. (In this balance, he resembled his contemporary Max Reinhardt, who worked out of pre-Hitler Germany.) Learning from the circus and other forms of vaudeville, Meyerhold came to see mime as superior to speech. He also proposed alternative seating arrangements. In The House of Interludes, a theater designed for his experiments, the hall was arranged like a restaurant bar with the audience seated at tables while the action occurred around them. James Roose-Evans describes a 1911 production of Molière’s Don Juan, where Meyerhold “removed the front curtains and the footlights and built a semicircular proscenium. The stage was lit by a huge

candelabra and chandeliers, and all the lights in the auditorium were on so that it resembled a vast ballroom.” After the Soviet Revolution, which he supported, even heading the state theater organization until 1921, Meyerhold developed a theory of biomechanics, which he incorporated into theatrical training, that made aspiring actors part athletes, part acrobats, part robots. The result was not only that every theatrical movement could be planned in advance, down to tiny details, but that human feelings would be eliminated. Roose-Evans also recalls a 1926 production of Gogol’s popular The Government Inspector that was set not in a small town, as in the original, but in Moscow: There was a semi-circular-shaped set, like the inside of a drum, in which were fifteen doors. The main action took place on a sloping platform which emerged out of the darkness for each scene. In the scene where the officials arrive to bribe Kheslakov secretly, Meyerhold achieved one of his most startling effects. Suddenly, all the doors in the circular wall opened and in each appeared an official offering money. At the end, as the General was carried off in a strait-jacket on a stretcher, a white curtain was lowered, announcing in gold letters the arrival of the real Inspector General. When it was raised, instead of the live actors there were painted dummies arranged like a tableau of the final scene. All of this sounds quite marvelous, even today. Not unlike other theater directors, Meyerhold had many assistants who subsequently established their own distinguished careers, including SERGEI EISENSTEIN. However, once Joseph Stalin assumed control of Soviet culture, socialist realism became the norm and then the rule in Moscow theater. By 1932, the principal Soviet newspaper, Pravda, began an endless attack on all experiment in art as representing capitalist decadence. By 1938, Meyerhold’s theater was closed, its director left unemployed. Invited in June 1939 to the Ail-Union Convention of Theater Directors to make a public display of submission, he gave instead an impassioned speech defending theatrical experiment and denouncing government-imposed uniformity. A few days later, Meyerhold was arrested and deported to an Arctic concentration camp that, scarcely young at the time, he did not leave. Shortly after his arrest, his wife, a noted actress, was found dead with her throat cut, her face disfigured, and her body punctured with knife wounds. The lesson of their deaths was not lost on

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those concerned with theater, both within the Soviet Union and outside it.

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MICHAUX, HENRI (24 May 1899–18 October 1984)

MICHALS, DUANE (18 February 1932) In addition to commercial portraiture and, with his book The Photographic Illusion (1975), a useful manual on more imaginative photography, Michals has produced sequences of photographic images not to document stages in an event but to evoke a story in the tradition of, say, FRANS MASEREEL. Two qualities that make these stories appropriate for photography, rather than film or print, are that the distance between images approximates the time it takes the reader to turn the page, and that the mystery of the plot depends the reader’s imagining actions that must have happened between the images. As Martin Vaughn-James said of his own visual fiction, “Between one frame and the next something has happened – an unknowable event.” In Michals’s book of wordless photographic Sequences (1970) is a set of six pictures entitled “The Lost Shoe.” The first image shows a deserted urban street with the fuzzy backside of a man walking away from the camera and up the street. In the second frame he drops on the pavement a blurred object that in*the third frame is seen to be a lady’s shoe; and this frame, as well as the next two, suggests that he departs up the street in a great hurry. In the sixth frame, the man is nowhere to be seen, while the shoe is mysteriously burning. The realism of all the photographs starkly contrasts with the mysteriousness of the plot, while the large changes between the frames reveal the absolute immobility of the camera. For this last reason, the authorial perspective is as Chekhovian as both the work’s title and its passive acceptance of something inexplicably forbidding. Realizing the marvelous title of “A Man Going to Heaven,” Michals in five images portrays from behind a nude man climbing a stark staircase that by the concluding frame feels his absence. In later sequences, Michals began writing on the surface of the photographs words that either added or detracted. One of the more suggestive sentences in Marco Livingston’s preface to a Michals anthology distinguishes him from “most photographers, who direct attention to things as they supposedly are. Michals is far more stimulated by what could be. Consequently, he depends not so much on his eyes as on his imagination.” To me, this is another way of saying that for Michals, telling stories through image sequences takes precedence over photography’s traditional mission of representing reality.

Allegorical is perhaps the best stab at describing the Belgium-born Frenchman Henri Michaux. Although living through the heyday of MODERNISM and the crossover into POSTMODERNISM, Michaux resisted the open invitation of renowned movements, such as SURREALISM, and bequeathed a legacy of cryptic images and prose poems that defy simple explanation. Michaux fancied himself a novice and aimed to avoid professionalism (and so in 1965 he refused the French Grand Prize for Letters). Nowhere near the textual or literal madness of ANTONIN ARTAUD, Michaux shared with Artaud the concerns of the psyche and the refusal to be incorporated. But whereas Artaud was maniacal and combative, Michaux was subtle in his choice of battles. He employed a lyrically vivid imagination into such enterprises as malady-inspired beasts or fictive cultures that rival BORGES’s dictionary of magical beings. In “Fantastic Animals” he wrote, “A trembling weasel with skull split open lets a small, toothed, metallic wheel be seen in a brain that is running with blood . . . For the sick man, no species are extinct.” Some of Michaux’s allegorical prose poems sound gracefully poetic, while others read like quick perverted fables. He described the events of his imagination with contrapuntal perversity: When it’s a physical sickness, it’s described in a psychological way; and when it’s related to the mind, it’s described as physical symptom. Michaux created paintings, prints, and sketches that were abstractly based upon the shape of texts – Arabic influenced and hieroglyphic-like – forming a unique pictorial vocabulary that on occasion was assisted by the use of a hairdryer. Some of his drawings were as much about writing as they were about image. Imagine inked drawings of static floater squadrons projected from the back of your eye to your eyeball, or living animated skin that is porous, hairy, and crawling. In forays and experiments with drugs, most notably mescaline, Michaux explored writing and sketching under their effects. —Michael Peters

MICROPRESS (1960s) The micropress revolution came of age in the 1980s, although such publishing had begun decades earlier. Smaller than the literary-cultural SMALL PRESS, the micropress has always depended on cheaper methods

284 • MICROTONALITY of reproduction and distribution: primarily xerography (and the postal system) until the Internet became the common method for distribution in the 21st century. From the 1960s until the 1980s, other forms of reproduction were also employed, including mimeography, spirit-duplication, and even handwriting of every sheet. These cheap varieties of printing permitted the almost instantaneous reproduction of text and image compared to the laborious process of traditional printing and binding. Since the 1980s, literally thousands of publications have been produced, both chapbooks and periodicals (customarily called “zines”), in print runs rarely exceeding one hundred, across the US and the rest of the world. Although much of the output from these publishers is (as with art everywhere) weak and nearly pointless, some of these micropresses in the US became major avenues for the publication of advanced writing since all the major publishers and many small presses have no contact with the literary avant-garde. With the advent of the Internet as a cultural behemoth in the mid-1990s, web-based e-zines and other forms of samiznet distribution became the main avenues for broadcasting micropress output. This last development is both hopeful (in that it provides greater access to this material than did the former print-based distribution) and disturbing (in that the likelihood is small that a system will arise to preserve the digital output of these presses). In a parallel stream, many micropresses now publish books and periodicals through print-ON-DEMAND services. —Geof Huth

MICROTONALITY (c. 1920) In the first half of the 20th century, composers around the world separately began to explore intervals smaller than the halftone, which is traditionally the tiniest feasible interval in Western music, including quarter tones (or more precisely, half of a halftone) and even slighter fractions. Though musicologists were aware of such microtones, especially in Asian music, it is only in the 20th century that self-conscious composers have systematically investigated the possibilities of using them in their works. Among the pioneers were the Czech Alois Haba (1893–1973), the Mexican Julian Carrillo (1875–1965), the American HARRY PARTCH, and Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893–1979), a Russian long resident in Paris. CHARLES IVES wrote a choral in strings for quarter tones in 1914. All these composers except Ives either made their own instruments or had instruments specially constructed to play microtones.

Carrillo had a “harpzither” built that reportedly had ninety-seven tones within an octave. I saw in 1997 a stunning concert organized by the Swiss pianists Thomas Bächeli and Gertrud Schneider that make me think that two normal pianos, tuned a quarter tone apart, constituted a distinct keyboard instrument. Though microtonal music is infrequently performed, in part because it sounds strange to Western ears (and is not conveniently available to instruments with fixed pitches), it remains one of those secondary innovative ideas that have had more influence than is commonly acknowledged. The New York bassoonist Johnny Reinhard (1956), who has been sponsoring his American Festivals of Microtonal Music since 1981, honors all these composers, the unevenness of their works notwithstanding. His most consequential concert was an evening-length reconstruction in 1996 of Charles Ives’s Universe Symphony, which was for decades thought to be incomplete. As eccentric and overwhelming as the best Ives, this piece begins with perhaps twenty-five minutes of languid percussion and concludes with stately sonorities.

MIES VAN DER ROHE, LUDWIG (27 March 1886–17 August 1969) The son of an Aachen stonemason, he moved to BERLIN as a teenager, apprenticing himself to an established architect and then working as an assistant before establishing his own office in 1913, incidentally adding his mother’s name to his father’s for Teutonic presence. Emigrating from Hitler’s Germany, Mies had the foresight to settle in Chicago, which had traditionally been more supportive of advanced architecture than other American cities, and then to teach at its technological institute, rather than, say, at a liberal arts university. Unlike LE CORBUSIER, Mies van der Rohe did not deviate from the glass-walled, strictly geometric INTERNATIONAL STYLE in any consequential way. Contemporary Masterworks (1991) includes a case for the Farnsworth House (1945–50), designed early in Mies’s stay in America, as an example of his break, even though it displays unadorned geometries and glass walls. The book’s contributor makes a claim for “the placement of furniture”: “Functional and aesthetic requirements were carefully balanced. With sophistication and subtlety, beds, chairs, and tables served as counterpoints to the fixed elements, animating the total composition and enhancing the total spatial experience.” This sounds like the International Style to me, and persuades me that, even in America, Mies’s buildings have epitomized it. Of those I’ve seen

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firsthand, the strongest is the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. (The Seagram Building in New York, by contrast, suffers from the imitators surrounding it.) Among this architect’s subsidiary interests was furniture design, including distinctive chairs. Though he didn’t write as much as LE CORBUSIER and FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, the other modernist masters with whom he is customarily grouped (as in Peter Blake’s popular introduction, The Master Builders [1960]), Mies also coined one of modernism’s most popular aphorisms, “Less is more,” which, notwithstanding its suggestive resonance, is only sometimes true.

MILLER, HENRY

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I first saw Spike II perform live in the spring in 1965 at a theater in west London. Assigned to the title role in Oblomov, he easily took over the playscript as he amiably undermined it with a great variety of antics both verbal and visual. Spike II had earlier been a principal in The Goon Show, which was the most memorable comedy on BBC-Radio from 1951 to 1960. Colleagues residing in England in the early 1970s tell me that his television performances then challenged the acceptable limits of British public humor. Perhaps Spike Milligan erred in publishing many slight books (which the earlier Spike didn’t do, his celebrity notwithstanding) that invariably disappointed, because Spike II could not realize on the printed page the comic energy that came so easily to him live on stage.

(26 December 1891–7 June 1980) Perhaps because he didn’t start writing seriously until he passed 40, Miller made the principal theme of his putatively autobiographical books his liberation from an earlier life. This liberation involved a rejection not only of the workaday world, but of its proper language. For three decades, his books were regarded as “pornography”; their importation into the United States was forbidden by law (and American Customs officials would eagerly confiscate them from returning tourists). Once these Miller books were published here, in the early 1960s, abolishing state censorship of erotica with their presence, they came to seem quite tame. Since few wrote about sexual intercourse as often as Miller, it was assumed that this was his principal subject; but now that most of us have read other writers on heterosexual experience, we judge that Miller’s copulating is less realistic than mythic. It thus becomes another element in his central story, told through numerous books, of self-liberation. Since his works are finally understood easily, if often misinterpreted, critical literature about them is slight. Though I did my B.A. honors thesis on Miller, using books that were contraband, a version of which was reprinted decades later in a professor’s anthology, I think nearly sixty years later that I’ve outgrown him.

MILLIGAN, SPIKE (16 April 1918–27 Februrary 2002; b. Terence Alan M.) To me he was the epitome of the manic PERFORMANCE comic who could with just a few words inspire deep laughter. Born Irish-English in India, he adopted the name Spike after hearing SPIKE JONES, who was as strong a comedic model as any anywhere during World War II.

MINIMAL MUSIC See MODULAR MUSIC; YOUNG, La Monte.

MINIMALISM (c. 1965) The idea of doing more with less was so persuasive that, once the principle was articulated in the late 1960s (first by whom remains a question of dispute), it conquered not only the visual arts but also acoustic arts. The term particularly refers to work with an usually low degree of differentiation, which is to say a monochromic (or nearly monochromic) canvas or a piece of music composed from only a few notes. At first the term also referred to work that revealed a meager amount of artist’s effort, such as MARCEL DUCHAMP’s exhibition of a urinal, ideally to suggest, at times by critical inference, meanings that would otherwise be unavailable. (Processes of intellectual inference could function to locate a work’s ultimate meanings outside of itself, say within the acknowledged contexts of art history.) Once the idea(l) of Minimalism won adherents, many earlier artists could be identified as proto Minimalists – among others, KAZIMIR MALEVICH in painting, or TONY SMITH in sculpture. Back in his System and Dialectics of Art (1937), the Russian-born American painter John Graham mentioned “reducing of painting to the minimum ingredients for the sake of discovering the ultimate, logical destination of painting in the process of abstracting.” I have used it to characterize poems, such as certain texts by YVOR WINTERS and ROBERT LAX, among others, with drastically few words. A very thick trilingual book titled Minimalismo/

286 • MIXED-MEANS THEATER Minimalism (2003) documents the esthetic principle’s influence upon design around the world. Used sometimes to refer to fiction that by most measures is scarcely Minimal, containing as it does full pages of conventional sentences, the term fell (much like “HAPPENINGS” just before it) into the mouths of opportunistic publicists who, for their success, necessarily depended upon ignorance of what the term initially meant and honored.

MIXED-MEANS THEATER (c. 1960) This was my epithet, in a book of that title, for performances that de-emphasize speech in the course of using a variety of means, including human bodies, lights, film, objects, and stagecraft. Even though the term did not become common parlance, I find it useful for encompassing pure HAPPENINGS, which were only certain kinds of participational pieces performed by ALLAN KAPROW, along with the film-based staged performances of ROBERT WHITMAN and the kinetic environments of, say, USCO or LA MONTE YOUNG. To distinguish among various genres, my book proposed this typology. Types of Mixed-Means Theater GENRE Pure happenings Staged happenings Staged performance Kinetic environments

SPACE Open Closed Closed Closed

TIME Variable Variable Fixed Variable

ACTIONS Variable Variable Fixed Fixed

“Closed” space was my euphemism for a theater, which could also be any kind of enclosed performance space; “variable” time could range from a few seconds to infinity, depending upon the performance. The assumption of a “Happening” was that generalized instructions could generate unforeseen results. The chapters of my book are extended interviews with practitioners who seemed major at the time: ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, ANN HALPRIN, CLAES OLDENBURG, JOHN CAGE, Ken Dewey (1934–72), and the artists mentioned before. Not unlike the classic “old fogey,” I think this mixed-means theater generally superior to performer-centered PERFORMANCE that became more prominent in the 1980s; and, as a contrarian resistant to fads, I think I’m right.

MNATSAKANOVA, ELIZAVETA ARKADIEVNA (31 May 1922; German pen name Elisabeth Netzkowa)

Mnatsakanova has produced a large body of Russian poetry that successfully uses musical procedures as a major compositional factor. She was born in Baku and received a musical education at the Moscow Conservatory (graduating in 1950); she earned a living in Moscow writing articles and books on classical music. In the late 1940s she began to write original poetry in combination with abstract colored drawings. She never attempted to get any of her poetry published in the Soviet Union and in 1975 emigrated to Vienna, where she now lives. Mnatsakanova’s first published poem, “Autumn in the Lazaret of Innocent Sisters. Requiem in Seven Parts” (written in Moscow 1971, published in Paris in 1977) is modeled on the traditional requiem mass and employs repetition, motivic development, polyphony, paronomasia, and unusual layouts to create an edifice of significant complexity akin, in her view, to a musical score. A second major work, Das Buch Sabeth, a love poem written in May 1972, synthesizes verbal, visual, and musical features in an even more complex and extended way. The book consists of six parts, composed of up to twenty-five individual numbered poems, each with an unique elaboration of its basic thematic material, mostly in a nonlinear form, ranging from unbroken stream of consciousness to word fragments scattered across the page. Part Five recreates the form of a passacaglia with a column of repeating and evolving italicized words on the right creating the effect of an organ pedal line, while the center of the page provides variations on fragments of everyday themes. A third book, Metamorphosen (Vienna, 1988) was written in emigration and can be compared to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Its subject is music itself and life’s transigence. Mnatsakanova’s first collection to come out in Russia, Vita Breve (Perm, 1994), served as the basis of a theater piece created by a Perm theatrical group and performed in Moscow in May 1998, on the occasion of her first return to Moscow since her emigration. —Gerald Janecek

MODERN MUSIC (1924–46) One of the great American art magazines, it was founded by Minna Lederman (1896–1995), a true servant of art, to enable composers of all persuasions, including avant-garde ones, to write at length and with consideration about one another and issues

MOHOLY-NAGY, LÁSZIÓ •

relevant to all. The fact that the musical profession had such an outlet, while visual artists or choreographers didn’t, perhaps accounts for why composers, at least in America, have always been better writers than other artists. Had Modern Music not existed, the intellectual and even the professional world of American composers would have been different. That is a fundamental measure of why it is remembered (and why an entry on it belongs here). To read through its issues, as I have done, is to be continually awed by the range and seriousness of the writing in its pages. Most other arts magazines seem, by contrast, too limited, too partisan, too transitory, too academic, too parochial, too small, and/or too compromised by hidden agendas or commercial considerations. When a colleague and I edited an anthology of Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music (1996), two of the selections originally appeared in Modern Music, while we seriously considered including several more originally published there.

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the avant-garde vulgarize their polemic with one or another ideological bias.

MODIGLIANI, AMADEO (12 July 1884–24 January 1920) Mythologized as the epitome of the dissolute destructive modern painter, he was also an avant-garde artist who made unique contributions to early MODERNISM. One was a unique way of depicting female faces with long necks and noses, as well as simplified features, all reflecting the influence of AFRICAN ART in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. His second, more unique departure was making a representational drawing, again usually of a female face, with remarkably few lines. Incredible it would seem a century later, but works that scarcely sold during his lifetime later routinely earn at auction millions of dollars for their previous owners. Consider that creating such posthumous escalating value is itself a very scarce art.

MODERNISM What this book is about: art reflecting modern times, which includes the development of new technologies, the dissemination of alternative ideas, the influence of new arts upon one another, the transcendence of transient content and transience-based media (aka journalism), the discovery of possibilities unique to every medium, the unprecedented appreciation of innovation, among other values that continue, indicating that modernism has not ended, any more than “modern times” have ended. Any polemic advocating the end of modernism in art, usually for the purpose of justifying RETROGRADE and probably inferior work, should not be called “POSTMODERNIST” but “antimodernist.” The most authentic history of modernism today will be the one that ignores “postmodernism” for the opportunism that it is. Accept no substitutes. One reason for my writing and then rewriting this Dictionary has been to defend modernism and modernist standards not only from traditionalists, who have scarcely disappeared, but from their de facto allies, the Philistines disguised as sophisticates. To define my position, consider this from the critic Paul Mann (1948): “Studies that focus on the similarity or partnership between modernism and the avant-garde tend to emphasize aesthetic issues, whereas studies that argue for the distinction between them tend to emphasize ideology.” With this caveat in mind, consider how many prominent “critics” proclaiming the death of

MODULAR MUSIC (late 1960s) In the middle 1970s, most of this work was first called MINIMAL music, in acknowledgment of self-imposed severe limitations on the use of musical materials (and perhaps to capitalize upon the growing reputation of Minimal visual art); but since all of its practitioners (other than LA MONTE YOUNG) produced work far more various in surface texture than monochromic paintings or simple geometrical shapes, another epithet would be more appropriate. I prefer “modular” in that composers/performers such as PHILIP GLASS, STEVE REICH, TERRY RILEY, MEREDITH MONK, JON GIBSON, John Adams (1947), and the Canadian composer Lubomyr Melnyck (1948), among others, tend to use circumscribed musical materials, such as a limited number of phrases (e.g., Terry Riley’s In C [1964]), as modules that are repeated either in different ways or in different combinations with other instruments.

MOHOLY-NAGY, LÁSZIÓ (20 July 1895–24 November 1946; b. Lászió Weisz) Born in Hungary, Moholy, as he was commonly called, made masterful paintings as well as writing first-rate

288 • MOHOLY-NAGY, LÁSZIÓ books. While residing in BERLIN during the 1920s, he additionally produced innovative and influential book designs, photographs that are sometimes exhibited and reprinted, films that are still screened, sculptures that are in MoMA and other major museums – all while developing a revolutionary program of artistic education. Moholy worked across the constraints of professional training and the disciplinary conventions still associated with artists’ standard careers. He created art he was not expected to and produced work in domains where he had neither specialized schooling nor apprenticeship. As an arts educator, he moved from Germany first to England and then to Chicago, where he headed a School of Design until his early death. The key ideas of Moholy’s sensibility had their origins in the BAUHAUS/CONSTRUCTIVIST synthesis. Nearly everything he did favored rectangular and circular forms. As the designer of the first great series of modern art books, the Bauhaus editions, he repudiated both “gray inarticulate machine typesetting” on the one hand and highly ornamental beaux-arts affectations in typography on the other. His alternative was the now more familiar hyperrectangular “modern” style, in which illustrations and occasional epigraphs mix with paragraphs sometimes prefaced by boldface subheadings in two-page spreads of rectangular blocks of uniform, justified, sans-serif type that are always much narrower than the width of the page. Visually the design of a typical Moholy page could be characterized as rectangles within rectangles, with no disruptive ornaments. One virtue of his style is placing illustrations in close proximity to commentary about them. The theme of his book mostly of pictures, Malerei Fotografie Film (1927, Painting, Photography, Film), is how the unprecedented visual possibilities of photography have revolutionized modern vision with cameraless prints, double exposures, x-rays, etc. One influential departure in a book ostensibly about art was including works made by nonartists such as scientists and amateurs. Among his first jobs in America was designing the cover logo for the new literary magazine, The Kenyon Review (1938–70), which kept his image alive for several years. In Moholy’s paintings are rectangles, straight lines, and the regular curves of circles, parabolas, and spirals, sometimes overlapping. Even in his artistic inventions – such as the Space Modulator, made by putting a sheet of Plexiglas a few inches above a background canvas so that shapes painted on or cutout of the Plexiglas make shadows on the canvas – Moholy favored his idiosyncratic iconography. It can be found as well in his photography: not only in the representational pictures he took in various cities but in his

photograms and PHOTOMONTAGES. Even for commissioned assignments, such as the photographs for John Betjeman’s Oxford (1938), Moholy put a geometric image in the center of nearly every picture. These Moholyan forms also appear in his stage designs; in his poster art for all sorts of commercial products, including conveniently geometric automobile tires; and in his 1946 extraordinarily brilliant charting of multiple referents in JAMES JOYCE’s FINNEGANS WAKE, which had been published only a few years before. (This masterful visual essay was oddly omitted from a 2017 Moholy retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, among other venues.) This last artifact appeared in Vision in Motion, the book that I take to be Moholy’s single greatest creation – a book he designed and wrote in American English while living in Chicago, representing better than anything else the sum of his imagination and intelligence. Not only is it the single most insightful survey I know of avant-garde modernism in the arts (including literature, in a chapter often ignored), Vision in Motion is also an “artist’s book” of the very highest order, demonstrating that few practitioners of any art ever wrote as well or as truly about their own esthetic aspirations. Appearing posthumously, it concluded an artist’s life as only a book can do.

Figure 14 Manfred Mohr P197pz1 algorithmic plotter drawing on paper, 1977. Courtesy Manfred Mohr.

MONDRIAN, PIET •

MOHR, MANFRED (8 June 1938) A pioneering computer artist, Mohr owned his own PDP11 computer well before most writers had their word processors. Trained in fine art, married to a mathematician, he began as a concrete (rather than mystical) CONSTRUCTIVIST committed to rational structures in black-and-white art. His BOOK-ART books, Artificiata I (1968), contains a succession of geometric shapes on a continuous field of horizontal lines, broaching narrative in the transitions from page to page. Soon afterwards, Mohr began to use computers not to execute drawings (which has become its predominant use) but to find possible shapes through his inventing algorithms, or logical sets of rules, to generate results that he could then realize initially on a computer-assisted plotter. “Generative art” was an appropriate term he used for such work. One of his principal subjects has been the hypercube, a geometric figure incorporating many dimensions, which he typically subjects to exhaustive alternatives. A principal paradox of Mohr’s work is that it can be rationally understood, with generally verifiable perceptions more typical of scientific processes, even though at first glance it may appear inscrutable. He is an intelligent artist in the sense that he knows how best to realize his purposes and his works represent what he says they should. In Mohr’s work, the critic Richard Gassen finds a search “for the ‘integrated artwork,’ as he calls it, a structure from which all works can be derived, a ‘hyperstructure’ that one day will encompass all his works.” Manfred Mohr (1994) is a rich monograph with texts and pictures recapitulating a quarter-century of highly thoughtful art. Though Mohr has resided principally in Manhattan for over four decades, his work is customarily exhibited mostly in Europe, where it wins him prizes.

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Mon’s playful typographic texts have been exhibited around the world. I personally credit him as the first to tell me about the esthetic value of LAS VEGAS, yes that American creation, over dinner at the 1982 Frankfurt Book Fair.

MONASTYRSKY, ANDREY (28 October 1949; b. A. Viktorovich Sumnin) The most important PERFORMANCE figure in MOSCOW CONCEPTUALISM, he was the de facto leader of the Collective Actions Group, the most important and long-lived performance art organization likewise based in Moscow. Founded in February 1976, Collective Actions produced over sixty performance works until it was dissolved in 1989. The first Action (aktsiia), “Appearance,” performed in March 1976, involved invitees observing two men emerging from the woods across a wide snow-covered field and presenting the observers with a certificate that gave the name and date of the work. Later events became increasingly complicated, involving multiple participants, objects, and topographical arrangements. Indoor Actions involved listening to prerecorded music or speech, often in polyphonic layers and combined with photo slides. While Monastyrsky is recognized as the leader of the group, a small circle of colleagues serving as assistants regularly contributed refinements. Two features of such works distinguishing them from Western HAPPENINGS and performance were a tendency toward mysticism and perceptual distances in which a boundary is imperceptibly provided (e.g., a person crosses an unmarked line in the space in which s/he comes close enough to the observers to be finally recognized, or on the contrary the person disappears from view). The sense of space’s emptiness was a key factor. —Gerald Janecek

MON, FRANZ

MONDRIAN, PIET

(1926; b. F. Lofferholz)

(7 March 1872–1 February 1944; b. Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan)

One of the most persistent and consistent German avant-garde writers, Mon has since the 1950s produced collections and selections of his poems, in addition to radio plays, that for one measure of their excellence are frequently rebroadcast. His alternative moves include MONTAGE, VISUAL POEMS, extended sentences, parts of words, and much else. He also collaborated with two colleagues in editing Movens (1960), one of those rare landmark anthologies that announced accurately several more experimental directions to come.

Though the best geometric paintings resemble one another more than anything else, any sense of a single family is an illusion. Whereas one strain in his work reflects a rational CONSTRUCTIVISM that includes MOHOLY-NAGY, SOL LEWITT, FRANÇOIS MORELLET, and MANFRED MOHR, another strain, epitomized by traditional Islamic art and among the moderns Mondrian, regards geometries as a key to ultimate truths.

290 • MONK, MEREDITH Mondrian came to his mature, familiar style after many years of doing something else. His first known paintings are landscapes; he painted flowers; he passed through CUBISM to a style that abstracted lines and rectangles from naturalistic scenes. Joining those artists, mostly Dutch, gathered around DE STIJL in 1917, he developed a compositional style, limited to horizontals and verticals, that he called Neo-Plasticism. Making precision an ideal, he eliminated from his paintings all signs of brushstrokes and individual technique. A purist in temperament, Mondrian objected to VAN DOESBURG’s use of diagonals, and over that issue, incredible though it seems, broke with De Stijl. His last years were spent in America, where his painting changed with the introduction of colored lines instead of black ones and blocks of contrasting colors that were thought to reflect his enthusiasm for American jazz. To some, these New York paintings marked new possibilities; to earlier Mondrian admirers, they represented a step back. Contrary to the sense that his geometries must reflect a dogged rationalist, his writings include his opposition to art which is purely abstract. In removing completely from the work all objects, “the world is not separated from the spirit,” but is on the contrary, put into a balanced opposition with the spirit, since the one and the other are purified. This creates a perfect unity between the two opposites. He continues, Precisely by its existence non-figurative art shows that “art” continues always on its true road. It shows that “art” is not the expression of the appearance of reality such as we see it, nor of the life which we live, but that it is the expression of true reality and true life . . . indefinable but realizable in plastics. Surprised? Incidentally, Mondrian’s collected writings include an extraordinary appreciation of “Italian Futurists’ Bruiteurs” (1921), as he called them, which might be the only major essay on modernist music written by someone known primarily for visual art.

MONK, MEREDITH (20 November 1942) A major MIXED-MEANS performance artist, Monk has, since her breakthrough 16 Millimetre Earrings

(1966), created a rich series of PERFORMANCE pieces incorporating choreography, music, language, and film customarily produced mostly, if not entirely, by herself. She has explored alternative theatrical spaces, performing the three parts of Juice (1969) weeks apart in a museum, a university, a theater, and a downtown loft. Much of Monk’s work is autobiographical to differing degrees; much, epitomized by Education of the Girlchild (1974), has content congruent with feminism. Her company, The House, realizes intermedial performances. Composing separately in various arts, Monk is most successful with music, especially when she sings her own compositions in her eerily unique voice. Some of her music is heard in films by the Coen Brothers and JEAN-LUC GODARD. She has also produced her own films and, with less success, a full-evening opera, Atlas (1991).

MONK, THELONIOUS SPHERE (10 October 1917–17 February 1982) Emerging on the margins of BEBOP as an inventive pianist who also behaved eccentrically, wearing scullcaps and dark glasses, occasionally arising from the piano to do a tap dance, Monk could smoke a cigarette while improvising, his hand going to the ashtray and coming back to the keyboard to continue an earlier complex rhythm at exactly the right micro-moment. To the classical musicologist NICOLAS SLONIMSKY, who was likewise a pianist, Monk experimented with discordant harmonies [angular rhythms and asymmetrical bar sequences], searching for new combinations of sounds. Paradoxically, he elevated his ostentatious ineptitude to a weirdly cogent modern idiom, so that even deep-thinking jazz critics could not decide whether he was simply inept or prophetically innovative. Most experienced jazz listeners can instantly identify Monk’s music after only a few bars. Verbally true to his music, Monk also had a taste for idiosyncratic titles such as Epistrophy Misterioso, and Rhythm-a-ning. Leslie Gourse’s biography (1997) lists ninety-one compositions, including the legendary “Round Midnight,” which Monk registered with BMI, as well as a “Sessionography,” which documents sixty occasions with identification of his musical colleagues and the pieces played.

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MONTMARTRE

MONTPARNASSE

(c. 1875)

(1920s)

This Parisian neighborhood was probably the first example in modern history of professional artists settling in previously under-inhabited real estate, in this case a quiet, somewhat hilly district quite far from the center of the city, giving the enclave an avantgarde identity. Artists, writers, and performers who felt that the Left Bank of the Seine was becoming too bourgeois or too expensive seized on this opportunity, defining themselves as alternative, not only artistically but geographically, the fact of the latter perhaps lending credence to more tenuous claims for the former. Whole groups of artists established themselves in Montmartre by the 1880s, while organizations such as the Chat Noir (black cat) were founded for the publication of an illustrated magazine and the presentation of theatrical performances. It was here in 1882 that the playwright Paul Bilaud (1854–93) exhibited “the first documented monochrome painting, a black rectangle with the facetious title Negroes Fighting in the Cellar at Night,” implicitly presaging not only painterly MINIMALISM but DADA as well. (Indicatively, that title would still cause controversy today, though for a different reason, such a provocative instinct Bilaud surely had) In a Montmartre apartment in that same year Jules Lévy (1857–1935) organized an Art incohérent (Incoherent Art) exhibition that included, in addition to the Bilaud monochrome, “a painting of a garlic sausage, the sculpture made of cheese, a landscape painted by a dancer on a ballet slipper, and a drawing done by an artist with his foot,” to quote a later account. In Montmartre, not on the Left Bank, was the first performance on 9 December 1896 of ALFRED JARRY’s monumentally challenging play Ubu Roi, with sets and costumes by Pierre Bonard (1867–1947) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901). By the 20th century, nonartists arrived to join the real estate pioneers in Montmartre, typically driving up the rents and making the neighborhood less distinctively avant-garde. In these respects, the evolution of Montmartre became a model for Greenwich Village from the 1920s, Brooklyn Heights at various times, and ARTISTS’ SOHO from the 1970s to 2000, to cite comparable NEW YORK CITY artists’ enclaves – not to mention less prominent frontier neighborhoods settled by the “creative class” with similar ambitions around the western world.

In the decade after World War I, this section on Paris’s Left Bank (of the river Seine) succeeded MONTMARTRE in harboring a hothouse of art activity centered mostly about a particular café called the Dôme where nearly a century ago, in MICHEL SEUPHOR’s summary (in translation): You could meet MARTINETTI on a lightning visit to the capital, GABO fresh from BERLIN, CENDRAS just back from America, [Robert] DELAUNAY out for spree, ARP trying to find somebody, TZARA and [Ilya] Ehrenberg [1891–1967] sitting there with inscrutable faces; you could risk a few words with HANS RICHTER or argue with VAN DOESBURG or KIESLER, or listen to the international speechifiers making themselves drunk with their own eloquence, or you could even manage to be bored by it all. Don’t you wish you were there then too? Artists and intellectuals still reside in Montparnasse, even though the long-renowned spacious café attracts more tourists. The last time I visited Paris, MARC DACHY insisted that we go to the Dôme.

MOOG, ROBERT (23 May 1934–21 August 2005) Moog invented the first generally available Electronic Music SYNTHESIZER. Whereas the previous comprehensive music-making machines were unique behemoths that filled whole rooms, Moog combined his experience as a builder of THEREMINS (a touchsensitive continuous sound generator) in the ’50s with the transistor technology new to the ’60s. As a synthesizer in the purest sense of the word, Moog’s machine worked by combining discrete parts into an aural whole, producing sounds that represented, literally, syntheses of different specifications of elements. By no means a composing (i.e., decision-making) machine, in that it makes no musical choices, a synthesizer merely executes musical designs that, like the traditional score, customarily precede the composer’s contact with the instrument. The initial Moogs of the late 1960s were monophonic, which is to say capable of producing only one note at a time; later Moogs were polyphonic. Among the most expert Moogists was WENDY

292 • MOORE, HENRY CARLOS. By the 1980s, there were so many synthesizers, most of them technically more advanced, that Moogs became antiques, while Moog himself became an advisor to successor manufacturers.

MOORE, HENRY (30 July 1898–31 August 1986) Moore dominated British sculpture in the middle of the 20th century, and in so doing, he created the first British sculpture of distinction since the Middle Ages. Despite the evident influences of JEAN ARP and CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI in his smoothed and simplified forms, Moore followed his own path. He combined nearly abstract but clearly recognizable renderings of human figures with what he called “universal shapes”: forms that can be considered essential in that they are those, in Moore’s own words, “to which everyone is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond.” His figures were matched to his formal concerns, in that they were limited to a few archetypal motifs: reclining figures, mother and child, and the family. It can be objected that Moore hedged his bet on the universal recognizability of form by incorporating the human figure, something generally not done by BARBARA HEPWORTH, a near-contemporary whose sculpture is otherwise remarkably similar to Moore’s. Nevertheless, Moore went further than any other artist of his time in fusing together pure form and precise, identifiable feeling. —Mark Daniel Cohen

MOORMAN, CHARLOTTE (18 November 1933–8 November 1991) After beginning her New York career as an orchestra pit cellist, Moorman became in the early 1960s involved with avant-garde performance, working principally with the video artist NAM JUNE PAIK, who typically made for her a brassiere with video monitors in place of cups. Her most extraordinary creation was the New York Avant-Garde Festival, which she organized almost annually from 1963 to 1982. Once a year, Moorman would invite artists to do whatever they wanted within available space for certain hours. As no admission was charged, one assumption was that spectators would go wherever they wanted, for as long as they wished. As she refused to recognize stars (in the John Cagean anarchist tradition), everyone received equal billing, even, in one year,

for SUN RA, who appeared with his Arkestra in a flatbed truck that inched down Central Park West. One festival was held in Shea Stadium, another on a boat docked in the East River, a third on a platform of Grand Central Station that was empty on Sundays. No one ever regretted attending or participating. A tenacious woman beneath her Southern-belle veneer, Moorman was incomparably adept at getting New York City politicians and administrators to accede to her proposals. Once she died, no one else could produce such a festival.

MORELLET, FRANÇOIS (30 April 1926–10 May 2016) Though for most of his adult life the manager of a family factory, Morellet was a prolific and consistent artist specializing in rationally derived, superficially simple, and yet awesomely clever geometric works that generate complex structures. Implicitly rejecting PIET MONDRIAN’s reliance upon intuition, Morellet worked with systems, which are customarily announced in the titles of his pieces (e.g., “6 Canvases with a 5m Perimeter and a Horizontal Diagonal,” 1973), and it follows that Morellet would deny Mondrian’s obsession with hidden meanings. Indeed, Morellet spoke of families of systems: juxtaposition; superimposition; random; interference; fragmentation; and destabilization. As both a painter and book-artist, Morellet worked almost exclusively in WHITE & BLACK. Morellet also made light objects and kinetic sculptures. The British critic Edward Lucie-Smith (1933) describes sphéretrames (sphere-webs) – a sphere made up of rods laid at right angles to one another to form a cellular structure which, through its multiple perspectives, has strange effects on light. A related work is a lattice of fluorescent tubes, which seems to dissolve the wall behind it. In significant respects, Morellet’s art predated similar developments in the work of FRANK STELLA, DONALD JUDD, and SOL LEWITT among others. Morellet wrote about wanting to “reduce my arbitrary decisions to a minimum. To put limits on my ‘artist’s’ sensibility, I among others have made use of simple and obvious systems, of pure chance, and of spectator participation.” Decades later, his work still looks uniquely his.

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MORGAN, EDWIN (27 April 1920–17 August 2010) Long a Glasgow academic, Morgan produced, along with scholarship, several deviant poems that rank among the best of the era. “Opening the Cage” is a sonnet based upon fourteen variations of the fourteen words in JOHN CAGE’s “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.” His poem “The Chaffinch Map of Scotland” uses a few typically Scottish words to represent the shape of his native land. “Pomander” uses words that sound like the title word to make that fruit’s shape, the visual prosody (such as the repeated p’s) complementing the aural. (This updating of the George Herbert shape poem is superior to the American poet John Hollander’s [1929–2013] forays in the same direction in Types of Shape [1969, 1991], which suffer, curiously, from prosaic language.) “Seven Headlines” finds English words embedded in the French phrase “il faut etre absolument moderne.” “Space Poem 1” mixes English words with Russian, the latter apparently chosen for their sounds. One virtue of Morgan’s experimental poems is that each invention is unique to one poem; none of his alternative devices are repeated. In Wi the Haill Voice (1972), he translated the Russian poet VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY, not into English but into Scots. Count Morgan among the few avant-garde poets (among the dozens acknowledged in this book) to merit an entry in Ian Hamilton’s smugly conservative Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (1994), where the entries on avant-garde subjects such as sound poetry, “concrete poetry,” and even “language poetry” are consistently ignorant and insufficient.

MORGENSTERN, CHRISTIAN (6 May 1871–31 March 1914) Though he might have intended otherwise, Morgenstern is best remembered for his nonsense poems and a certain wordless poem composed entirely of typographical marks (dashes and parentheses tilted 90 degrees and thus arrayed horizontally, like inverted umbrellas) and customarily translated as “Fish’s Nightsong.” The British writer Martin Seymour-Smith (1928–98) credits Morgenstern with anticipating most of the modern tendencies that came after his early death from tuberculosis, [among them] the realization that bourgeois “values” are mechanisms for self-evasion, experiments with words as things-in-themselves as well as (arbitrary?) symbols of things they denote.

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Another quality is cosmic, religious vision. One American book of Morgenstern translation mentioned below curiously omits (!) his classic sound/nonsense poem “Des grosse Lalula,” which begins: “Kroklowafzl? Semememl!/ Selokrontro – prafriplo:/ Bifzl, bafzl: hulalemi:/ quastl bastl ho . . ./Lalu lalu lalu lalu la!” – perhaps because no translation is necessary.

MORICE, DAVE (10 September 1946) One of Morice’s original ideas was a poetry marathon in which he would write as many poems as possible within an extended period of time, usually in a public place. Morice claims to have written “a thousand poems in twelve hours, a mile-long poem, and a poem across the Delaware River.” His questionable feats belong in the Guinness Book of World Records, among other competitors to this Dictionary. Remembering two principles – that a special mentality can produce special work and that if you write a lot you increase the likelihood that something might be good – I would wager that somewhere in this mountain of produce is some remarkable poetry. A second Morice move was to cast the words of poems, both classic and contemporary (ALLEN GINSBERG, W. C. WILLIAMS, JOHN CAGE), into comic strips of various styles, at once introducing the poems and, largely through images, establishing his own ironic commentary on the texts. Under the heading “abuse the muse,” these poetry comics first appeared as a photocopied periodical and then in an oversize book that, since it came from a hypercommercial publisher, quickly disappeared from public view. A third Moricean idea was the creation of a female pseudonym, Joyce Holland (1969–78), whose specialty was MINIMAL poems, in contrast to Morice’s garrulous predisposition. The classic, in collaboration with the late Darrell Gray (1945–80), is “Days of the Week”: “mungday. twosday. weedsday. thirty, fryday. sat her day. someday.” An actress claiming to be Ms. Holland often appeared, usually with Morice in tow, at art festivals and at conferences. Holland was also the editor-in-name of Matchbook (1973–74), in which one-word poems by many authors were stapled into a matchbook cover. Though Morice is one of the few writers mentioned in this book to have an M.F.A. from the mass-production lines of the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, his Dictionary of Wordplay (2013) is by far the richest guide, with the most useful instructions for exercises, for anyone aspiring to create innovative writing.

294 • MORPURGO, NELSON MORPURGO, NELSON (19 September 1899–11 October 1978) A forgotten ITALIAN FUTURIST, he became F. T. MARINETTI’s associate back in their native Egypt, then a British colony where educated people learned to write in French (as Marinetti did, notably in his initial manifestos) and children were often given Anglo first names. While still a teenager, Morpurgo then in Milan contacted Marinetti, a whole generation older. Before turning 20 Morpurgo had contributed Futurist short plays and poems to Italian magazines. Once he was back in Egypt, his texts appear in a Futurist magazine XX Settembre 1921, and he both mounted a trilogy in three acts, Morfina! and organized PERFORMANCE festivals including other Egyptians with Italian surnames. In 1923 appeared a collection of Morpurgo’s poems Il fuoco delle piramidi, subtitled “Liriche e parole in libertà,” prefaced by none other than Marinetti himself. Pages from this scarce book, as visible on the Internet, show VISUAL POETRY among other departures. In his otherwise scholarly book on Literary Futurism (1990), Professor John J. White (1940–2015) credits Morpurgo with “radical word-creation on the basis of inventive morphememontages and a series of ideiosyncratically semanticized phonemes.” Though Morpurgo died decades later in Italy (in Rimini, oddly perhaps), he and other Egyptian Futurists with Italian surnames are rarely included in books and exhibitions about ITALIAN FUTURISM. (NOT even the index of the mammoth Futurismo & Futursimi [Futurism & Futurisms] [1986] includes Morpurgo’s name.) His surname is Sephardic Jewish.

MORRIS, GEORGE L. K. (1905–26 June 1975; b. G. Lovett Kingsland M.) An artist wealthy enough also to be a patron of other artists and cultural activities, he’s best remembered in the literary world for his early financial support for Partisan Review (1934–2003), which became roughly from 1940 to 1960 among the most prominent literary quarterlies. As its art critic from 1937 through 1943, Morris favored ABSTRACT art that was less fashionable at the time. As a visual artist who had studied in Paris with LEGÉR and OZENPHANT, he practiced a distinctive CUBISM with bright colors and clear edges. Morris was among the founders of AMERICAN ABSTRACT ARTISTS whose president he often was. Along with his wife likewise an abstract artist, Suzy

Frelinghuysen (1911–88), likewise VOA (Very Old American), he constructed in Lenox, MA, a studio that survived them as an eponymous museum with her name before his. Posthumous exhibitions often paired Morris with Harry Holtzman (1912–87), a Brooklyn College painter-professor, who was PIET MONDRIAN’s initial host in America.

MORRIS, ROBERT (9 February 1931) A radical sculptor and sculptural theorist, working with a variety of alternative ideas, Morris produced in the late 1960s a series of works, accompanied by several provocative essays, that challenged previous ideas in several ways. In his criticism Morris favored sculptors working outside of the studio, with materials offered by Nature, such as earth; the use of previously neglected materials, such as felt, whose shapes necessarily depend upon gravity, whose natural actions he respected; and the creation of easily comprehended structures, which he called “unitary” forms, in contrast to the CUBIST complexity of, say, DAVID SMITH or JOHN CHAMBERLAIN. The result is work that presented a single image, rather than interrelated parts. “Such are the simpler forms that create strong gestalt sensations,” Morris wrote at the time. “Their parts are bound together in such a way that they offer the maximum resistance to perceptual separation. In terms of solids, or forms applicable to sculpture, these gestalts are the simpler polyhedrons.” Unlike his contemporary DONALD JUDD, who had similar negative biases, Morris eschewed modular formats. He also collaborated to significant MIXED-MEANS performance. The manager of a university gallery once told me that, of all the artists ever showing there, Morris took the most complete charge of installing his work, dismissing the staff as he arrived with his own tools for mounting.

MORSE, SAMUEL F. B. (27 April 1791–2 April 1882; b. S. Finley Breese M.) Odd it is that the great inventor of the telegraph and the Morse code that facilitates its use, both so advanced in the 19th century, spent his early adult years as a professional painter matching the form, then familiar, of waist-high portraits mostly of formally attired living people. By contrast, his two more extraordinary paintings were large and awesomely detailed with many figures: His Old House of Representatives (1822; 7.3 feet by 10.8 feet) with eighty-five individuals working at

MOSCOW SUBWAY STATIONS •

night in a large space under oil lamps; the Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33; approximately 6 feet by 9 feet) with many paintings stacked atop each other on walls while people occupy its floor. As a serious visual artist, Finlay Morse, as he was commonly known, helped found the National Academy of Design in 1826 and served as its president for two decades. He taught art at New York University and delivered public talks, some of which were reprinted a century and one-half later as Lectures on the Affinity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts (1983). It could be said that he adapted his strongly acquired technical competence as a painter to the challenges of mechanical invention. Politically active as well, the son of his country’s first prominent geographer, Morse was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic, implicitly reminding us that even famous artists aren’t always POLITICALLY CORRECT, bless ’em. His unique life is the theme of a biography by Kenneth Silverman (1936–2017), himself long among the more accomplished academics producing thick lives about major Americans.

MOSCOW CONCEPTUALISM (1970s–90s) As the most important and original artistic movement at the end of the Soviet period, Moscow Conceptualism made significant contributions to art, literature, and PERFORMANCE, creating a substantial body of literary work related to CONCEPTUAL ART worldwide. It remained concentrated in Moscow, though there were small branches in St. Petersburg and other cities. As in similar Western trends, Moscow Conceptualism focused on the ideational content of art, often presenting new works in the form of documents or texts, rather than as visual artifacts. Russia’s vaunted tradition of logocentric expression made the orientation toward verbal products more important and explained why the movement had a much more significant literary dimension there than was true elsewhere. The name for the movement was provided in 1979 by the philosopher Boris Groys (1947), who, in an article in the emigre Russian art journal A-YA, added “romantic” in the middle to emphasize the greater lyricism and emotionality to be found in the Moscow variant. While that adjectival attribute did not stick, the rest of the name did, even though many participants did not like it. In the visual arts were two main branches. One concentrated on everyday life aspects (ILYA KABAKOV) while the other focused on the analysis of Soviet symbols (Sots Art, KOMAR & MELAMID). In both

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cases, the artistic merits of the work were less important than the images ironically juxtaposed in the composition. In both cases, however, the portrayal of empty space is a key aspect. In literature, the key figures were VSEVOLOD NEKRASOV, LEV RUBINSTEIN and DMITRY PRIGOV. Moscow Conceptualism generated a major body of performance art of a special sort unfamiliar in the West. In the 1970s–90s the group Collective Actions, headed by ANDREY MONASTYRSKY, created a series of over sixty interlocking performance works that have since been reasonably well documented, though the works themselves, never thoroughly recorded or repeated, remain ephemeral. —Gerald Janecek

MOSCOW SUBWAY STATIONS (1931–) This was reportedly Joseph Stalin’s pet art project and perhaps the only surviving compensation for all the prominent artists and writers his regime killed in mid-career. Not only are the stations esthetically more magnificent than those in other cities, but they were also individually designed in a variety of styles with chandeliers, statuary, and reliefs. The trackside pillars in some stations incorporate columnar designs, while those in other stations have flat, rectangular shapes. Some stations also have street-level entrances that are likewise magnificent. Because Moscow subways ran more frequently than those elsewhere, in 1981, when I was last there, I could get out at any stop, admire that

Figure 15 Novoslobodskaya Station of Moscow Subway, 2016. Photo by Alex “Florstein” Fedorov | Wikimedia Commons.

296 • MOSOLOV, ALEXANDER station’s interior design, and expect another train to come along within a few minutes. The Moscow Subway stations represent collective art, much like LAS VEGAS, but whereas the latter was constructed by independent entrepreneurs in competition with one another, the Moscow Subway stations reflect a plan officially initiated by the Soviet Central Committee. During my Moscow visit, I purchased a paperback book with color illustrations that was produced for the 1980 Olympics (in which the USA did not participate) that effectively represents the whole work. No other city known to me has even tried to build subway stations of comparable individuality and esthetic quality, preferring instead for their public transportation a grim uniformity.

MOSOLOV, ALEXANDER (11 August 1900–12 July 1973) His contribution to the avant-garde tradition was the use of shaking sheet metal to suggest the sound of a working factory in his composition Zavod (1927, Iron Foundry). Like the composer NICOLAS SLONIMSKY, Mosolov also wrote songs to the texts of newspaper advertisements. Slonimsky the musical lexicographer reports that such explicitly proletarian music elicited a sharp rebuke from the official arbiters of Soviet music. On 4 February 1936, Mosolov was expelled from the Union of Soviet Composers for staging drunken brawls and behaving rudely to waiters in restaurants. He was sent to Turkestan to collect folk songs as a move toward his rehabilitation. (If not for the historic Soviet Union, we could regard the America as incomparably inhospitable to the avant-garde.) Mosolov does not rate an entry in John Vinton’s Dictionary of Contemporary Music (1974), perhaps because, unlike many of the lesser composers included there, Mosolov was not connected to an American university that purchases books.

MOSS, DAVID (21 January 1949) Tall and broadly built, trained in percussion, Moss has worked with alternatives in the placement of his drums and thus with different physical strategies in using available soundmakers. Meanwhile, Moss developed

a unique kind of propulsive scat singing, reflecting a variety of declamatory styles but commonly identifiable as uniquely his. Usually in conjunction with amplifiers that he controls while he sings (sometimes playing percussion as well), he succeeds at what many other composers have tried to do far less effectively – making music that suggests the end of the world. Not unlike others active on the current “performance scene,” Moss tours widely and collaborates generously, claiming to have given well over a thousand discrete solo concerts. Since the 1990s, he lived as an American in BERLIN, sometimes performing bass roles in operas across Europe.

MOSTEL, RAPHAEL (11 August 1948) Mostel’s innovation comes from using ancient Eastern artifacts, namely Tibetan singing bowls, to play distinctly contemporary music. Actually made to receive sounds rather than make them, the small bowls respond to wooden mallets run around their rims. Realizing that the different acoustics of various venues can affect the humming sound of these bowls, Mostel has performed in New York’s Central Park, which has little echo amid an abundance of natural sounds, and in the humongous Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which has a rich, extended echo. In these performances, Mostel adds such Eastern instruments as wooden and clay flutes, thigh-bone trumpets, a ram’s horn, and various kinds of non-Western percussion. More recent work has been writing music to The Travels of Babar (2016).

MOTHER MALLARD’S PORTABLE MASTERPIECE COMPANY (1969–78; 1999–?) Founded by the musician David Bordon (1938), they were among the first to play MOOG synthesizers live, performing mostly MODULAR MUSIC, successfully demonstrating that an instrument thought to belong exclusively to the recording studio (thanks to WENDY CARLOS) could also be used on a concert stage. In their first New York City concert, three musicians played several Moogs, incorporating a variety of rifts that overlapped one another, each musician beginning his or her bit before the other was finished. Not unlike other early compositions for the Moog, their music relied heavily upon the “sequencer,” as it was called, which could easily generate the repetition characteristic of MODULAR MUSIC The group survived in

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spite of unjustified neglect, caused in part by residing in Ithaca, rather than New York City, and by changing personnel. MMPMC set a precedent not only for other live synthesists but for later groups like The Hub, which was composed of Chris Brown, John Bishoff, Mark Trayle, Tim Perkis, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, and Phil Stone sitting before cathode-ray tubes, not only generating computer music in live time but also silently sending one another word-messages that appear on their screens, supposedly altering their collaborative performance. David Borden revived Mother Mallard along with his musical sons early in 1999.

Naziism. Courageous in every way, he was frequently arrested until killed in an early Nazi concentration camp, earning a posthumous celebrity. As early as 1936, at the American Writers Congress, the German Communist playwright Friedrich Wolf (1888–1953) told of

MOTHERWELL, ROBERT

Out of such grim recollections are literary myths made.

(24 January 1915–16 July 1991) As one of the few notable American visual artists to have a degree from Stanford University, he knew early not just to read but also to appreciate great books. Though Motherwell’s paintings brought him fortune and modest celebrity, he did more significant work in expediting books that he “edited,” presumably with various degrees of assistance. Initially for the art-book retailer GEORGE WITTENBORN, incidentally a major SMALL PRESS, Motherwell oversaw the publication between 1944 and 1961 sixteen Documents of Modern Art, all necessary, most of them hugely influential. The single greatest volume, forever important, was his own anthology, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (1951). Later Motherwell’s name fronted for a more commercial publisher Documents of 20th-Century Art (1971–89), which became the best (and perhaps only) way to get into English print the best fat books by GUILLIAUME APOLLINAIRE, AD REINHARDT, and ITALIAN FUTURISTS, among others. After their literary-industrial sponsor dropped these necessary titles, a university press reprinted them, mostly intact. Whether Motherwell’s paintings changed avant-garde art can be debated, but books with his editorial imprimatur surely did. Everybody seriously involved has not just read but treasured at least some of them.

MÜHSAM, ERICH (6 April 1878–10 July 1934) A certifiably inspired poet, more than a bit touched, he participated in the short-lived post-World War I Bavarian socialist republic, perhaps the closest semblance of a genuine anarchist government ever. As early as 1923, Mühsam wrote stories and even a play ridiculing

the war-hating writer, Erich Mühsam, [who] was beaten with steel rods for months, was forced to stand erect for days in a dark cage because he refused to sing the Horst Wessel Nazi song. When they revived him with cold water and ordered him again to sing the Nazi song, he reportedly sang with his last weak breath the “International.”

MULLEN, HARRYETTE (1 July 1953) At her most audacious she writes an African-American poetry rich in wordplay in an American tradition of MELVIN TOLSON, GERTRUDE STEIN, and Ralph Ellison (1914–94). In 2011 appeared a book of interviews with Barbara Henning (1948), Looking Up Harryette Mullen, talking mostly about Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), which contains a rich variety of generative constraints playing with rhyme and earlier canonical literature as in her classic rewrite of SHAKESPEARE’s Sonnet: # 106 as only an American could do: “My honeybunch’s peepers are nothing like neon. Today’s special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If her mop were Slinkys, dishwater Slinkys would grow on her noggin.” Bingo.

MULTICULTURAL (c. 1990) A modish academic term for a group of people who look superficially various but think pretty much alike about major issues of politics and art. One synonym is “diversity,” though both words had different meanings in the past and will probably assume yet other meanings in the future. The fallacy here is that people are not what they are now but what they were at birth, a while ago – a fallacy that is for some too reminiscent of fascism, which believed, to be precise, that Jewish soldiers, say, were categorically different (and thus death-destined) only because they were different at birth from other soldiers. George Orwell once quipped about something else: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia

298 • MULTITRACKING to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Beware of anyone using either of these words affirmatively in the course of selling you something; you’ll be stuck with something you probably don’t need.

MULTITRACKING (c. 1960) This is one of the great technical innovations in the development of recorded music, comparable to the development of the typewriter in the production of writing. The original recording technologies – first, the wax cylinder, then disks, then wire, and finally audiotape – were monophonic in the sense that they could record only one line of sound. Two-track tape recorders arrived in the 1950s, to record simultaneously live sound through two separate microphones, each of which purportedly had a different perspective (comparable to that of two eyes). It later became possible to record or modify each track separately without affecting the other. In the 1960s came four-track tape, with the possibility of four-line recording, which was what THE BEATLES used to create their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, and thus the opportunity to produce in the late 1960s “quadraphonic” records for those listeners with four loudspeakers. In the 1970s came tape with sixteen, twenty-four, thirty-two, and even sixty-four tracks, each of which could be recorded independently of the others, so that sound producers were offered the possibility of adding sounds well after the original tapings were recorded. Sounds from each of these tracks could then be modified in the “mixing down” process to the stereophonic (two-track) tape required for standard distribution. Needless to say, perhaps, each of these technological developments generated alternative musical possibilities. With the advent in the late 1980s of DIGITAL consoles, such as the Lexicon Opus, a simulation of multitracking could appear on a computer screen; so that instead of going through the cumbersome process of rerecording a sound on, say, track two to have it begin a few seconds earlier, the audio engineer/computer operator needed only to punch a few instructions into his machine, greatly accelerating the re-editing process.

with an esthetic platform he called “Conscious Construction,” even though it resembled Dada more than CONSTRUCTIVISM. Once home, he quickly mounted several exhibitions, mostly of small works, because, as Tsutomu Mizusawa writes, “He could not wait for larger pieces to arrive by sea freight. He called the show Exhibition of Small Conscious Constructivist Works by Tomoyoshi Murayama Dedicated to the Overbearing Beauty of Niddy Impekoven.” The last two words supposedly identified a teenage dancer in Berlin. Mizusawa continues, Looking at the catalog made of art paper, which was unusual for the time, we see four photographs. The three photographs of the works are a valuable record since most of them were destroyed during the war, but the photograph of the artist himself is even more interesting. We see Murayama here as a dancer. He appears with long hair cut in the Buben-kopf style (a kind of Dutch-boy), which was to become the trademark of the Mavo group, bare feet, and wearing a dark-colored tunic, posing selfconsciously for the camera. Mizusawa concludes, “There was probably no other artist who had made his debut in the Japanese art world quite this way before.” Murayama’s ideas spawned a group called Mavo, which, according to Mizusawa, “broke down the boundaries of the art system, and carried out activities on the stage of Tokyo quite different in character from anything done by the established art societies.” One associate made a “sound constructor” of oil cans, logs, and wire, while Murayama designed modernist stage sets, especially for productions in translation of German avant-garde plays. After publishing several issues of a monthly magazine, Mavo fell apart. By the late 1920s, Murayama had assimilated Marxism and moved into making political theater that was esthetically less significant.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (1929)

MURAYAMA, TOMOYOSHI (18 January 1901–22 March 1977) Murayama introduced DADA to Japan. After spending several months of 1922 in BERLIN, he returned

In America at least, it has long been strongest and thus the model of its kind. Established in 1929, controlled by the Rockefeller family unit it wasn’t, MoMA has usually supported high MODERNISM as the institution has grown steadily over the decades, adding innumerable items to its incomparable collections while

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expanding its physical space in midtown New York and even adding satellites within the city. Credit MoMA with the first populous one-person retrospectives that established the reputations of many avant-garde artists, including, say, ALEXANDER CALDER and CLAES OLDENBERG, among others. Credit it as well with pioneering departments of film and photography that helped establish the artistic legitimacy of those new media before defining the canon in those new arts. (With later new media, such video or computer-assisted art, MoMA was less successful.) Its library reportedly “includes over 300,000 books and exhibition catalogues, 1,000 periodical titles, and over 40,000 files of ephemera about individual artists and groups.” Artwise, MoMA is the most educationally consequential art school in NEW YORK CITY, if not the entire US, because it not taught not only spectators but potential artists, incidentally becoming a choice venue for artists meeting each other. Even some of its young floor guards became distinguished visual artists (e.g., ROBERT RYMAN, DAN FLAVIN). For other institutions around the world similarly titled, MoMA has set a standard. Whether this prominence will continue into the 21st century is good question implicitly raised by Modern Contemporary (2000), subtitled “Art at MoMA Since 1980,” whose selection seems so weak, so under-curated, that some might rightly fear for MoMA’s future. Note that the acronym should be spelled MoMA, not MOMA, which is an easy illiteracy that nonetheless appears in published writings by people who should know better, much like “Julliard” (instead of Juilliard, which is correct) or FINNEGANS WAKE with an apostrophe. (Ain’t none.) In writings about avant-garde arts, such small erroneous details, while barely noticed by most readers, implicitly epitomize greater ignorance to the cognoscenti.

MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE (c. 1947) This epithet arose after World War II, in the wake of the development of magnetic audiotape. Sound had previously been recorded on wax cylinder, shellac disk, or magnetic wire, none of which offered the opportunity for neat editing. Tape, by contrast, could be cut with a razor blade, much like film, its loose ends spliced together with a minimum of audible signs. Musique concrète differs from subsequent ELECTRONIC MUSIC

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in drawing upon the sounds of the world, rather than only artificial sound generators. These natural sounds could then be played at faster or slower speeds, modifying not only pitch and rhythm but timbre, while parts separately recorded could be spliced together. Once stereo and then MULTITRACK tape were developed, the composer could mix and play back separately produced sounds simultaneously. One practical (dis) advantage was that the tape composer did not need to know how to read music. As the epithet suggests, the prime movers of musique concrète were based in Paris, often working at European radio stations: PIERRE HENRY and Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95). One masterpiece in this mode is JOHN CAGE’s Williams Mix (1953), which consists of six tapes, each made from the tiniest feasible fragments, that are designed to emerge from six transducers/speakers simultaneously (but not synchronously) as a kind of prerecorded chorus. One familiar example of Musique Concrète is JOHN LENNON’s “Revolution No. 9” (1968), which is as close to contemporary avant-garde music as any Beatle ever came; it purportedly has a different sound if played backwards (a feat then possible only with reel-to-reel audiotape). A later term for audiotape produced mostly from live sources is “electroacoustic,” again as distinct from Electronic Music.

MUYBRIDGE, EADWEARD (9 April 1830–8 May 1904; b. Edward James Muggeridge) Born in England, Muybridge came to America in 1852 and settled in San Francisco in 1855. As a pioneering photographer, Muybridge took early pictures of Yosemite Valley and, in 1867, became Director of Photographic Surveys for the US government. Influenced by American landscape painting, he developed an interest in representing photographically unusual atmospheric effects. Beginning in 1878, Muybridge used several still cameras to portray movement, initially of a galloping horse, later of nude men and women. This led to his development of a “zoopraxiscope,” as he called it, in which motion could be reproduced through a sequence of photographs mounted on the inside of a rotating cylinder. Thanks to his photographic ingenuity, Muybridge proved for the first time that a galloping horse had at certain points all four feet off the ground. The books collecting his motion studies, at once accurate and informative, remain in print.

N

NABOKOV, VLADIMIR (23 April 1899–2 July 1977) An aristocratic Russian émigré of profoundly conservative, anti-Soviet prejudices, Nabokov nonetheless wrote one truly avant-garde novel, a book so original and subtle that it is easily misunderstood, even by his academic biographers. Produced in the wake of the success of Lolita (1958) and Nabokov’s early retirement from American university teaching, Pale Fire (1962) consists of a long poem, attributed to a fictitious American poet named John Shade, followed by an elaborate commentary by Charles Kinbote, a more fictitious African-born scholar teaching in America. Though some commentators, including at least one Nabokov biographer, have praised the poem as masterful, it is a subtle parody of Robert Frost (1874–1963) in particular and of American poetries in general. Kinbote’s commentary, on the other hand, is the work of a megalomaniac, whose typical extravagance is to see himself and his experience as a deposed African prince writ large in lines that ostensibly don’t refer to him at all. This mad misreading becomes a sustained joke that only gets bigger with each Kinbote abuse of Shade’s text, all abetted by the reader’s suspicion that if Kinbote were a sufficiently titled academic, his juniors would no doubt kowtow to his delusions. My own hunch is that, in the course of writing his elaborate commentary to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Nabokov, as a profound ironist, decided to write a fiction about an aristocratic exile, whose background superficially resembles his own, writing a hilariously skewed commentary. The result of that clever displacement is classic. Buried in Nabokov’s huge oeuvre are probably other comparably innovative texts that I haven’t found, perhaps they were originally written in another language and remain untranslated (say, a fiction in the form of a chess problem or an entomological discovery,

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to mention two other Nabokov hobbies), because the paradox of Nabokov’s career is that he was a fairly conservative fictioner who, perhaps incidentally, wrote at least one subtle avant-garde masterpiece. Once he began to be a celebrity, Nabokov accepted invitations to be interviewed, or at least write out responses to questions; and one reason why Strong Opinions (1973) is better than most collections of conversations, incidentally setting a good example, is that his published “interviews” were not just written but rewritten.

NAKIAN, REUBEN (10 August 1897–4 December 1986) Of all the sculptors influenced by ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST painting, Nakian was the freest and most expressive in his use of form. Avoiding all suggestions of the slick industrial look, he developed in his bronze sculptures a personal style that appeared at the same time both rocky and ageless, and spontaneously conceived. Works such as Olympia (1962) seem to have been constructed quickly, out of sudden gestures that were never retouched. Large slabs of bronze lean against each other and make what, at first glance, seems to be nothing more than a simple triangular arrangement of individual sections. Nevertheless, the form coheres before the viewer’s eyes into the suggestion of a human figure, holding itself in a heroic pose. Even Nakian’s more overtly figurative works, such as The Goddess of the Golden Thighs (1964–65), look at first as if they were modeled rapidly in a mound of clay and then abandoned, with all the thumbprints and the excess material still evident on the surface of the form. Nevertheless, there is an intricacy and a mythological power to the gesture of the goddess, who sits with legs spread wide as the embodiment of fecundity itself. In their immediacy and impulsive energy, the masses out

NASH, OGDEN •

of which his works are assembled have distinct similarities to the brushwork of FRANZ KLINE and WILLEM DE KOONING. —Mark Daniel Cohen

from Nature. (Nash currently lives in Britain’s Wales.) The crevices become nearly black and mysterious recesses. His works are remarkably effective in a time when many people confuse the urban with the urbane and believe themselves to be too sophisticated for an authentic religious emotion.

NARRATIVE One recurring theme of the avant-garde literary project is discovering other ways to tell a story. Within the realm of prose fiction, consider the JULIO CORTAZAR “novel” whose chapters can be read in alternative sequences; OGDEN NASH’s elliptical short stories; the graphic novels without words of FRANS MASEREEL and LYND WARD, among others; and the multipath options available on certain HYPERTEXTS. With visual literature, consider, as well the single-page narratives of RUBE GOLDBERG. For narrative in photography, try DUANE MICHALS sequences of pictures likewise devoid of words. In multiplex (film) HOLOGRAPHY, consider Lloyd Cross’s The Kiss in which, as the viewer moves from left to right before a frame, a young woman appears to blow a kiss at the viewer. In pure holography, DORIS VILA floats text in large color fields, charting emotions while playing hide-and-seek with meaning.

NARRATIVE PAINTING See GRAPHIC NARRATIVE.

NASH, DAVID (14 November 1945) Along with ANDY GOLDSWORTHY, Nash is one of the two principal sculptors to take the urge to return to Nature that typifies EARTH ART and practice it in object-based works, thereby also returning to sculpture crafted after the emphasis on manufacture that characterized MINIMALISM. Nash’s early wood sculptures from the 1970s and 1980s combine cultural and natural forms: window frames that emerge like strange growths from the ends of tree limbs, chairs and tables that bristle with branches and twigs, which extend from them like tentacles. These works blur the clarity of the nature/culture distinction, suggesting the artificiality of the division. Nash’s later works of the 1990s take on religious overtones. He chars tall tree trunks, burns crosses onto their surfaces, and cuts deep vertical crevices into them, creating Christian symbols that seem distinctly Celtic for being rendered in elements

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—Mark Daniel Cohen

NASH, OGDEN (19 August 1902–19 May 1971) SURPRISE? Nash’s prosaic subjects and corny sentiments notwithstanding, he was an inventive poet, beginning with campy couplets uniquely identifiable as his: “I think it very nice for ladies to be lithe and lissome,/ But not so much so that you cut yourself if you happen to embrace and kissome.” Writing out of the traditions of conventional verse, Nash played not only with formal fulfillment and violation but with symmetry and asymmetry, as in couplets such as: “I know another man who is an expert on everything from witchcraft and demonology to the Elizabethan drama,/ And he has spent a week-end with the Dalai Lama.” This, like all good wit (as well as much avant-garde art), depends upon unexpected shifts. As an alternative poet, Nash avoided what his contemporaries were doing – there are no myths, no symbolism, no enjambment, no obscurity, no deep mysteries or anything else that academic critics influential at the time would have thought particularly important. Nonetheless, the best Nash epitomizes Robert Frost’s definition of poetry as that which cannot be translated. Just as limericks are unique to English, so is the best Nash, who made qualities indigenous to our language a favorite subject: “English is a language than which none is sublimer/ But it presents certain difficulties for the rhymer/ There are no rhymes for orange or silver/ Unless liberties you pilfer.” So familiar is Ogden Nash’s poetry that few remember that he also wrote stories, a kind of avant-garde skeletal fiction that depended not upon linguistic play but narrative ellipses (and incidentally makes subsequent so-called MINIMAL fictions seem verbose). This is the opening of “The Strange Case of Mr. Donnybrook’s Boredoms”: Once upon a time there was a man named Mr. Donnybrook. He was married to a woman named Mrs. Donnybrook. Mr. and Mrs. Donnybrook dearly loved to be bored.

302 • NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS Sometimes they were bored at the ballet, other times at the cinema. From this introduction follows a wild story about fantasies incurred during insomnia. Needless to say perhaps, this more deviant Nash has been less acceptable to anthologists and diehard Nashians (otherwise probably unfamiliar with everyone else mentioned in this book) than the pap-master.

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS (1965; aka NEA) Founded as a minor contribution to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, as a means of underwriting the development of all the arts in America, the NEA has been uneven in its support of the American avant-garde, mostly because of different levels of sophistication in its various departments. On this issue, Media Arts and Visual Arts, say, have better records than Literature and Music, both of which have rarely supported the writers and composers mentioned in this book. Thus, the problem becomes that nobody at the higher NEA levels seemed to care about persistent RETROGRADE deviance in particular departments, which is another way of measuring an absence of cultural leadership that would be unacceptable at even, say, the CANADA COUNCIL across the border. Secondly, in contrast to more sophisticated European governmental cultural agencies, which often support avant-garde Americans (particularly in Germany), the NEA rarely supports comparable Europeans, to the detriment of our cultural reputation abroad. (You get the impression of NEA administrators working overtime to look subversively Bush league, at all taxpayers’ expense.) Until about 1990 or so, it often funded major work that wouldn’t otherwise happen, which is what grants at their best should do; but sometime in the last decade of the century it succumbed to social-justice warriors wanting to reward people for what they were, as defined by one or another glib socio-esthetic definition, rather than what they proposed to do. This sad bias toward prizes, rather than productive grants, continued into the 21st century unfortunately. Furthermore, once the NEA eliminated grants to individual artists, it became even less consequential in contributing to avant-garde art. The NEA’s companion, the National Endowment for the Humanities (aka NEH), has an even sorrier record when presented with opportunities to support criticism/scholarship about avant-garde art and

literature. I’ve written elsewhere that the NEH’s outlook and politics – its devotion to hierarchy and a circumscribed collection of approved authorities, its subservience to academia, its enthusiasm for embarrassing America – are essentially Stalinist. The fact that Senator Jesse Helms, Patrick Buchanan, and their ilk have missed this last ripoff of the American taxpayer tells everyone all that need be known about their unfortunate ignorance and innocence. (My suspicion is that these “conservative” attacks on the NEA look like a classic example of a subversive diversionary tactic.) The surest way to find out what the NEA and the NEH have actually done, rather than what people say they have done, is to get their Annual Reports, which are public documents once in print and later online.

NAUMAN, BRUCE (6 December 1941) Since his entry into installation art in the early 1970s, Nauman’s works have been the most aggressive critiques by an artist of the standard expectations people have for art. His arrangements of constructed corridors leading nowhere, videos of visual static and of shrieking clowns, and casts of oddly combined and seemingly mutated body parts, have been devised to frustrate typical expectations of clearly defined art objects that offer some form of information and enlightenment. However, as “critiques,” Nauman’s installations are themselves uninformative and unenlightening, for they merely turn artistic definitions on their head without offering any specific ideas or criticisms. Furthermore, if art can be considered to be, at minimum, a manner of communication between the artist and the viewer and an enhancement of the felt human connection between them, Nauman’s shrill, simplistic, adversarial style can be considered the ultimate example of “anti-art,” and even, in its abuse of the audience, anti-human. —Mark Daniel Cohen

NEGRO SPIRITUALS (1800s) A uniquely American folk invention, these began as klunky British hymns imaginatively reworked. One departure was the introduction of more expressive rhythms, beginning with syncopation that comes from performers hitting a note slightly before or after the annotated beat. A second came from the structure of the blues songs, another American invention, where

NEO-PLASTICISM •

the first line is repeated, as often as three times, before the second is sung. How these songs began and developed seems unknown; but even in the late 19th century, choirs from historic black southern colleges successfully toured them through Europe. So powerful has the presence of these songs been in Europe that they are heard implicitly in the music of Antonin Dvorak (1841–1904) and, ostensibly, in the single greatest composition of Britain’s Michael Tippett (1905–98), Child of Our Time (1941). When I sang in All-State (NY high school) chorus in 1956, our conductor, William L. Dawson (1899–1990), who had earlier conducted the legendary Tuskegee Institute Choir (1886), had us perform 16th-century songs (Palestrina, de Victoria, etc.) before the intermission and then these spirituals afterwards. The implicit theme of this concert was that the two elegant musics were esthetically equal, as indeed they sounded. When I later heard choirs from historic black colleges, as was Tuskegee, the programming of both musics respectively before and after the intermission was similar. The great historic soloists for these major American songs include Roland Hayes (1887–1977) and Marion Anderson (1897–1993). Certain churches in the African-American south took these spirituals so seriously that the amateur level in performance became very high, much as happens when German church people, say, sing their J. S. Bach, perhaps because both rehearse and perform nearly every week of the year. For such classic music I prefer using the historic moniker as an honorific, as “African-American” seems clumsy, much like the verbal “English hymns.” Such songs differ from Gospel music, likewise an American invention, which is more expressionist, if not raucous.

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sharply polemical. One English gathering is “I Live I See: Selected Poems” (2013). —Igor Satanovsky

NELSON, TED (17 June 1937; b. Theodor Holm N.) As a legendary eminence grise in the development of computer applications, he coined in the early 1960s the epithets “hypertext” and “hypermedia,” publishing them in 1965 independently of any corporate or governmental sponsor. While just a student in America, Nelson envisioned well before almost everyone else that computers could facilitate the storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information and art, all without fearing established gatekeepers. Much of what he imagined in 1960 as Project Xanadu was realized decades later in the www (the World Wide Web). Not for nothing was Nelson’s work included in the legendary Software exhibition (1970) at New York’s Jewish Museum. Around that time Nelson also designed a protoword processor and a database, neither of which was ever realized. As the only child of a television director and a famous film actress, he precociously made a film with music by his Swarthmore College buddy PETER SCHICKELE. Nelson’s writings, though obscurely published, remain brilliant and inspiring. Though others have made millions developing Nelson’s imaginative ideas, he didn’t, instead becoming a peripatetic computer intellectual recognized more often in Europe and Asia than in his native country. Curious it is that Nelson and the composer JOEL CHADABE, likewise more imaginative about computers in art, were classmates in high school.

NEKRASOV, VSEVOLOD (24 March 1934–15 May 2009) One of the most important and inventive poets in the Soviet literary underground, he was a groundbreaking Russian minimalist, who became in the 1970s one of the founders of MOSCOW CONCEPTUALISM, collaborating with Collective Actions group. Mining the least original bits of everyday speech he transformed them by means of repetition and paronomasia (a play on words derived from the same root, or similar-sounding words). Nekrasov extensively manipulated the lingo of the Soviet propaganda to expose the abyss that separated it from the private Russian speech. The resulting terse verse was fresh, colloquial, and uniquely his own, in turns lyrical, philosophical, political, satirical, and

NEO-PLASTICISM (1917–40s) Peculiar though it sounds, as all visual art is inherently “plastic,” this was for years the favorite epithet for PIET MONDRIAN and then artists working under the influence of him, the term emphasizing the primacy of austere visual form. The initial principles, scrupulously observed, were only right angles arrayed horizontally and vertically and then the three primary colors along with the neutral hues of black, white, and sometimes gray, all reflecting the influence of a precious Dutch philosopher/mathematician M. H. J. Schoenmaekers (1875–1944). After Mondrian immigrated to New

304 • NEON York, the epithet became popular there until it quietly disappeared. Most art terms with “new” or “post” in their names inevitably have short lives.

I horrors. Though the Tate London features him, his art is rarely seen in New York, not to mention in “the states,” as Brits say.

NEON

NEW DIRECTIONS

(1912)

(1936)

An illuminating technology different from the earlier tungsten-based electric lamp and later LED lamps, neon offered a new and different quality of light to artists such as STEPHEN ANTONAKIS, DAN FLAVIN, and ROBERT IRWIN, among others.

Commonly thought to be a book publisher predisposed to avant-garde writing, New Directions was actually something else. Founded by an heir to some Pittsburgh steel fortune, James Laughlin IV (1914–97), while he was still a Harvard undergraduate, it loyally served certain major avant-garde figures at least a decade older than he: EZRA POUND, WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, JORGE LUIS BORGES, and KENNETH REXROTH, until other book publishers contracted them. Toward avant-garde figures of his own generation, Laughlin was less faithful, publishing at times KENNETH PATCHEN and CHARLES HENRI FORD, until their work was dropped, needlessly disappearing, to everyone’s misfortune. The voluminous perfect-bound semiannual publication, likewise called New Directions (1936–91), could sometimes be editorially more adventurous. One implicit key to understanding ND’s limitations was Laughlin’s distaste for the writers and innovations prominent in EUGENE JOLAS’s more avant-garde TRANSITION, thus accounting for his failure to accept, as he reluctantly acknowledged later, SAMUEL BECKETT. Remarkably few avant-garde writers of the next generations appeared under New Directions’ imprint. Acknowledging limitations and peculiarities, Pound often referred to the imprint as “Nude Erections.” In the “Publisher’s Foreword” to A New Directions Reader (1964), a self-retrospective in mid-career, Laughlin speaks of “no editorial pattern beyond the publisher’s inclinations,” which is another way of accounting for the essentially personal base of his selections. “The name New Directions,” he continued, “is as often as not misleading in its implication of the experimental, the avant-garde, and the ‘offbeat.’” Considering this accurate self-appraisal, Laughlin could just as well have avoided the avant-garde moniker and instead followed the example of Alfred A. Knopf, for instance, in naming his publishing house after himself.

NEVELSON, LOUISE (23 September 1899–17 April 1988) Nevelson’s innovation was a sculptural image – more precisely, a rectangular relief, best viewed perpendicularly from the front. These reliefs are divided into smaller rectangular compartments containing miscellaneous scraps of wood, ranging from newel posts to pegs, sometimes including chair legs and other discarded wooden pieces and then painted entirely in a single color, usually black, sometimes white or gold. Though Nevelson did not change her compositional style after 1955, internal relationships became more complex, culminating perhaps in the grandiose Homage to the World (1966). In the late ’60s, Nevelson favored Plexiglas for open rectangles within a larger frame or smaller assemblages of geometric wooden parts within a Plexiglas case. Nevelson also reworked her SIGNATURE style for outdoor sculptures in aluminum and steel.

NEVINSON, C. R. W. (13 August 1889–7 October 1946; b. Christopher Richard Wynne N.) Curious it seems that the principal British advocate of ITALIAN FUTURISM should do his most memorable paintings of and about NEW YORK CITY around 1920. Portraying oppressive verticality, Nevinson’s The Soul of the Soulless City (1920) ranks among the best of its early kind. Otherwise, Nevinson, sometimes called Richard N., developed before World War I a collaboration with F.T. MARINETTI that prompted WYNDHAM LEWIS, born combative, to found VORTICISM and then BLAST that excluded Nevinson. Otherwise, he is remembered in England, especially for La Mitrailleuse (1915), among the stronger painters of World War

NEW YORK CITY (1920–) In the first two decades after World War I, America’s biggest city inspired extraordinary works by American

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artists and writers such as Hart Crane (1899–1932) and numerous painters, as well as by such Europeans visiting there as VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY, BLAISE CENDRARS, JULIETTE ROCHE, and Frederico García Lorca (1898–1936), all of whom produced major poems about their experience of New York. In 1930 HENRI MATISSE wrote: “The first time I saw America, I mean New York, at seven o’clock in the evening, this gold and black block in the night, reflected in the water, I was in complete ecstasy.” After major European artists settled in New York, New York, during World War II, it replaced Paris as the most hospitable city for the education in and creation of avant-garde arts. In various precincts of DOWNTOWN Manhattan – Greenwich Village, SoHo, and the East Village – artists from around the world found generous space, low rents, and congenial company. There the immigrants made new art, often reflecting other art made there, sometimes about its culture. The principal change in the 21st century is that the avantgarde moved across the East River to certain precincts of Brooklyn mainly connected to a subway line commonly called the L-train. Other than the New York School of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST artists in the 1950s, most groups of writers or artists hanging themselves on “New York [this]” or “New York [that]” are hangers-on. May I admit to a predisposed prejudice, having resided in New York City my entire life and judging its culture to be profoundly and endlessly inspiring.

NEW YORK SCHOOL, SCHOOL OF PARIS, BLACK MOUNTAIN POETS, ETC. Any purportedly categorical classifications of art or artists based upon geography, sex, race, or academic background do not belong in arts criticism, as they rarely say anything significant about the character of an individual artist’s work. Such epithets customarily function as sales slogans, capitalizing upon preestablished favorable auras of key words (e.g., New York, Paris, feminism, etc.) in the marketing both of works and of opinions (and even of “critical” books), mostly to establish significance for art or artists about which and whom nothing more substantial can be said. Beware of any artist who opens his or her biography with sexual, racial, geographic, or academic tags designed to substitute for genuine credentials, artistic styles, or past achievements. Whereas some consumers of art lap up these sorts of deceptions, others avoid them like a plague. Caveat emptor.

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NEWMAN, BARNETT (29 January 1905–4 July 1970) Though a painting contemporary of WILLEM DE KOONING and JACKSON POLLOCK, Newman, proceeding from different assumptions, incorporating gesture with geometry, created a different sort of scarce work, whose excellence was thus not acknowledged until the 1960s. Typical Newman paintings consist of a predominantly monochromatic canvas with deeply saturated color, interrupted by only a few contrasting marks that often take the form of vertical stripes. The Wild (1950), for instance, was a canvas nearly 8 feet high but only 1 5/8 inches wide. In Abraham (1950), 6 feet 10¾ inches high but only 34½ inches wide, a dark black vertical stripe bisects a uniformly light black field. Because Newman’s first one-person exhibitions in 1950 and 1951 aroused hostile responses, he did not show again in New York until 1959, when he was in his mid-fifties. Only with a 1966 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, featuring his monumentally christened Stations of the Cross, was his genius fully acknowledged. In the fourteen paintings comprising that last work, each 6½” feet by 5 feet, the traditional Biblical narrative is “told” through vertical stripes of various widths and shapes, against a background field of raw canvas, so that the absence of familiar iconography becomes a commentary on the classic myth, as well as an echo of the simple cosmological forms of primitive art. His most notable sculpture, Broken Obelisk (1963– 67), is similarly vertical, with a ground-based pyramid on whose pointed top is balanced a rectangular volume whose bottom comes to a point. (This looks technically impossible and no doubt required sophisticated engineering.) In retrospect, Newman can be regarded as a primary precursor of COLOR-FIELD PAINTING, monochromic painting, the conundrum art of JASPER JOHNS, and much else. He was also a strong writer and talker whose prose was posthumously collected into a book, who often contributed titles to his colleagues’ paintings. Since his contemporaries regarded him as an extremely funny, recalling his monumental jokes, I’ve often wondered if viewers miss the humor of his ostensibly solemn art.

NEWSPAPER REVIEWERS For truer critical guidance about avant-garde literature and art, forget about newspaper reviewers, nearly all of them. Likewise those on the daily mass media (as distinct from those occasionally online). They’re usually

306 • NICHOL, BP wrong and superficial in their opinions, if they cover avant-garde work at all. The history of their errors and ignorance is indisputable. For artistic judgment and understanding, trust more those critics writing for weeklies and monthlies and, even more, the authors of books, because, simply, the further the distance the critic gains from new work, the greater is her or his immunity more likely from passing promotions and fads and thus the more likely it becomes that his or her critical guidance will be true. More serious critics, don’t forget, have principled positions informing their opinions. Consider as well that mistakes and misjudgments made in newspapers will be forgotten within a week or so, while those in books could plague their authors forever. One measure of mental hygiene in both appreciating the arts and writing about them is resistance to short-sightedness. Without distance, even detailed knowledge and purportedly greater intelligence can seem dumb. In my head is the principal professor of the opening course for graduate students in history (not journalism) at Columbia advising us: “You’re here to learn what not to read.”

NICHOL, BP (30 September 1944–25 September 1988; b. Barrie Phillip N.) Perhaps the most prolific notable Canadian poet of his generation, Nichol worked in several veins, only some of which were avant-garde. Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer (1967) contains typewriter poems. Later visual writing incorporates press-on type. Still Water (1970) is a box of poems. Of the last, his fellow Canadian Michael Andre (1946) writes, “Many are funny, like this rap at high coo: ‘2 leaves touch/ bad poems are written.’ Others are one-liners using onomatopoetic permutations: ‘beyond a bee yawned abbey on debby Honda beyond.’” Though Nichol’s poetry won a Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award in 1970, by international avant-garde standards he ranked among neither the best nor the worst. Even in his strivings for profundity, he tended toward the superficial. Nichol also participated in the FOUR HORSEMEN, the most prominent SOUND-POETRY quartet of its time, and in the collective compositions of the Toronto Research Group. Among his less experimental masterworks is The Martyrology (1972, 1976, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1990), several volumes about imaginary saints. Nichol’s indigenous success – with one bibliography listing over

seventy titles, nearly all of them published in his native country – demonstrated that no English-speaking country can match Canada in supporting experimental poetry.

NICHOLAS BROTHERS (Fayard N., 1914–2006; Harold N., 1921–2000) Though other masters of the uniquely American art of tap dancing might have been better in their time, their immortality depends upon a single filmed sequence only a few minutes in length, informally titled “Jumping Jive,” in which they demonstrate the possibilities for exuberant dancers moving mostly to their own percussion. Originally the finale of the film Stormy Weather (1943), the film clip shows the two formally dressed men, one visibly taller and suppler than the other, leaping unaided onto a grand piano and then tap dancing up steps to a raised platform before descending with their legs split apart as they hit each landing and pushing themselves erect, moving in and out of unison activity while continuously tapping intricate beats. Descending from American vaudeville, rather than modern dance, the Nicholas Brothers’ work epitomized athletic nonrepresentational dance at a time when EXPRESSIONISM was more common and then modest filming when BUSBY BERKELEY’s spectacles for dozens of women were more popular. Perhaps the greatest dance film ever, “Jumping Jive” must be seen to be believed. Decades later, one brother joked that this dance could not be duplicated – certainly not by them or any other humans, probably not by robots either.

NIKOLAIS, ALWIN (25 November 1910–8 May 1993) Though initially trained in dance, Nikolais worked as an accompanist for silent films and with marionettes before developing a dance theater in which the movements of individuals are subordinated to larger theatrical patterns established by scenery, costumes, and lights, very much in the tradition of LOÏE FULLER generations before. Nikolais’ major works incorporate all kinds of props, most of which function as dramatic extensions of the dancers’ limbs, and brightly colored costumes that puff out from the natural lines of the body, to generate what he called a “direct kinetic statement.” Technologically more advanced than other choreographers, Nikolais composed his own electronic scores

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(as he was historically the first customer for a MOOG synthesizer), and developed original theatrical illuminations, including portable lights carried by performers. Perhaps because his choreography as such was not as innovative as his spectacular stage images, a typical Nikolais piece tends to be experienced as a series of episodes that establish breath-taking new scenes for less engaging movements. Nothing quite like his theater has appeared since.

NIKONOVA, REA (25 June 1942–10 March 2014; b. Anna Alexandrovna Tarshis) Nikonova is arguably the premier Russian avantgardist of the post-Stalin period, having created an enormous and varied body of innovative work, some of which clearly relates to the futurist tradition, but much of which was entirely new. She received a musical education in Sverdlovsk, was one of the main organizers of the Uktus School there, and of the manuscript journal Nomer. She began to write seriously in 1959 and to paint in 1962, producing numerous pictures and drawings per day. With her husband SERGE SEGAY, she founded the group TRANSFUTURISTS and the journal Transponans. Nikonova authored some of the earliest Russian examples of MINIMALIST and CONCEPTUALIST POETRY (mid-1960s). She was particularly interested in exploring the possibilities of what she calls “vacuum poetry,” where text or words are expected but absent. These can range from printed texts with absent components to performance pieces. Among her other inventions are vector poems (where arrows indicate movement), gesture poems (performed only with hand motions), architectural poems (treatments of pre-existing or new poems in which equivalent letters are lined up vertically in a grid with added vectors and coloration to create a unique visual artifact), and “Pliugms” (series of variations on several set phrases that employ all possible manipulations from shuffling of letters to the substitution of geometric figures for words). The last also exist in audiotaped versions. Nikonova wrote theater pieces, as well as prose and criticism. Among her largest projects are a work called “Mutology,” which describes several hundred kinds of pieces in which silence is the main ingredient, and the System of Interrelated Styles with Illustrations and Commentaries for Them in ten volumes, which is a compendium of virtually any imaginable literary technique, with examples provided mostly from her own works. Nikonova began an international mail-art

Figure 16 Rea Nikonova, a vector poem, pre-1990. Collection of Gerald Janecek.

journal, Double (1991–2001, eight issues) designed in the “rea-structure” (pages cut to various geometric shapes and combined) used for some of the latter issues of Transponans, and in her later years she contributed to numerous Western and Russian journals. Her first book to appear in Russia, however, came out only in 1997 in connection with her performance at the Sidur Museum in Moscow. After 1998 she and her husband lived in Kiel, Germany until their deaths in 2014. —Gerald Janecek

1912 (1912) 1912 is increasingly recognized as the crucial year in the history of this century’s vanguard painting. It was a year in which so much was begun afresh, although the old disciplines were neither consciously nor finally cast aside – a year in which, to the painter/writer MICHEL SEUPHOR, “the main tendencies of abstract art have radiated and to which we can always turn in our search for origins, for the seed of invention.” Among the

308 • 1980S milestones for him were PIET MONDRIAN’s arrival in Paris and a KASIMIR MALEVICH exhibition in Russia; the creation of MARCEL DUCHAMP’s NUDE DESCENDING STAIRCASE, NO. 2, and ROBERT DELAUNAY’s Simultaneous Windows on the City; the debut of ARNOLD SCHOENBERG’s Pierrot Lunaire; the publication in Munich of the Blue Rider Almanac. In my own sense of American arts history in particular, 1959 was another turning point before the 1960s and 1970s.

1980S Much of what emerged during that decade, especially in the visual arts, was RETROGRADE disguised as “fresh.” The truth of this generalization, which I only sensed at the time (residing as I did in ARTISTS’ SOHO and West BERLIN), was confirmed in a largeformat 1992 picture book ostensibly about the new art of the previous decade – Klaus Honnef’s Contemporary Art (Benedikt Taschen). The artists featured in its pages seemed to exemplify opportunistic POSTMODERNISM: kitschy, simplistic, anti-intellectual, unproblematic, exploitative, immediately appealing, and often avowedly anti-avant-garde. Catalogues surviving from large “blockbuster” exhibitions of new art from this decade confirm my judgment. One suspicion I’ve developed three decades later is that, as the modernist masterpieces of the previous decades became too expensive, as more wealthy people established collections, the market had to be expanded opportunistically with lousy lighter art susceptible to enough publicity to support purchases. If any of these artists new during the 1980s will be remembered two decades from now, I’d be surprised and so won’t name them here; but aged 78 as I write this, I might not be around to find out. May I nonetheless wager (with money for my heirs) that 1980s art will be reinterpreted to identify hidden excellences while artists prominent then will be degraded, much as critical art historians after 1970 identified as major certain 1930s artists scarcely known at that time. As an experienced arts historian who writes books, I can’t afford to be wrong about such judgments of quality. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

NINTH STREET SHOW (21 May 1951–10 June 1951) Essentially a pop-up exhibition in the first floor and basement of a building about to be demolished at 60 East Ninth Street in lower Manhattan, this served

artists whose studios were then between 8th Street and 12th, and between First Avenues and Sixth, most of whom were war veterans, male, and already over 40 in age. Many of these artists had also participated in a discussion group known as the EIGHTH STREET CLUB. Organized mainly by LEO CASTELLI, then a collector who later became a prominent art dealer, this populous exhibition accomplished what preestablished art galleries could not do – successfully introducing “emerging” downtown artists to prominent uptown connoisseurs. Among the former were JACKSON POLLOCK, AD REINHARDT, FRANZ KLINE, CLEMENT GREENBERG, WILLIAM DE KOONING, LEE KRASNER, and DAVID SMITH. Among the latter were curators at the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. Precisely at the time of this show I was finishing fifth grade at Downtown Community School, which happened to be on East 11th Street only a few blocks away. Among my classmates was Peter Manso (1940), later a provocative writer, whose father was the painter and teacher Leo Manso (1914–93). When I recently asked Peter if we kids attended this monumental show, he replied that we missed the opportunity to connect to the beginnings of DOWNTOWN Manhattan art. Drats. Historically the principal later analogue was The Times Square Show (1980), which was likewise a populous pop-up exhibition with a Manhattan address, but in a four-story building, once a seedy massage parlor, at Seventh Avenue and Forty-First Street. As its theme was establishing the validity of eccentric figuration for artists born in the 1950s and residing mostly on the Lower East Side, it included TOM OTTERNESS, Kiki Smith (1954), John Ahearn (1951), and David Hammons (1943), along with graffiti artists from the South Bronx. Decades later, the significance of both populous pop-up exhibitions is still acknowledged.

NOGUCHI, ISAMU (17 November 1904–30 December 1988) Born in Los Angeles, the son of an American writer named Leonie Gilmore (1873–1933) and a Japanese poet who abandoned her before their son was born, Noguchi grew up in Japan before studying (as “Sam Gilmour”) at an Indiana high school. After taking courses in art in both New York and Paris, where he befriended CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, he then studied further in both China and Japan. It is often said that his art synthesized Eastern and Western influences more profoundly than anyone else based in the USA.

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His early stone and metal sculptures favored a postBrancusi reduction of forms to simple, smooth surfaces that assumed organic qualities. Beginning in the 1940s, he sometimes placed electric lamps inside his works. Noguchi experimented with various base supports. In a fully productive long career, he also designed gardens, furniture, and lamps. His late masterpiece is a memorial fountain (1978) placed in a Detroit public plaza. His decors for ballets by GEORGE BALANCHINE and MARTHA GRAHAM are remembered as among the best in that genre. Perhaps because Noguchi was moderately famous for so long, while his art didn’t change appreciably, little was written about his later exhibitions. In Long Island City, just over the East River from Manhattan, he made his studio-home into a modest eponymous museum that survived his death (albeit across the street from a humongous Costco).

“NONSENSE” (forever) Actually there is no such thing, for any human creation that can be defined in one way, rather than another way, has by that fact of definition a certain amount of esthetic sense. Indeed, some of the most inspired avant-garde writing, from EDWARD LEAR through FINNEGANS WAKE to the present, has struck many who should have known better, if only as a measure of esthetic intelligence, as “nonsense.” That means that the use of that word as derogatory criticism indicates that the writer/speaker is none too smart about contemporary art. Wim Tigges’s An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense (1988) contains essays on Lear, LEWIS CARROLL, EDWARD GOREY, EDWARD LEAR, FLANN O’BRIEN, and STEFEN THEMERSON, as well as a useful bibliography.

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SCHAPIRO, ROGER SESSIONS, CHARLES EAMES, NORTHROP FRYE, FRANK STELLA, JOHN CAGE, JOHN ASHBERY, UMBERTO ECO, LEO STEINBERG, and WILLIAM KENTRIDGE. Texts of their lectures often appear later as a book, and some of these volumes, such as Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941, often revised since), have become classics on their own. If any mausoleum for the avant-garde elite exists in the world, this would be uniquely it. Consider, by contrast, of those recognized with an individual entry in earlier editions of this book, only George D. Birkhoff (1884–1944), ostensibly a mathematician, was ever a tenured professor at Harvard, and surprisingly few were alumni.

“NOT ART” (20th century) Often has startlingly original work in the 20th century been initially dismissed as “not art,” customarily for violating established restrictions on esthetic propriety, only to become accepted, if not canonical, at later times. Indeed, the tradition of “not art,” as well as “not poetry,” is so distinguished that whole books could be written about works so greeted, as well as the stupidity of otherwise accredited people who have uttered that dismissive epithet. Just as NICOLAS SLONIMSKY compiled a classic anthology of wrong reviews of famous composers, A Lexicon of Musical Invective (1953), so could a comparable collection be made solely about declarations of “not art.” It’s not for nothing that an annual arts festival in Australia proudly calls itself “This Is Not Art” (1998). Were I ever in New South Wales, I’d attend TINA.

NOTHING NORTON PROFESSOR (1926) No academic appointment anywhere in the world has included as many truly avant-garde artists and writers as this revolving chair at Harvard University. Beginning in 1926, named after a previous president of Harvard (Charles Eliot N., 1827–1908), it has since annually invited individual recipients superlatively distinguished in various arts to give six lectures in the course of an academic year before sending them home. Representing all the arts, recipients have over its ninety years included T.S. ELIOT, SIGFRIED GIEDION, E. E. CUMMINGS, HERBERT READ, MEYER

An avant-garde ideal sought by many artists. About it, to be true to itself, nothing more need be said. On second thought, while “plenty of nothing” might be a negative in life, it can be an honorific in avantgarde art, where some “nothing” can contain more resonance than other “nothing.” One measure for treasuring JOHN CAGE’s 4′33″, for instance, is the plentiful amount and quality of something that can be inferred from nothing. Q. E. D. Among other artists striving for plenty of nothing was SAMUEL BECKETT. From a commercial publisher in 1974 came The Nothing Book, hardbound with only blank sheets between the colored endpapers, subtitled “Wanna Make Something of It.” (Apparently

310 • NOVELLAS it didn’t sell enough copies to warrant a sequel.) By contrast, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’s Much Ado (1612) is neither nothing nor about nothing. A further truth is that the heaviest nothing is both comic and serious or, more precisely, serious and comic, as might be this entry, which (illustratively?) makes something out of nothing (and perhaps establishes a certain AURA informing this entire book?).

NOVELLAS (1898) For avant-garde prose fictions longer than a story but shorter than a novel, the historic masterpieces are ALFRED JARRY’s Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll pataphysicien: Roman néo-scientifique suivi de Spéculations (written, 1898; published posthumously in 1911; Dr. Faustroll, ‘Pataphysician), and his Le Surmâle, roman moderne (1902, The Supermale). As an influence on both DADA and SURREALISM, the former tells of a trip over Paris in a cooper skiff while the latter portrays in outrageous prose with audacious characters a race between a train and bicyclists energized by imaginary elixir. Otherwise, the canon of later avant-garde novellas includes GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE’s Le Poète assassiné (1916, The Poet Assassinated), PIERRE ALBERT-BIROT’s Grabinoulor (1919, The First Book of Grabinoulor), Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (1915, The Metamorphosis), WILLIAM FAULKNER’s The Bear (1942), GERTRUDE STEIN’s Two (1951), GEORGES PEREC’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise (1968), KENNETH GANGEMI’s Olt (1969), and JACK KEROUAC’s Old Angel Midnight (1973). One quality common to several is extraordinary English prose of a quality hard to sustain for greater lengths.

NOVELS (1906) Among the early avant-garde novels, forging alternative directions in the tradition of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), are FELIX FÉNÉON’s Novels in Three Lines (1906), JAMES JOYCE’s ULYSSES (1922), GERTRUDE STEIN’s The Making of Americans (1926, though completed in 1911), Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), MILT GROSS’s He Done Her Wrong: The Great American Novel (1930), WILLIAM FAULKNER’s As I Lay Dying (1930), LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE’s Voyage au bout

de la nuit (1932, Journey to the End of Night) DJUNA BARNES’s Nightwood (1936), Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom (1936), Céline’s Mort à crédit (1936, Death on the Installment Plan), Joyce’s FINNEGANS WAKE (1939), FLANN O’BRIEN’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), RAYMOND QUENEAU’s Exercices de style (1947, Exercises in Style), WILLIAM BURROUGHS’s Naked Lunch (1959), SAMUEL BECKETT’s Comment c’est (1961, How It Is), MARC SAPORTA’s Composition No. 1 (1962), ANTHONY BURGESS’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), VLADIMIR NABOKOV’s Pale Fire (1962), EMMETT WILLIAMS’s Sweethearts (1967), MADELINE GINS’s Word Rain (1969), B.S. JOHNSON’s The Unfortunates (1969), and JACK KEROUAC’s Visions of Cody (1972, though written 1951–52). For publications appearing after 1972, apparently an historical turning point, the list is either longer or shorter.

NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE (1912) The title of Marcel Duchamp’s most famous early painting actually belongs to two works, respectively subtitled No. 1 (1911–12) and No. 2, the sequel far more elaborate than the first. One of the most familiar images in early modernist art, it initially looks like a series of vertical panels, askew at various angles, in shades running behind brown and yellow, against a darker brown background. Like so (too?) much other Duchamp work, it depends upon (gains from?) its title. Though made in France, it became prominent in the United States, particularly at THE ARMORY SHOW that opened on 17 February 1913, in a large exhibition that intended to mix avant-garde European art with the latest American work. Duchamp provided his last oil painting, and at over 2 feet high, nearly 10 feet wide, the Nude’s fame obscures recognition of several other extraordinary paintings similar in vertical style, made by Duchamp around the same time – Sad Young Man on a Train (1911), The King and Queens Surrounded by Swift Nudes (1912), and Passage from Virgin to Bride (1912), in sum representing probably the summa of early CUBISM. Journalists at the time feasted upon this Duchamp more for its title, which suggested eroticism, than its visual style, which didn’t. As no other single picture at the time gained so much notoriety, Nude was also parodied, most successfully by a New York Evening Sun cartoon titled “Seeing New York with a Cubist,” subtitled “The Rude

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Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway).” So often badly reproduced, Duchamp’s second Nude had less influence upon later art than Duchamp himself. Nonetheless, it should be seen live. Once owned by ARENSBERG, it is now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

NYMAN, MICHAEL (23 March 1944) Given his reputation as one of the best British composers for feature-length films (including several directed by Peter Greenaway and Jane Campion’s The Piano [1994]), do not forget that Nyman once composed austere innovative music, in addition to writing Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1974), which is still

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a good survey of compositional INDETERMINACY and early MODULAR music. Perhaps the epitome of the former is a piece whose title has only numerals, 1–100 (1976). For “multiple pianos,” this work is designed, in Nyman’s words, to “demonstrate a curious confluence of free and fixed musical systems.” Each pianist is instructed to read the same scored sequence of one hundred sustained chords, moving ahead to the next chord only when the previous one decays; and as the chords move down the scale, their overall pitch gets increasingly lower. “The free(ish) process is designed to create unwritten harmonic (and rhythmic) divergences by overlapping and juxtaposition brought about by the fact that each individual reading of the chordal text is independent of those of the other players.” 1–100 is a stunning piece, paradoxically brilliant in its austerity, perhaps gaining from the recollection of the far slicker music that Nyman has composed since.

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OATES, JOYCE CAROL (16 June 1938) Buried in Oates’s topless bibliography are several genuinely experimental stories, most of them ironic takeoffs on conventional forms, such as the contributors’ notes in the back of a literary magazine. Quite wonderful, such fictions suggested a direction for Oates’s work far more avant-garde and fundamentally more distinguished than those she has since pursued. In the New York Review of Books (29 June 2000), she wrote of modern American writers whose short stories “are a greater accomplishment than the novels that brought [them] wealth and celebrity.” That judgment is incidentally self-applicable. More than most ambitious writers, she has sought the signs of bourgeois success in money, position, celebrity, rewards, and real estate, probably without recognizing the costs of such “success” upon the quality of her own work as both a fictioner and book reviewer, which has become inconsequential. Sad becomes the fate of winners who survive long enough to discover what they’ve lost. Odder still, as this last theme appears often in traditional literature.

OBERIU (late 1920s) An acronym for “Union of Real Art,” this turned out to be the last important development of the Russian avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century. A group of poets who came together in St. Petersburg in the late twenties, this consisted of ALEKSANDR VVEDENSKY, DANIIL KHARMS, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Igor Bakhterev and sometime collaborators Konstantin Vaginov and Nikolai Oleynikov. A poster from an OBERIU theatricalized evening, Three Left Hours, presented on 24 January 1928,

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states that it involved a poetry reading, a staging of D. Kharms’s play Elizaveta Bam , movie shorts presentation, and a jazz band playing in intermissions. While sharing ideals and goals of the most radical Futurists like KASIMIR MALEVICH and ALEXEI KRUCHONYKH, the OBERIU poets found their own direction exploring concepts of nonsense and the absurd. Their influences, besides Futurism, included “outsider” genres like Russian nonsense folklore, children’s poems, poems of the mad, and even bad amateur poetry. Unlike ZAUM, OBERIU writing stayed mostly within the limits of Russian traditional vocabulary and meter, and yet was infinitely inventive in juxtaposing different semantic layers of language. Filled with dark humor of the most subversive kind, their works were particularly unacceptable to Stalin’s regime. Because few of OBERIU members’ major works appeared in print in the late twenties, their greater immediate impact was in performance and theater. OBERIU plays like Vvedensky and Kharms’s “All in Clocks My Mother Walks” (1926) or Kharms’s “Elizaveta Bam” (1928) defined THEATER OF THE ABSURD well before this term was invented. Though most of the OBERIU poets were arrested and prosecuted by 1931, individual members continued to create innovative works well into the late 1930s, before perishing in the Soviet Gulags. Their works were rediscovered by the younger generation of Russian poets in the ’60s, in large part thanks to the last surviving OBERIU member, Igor Bakherev (1908–96). —Igor Satanovsky

O’BRIEN, FLANN (5 October 1911–1 April 1966; b. Brian O’Nolan; aka Myles na Copaleen, Brian Ó Nualláin) As a civil servant who wrote a newspaper column under the name Myles na Copaleen, Brian O’Nolan needed

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yet another pseudonym for his fiction, and so chose Flann O’Brien. His supremely clever masterpiece is At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), a novel about an author whose characters turn against him by writing a novel about him. Because the initial narrator is a student writing a book, At Swim-Two-Birds has three beginnings and three endings. The extremely witty writing includes this interrogation of a cow: “State your name . . . . /That is a thing I have never attained, replied the cow. Her voice was low and guttural and of a quality not normally associated with the female mammalia.” Though this novel initially failed in the marketplace, it became a genuine underground classic that is reissued from time to time. Its sequel, written around the same time, was posthumously published as The Third Policeman (1967). About another novel Flann O’Brien novel, The Dalkey Archive (1964), HUGH KENNER writes: Neither James Joyce nor he ever surpassed the nested ingenuity of its contrivances, the insidious taut language to make everything at all seem plausible, or the unforced beauty of such episodes as our man’s dialogue with his soul, when, not knowing he’s already dead, he supposes he’s about to be hanged. O’Brien also published another novel entirely in Gaelic. Some would nominate him to be the lower wing of the Irish trinity of JAMES JOYCE and SAMUEL BECKETT.

OBSCURITY (forever, alas) In art, as well as writing about art, it epitomizes pretentiousness disguised.

OCKERSE, TOM (20 April 1940) Born Dutch in Indonesia, Ockerse came to America in the late 1950s and was initially active among those producing VISUAL POETRY at Indiana University in the middle 1960s. Trained in visual art, he differed from other early visual poets in using colors, at the same time respecting the literary convention of 8½” by 11 inch sheets of paper. One distinguishing mark of his first major collection, the self-published T. O. P. (or Tom Ockerse Project; 1970), is design solutions so various that the book as a whole lacks stylistic character.

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However, in his works that are most frequently reproduced elsewhere, there is a distinct SIGNATURE reflecting verbal-visual elegance and CONSTRUCTIVIST simplicity. Around this time, Ockerse also produced The A–Z Book (1970), an awesomely inventive alphabet, a foot square, in which he used die-cutting to produce a sequence of pages in which the portion cut away from a foreground page belongs to the letter behind it. Considering that many visual poets have made alphabet books (including me), I rank Ockerse’s among the greatest of all time.

O’DOHERTY, BRIAN (4 May 1928) Born in Ireland, educated in England, O’Doherty began his American career as an art critic who then worked primarily as an imaginative administrator for the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS as the director of the esthetically most progressive departments, successively visual arts and media arts, apparently with remarkable political skill, because little, if any, of the negative attention aimed at the NEA ever mentioned him. As a visual artist customarily exhibiting under the name Patrick Ireland, he realized a highly original, rigorously relational CONSTRUCTIVISM, at times in drawings on paper, at other times with installations of taut strings stretched to the edges of a space, interacting in geometric ways. As elaborate investigations of the new circumstances of art galleries and museums, the essays he collected as Inside the White Cube are true avant-garde criticism. O’Doherty edited the most distinguished issue of ASPEN that came in a box, much in the tradition of MARCEL DUCHAMP’s Valise. He also co-curated, co-wrote, and then narrated Video: The New Wave (1973), which was an early attempt to identify the strongest VIDEO ART as distinct from video documentaries that became more prominent in later curating, even by curators who should have known better.

OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION/ STRATEGIC SERVICES (1942–45) In America at least, these were probably the only government agencies to employ avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Instructed to produce propaganda not only for distribution abroad but for domestic

314 • OHNO, KAZUO consumption, the former, commonly called OWI, hired such poets, artists, and filmmakers as the poet CHARLES OLSON, the painter/graphic artist Ben Shahn (1898–1969), and the filmmaker ALEXANDER HAMMID. By contrast, the OSS sought brilliant and original young minds to collect and analyze strategic information for the American military. On its staff in its short life were the future intellectual historian CARL SCHORSKE, the radical social philosophers Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Norman O. Brown (1913–2002), the cookbook guru Julia Child (1912– 2004), the Marxist-Hollywood filmmaker Abraham Polonsky (1910–99), and the major-league baseball player Moe Berg (1902–72), who, Princeton-educated, incidentally knew several languages. For a while during the 1970s, certain well-educated musicologists with higher competence with computers earned paychecks from the latter’s successor, the Central Intelligence Agency, supposedly the information processor’s totem information processor; but by the 21st century, such superior computer competence became more common.

OHNO, KAZUO (27 October 1906–1 June 2010) Considered to be the soul and cofounder of BUTOH, Ohno began dance studies with Baku Ishii (1886–1962) in 1933 and later studied with Takaya Eguchi (1900–77), who had been a pupil of the German EXPRESSIONIST dancer MARY WIGMAN. In 1977, Ohno created and performed Admiring La Argentina, in which, dressed in a flowing gown, he impersonated and honored the Spanish dancer Antonia Merce (1888–1936), whose performances had inspired Ohno early in his career. Ohno’s son, Yoshita, is also a Butoh performer. —Katy Matheson

O’KEEFFE, GEORGIA (15 November 1887–6 March 1986) Apparently learning from photography about the esthetic advantages of enlargement, O’Keeffe initially discovered formal qualities and radiant colors in the extremely close observations of biomorphic objects, such as flowers, plants, and pelvic bones, often painting similar objects many times over, in series. Moving to rural New Mexico in the late 1940s, she again echoed photography by using the contrary strategy of painting broad expanses in a compressed scale. These paintings

in turn echo her remarkably stark and lyrical 1920s horizontal views of New York. The thin paint of her early watercolors presages the innovations of MORRIS LOUIS and HELEN FRANKENTHALER, among others. O’Keeffe lived long enough to become a feminist exemplar whose celebrity could support a commercial publisher releasing a strong collection of images accompanied by her writings.

OLDENBURG, CLAES (28 January 1929) Born in Sweden, raised in Chicago as the son of a Swedish diplomat, educated in English literature at Yale, Oldenburg mounted a 1959 exhibition of sculpture made from urban junk and soon afterward created his first truly memorable works: semblances of such common objects as ice-cream cones, hamburgers both with and without an accompanying pickle, cigarette ends, pastries, clothespins, toasters, telephones, plumbing pipes, and so forth. Compared to their models, Oldenburg’s fabrications are usually exaggerated in size, distorted in detail, and/or dog-eared in surface texture. By such transformations, these pedestal-less sculptures usually gained, or accentuated, several other, less obvious resonances, most of them archetypal or sexual in theme, in the latter respect echoing FRANCIS PICABIA. Epitomizing POP ART, Oldenburg’s Ice Cream Cone (1962) is indubitably phallic; Soft Wall Switches (1964) looks like a pair of nipples; the soft Giant Hamburger (1963), several feet across, is distinctly vaginal; and so forth. “Appearances are not what counts,” he once succinctly wrote, “it is the forms that count.” After 1962, Oldenburg’s strategy of ironic displacement took another elaborate form in his “soft” sculpture, in which semblances of originally hard objects are fabricated in slick-surfaced, nonrigid materials different from the traditional sculptural staples. These representations of a toilet, a bathtub, a typewriter, and a drum set are so flabby that they behave contrary to the original object’s nature and thus customarily need some external support for effective display. They also create a perversely ironic, if not ghostly, relation between the sculpture and its original model. Thanks to an adventurous imagination (and perhaps an education not in art but in literature), Oldenburg has worked successfully in various media. The Store (1962) was a real Lower East Side store-front filled with artistically fabricated but faintly representational (storelike) objects. Because regular hours were kept, people could browse through the place and

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even purchase objects, so that The Store was indeed an authentic store, but it was also an artistically defined space, an ENVIRONMENT, wholly in Oldenburg’s early 1960s style of colorful but ironic renditions of seedy objects. As an ingenious writer, whose first job after Yale University was working as a newspaper reporter, who once acknowledged F.-L. CÉLINE as a major influence, Oldenburg authored Store Days (1967), a large-format, glossy book that contains a disconnected collection of prose and pictures as miscellaneous in form as the stuff of his store: historical data, replicas of important printed materials (such as a business card), sketches, price lists for the objects, photographs, scripts for his staged performances, various recipes, esthetic statements, parodies, declarations, and even an occasional aphorism (which may not be entirely serious). The result is an original open-ended potpourri of bookish materials that, unlike a conventional artist’s manifesto, “explains” Oldenburg’s Environmental art less by declarative statements than by implied resemblances. He has also published books of his theatrical scripts, some of which were staged as MIXED-MEANS performance. As I’ve advised him several times, more of his special writings, especially from his journals, should appear in print. Perhaps best of kind, they can be both stylish and informative. One question raised by his work of nearly six decades was whether it declined. Those who think it did point to the ameliorative influence of his second wife, Coosje van Bruggen (1942–2009), an art historian/ curator who became his close collaborator, especially for public projects where her own name was added. My own sense is that, while Oldenberg didn’t “develop,” so profound were his initial ideas that they sustained later variations.

OLIVEROS, PAULINE (30 May 1932–24 November 2016) Long an academic, Oliveros threw up, as the British would say, a full professorship at the University of California to become an itinerant musician, working with a wealth of superficially divergent ideas, including feminist consciousness, improvisation, meditative experience, and possibilities for playing the accordion (which is her unusual instrument of virtuosity). She wrote that “All of my work emphasizes attentional strategies, musicianship, and improvisational skills.” Oliveros’s most stunning recordings were produced in reverberant caves with the Deep Listening Band (mostly the trombonist Stuart Dempster).

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OLSON, CHARLES (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) On top of leaving politics for poetry, contributing early scholarship to HERMAN MELVILLE’s revival, and teaching at BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE, his life work included not only writing his 20-year epic poem project The Maximus Poems, but developing projective verse into a radical literary science. Olson thought his method intensely scientific, for the ethical stakes were high: “Value is perishing from the earth,” he wrote. In short, Western thinking had separated “Man” from “Nature,” and few cared. In saying “the literal is the same as the numeral,” Olson’s sense of science, mathematics, and poetry emerges as a compositional re-structuring device to mend the human-environment composition we call life. Using scientific terms, Olson mixed function theory with a non-Euclidean sense of form and content to create new modes of reader analysis regarding oneness, a topological sense of man-and-nature as an extended, singular surface (what he also called “skin”). This was an ecological topology to Olson. By harnessing probabilities to generate the construction of “an actual earth of value” (a “oneness,” also in terms of quantity, matter and energy), Olsonic verse enacts Riemann sphere transformations. It inverts flat two-dimensional commands from the poem-on-the-field-of-paper – via thermodynamics – all the way over to, not only the reader as he writes in his early “Projective Verse” essay, but later on, all the way over to the sphere of the earth. His poems are circuit boards embedded with historical coordinates that function as “vectors” (a programming and cartographical term). Coupling vectors and injunctions, his poems activate awareness of what history has done to us, reactivating one’s ethical “stance toward reality” (if Coca-Cola knows the art of melopoeia, “o Po-ets, you/should getta/job”). The technical aspects of vector and injunction produce ethical discoveries. Thus, Olsonic verse is ultimately algorithmic, programming a reader’s autodidactic discovery of “value” (the results of a calculation) induced by the equation-like poems. Considering the if/then, literal/numerical complexity, it’s no wonder the 6’9” Olson once explained it simply: “I teach posture.” —Michael Peters

ON-DEMAND PRINTING (1991, aka digital printing) Thanks to this major development in centuries-old duplicating procedure, it’s possible to print complete

316 • ONO, YOKO spine-bound books one at a time at equal cost, thus enabling the publication of anything with minimal circulation. Prior to this development, even when printing from a digital file, smaller publishers were confronted by economics of scale that made the cost of manufacturing, say, a thousand copies scarcely more expensive in sum than the cost of 500, thus encouraging small publishers to print more books than they could quickly sell, thus incurring the expense of storage and disappointment in “remaindering” surplus copies, etc. While the cost per copy of on-demand printing from a digital file might be greater per book than one thousand copies printed from a physical plate, the most immediate benefit offered by the new technology is transcending censorship-by-commerce, which in Western countries has always been more deleterious than government censorship. “Unpublishable” becomes an obsolete epithet with the elimination of gatekeepers to economical publication. On-demand printing also enables a writer in the twilight of his career, such as myself, to make public his unpublished manuscripts in a public channel that, even if he charged an exorbitant price for what he’d rather keep out of circulation during his lifetime, he could expect to survive him, no doubt later at a more reasonable price.

ONO, YOKO (18 February 1933) Born in Japan, she came of age in upper-middle-class America; and though she has returned to Japan for visits and speaks English with a Japanese accent, she has been an American CONCEPTUAL artist known initially for her radical proposals. She later gained international celebrity from her 1969 marriage to her third husband, the pop singer-songwriter JOHN LENNON. Ono’s strongest avant-garde works are the PERFORMANCE texts collected in her book Grapefruit (1964). For “Beat Piece,” the entire instruction is “Listen to a heartbeat.” Her “Cut Piece” requires the performer, usually herself, to come on the stage and sit down, “placing a pair of scissors in front of her and asking the audience to come up on the stage, one by one, and cut a portion of her clothing (anywhere they like) and take it.” (One charm of this piece is that the spectator courts as much embarrassment as the performer-author.) Ono’s films customarily have the same audacious image repeated to excess (e.g., human butts). She

pioneered the essentially literary form of the verbal film script meant to stand on its own: 1. Give a print of the same film to many directors. 2. Ask each one to re-edit the print without leaving out any of the material in such a way that it will be unnoticed that the print was re-edited. 3. Show all the versions together omnibus style. Ono also collaborated with Lennon on musical works in which her highly expressionist singing, part chanting and part screaming, sustained to excessive duration influenced PUNK musicians in the mid-1970s. Perhaps because her best works are too physically slight to warrant a museum exhibition, one at MoMA in 2005 was disappointing, implicitly supporting the unfortunate myth that, for too many dopes, Ono will never be more than a famous pop singer’s widow.

OP ART (1960) This abbreviation for Optical Art was one of several developments in the wake of the general sense common in the early 1960s that ABSTACT EXPRESSIONISM had declined. (Another was POP ART.) The defining Op mark was an image that, if observed patiently, began to suggest the illusion of movement. Among the masters at creating such shimmer were BRIDGET RILEY in England, Richard Anuszkiewicz (1930) in America, VICTOR VASERELY as a Hungarian in Paris, WEN-YING TSAI as Chinese in America, and Julian Stanczak (1928–2017) as a Pole also in America. A group exhibition at the MoMA, The Responsive Eye (1965), was more popular than most, in spite of negative newspaper reviews. This show, which I still remember among the greatest of that decade, became the subject of a nifty short film directed by Brian de Palma (1940), who later had a Hollywood career, and produced by my college buddy Kenneth David Burrows (1941), later a lawyer.

OPERAS (PUPPET/RADIO/FILM/ TELEVISION) (1922–) Given such extragavant obstacles as the huge expense and numbers of personnel required for producing fully staged operas in the past century, it’s no surprise that many of the most unusual modern operas began

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in more modest venues. Some extend the tradition of puppet operas, which actually date back to Joseph Haydn in the 18th century. A twenty-first-century Seattle production of Haydn’s The Burning House fit within a stage some 12 feet wide and 5 feet high, with supertitles (now so customary in America) in a changing banner above the stage. In the 1920s, the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla (1876–1946) presented El retablo de maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show), which he based upon an episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. My sometime sparring partner, the aspiring librettist Dana Gioia (1950), recalls the puppeteer Basil Twist’s 2005 production of Ottorino Respighi’s The Sleeping Beauty (1922; revised, 1934) as “one of the best opera productions I’ve ever seen.” The American composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003) was the first to tell me about puppet operas, beginning with his own Young Caesar (1971). While many European live opera performances have been filmed and later videotaped, most auspiciously by Paul Czinner (1890–1972), a Hungarian who worked successively in Germany and England, the most distinguished opera production initially for film is Emric Pressberger and MICHAEL POWELL’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), which, given the possibilities of the newer medium, does the Offenbach opera differently from any live production and yet as spectacularly as a production of 19th-century opera should be. Among the operas composed expressly for radio, I know about but have not heard the first radio opera as probably The Red Pen (1925) that the BBC commissioned from Geoffrey Toye (1889–1942) to a libretto by the British humorist A. P. Herbert (1890–1971). “The 1930s proved to be the high-point of radio opera,” Wikipedia’s scribes advise, “with at least twelve productions composed by German, American, Czech, Swiss, and French composers.” Among those produced in America were Charles Wakefield Cadman’s The Willow Tree (NBC Radio, 1932), Vittorio Giannini’s Flora and Beauty and the Beast (CBS Radio, 1937 & 1938), Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief (CBS, 1939), and Randall Thompson’s Solomon and Balkis (CBS, 1941). May I wish that these were all more available. Taping only sounds recorded live at North American baseball games, I once composed wholly from those tapes two acts, each thirty minutes in length, in effect compressing two games into a two-part format each with a beginning and an end. Americas’ Game (1986) thus becomes a kind of double-header, to recall an obsolete sports epithet. The departure marking this as an acoustic opera is episodes suggesting particular activity without any visual specifics. While that last absence might in some minds mark the work as

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“abstract,” the continuous presence of sounds unique to baseball warrants something else, to be called perhaps “opera concrete.” For a video of this Americas’ Game, I added not scenes from games but a great variety of images based upon the true icon of a single baseball, the electronically generated visual element of action-without-performers thus complimenting, rather than illustrating. Otherwise, the list of operas composed initially for television is substantial. A 2018 Wikipedia list mentions works by American composers such as Gian Carlo Menotti, Lukas Foss, Ezra Laderman, and Carlisle Floyd only from 1951 to 1963 and then mostly by Europeans since. And then none after 2006, which is unfortunate, as composing for less costly media is still more economical and thus feasible than staging in opera stadia. Consider, aspiring opera composers, the advantages gained from imagining smaller over bigger? And for discriminating operagoers, a venue more intimate that a humongous barn?

“ORIGINAL INSTRUMENTS” This epithet has different meanings for old arts and for new. For the former, such as the performance of music from centuries ago, it classifies instruments physically different from modern ones, it refers to instruments constructed according to earlier physiques, such as horns or trumpets lacking valves. The term is sometimes applied to modern instrument reproductions built according to historical specifications, and sometimes to actual antiques that may have been restored to playing condition. In avant-garde arts, it refers to the use of obsolete technologies in performance. KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN’s Kurzwellen (1968), for instance, depends in performance upon the tuning dial of a mid-20thcentury short-wave radio to receive with differing acoustic quality various stations amid aural static. The subsequent development of digital tuning with its focusing powers made such chaotic surfing impossible. Likewise, “DJ” music of the 1970s and 1980s depended upon the performer’s manipulation of vinyl records for effects impossible with the later technology of compact disks. For certain writers in the 21st century, the TYPEWRITER becomes an original instrument.

ORNSTEIN, LEO (11 December 1895–24 February 2002; b. Yuda-Leyb Gornshteyn)

318 • O’ROURKE, P.J. Born in the Ukraine, then under imperial Russian rule, he was a child prodigy as a pianist. Coming with his family to America in 1906, he studied at Juilliard and gave his debut recital in 1911 with classic piano pieces. Meanwhile Ornstein as a composer developed rapidly, reportedly giving, while still officially a teenager, a concert of his own “futurist” music, as he called it, the epithet referring to certain visual art new at the time. He particularly pioneered the use of tone-clusters played by groups of keys incidentally adjacent on a piano. In part because of his reputation as a pianist, Ornstein’s aggressively dissonant compositions received newspaper reviews. In 1917, JAMES GIBBONS HUNEKER wrote: “I never thought I should live to hear Arnold Schoenberg sound tame, yet tame he sounds – almost timid and halting – after Ornstein who is, most emphatically, the only true-blue, genuine, Futurist composer alive.” However, not unlike some other prodigies, Ornstein burned out, giving his last public performance in the early 1930s. Later in that decade he and his wife founded in Philadelphia the Ornstein School of Music. Among its more prominent sometime students were JOHN COLTRANE and Jimmy Smith (1925 [or 1928]–2005), who was generally ranked among the greatest jazz organists. After closing their eponymous school in 1953 the Ornsteins disappeared from public view. In the mid-1970s, they were found living in a Texas trailer park while summering in their home in New Hampshire. Leo Ornstein died in 2002 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, of all places, having lived in three centuries – nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first, uniquely perhaps among the individuals featured in this book. His son Severo M. O. (1930) is a prominent pioneering computer scientist.

O’ROURKE, P.J. (14 November 1947; b. Patrick Jake O’R.) What is he doing here, I can hear you say. Well, in 1975 he published (perhaps self-published under an otherwise unfamiliar imprint) a loose-leaf collection of TYPEWRITER POEMS printed on legal-size (8½” inch by 14 inch) pages, and dedicated to the actress Shelly Plimpton. They are carefully wrought, witty, and at times delicate, especially in the opening dedication piece, which is as good as any typewriter poem done anywhere. O’Rourke subsequently worked as a columnist for The National Lampoon and Rolling Stone, among other mass magazines, contributing witty, anti-liberal,

political criticism that, while esthetically less distinguished and certainly less avant-garde, has been more remunerative, America being America. In this respect, his career resembles that of Hendrik Hertzberg (1943), who coauthored One Million (1970), an imaginatively designed BOOK-ART essay about size and number, before he became a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and an editor at, successively, The New Republic and The New Yorker. (And, wonders of wonders, One Million was reprinted two decades later to even less acclaim the second time around, the author’s greater presence notwithstanding, perhaps to no surprise.)

OROZCO, JOSÉ CLEMENTE (23 November 1883–7 September 1949) A one-armed painter who identified passionately with the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Orozco developed a highly stylized representational art that rendered at once simply and heroically Mexican people, especially rural working people, campesinos, who were the Revolution’s heroes. A principal Mexican influence on him and the other muralists was the engraver JOSÉ GUADALUPE POSADA, whose last great subject was the Mexican Revolution. Though Orozco made paintings, his most effective surface was the extended mural. Most of these survive not in art museums but in public buildings throughout Mexico. Among the most successful, dating from the late 1930s, are those in the former chapel of the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalajara, the capital of the Jalisco state. The Mexican art historian Justino Fernandez (1904–72) wrote in 1961 that the Orozco murals at Dartmouth College from the early 1930s are “the most important contemporary mural paintings in the United States,” incidentally marking “a beginning of a new and splendid period in Orozco’s work.” Since he refused to join the Communist party, which had captured his muralist colleague DIEGO RIVERA, Orozco was in his own lifetime often dismissed as a “bourgeois skeptic.” Nonetheless, about the Mexican Revolution he reportedly wrote, “To me the Revolution was the gayest and most diverting of carnivals.” Orozco’s work had far more presence and influence in the States in the 1930s than later, especially upon those coming of age at the time, such as JACKSON POLLOCK. In Orozco’s style of representing people and the world I find an esthetic precursor for the “magic realism” commonly associated with a later generation of Latin American writers, beginning with Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), a Colombian Nobelist who, incidentally, lived mostly not in his native country but in Mexico.

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ORWELL, GEORGE (25 June 1903–21 January 1950; b. Eric Blair) Born in India and thus in the colonies of the country whose literature he embraced (Britain), he was the second (after Rudyard Kipling [1865–1936]) to bring the critical distance of colonial intelligence to its mainstream, preceding in this respect other British writers such as V. S. Naipaul (1931–2018, born in Trinidad), Doris Lessing (1919–2013, born in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe), Edgar Mittelholzer (1919–65, born in Guyana), AMOS TUTUOLA, and Edward Lucie-Smith (1933, born in Jamaica), all of whom wrote differently from native-born Brits. The last four also produced formally innovative work. This post-colonial sensibility informs Orwell’s fiction, some of which takes place in British colonies, and his essays, which are written from an Olympian distance more typical of an outsider. Comparably colonial later French writers would include Albert Camus (1913–60) and JACQUES DERRIDA, both of whom were born in North Africa. Orwell and these writers also created preconditions for the acceptance of yet other writers who did not descend from the country of their mother-language. (Oddly, such figures scarcely exist in American literature.) Among Orwell’s other virtues not necessarily avantgarde are a clear intelligence, not only in his expository writing whose best essays have survived (e.g., “Politics and the English Language”) but as a fabulist with a persuasively insightful portrayal of a totalitarian society he did not know firsthand. (I can recall being told by people in Communist Poland in 1985 that the more accurate book about their society was Orwell’s 1984!) Consider his best works to be persuasive evidence for the argument that Olympian distance might be a prerequisite for cultural survival.

OSSORIO, ALFONSO (2 August 1916–5 December 1990; b. A. Angel Yangco O.) Of the several artists wealthy enough to become a patron of their avant-garde colleagues (e.g., F. T. MARINETTI and William Copley [1919–96]), few equaled Ossorio, who incidentally made some lucrative investments on his own. When he was back home in the Philippines in 1962 his friend JACKSON POLLOCK cabled him about a spacious property in Easthampton. Once purchased, it became a private museum for artists of his generation, many of them neighbors on Eastern Long Island, as he exhibited ABSTACT

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EXPRESSIONIST paintings that he personally purchased, often before his contemporaries found dealers. The sculptures filling his garden were also memorably impressive. For his own paintings Ossorio densely filled small objects in a non-centered field reminiscent of his friend Pollock.

OSTAIJEN, PAUL VAN (22 February 1896–18 March 1928) Though born in Belgium proper, van Ostaijen was by common consent the most advanced Dutch-language writer of his time. Residing in BERLIN for a few years in the early twenties, he assimilated DADA and wrote satires he called “grotesques” that often depended upon ironically contrasting the present with the past and the sublime with the disgusting. Back in Belgium, he started an art gallery that failed and worked as a journalist before succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of 32. One English-language collection of his work contains a richly envisioned film script, “De Bankroet Jazz” (1920–21) that survives brilliantly, to some as “the only known Dadaistic film script,” even though the film was never made. Van Ostaijen also wrote VISUAL POEMS that are mostly unavailable in English.

OTOLITHS (2006) By the second decade of the 21st century, this became principal English-language poetry journal for innovative poetries, not by specializing in them but by generously including them alongside more conventional writings in populous productions. Edited and produced electronically in Queensland, Australia, by Mark Young (b. 1941, New Zealand), it cleverly is also printed ON DEMAND in America without its publisher ever needing to set foot in the United States (and later wherever around the world that the company called Lulu could print it). After 2010 new Otoliths appeared initially in outer space, so to speak, with printed reprints, so to speak, available on demand. With several dozen contributors in every new issue, Otoliths calls itself “a magazine of many E-things.”

OTTERNESS, TOM (21 June 1952) In making art for public places few have been as inventive and visually witty. Born in Kansas, he received

320 • OULIPO most of his art education in the New York art world of the 1970s, participating in popup exhibitions organized late in that decade by a group calling itself Colab (for Collaborative Projects). Otterness began with small plaster figures that he sold cheaply. For the 1980 Colab Times Square show he made plaster “proto monuments.” His earliest public art commission came in 1987 from the General Services Administration for the Los Angeles Federal Center for which he made a baby holding a globe in the middle of a fountain and a frieze. So far okay. His masterpiece for me is Life Underground (2001), which he installed throughout the Manhattan subway station at 14th Street and Eighth Avenue where four different trains converge. Rather than the single edifice customary in sculpture, his Life consists of over one hundred cast-bronze miniature sculptures that are distributed all over the platforms and stairways of two subway stations and their intersections. While most portray amiable subway people with various functions and from different social classes, the greatest joke is the head of a tiny alligator apparently emerging from the depths. Nearly two decades after Life Underground was first installed, even after I’ve experienced it hundreds of times, this masterpiece of public sculpture continues to amuse, enriching the subway transfer experience for me among thousands every day at this station. On the other hand, since nearly all the figures are placed well below eye level, they can be missed, especially by anxious people looking upwards for directional signs. Indeed, few sculptors succeed as well with short small figures placed low on a floor. Another Otterness masterpiece is his figures in the great caverns in Camuy, Puerto Rico (2004), in the hills south of Arecibo. Outside the entrance is a huge bronze replica of the Puerto Rican national animal, El Coqui, a noisy toad that is actually the size of a fingernail. Inside the caves are several smaller sculptures of various figures along with a single plaque identifying their creator. Seek them out; for, unlike his giant coqui, they can be missed, much like his figures in Life Underground.

OULIPO (1960–) Founded by RAYMOND QUENEAU and François Le Lionnais (1901–84), this Parisian-based group began with the intention of basing experimental writing on mathematics. Its name is an acronym for Ouvroir de Litérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature). Once others came aboard, the group’s theme became the use, at times the invention, of highly

restrictive literary structures. According to HARRY MATHEWS, its principal American participant, “The difference between constrictive and ordinary forms (such as rhyme and meter) is essentially one of degree.” Jean Lescure (1912–2005) took texts written by someone else and by rigorous methods substituted, say, each noun with the seventh noun to appear after it in a common dictionary. Others wrote “recurrent literature,” as they called it, which was defined as “any text that contains, explicitly or implicitly, generative rules that invite the reader (or the teller, or the singer) to pursue the production of the text to infinity (or until the exhaustion of interest or attention).” One associate, by trade a professor of mathematics, wrote a sober analysis of “Mathematics in the Method of Raymond Queneau.” No other literary gang, in any language known to me, has produced quite so many extreme innovations; and perhaps because Oulipo does not distinguish among members living and dead, its influence continues to grow. Among the contributors to its first major self-anthology, Oulipo, la littérature potentielle (1973), were Queneau, GEORGES PEREC, Jean Queval (1913–90), Marcel Bénabou (1939), Jacques Roubaud (1932), and Noël Arnaud (1919–2003), all of whom are, by any measure, consequential experimental authors. MARCEL DUCHAMP joined Oulipo in 1962, while OSKAR PASTIOR, a German-speaking Rumanian long resident in BERLIN, wasn’t inducted until 1995. In the American translation of much of this initial anthology is a new name: ITALO CALVINO, whose celebrity made his association untypical and finally marginal. The Oulipo Compendium (1998) is a witty and masterful guide both to the entire movement and its constituents. I wanted to spell it OuLiPo, acknowledging the component words, but Mathews himself, first met in 1965, insisted that I do otherwise.

OUTSIDER ART (18th century?) The epithet customarily refers to exceptional visual art produced by individuals who didn’t go to art school or socialize with other artists. Some suffered from more serious physical or psychological handicaps. Some of the European exemplars were actually institutionalized. Customarily praised for a lack of sophistication, such work is at its best only incidentally (or accidentally) avant-garde, reflecting not conscious intention but the lack of it. Perhaps the most famous Outsider Artist in America was Grandma Moses (1860–1961, b. Anna Mary Robertson), who didn’t start serious painting until

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her early eighties, with work that seems commercially prosaic. Other American outsiders producing more avant-garde work include SIMON RODIA, JAMES CASTLE, C.A.A. DELLSCHAU, and Henry Darger (1892–1973). My own sense is that the greatest outsider visual art appears not in painting but in sculpture sometimes composed of agglomerations produced, like Rodia’s Watts Towers, within the artist’s homestead. The outsider epithet is less applicable in literature and extended music composition, both of which require more training and apprenticeship.

OVERLOAD (1960) Somewhere in the 20th century, enthusiasts for avantgarde art became more and yet more overwhelmed than earlier generations by the sheer amount of firstrate art offered to them, even as they cast aside produce they judged inferior and RETROGRADE. And as more work became available deserving great appreciation, individual memory banks needed to expand as they risked being swamped. This development has defined my experience over my adult years and thus this ever more populous editions of this Dictionary.

OXBRIDGE Whatever contributions Britain’s two most august universities, more specifically the University of Oxford

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(1096, perhaps) and Cambridge University (1209, maybe, maybe), both of them collection of colleges, have made to the making (or even the understanding) of avant-garde art, ever, will need to be written by someone else, ever. Remarkable is the fact that few of the most advanced art minds in the English-speaking world (say, recognized here) ever passed through either institution. None are teaching there now.

OZENFANT, AMÉDÉE (15 April 1886–4 May 1966) Among the prominent modern painters who wrote much better than they painted, he was probably the most advanced as a writer and thus also the most developed as an editor. Beginning with magazines, he cofounded L’Elan (1915–17), along with GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE. After meeting the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (1887–1965), later known as LE CORBUSIER, they founded L’Esprit Nouveau (1920–25), its title echoing an influential Apollinaire polemic; it quickly established a reputation for publishing the most radical ideas. Ozenfant’s major book, Art (1928), translated into English as The Foundations of Modern Art (1931), was long treasured by visual artists especially for its intelligence about color. Additionally a popular teacher, Ozenfant founded in New York an eponymous School of Fine Arts that survived from 1939 to 1955 before his return to France. About his own paintings, may I quote another: “strictly constructed, precisely drawn compositions with flat, muted colors.”

P

PAGANINI, NICOLÒ (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.

PAGEANTS 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

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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.

PAGLEN, TREVOR (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 antisurveillance whistle-blower Edward Snowden (1983).

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One laudable, recurring Paglen theme holds that in the 21st-century secrets can’t be kept.

PAIK, NAM JUNE (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 STOCKHAUSEN and JOHN CAGE, neither of them pushovers, Paik came to America in 1964 as a celebrated young international artist. His initial forte was ELECTRONIC MUSIC, 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. (REYNOLD 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 MOORMAN, 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.

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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.

PANDIATONICISM (1937) The term pandiatonicism was coined by NICOLAS SLONIMSKY 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 diatonic 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

324 • PAOLOZZI, EDUARDO 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 pandiatonic 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 diatonic 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 STRAVINSKY, Casella, Malipiero, Vaughan Williams, AARON COPLAND 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

PAOLOZZI, EDUARDO (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 MOORE, the Edinburgh-born Paolozzi introduced the metaphor of the machine into his art form. Unlike John Chamberlain and RICHARD STANKIEWICZ, 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 ARP, 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 READ. 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

PARADIGM SHIFT (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

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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.

PARKER, CHARLIE (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 BEBOP, 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 VARÈSE 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).

PÄRT, ARVO (11 September 1935) Initially a tonal composer and then one of the few SERIAL composers in his native Estonia, Pärt

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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.

PARTCH, HARRY (24 June 1901–3 September 1974) An eccentric western American, Partch was a selftaught 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 microtonal 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

326 • PASTIOR, OSCAR 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.

PASTIOR, OSCAR (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 Rosmarie 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.

‘PATAPHYSICS (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 avantgardes, it included contributions from ALFRED JARRY (purportedly ‘Pataphysics’s proto-founder); RAYMOND QUENEAU; and EUGENE IONESCO, 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,

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absurd, and it is ludicrous to take it seriously. Only the comic is serious.” As an extension of DADA, 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.

PATCHEN, KENNETH

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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 HIGGINS 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.

(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 BLAKE, 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.

PATTERN POETRY (c. 325 B.C.) This term is most appropriate in defining poems, usually conventional in syntax, whose typography represents a

PATTERSON, CLAYTON (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).

328 • PAXTON, STEVE PAXTON, STEVE

PENDERECKI, KRZYSZTOF

(21 January 1939)

(23 November 1933)

Previously a member of the MERCE CUNNINGHAM Dance Company from 1961 to 1964, Paxton also participated in the JUDSON DANCE 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.

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 microtonally smoothly modulated frequency bands, mostly at their highest possible pitches, superficially resembling GYORGY LIGETI’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 SLONIMSKY 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.

—Katy Matheson

PELL, DEREK (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.

PENN & TELLER (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

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opinionated, they are unreservedly teetotalers, atheists, and libertarians.

PEREC, GEORGES (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 OULIPO, 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 MATHEWS, 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.

PEREIRA, I. RICE (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 MONDRIAN, Pereira thought her trapezoidal

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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.

PERFORMANCE (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 CAGE’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 ART.

330 • PERFORMANCE GROUP PERFORMANCE GROUP (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.

PERFORMANCE STUDIES (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.

PESSOA, FERNANDO (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.

PHELPS, DONALD (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.)

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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.

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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/

(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.

PHOTOGRAPHY The initial measure of avant-garde photography is doing what common photographers don’t (and

PHOTOMONTAGE (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 HEARTFIELD, 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 HUELSENBECK 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

332 • PICABIA, FRANCIS by Solomon Telingator (1903–1969) was montaging photographs with expressive typography.

PICABIA, FRANCIS (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 CUBIST, and by 1912 following ROBERT DELAUNAY’s Orphism. Traveling to New York in 1913, Picabia collaborated with his compatriot MARCEL DUCHAMP, who was by 1915 also in New York, in establishing American DADA. Having contributed to ALFRED STIEGLITZ’s periodical 291 in 1916, Picabia published in 1917 the first number of his Dada review 391 in Barcelona, participating in underorganized 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 SURREALISTS, collaborating with ERIK SATIE 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.

PICASSO, PABLO (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, SURREALISM, 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 ART. 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 DIAGHILEV’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.

PIETRI, PEDRO (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

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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.

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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 POVERA. 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

PLAGIARISM PISCATOR, ERWIN (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 THEATRE. Returning to (West) Germany in 1951, he struggled for a decade until he became artistic director of the Berlin Volksbuhne in 1962.

PISTOLETTO, MICHELANGELO (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

(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

334 • PLURALISM single structure (we, the people of the world, now, then, and forever). —Geof Huth

PLURALISM (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 avantgarde 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 ART, OP ART, shaped canvases, monochromic fields, nonhierarchical pastiche, conundrum art (associated with JASPER JOHNS), CONCEPTUAL ART as well as ASSEMBLAGE, space-encasing ENVIRONMENTS, and works that resemble paintings but are not, such as the light pieces of JAMES TURRELL Whereas only the followers of ARNOLD SCHOENBERG on one side and JOHN CAGE on the other were identified with avant-garde music three decades ago, now we can speak of ALEATORY, MODULAR, MICROTONAL, 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 CAGE, 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 avantgarde 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 CUNNINGHAM, who was in his beginnings avantgarde in the first sense, switched his emphasis in the early 1960s to become an innovating figure in MIXEDMEANS 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.

POESIA VIVISA (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 Mabellini); 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

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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.”

POETISM (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 mixedmeans 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.

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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.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS (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-culturecentric 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

POLITICAL ART

POLKINHORN, HARRY

(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

(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

336 • POLLOCK, JACKSON 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 Portugueselanguage 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.

POLLOCK, JACKSON (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 KOONING, his contemporary, radically extended CUBISM, Pollock initially developed another major innovation of early 20th-century European art – EXPRESSIONISM. 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-NAGY, 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 selfdestructive 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.

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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.

POLYARTIST (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 LEWIS, MOHOLY-NAGY, THEO VAN DOESBURG, KURT SCHWITTERS, JEAN (HANS) ARP, JEAN COCTEAU, and WILLIAM BLAKE. Among contemporaries after Cage I would rank YVONNE RAINER, DICK HIGGINS, and KENNETH KING. I distinguish the polyartist from the individual who excels at one art but not in another, such as PABLO PICASSO, 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”).

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Consider too that the great movements of classic modernism – DADA, SURREALISM, FUTURISM, the BAUHAUS – were all essentially polyartistic enterprises. True polyartistic criticism attempts to identify the core esthetic ideas that are reflected in categorically various works.

POP ART (c. 1960) It was quite stunning at the beginning – the first postWorld War II representational reaction to ABSTRACT ART 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 ROSENBERG 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 LICHTENSTEIN, painted enlarged comicstrip images, which are so refined in their realism that they even reproduce the dots characteristic of comicbook 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 OLDENBURG and certain paintings of ANDY WARHOL. 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.

POPOVA, LIUBOV (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,

338 • PORTER, BERN 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.

PORTER, BERN

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).

PORTER, EDWIN S. (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.

(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 MILLER. 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 HENRI FORD. 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 BUTOR’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

PORTSMOUTH SINFONIA (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

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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.

POSADA, JOSÉ GUADALUPE (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.

POSSIBILITIES (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 POLLOCK with his statement “My Painting.” Decades later, Tod Lippy’s lavishly produced semiannual Esopus (2003) published in its twenty-first issue (Spring 2014) manuscripts collected for a second

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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.

“POSTMODERN” (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 avantgarde 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

340 • POTAMKIN, HARRY ALAN 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.?

POTAMKIN, HARRY ALAN (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 BABBITT, 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

POUND, EZRA (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 JOYCE, 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.

POWELL, MICHAEL (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

PREPARED PIANO •

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).

POWER, J. W. (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

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around them, also self-publishing Eléments 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.

PRAECISIO (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

PREPARED PIANO (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

342 • PRINCE, RICHARD 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.

PRINCE, RICHARD (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.

PRIZES 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.

PROFESSOR X (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, WisconsinMilwaukee), 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.

PROJECTION TELEVISION (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.

PSEUDONYMS •

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.

PROUST, MARCEL (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

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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 FAULKNER and JACK KEROUAC is immeasurable. —Katy Matheson

PSEUDONYMS (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’BRIEN grace certain produce by civil servants named BRIAN O’DOHERTY 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 MacDAIRMID’s name became a more aggressive Scottish presence than Christopher Murray Grieve’s. The Portuguese poet FERNANDO PESSOA 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

344 • PSYCHEDELIC ART 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.

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 mid1970s, 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

PSYCHEDELIC ART (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.

PUNK ROCK (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

PWOERMD (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

PYNCHON, THOMAS (8 May 1937) I would love to write an entry that portrays Pynchon’s spectacular development from precociously

PYNCHON, THOMAS •

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

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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.

Q

QUENEAU, RAYMOND (21 February 1903–25 October 1976) Very much a smart writer’s smart(est) writer, Queneau was literarily brilliant beyond measure, working in a variety of mostly original ways. After SURREALIST beginnings, he became involved with ‘PATAPHYSICS, an avant-garde parody-philosophy calling itself the “science of imaginary solutions.” In 1960, Queneau cofounded (as well as confounded) Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, commonly known as OULIPO, along with the mathematician François Le Lionnais (1901– 84). In addition to working for a prominent book publisher, as a translator into French (of books such as The Palm Wine Drinkard by AMOS TUTUOLA), and as the principal editor of the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, Queneau published comic pop novels, such as Zazie dans le metro (1959; Zazie, 1960), along with such experimental works as EXERCISES DE STYLE (1947; Exercises in Style, 1958), a tour de force, or farce, in which the same scene is described in ninety-nine different ways. His avant-garde masterpiece, so audaciously extraordinary it will never be transcended or remotely repeated, is Cent mille milliards de poemes (100,000 Million Million Poems, 1961), in which he wrote ten sonnets whose lines (in place) are interchangeable, because they are die-cut into strips bound to the book’s spine, creating combinatorial sonnet possibilities numbering ten to the fourteenth power. The result is the creation of preconditions for the reader to discover a multitude

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of relationships not intended. Though daunting, this book has been translated into English, German, and even Polish. Whereas the writing of his near-contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) was unashamedly heavy, Queneau’s was both light and heavy or, more precisely, heavier because it was so deceptively light.

QUIN, ANN (17 March 1936–? August 1973) An innovative British novelist, in more ways than one a contemporary of B.S. JOHNSON, she published Berg (1964), which is a grim farce about a man intending to kill his father. In contrast to British fashions prevailing at the time, she and Johnson wrote not rambling social realism but something else; typically not long sentences but short. ‘Tis said that few wrote more profoundly about a peculiarly British seaside town, in this case Brighton. The theme of her second novel Passages (1969) is quests as told through a narrative and an annotated diary. Two more novels followed before Quin committed suicide in the English Channel, a few weeks before Johnson similarly excused himself. Nonetheless, Quin is not forgotten, as all her novels were reprinted, not in England but by an American SMALL PRESS, sometimes with respectful introductions and a critical biography. Quin also influenced later radical British writers such as STEWART HOME, who published a long appreciation.

R

RADIO ART (1920s) Radio art exploits capabilities unique to audio broadcasting. Mark E. Cory (1942) tells of Richard Hughes’s 1924 radio play set in a deep mine after a cave-in had extinguished all light. As Cory writes, “Listeners and characters work out the consequences of being trapped in darkness in a bond no other dramatic medium could forge as well. NBC would later exploit the principle [of theatrical lightlessness] in its Lights Out series of ghost stories.” ORSON WELLES’s famous War of the Worlds broadcast depended upon the established radio convention, used even in 1938, of interrupting a program with on-the-scene news bulletins. The Australian Chris Mann (1949–2018) reportedly broadcast his Quadraphonic Cocktail simultaneously over two mono AM stations and one stereo FM station, depending upon the fact that in Australia listeners were likely to have three radios in fairly close proximity to one another. Within broadcasting institutions after World War II, artful radio matured mostly in Germany, usually in departments called Hörspiel, or “hear-play.” The principal development transcended reproducing poetic monologues or the illusion of live theater with their literary base, toward audio experience based in sound. In Der Monolog der Terry Jo (Saarländischer Rundfunk, 1968), by Ludwig Harig (1927) and Max Bense (1910–90), the voice of an unconscious accident victim is rendered by an electroacoustic vocoder, which is able to create approximations of human speech until recognizable words appear. One theme is the kind of message communicated by incomprehensible speech. Other radio works, such as my own Invocations (Sender Freies Berlin, 1981), bring into the same acoustic space sounds that would normally be heard separately – in my piece, prayers spoken by ministers of various (even antagonistic) faiths.

The principal sponsor of this Akustische Kunst (acoustic art) has been Klaus Schöning (1936), who has also edited books of scripts and criticism. During the 1980s, certain German stations publicly broadcast radio art designed to be heard through earphones, Kunstkopf (literally, art-head) stereo, surrounding the listener with stereophonic effects.

RAINER, YVONNE (24 November 1934) Originally known as an inventive choreographer whose pieces incorporated movements previously unknown to dance, such as running, climbing, tumbling, and other elementary athletic activities. In one sequence of The Mind Is a Muscle (1966), perhaps Rainer’s greatest single dance, a professional juggler commands the left side of the stage, while the company of six mill uninterestedly on the right side of the stage. In another part, behind a movie screen filled with the image of someone’s legs, the dancers execute mundane movements and at one point dribble a basketball. Another section, known as “Trio A,” includes Rainer’s choreographic innovation of circular swinging of both arms and a concomitant shifting of the body’s weight in an intrinsically endless phrase that was performed by others. Her strongest essays reflect sure critical intelligence. In the 1970s, she quit chorography, because, tis said, she felt she was exercising too much control over her dancers. Rainer became a filmmaker whose reels, never too experimental to begin with, have turned increasingly more accessible, probably thanks to her directorial authority.

RAND, PAUL (15 August 1914–26 November 1996; b. Peretz Rosenbaum)

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348 • RANDALL, J. K. He frequently told the story of encountering MOHOLY-NAGY while still an art student. “What do you read?” Moholy asked. I don’t, Rand replied. “Pity,” Moholy said. Learning the lesson, Rand became a literate designer, who not only read but wrote widely, in addition to teaching and designing logos for major American companies. One theme of his writings was that a successful design should define the environment for which it was intended. The designer, he wrote, “coordinates and integrates his material so that he may restate his problem in terms of ideas, signs, symbols, pictures. He unifies, simplifies, and eliminates superfluities. He symbolizes – abstracts from his material by association and analogy.” Smart Rand was, not only as a designer but as a writer.

RANDALL, J. K. (16 June 1929–28 May 2014) After taking his M.F.A. at Princeton, Randall became a pioneering computer composer, whose Mudgett: Monologues of a Mass Murderer (1965) ranked among the best work produced for “converted digital tape” at the time. However, by the 1980s he gave up this sort of composing in favor of eccentric improvisations that were self-published on cassettes that he and his esthetic compatriot Benjamin Boretz (1934) distributed to an interested few. Even more brilliantly eccentric are Randall’s highly visual essays “Compose Yourself: A Manual for the Young,” which were included in Being About Music: Textbooks 1960–2003 (2003).

(in contrast to AD REINHARDT, say, whose polytonal black canvases were intentionally nonreflective). About this early work, Allan Kaprow wrote a decade later: They were taken as a joke by most of the committed artists of the New York school. Yet they are the pivotal works of the artist, for in the context of Abstract Expressionist noise and gesture, they suddenly brought us face to face with the humbling devastating silence. For painted ASSEMBLAGES that had three dimensions and yet were not quite sculpture, Rauschenberg coined the term COMBINES. In the late 1960s, he worked with technology and theatrical PERFORMANCE. Otherwise, the typical Rauschenberg painting (or graphic) is a disparate collection of images, some of them painted, others applied in other ways (such as silkscreen or glue), in which no image is more important than any other, though they may comment upon one another. Rauschenberg’s initial adventurousness notwithstanding, he never developed much beyond his early innovations, perhaps because by the 1970s he had forsaken NEW YORK CITY, which seemed an inspiration for his art, for residence on an island off the west coast of Florida. By the 1980s, he became the Leonard Bernstein (1918–90) of visual art, a sort of elder statesman whose public activities were exemplary and publicized, even though his art ceased being interesting or influential.

RAUSCHENBERG, ROBERT

READ, HERBERT

(25 October 1925–12 May 2008; b. Milton Ernest R.)

(4 December 1893–12 June 1968)

His innovations were based upon two radical principles: that literally everything could be incorporated into painterly art, and that one part of a picture need not dominate, or even relate to, the others. In the first respect, he painted his own bed, transforming a subesthetic object into something that was purchased and displayed by the MoMA (Bed, 1955); he put a whole stuffed Angora goat into a painted field (Monogram, 1959); added a live radio to another (Broadcast, 1959); and even added a clock to yet another (Third Time Painting, 1961). For a while, Rauschenberg seemed the most inventive productive visual artist since PABLO PICASSO. Rauschenberg’s earlier White Painting (1951, three panels) has reflective surfaces designed to incorporate lights and images from the surrounding environment

From a provincial background, Read went not to Oxford-Cambridge, which had been the standard path for the major literary gents of his generation, but through the University of Leeds before serving in World War I, where he earned medals. Moving to London in the 1920s, he cofounded the short-lived magazine Arts and Letters (1917–20) and worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Later an editor in higher class book publishing, where he worked alternate weeks, Read produced not only an endless stream of essays and reviews but numerous books about literature and the visual arts, including applied arts – no false snob he. As the most visible advocate of modern abstract visual art in England, he was particularly skilled at catalogue introductions. As a sometime publisher,

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he had an enviable talent for giving his books seductive titles that no doubt contributed to their being reprinted widely. Often portrayed during his lifetime as advocating the most avant-garde work, he seems in retrospect too self-consciously accommodating to RETROGRADE fashions. Typically, he championed the sculptor HENRY MOORE over more radical artists. Indicatively, T S. ELIOT accepted Read while reportedly keeping the books of WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS unpublished in England during their common lifetimes. A true man of letters, Read also published poetry, autobiography, and a single novel. Politically, he declared himself an anarchist, a kind of agricultural utopian, and was perhaps the most prominent British anarchist until at 60 he accepted a knighthood, becoming “Sir Herbert” and reportedly sending the British libertarian movement into disarray. (Always this happens when the radicals’ figurehead is publicly co-opted.) By current standards, Read seems less interesting and less radical than, say, his near-contemporary WYNDHAM LEWIS, accounting for why he was for me five decades ago an enthusiasm that I’ve outgrown. So unpredictable can developing tastes be.

READYMADE (1913) While commonly identifying a commercial product that’s available for immediate use, whether because it fits everyone or needs only to be defrosted, for the ART WORLD this term identifies an ordinary object that aspires to the status of art because a known artist has presented it. The classic example was MARCEL DUCHAMP’s Fountain (1917), which was a urinal that, though he purchased it at a hardware store, he offered to a major art exhibition with a pretentious title and a signature. One development on this theme was JASPER JOHNS’s painting of an American Flag (1955) that resembles an authentic American flag. Duchamp himself, forever witty, reportedly called this last “a reverse readymade.” The radical departure of Haim Steinbach (1944), an Israeli long resident in New York, was presenting INSTALLATIONS composed wholly of readymades.

RECALLING What can be recalled in art (and probably in life as well) is usually worth remembering, as involuntary memory

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can function as an honest mechanism for distinguishing strong from weak, especially with new art, more particularly with avant-garde work. However, may I introduce one caveat. Try to recall work(s), rather than just artists’ names, because the latter may simply benefit from fortunate publicity. Consider this test which you can give yourself: Even if you can remember, say, a poet’s name, try to identify solely from memory the name of a poem by him or her that’s not the title of a book? Similarly, try a similar self-test with a composer or a visual artist. The challenge can also be presented to others who are favoring one or another artist. As a prerequisite: no peeking, no cheating. Don’t disrespect the truth embedded in this exercise.

REICH, STEVE (3 October 1936) Not unlike his Juilliard schoolmate and sometime colleague PHILIP GLASS, Reich began as a daunting avant-garde composer whose work has become more accessible and popular over the years. What Music in Twelve Parts (1974) was for Glass, Drumming (1971) was for Reich, which is to say the apex of his radical style – a composition that benefits from being longer and thus more ambitious than his previous innovative works, as well as more limited in its instrumentation. Reich’s original radical idea was a strain of MODULAR MUSIC, in which bits of material would be repeated, customarily in slightly different forms, until through repetition alone they generated a pulsing sound. The clearest example of this effect is It’s Gonna Rain (1965), where that three-word phrase becomes a chorus of itself, as Reich working in an early electronic music studio realized an incantatory intensity unequaled in audio language art. Another, similarly composed work, Come Out (1966) depends upon more violent language, as initially spoken by a black teenager who had suffered a police beating. Whereas Glass is a melodist, the best Reich, as in Drumming, marks him as a superior rhythmicist. Of the middle-period Reich, I like Tehillim (1981) for its imaginative setting of a Hebrew text. A more ambitious later work, The Cave (1993), based on the Biblical story of Abraham, Sarah, and their sons, includes multiscreen video made by his wife Beryl Korot (1945) in a kind of multimedia oratorio. In 1997 Nonesuch produced a box of 10 Reich CDs, a monument with an accompanying book running 136 pages, that ranks him among the major living composers and Nonesuch high among those

350 • REINECK, GAY BESTE distributive companies supporting the best contemporary composers.

achievement includes his monumental Bach and Tuning (2016), among other considerations of unfamiliar musicological territory.

REINECK, GAY BESTE (8 August 1942) Educated in stained glass and textiles in London, residing in America since the late 1960s, she became between 1967 and 1969 among the first visual poets to employ a computer, specifically “CalComp plotter,” in designing resonant words, mostly for exact visual repetition to enhance them as words alone, apart from any other images. “Obsessive Tower” (1968) becomes 48 inches tall, while her expanding and contracting “Goodbye” becomes a single-page verbal-visual narrative. Other English words were tightly repeated to become either representations or abstractions of themselves. Eventually settling in San Francisco, she has since designed, with her husband Jack Reineck, such information graphics as subway maps, diagrams, and posters.

REINHARD, JOHNNY (29 April 1956) One of the avant-garde subterranean music impresarios, in the American tradition of HENRY COWELL, he has for decades produced extraordinary concerts of the American Festival of Microtonal Music, regularly reviving composers whose works are otherwise forgotten, in addition to the more eccentric works of Charles Ives. Surely Reinhard’s greatest landmark was in 1996 the first evening-length concert of Ives’s Universe Symphony, which had for a half-century languished as unfinished. On the side, Reinhard ranks among the world’s most exploratory bassoonists. As his fellow composer Anton Rovner (1970) recalled: Among the techniques used were slapping a detached middle portion of the bassoon with the palm of his hand, playing slap effects on keys as a percussion instrument, blowing into a handmade instrument constructed of a multitude of reeds, roaring out the piece’s main theme as a lion, playing an odd conglomeration of tremolos and glissandi, and finally playing on the bassoon without a reed. Reinhard’s musical achievement here is exploring microtones, or sounds between the notes of the standard Western twelve-tone scale. His scholarly

REINHARDT, AD (24 December 1913–30 August 1967; b. Fredrick Adolf R.) A college chum of both ROBERT LAX and THOMAS MERTON, Reinhardt was, from his professional beginnings, a scrupulous ABSTRACTIONIST, perhaps the only major American Abstract artist of his generation never to have exhibited primarily representational art. His most distinctive early paintings had geometric shapes on a multicolored field, while works of the late forties favored less definite abstract shapes. By 1953, he offered canvases painted entirely in different shades of the same color – all red, all blue, all black, in one case, all white – usually subtly divided into geometric shapes whose slight differences in hue became more visible with the spectator’s increased attention. Reinhardt’s classic Black Paintings of the early 1960s, each 5 feet square, contain not a sole black color evenly painted from edge to edge, but many rectilinear forms, each painted a slightly different hue of black. Viewing Reinhardt’s work from the perspective of subsequent art history (which generally clarifies earlier innovations), the critic LUCY R. LIPPARD judges succinctly that his “innovations consist largely of the establishment of a valid function for nonrelational, monotonal concepts, progressive elimination of texture, color contrast, value contrast and eventually of color itself, which was replaced by a uniquely nonillusionistic painted light.” In addition to being a masterfully sophisticated cartoonist, more precisely a great visual essayist critically portraying within a single frame ideas and life in the New York art world, Reinhardt was a witty and aphoristic writer of sharp prose, declaring, for instance, “An avant-garde in art advances art-as-art or it isn’t an avant-garde” – an adage that could have been an epigraph to this book, did it not seem more appropriate here. Less commonly appreciated were his postcards, handwritten in a unique calligraphy, customarily filling all the available space with a concise message. If only as a radical contribution to the genre of an author’s “letters,” a book reprinting the best of them should appear. (‘Tis said as a great believer in postcards he would begin his visit to a new museum by purchasing picture postcards of featured works and then try to find the originals on the museum’s walls.) I’m also a great

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fan of Reinhardt’s travel photographs that I saw in the 1970s as a projection of slides that he would show to his colleagues two decades before. Everywhere he went around the world Reinhardt photographed verticals and horizontals, usually in human constructions, with scant attention to Nature, in sum reflecting the sensibility of a native New Yorker who lived his entire life there, incidentally much like myself. These too should sometime appear as a book.

REINIGER, LOTTE (2 June 1899–19 June 1981; b. Charlotte R.) Among the pioneering film animators, she designed distinctive intertitles for another director’s film in 1916, while she was still a student in her native BERLIN, and made her first film in 1919. In 1923 Reiniger began directing one of the earliest feature-length animated films, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), which is based upon the familiar Arabian Nights. Her SIGNATURE technique involved paper cutouts that were illuminated from behind to create moving silhouettes on screen. For this style of animation Reiniger drew disparately upon Chinese shadow puppets and the Expressionist theater lighting of the theatrical director Max Reinhardt, with whom she briefly studied. Even though Prince Achmed had international success, it includes several abstract sequences that depend upon experimental techniques involving sliced wax and sand on glass likewise illuminated from behind. The music biographer Eric Walter White (1905–85), who compiled the music for Harleken/Harlequin (1931), published in 1931 a charming booklet, Walking Shadows, that described Reiniger’s animation technique, incidentally establishing her reputation in England. In the mid-1930s, Reiniger emigrated to London where she stayed after World War II, producing many short films, mostly for British children’s television. Her husband Carl Koch (1892–1963) produced and photographed her films from 1921 until his death in 1963. Reiniger’s reputation for adult filmmaking was revived in post-post-War Germany, just before her death. In part because no one afterwards used Reiniger’s silhouette technique as well, those 1920s films invariably look fresh on first viewing today.

or rear-guard or backward, both of which sound more condescending, as they imply retreating and retiring. Often confused with both bourgeois or commercial, both of which are nearly always retrograde, this derogation retrograde is not synonymous with academic, which characterizes something familiarly formulaic. Retrograde can be used to characterize art, artists, critics, media, institutions, and much else cultural. Even though retrograde is the negative of the avantgarde’s positive, I’d love to read (though would not write, not even for golden moolah), “A Dictionary of the Retrogrades,” again preferring the plural over the singular, as, much like the avant-garde, it comes from more than one direction. Two questions are: would this book, if more tactile than CONCEPTUAL ART, be longer or shorter than DAG? Would it be funnier?

REXROTH, KENNETH (22 December 1905–6 June 1982) I’d like to think Rexroth belongs here, because anyone who is radical in both his literary politics and social politics should serve as a professional model. However, Rexroth’s poems at their best were fairly conventional and accessible, usually in appreciation of nature (no, Nature), with scarcely any interest in alternative poetic forming. I have scoured them, hoping to find avant-garde aberrations comparable to those existing in, say, CUMMINGS and OGDEN NASH, but have uncovered one and only one, “Fundamental Disagreement with Two Contemporaries,” which is indicatively dedicated “for Tristan Tzara & Andre Breton” and opens with fragmented language (“gonaV/; /ing evIT/ dras pRoG”) before returning into the underpunctuated declarative phrases more typical of Rexroth’s poetry. Notwithstanding his claim as a California artist to have assimilated more Oriental cultural influence than other writers, Asia didn’t show as strongly in his work it did, say, in the music compositions of Lou Harrison (1917–2003) or the art of JOHN McLAUGHLIN. Reputed to be an impressive improvistory talker, he conducted on a Bay Area radio station a regular book review program. I recall hearing one bit, probably in the 1960s, where he was audibly opening the book’s package as he talked about it. Consider that that move exemplifies a level of memorable PERFORMANCE that no one else would dare.

RETROGRADE As the opposite of avant-garde, this epithet is certainly more pointed and thus memorable than derrière-garde, which sounds asinine (at least in English),

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RHOADS, GEORGE (27 January 1926)

352 • RICHIER, GERMAINE After decades as a young painter incidentally skilled at fixing watches, Rhoads began in the 1970s to create kinetic sculptures that use a minimum of technology by mostly depending upon gravity for their effects. Rhoads typically installed a simple motor to bring a single kind of mobile object (billiard balls, golf balls, etc.) to the top of a structure. The balls then flow randomly down one of several available paths, customarily hitting a succession of noisemakers and moving parts until they reach a bottom level, from which they are, by machine, carried back to the top. These audiokinetic sculptures, as Rhodes calls them, have customarily been placed in shopping centers (two in West Edmonton, Canada; one in Plattsburg, New York, etc.), public institutions (Boston’s Science Museum), bus stations (New York’s Port Authority), and airport terminals (Logan C in Boston) – which is to say in places where people congregate. It is not unusual to see individuals, usually juveniles, fixated for minutes at a stretch, intent on discovering a sculpture’s many possible movements. Little other public art succeeds as well with the general public, perhaps explaining why, in contrast to unpopular public art, Rhoads’s machines are rarely, if ever, defaced. My own favorite is an untitled piece installed at the Allendale Shopping Center in Pittsfield, Mass., where golf balls are propelled into the air. As they fall into different channels, they activate various switches that open different organ pipes, producing a wealth of charming sounds. I consider Rhoads’s machines to be a kind of mechanical theater in the tradition of OSKAR SCHLEMMER and thus note that, because the only technology they require is a simple motor to lift balls to an apex, they would have been technically feasible long before.

RICHIER, GERMAINE (16 September 1902–31 July 1959) A precursor of the group of sculptors who emerged after World War II and whose works critic HERBERT READ referred to as the “geometry of fear,” Richier may be the most unnerving sculptor in the modern era. The scabrous, diseased, eaten-away metal forms of this French sculptor bear a resemblance to the works of Alberto Giacometti (1901–66), and her concern with anxiety matches his. But where Giacometti was interested in the human figure distorted by anxiety, Richier developed a sculptural style that was aimed at creating metaphoric images of anxiety itself. She portrays sinister and decomposing creatures that observe no natural distinctions. The images break down the boundaries between the animal, vegetable, and mineral realms. As

images of a frightening mental chaos, Richier’s creatures are symbols for unknown depths of the imagination, for unconscious qualities of sensation and emotion. In this pursuit, she shows a relationship to Surrealism, but where Surrealism most often sought to evoke unconscious states of mind through the anomalous arrangements of familiar objects, Richier fused elements from nature into unnatural combinations. Perhaps a response to the carnage of the war, perhaps a register of the discontent of the technological world, Richier’s sculptures are piercing renditions of the imagination of terror. —Mark Daniel Cohen

RICHTER, HANS (6 April 1888–1 February 1976) A POLYARTIST of sorts, Richter is now remembered mostly for his pioneering films and his books, beginning with his 1921 abstract film Rhythmus 21, which focuses upon a single formal element, the rectangle. In Germany, he worked initially with VIKING EGGELING and then with SERGEI EISENSTEIN. In Vormittagsspuk/Ghosts before Breakfast (1927–28), bowler hats fly through the landscape in articulate formations, Richter replicating in human action footage the animator’s trick of creating on film certain comic effects that could not be done live on stage. Once settled in America, where he became director of the Institute of Film Techniques at New York’s City College (1942–52), Richter organized Dreams That Money Can Buy (1946), a feature-length color film that drew upon scenarios by ALEXANDER CALDER, MARCEL DUCHAMP, MAX ERNST, and MAN RAY, among others. Another longer film, 8×8 (1957), made after his return to Switzerland, involved JEAN COCTEAU, among others. Richter compiled a twopart self-retrospective mostly of paintings, Forty Years of Experiment (1951, 1961), in addition to writing histories featuring his own involvements in the arts. In the concluding two decades of his life, much of them spent back in Europe, he worked principally as a painter. He authored in the middle 1960s an early book-length history of DADA that, partly because of a lack of competition at the time, got widely translated and reprinted.

RICKEY, GEORGE (6 June 1907–17 July 2002) ALEXANDER CALDER’s innovation (of a nonmechanical, kinetic, three-dimensional art) was so

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different from traditional sculpture that his sort of work, apparently requiring competences different from those typically learned in art school, had remarkably few successors. The most important, as well as original, disciple was been George Rickey, a Scotsman who had spent most of his life in the United States (and learned mechanics in the US Army Air Corps). His delicately poised pieces move, like Calder’s, in response to the gentlest shifts of air (even drafts within museums). Whereas Calder customarily suspended his floating and spatially intersecting parts from a central point (itself usually suspended from the ceiling), providing a pivotal axis, Rickey either suspended his metal pieces individually from several axes or pitched them up from an axial point close to the ground, as in his classic Two Lines (1964), where intersecting blades, like scissors, run 35 feet high into the open air. Though Rickey’s oeuvre may not be as rich as Calder’s, it suggests that the medium of nonmechanical kinetic art is scarcely exhausted. Rickey also published the strongest critical history of artistic Constuctivism: Its Origins and Evolution (1967), which remains standard a half-century later. From his own private collection, compiled mostly from swapping with colleagues, he also mounted an exhibition Constructivist Tendencies (1970) that traveled through smaller museums, mostly in American universities. Among the most loyal guests of the DAAD BERLINER KUNSTLERPROGRAMM, he returned regularly to West Berlin to oversee European work. An especially thoughtful visual artist he seemed to me when I met him there around 1982.

RIDING, LAURA (16 January 1901–2 September 1991; b. L. Reichenthal, later L. R. Gottschalk, L. (R.) Jackson) Marrying young to her history teacher at Cornell, Louis Gottschalk, she moved with him first to Urbana, Il, and then to Louisville, KY. Offering her poetry in 1923 to The Fugitive, a magazine in Nashville eager to identify literary genius residing in the American South (even though she was Jewish, and its editors were not), she was awarded the magazine’s Nashville Prize in 1924. An ungrateful acolyte apparently, she departed the following year, divorced, initially for New York City, her birthplace, and then for England with the writer Robert Graves (1895–1985), several years her senior and already established as an incipient major writer. With him she relocated in 1929 to Mallorca, an island off Mediterranean the coast of Spain, where she both inspired Graves and collaborated with him, in addition

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to founding the Seizen Press, one of the century’s most important small literary publishers, and producing twenty books of her own poetry, fiction, and criticism in an extraordinary productive expatriate career. Returning alone to her native country in 1939, she renounced literary activity and, instead, collaborated with her new husband, Schuyler B. Jackson (1900–68), formerly a Time magazine writer, on Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, a magnum opus which didn’t appear in 1997, several years after her death (and nearly three decades after his, in 1968). For the rest of her life, her pen name of choice was Laura (Riding) Jackson. Her renunciation of literature earned less resonance than MARCEL DUCHAMP’s comparable renunciation of visual art, perhaps because the literary world differs from the art world, especially in America; but such silence perhaps provided the precondition for the survival of her reputation after her death. Writers so original are not forgotten. From 1970 onwards, books of her poetry, fiction, and criticism appeared sporadically. In my own opinion, the last are more distinguished, if only for their self-confident eccentricity.

RIEFENSTAHL, LENI (22 August 1902–8 September 2003; b. Helene Bertha Amalie R.) Riefenstahl was the EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE of film, which is to say that she mastered, as no one before her had done as well, the capture of human motion. Her masterpiece is Olympia (1938), a four-hour documentary ostensibly about the 1936 BERLIN Olympics, but stylistically a glorification of human athletic performance at its highest. Generously supported by the Nazi government, Riefenstahl used forty-five cameras, some of which were sunk in holes dug into the ground, others of which were in balloons; and after amassing over two hundred hours of raw footage, she spent over a year editing . (Ironically, the African-American sprinter Jesse Owens [1913–80] often credited a female follower of Adolf Hitler with making him famous through her visual record of his stunning victories and his memorable smiling face.) If only for directorial decisions about shooting individual events, nearly every major sports film since seems in some way or another indebted to Riefenstahl. (To her credit, she eschewed the post-victory, talkinghead interviews that plague American television’s coverage of sports. Since her soundtrack wasn’t synchronized with the visual elements, Riefenstahl could

354 • RILEY, BRIDGET redo her work in different languages without changing her brilliant footage.) Her book of still photographs that she likewise titled Olympia (1937) also ranks as a masterpiece of its genre. Because of Riefenstahl’s Nazi involvements, most notoriously as the producer of Triumph of the Will (1936) about the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi Party Convention, she was interned in various prison camps after World War II, her films and filmmaking equipment confiscated. Her good looks gave credence to the charge that she had been Hitler’s mistress, though this was not true. Although Riefenstahl later worked for European magazines as a photographer, she never again produced a major film. (Tiefland, based upon an opera by Eugene d’Albert [1864–1932], was actually completed in 1944, a decade before it was released.) Germans making a documentary in 1990s continually confronted her about her prewar political involvements, which should be forgotten by now, rather than acknowledging her pioneering artistic achievements that will stand. Surviving for more than a century, Riefenstahl probably experienced the perverse pleasure of reading most of her detractors’ obituaries.

RILEY, BRIDGET (24 April 1931) Riley and VICTOR VASARELY initiated modern OP ART; and whereas Vasarely popularized it, with an increasing number of colorful prints, Riley has maintained a near monopoly on its masterpieces. These are typically visual fields with such an ingenious regularity that they generate the illusion of shimmering irregular movement. What seems at first scrupulously CONSTRUCTIVIST is really involved with nonrational retinal-perceptual processes, exposing, as Cyril Barrett (1925–2004, a Jesuit) put it, “certain physiological processes in the eye and brain which we are not normally aware of either in ordinary vision or in looking at other works of art.” After beginning with just black and white, Riley introduced color around 1965, with less success. One joke was that her paintings generated too much visual disturbance to be hung in wealthy collectors’ homes; only in public institutions, among other distractions, could they be exhibited.

RILEY, TERRY (24 June 1935; b. Terrence Mitchell R.) A sometime ragtime pianist, Riley developed in the mid-60s a radical alternative to the predominant

schools of music composition. Sometimes called MINIMAL, resembling a new development in visual art at that time, its operation is more accurately characterized as MODULAR. For his In C (1964), some two dozen musicians are given fifty-three separate phrases (or modules) to play in sequence, moving from one to the next whenever they wish, ideally in sensitive response to one another. Meanwhile, the pianist plays a continuous beat on the top two C’s of the keyboard for the entire duration. The performance ends when all performers have arrived at the final module. As the composer/record producer David Behrman (1937) wrote about its first recording, “A good performance reveals a teeming world of groups and subgroups forming, dissolving, and forming within a modal panorama which shifts, over a period of about forty-five to ninety minutes, from C to E to C to G.” Later in the 1960s, Riley worked with audiotape delay, whereby a live sound is recorded on one machine that feeds tape to a second machine that plays back the sound that is recorded by the first machine, generally at a lower level (a process that is repeated until the sound fades away). Meanwhile, the live performer can add new sounds that are likewise recycled until they become inaudible. By this process, Riley, also a virtuoso on the soprano saxophone, created Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band (1966). Later Riley recordings reveal his taste for highly sensuous music, especially when played by himself. Indeed, few can match him as a piano improviser, drawing mostly upon familiar classical music over extended durations; and few performers, in my observation, take as much visible pleasure as Riley in hearing their own notes live.

RIMBAUD, ARTHUR (20 October 1854–10 November 1891; b. Jean Nicolas A. R.) Running away from home, the teenage Rimbaud befriended the prominent French poet Paul Verlaine (1844–96), who left his wife to live and travel with Rimbaud, until the older man shot the younger. That prompted Rimbaud to write Une Saison en enfer (1873, A Season in Hell), which consists mostly of prose poems filled with extreme imagery. Rimbaud’s other important prose poem, Illuminations, also composed before 1874, introduces his theory of the poet as seer, thereby influencing poetic practice well into the 20th century. The legend is that Rimbaud abandoned poetry before turning 20. Without roots, in constant rebellion against his family and social conventions, Rimbaud explored

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both mental and social derangements, producing an art of hallucination and irrationality through symbolism that is often obscure. For generations thereafter, the acceptance or rejection of Rimbaud’s psychopoetic orientation became an important decision for aspiring poets. Perhaps the most curious testimony about his later influence is Wallace Fowlie’s Rimbaud and Jim Morrison (1994), which is based upon an appreciative letter about his Rimbaud book that the scholar-translator received from the rock star (1943–1971) in 1968.

RIVERA, DIEGO (8 December 1886–24 November 1957; b. D. María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la R. y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez) Of the several masters of Mexican mural painting in the early 20th century, Rivera is at once the most famous and the most notorious. Some of his fame and notoriety came during his life from his Communist politics and provocative imagery, both of which prompted opinionmakers to take sides. Later, he was posthumously vilified for bullying his diminutive infirm wife, the painter Frida Kahlo (1907–54), who became a feminist heroine in the 1970s. None of this gossip, essentially, should obscure his genuine painterly achievements. Initially Rivera practiced Cubism, epitomized by his 1915 portrait of RAMÓN GÓMEZ DE LA SERNA (1915). Returning to his native Mexico in 1921, after fifteen years in Europe during which he studied Italian fresco paintings, Rivera was commissioned by the victorious socialist government to paint a series of frescos glorifying the Mexican Revolution. Those in the patio of the Ministry of Education in Mexico City are commonly regarded as his finest murals. Perhaps the most successful in the United States proper are those portraying American autoworkers on the ceilings of the Detroit Institute for the Arts. Those commissioned for Rockefeller Center in the 1930s survive only in a book, because Nelson Rockefeller himself (1908–79), then a young man, and later a prominent (if flawed) art patron, ordered them destroyed (i.e., censored). Rivera painted all his murals with his own hand, while working on a scaffold, depending upon “assistants” only to assist, not substitute, his strokes reflecting extraordinary attention to detail that sometimes reflected personal research. To the American critic Max Kozloff (1933), “Rivera’s pictorial economy takes into itself the insatiable need to show how things work, and his frescoes, loaded with an almost bewildering amount of information, are more descriptive than any

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other words with a comparable object.” His principal biographer Bertram Wolfe (1896–1977) reports one Mexican scholar estimating that by 1949 Rivera had covered on walls alone approximately four kilometers of painting one meter high. Wow. Nonetheless, compared to his contemporary JOSÉ OROZCO, Rivera seems the lesser – shorter on both art and character. In his native country he was generous and beloved, both personally and professionally, also as a pioneering collector of early Mexican art and artifacts, amassing several thousand objects for which he built a monument, all donated to his country. Consider as well that Bertram Wolfe, an independent American writer, wrote not one but two long biographies of Rivera, in addition to an exhibition catalogue in between.

ROCHÉ, HENRI-PIERRE (28 May 1879–9 April 1959) Essential though not necessary, his gift to the Paris art world at the beginning of the 20th century was connecting people who should have already been connected (but might not have been, if not for him). It was Roché, no one else, who in November 1905 took GERTRUDE STEIN and her older brother Leo (1872–1947) to meet PABLO PICASSO, forging a monumental friendship. Discharged from the French military early in World War I, Roché journeyed with MARCEL DUCHAMP to New York, where together they founded the magazine The Blind Man (1917). Later returning to Paris, he befriended FRANCIS PICABIA and CONSTANTIN BRÂNCUSI, among other MONTPARNASSE art stars, always making connections among them, collecting their work and sometimes storing it while they went elsewhere (e.g., the American PATRICK HENRY BRUCE). Late in his life Roché published the novel Jules et Jim (1952), which inspired a François Truffaut film of the same title (1962).

ROCHE, JULIETTE (29 August 1884–23 November 1980) The daughter of a powerful government official, Roche studied painting in Paris and married in 1915 Albert Gleizes (1881–1953), a few years her senior, who was already established as a CUBIST painter. Thanks to her father’s influence, he received an honorable discharge from service in World War I, and the two sailed for America to participate in New York DADA. Among the works Roche produced was an extraordinary visual poem entitled “Brevoort,” which

356 • RODCHENKO, ALEKSANDR MIKHAILOVICH portrays in both English and French, arranged in geometric shapes, snatches of overheard conversation. In this appreciation of the American art historian Robert Rosenblum (1927–2006): Transporting the pleasures of Parisian café life to New York, she first sets the scene, top center, with the most minimal image of a Cubist glass on a table, but then moves on to a more adventurous territory of capturing the simultaneous buzz of music and conversation around her with sentence fragments that evoke the orchestra playing an Italian song as well as snippets of overheard dialogue, a verbal potpourri of arty Greenwich Village talk that covers everything from Nietzsche and anarchy to Washington Square and Japan. Rosenblum also appreciates Roche’s “free-verse poems in French that would seize the thrilling rush of the city’s signs and sounds. Sprinkled with words like Biltmore, Jazz-Band, Tipperary, West 88, Cyclone, Triangle Play Film.” A painting made at this time about the swimming pool at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn provides a similarly cubist overview of chaotic social activity. Roche’s experience of NEW YORK CITY is crystalized in an extended narrative poem La Mineralisation de Dudley Craving MacAdam (1918) whose protagonist incorporates several people Roche encountered in New York, including MARCEL DUCHAMP and the poet and art collector WALTER ARENSBERG. Roche and Gleizes returned in 1920 to Paris, where she resumed making the art in which she was initially trained.

RODCHENKO, ALEKSANDR MIKHAILOVICH (5 December 1891–3 December 1956) An early champion of ABSTRACT ART, who was also a photographer, theoretician, and designer, Rodchenko emphasized a rational approach over the intuitive and mystical one favored by WASSILY KANDINSKY and KAZIMIR MALEVICH. Therefore, beginning with compositions of 1915, he drew with a ruler and compass in an attempt to eliminate the emotional and psychological influence of the artist’s personality. This orientation made Rodchenko a leader in both CONSTRUCTIVISM and Productivism, which applied the principles of Abstraction to furniture design, book design, and advertising for the new collectivist proletarian society. Rodchenko pioneered PHOTOMONTAGE, his most noted work being illustrations

for MAYAKOVSKY’s About This (1923). In 1924, he turned more to the “real” world of photography, but his photographs retain abstract compositional elements, most notably strong diagonal lines resulting from unusual viewpoints. He designed FUTURIST sets and costumes for Mayakovsky’s play The Bedbug (1929), among other theatrical works. In the 1920s, Rodchenko held influential administrative and teaching positions, including one as head of the metalwork department at VKHUTEMAS, only to retire in the 1930s and 1940s to a quiet life working in photography, book design, and easel painting of a more biomorphic sort. —Gerald Janecek

RODIA, SIMON (12 February 1879–19 July 1965; b. Sabato or Sabbatino R.) One of the most awesome works of American OUTSIDER art is several brightly colored skeletal towers, two of them nearly 100 feet high, at the end of a dead-end street, next to an abandoned railroad track in the Watts section of Los Angeles. They were constructed between 1921 and 1955 by a diminutive Italian immigrant tile setter/laborer working alone, without scaffolding, in his spare time. In their skeletal structure they resemble the Eiffel Tower, constructed only two decades before Rodia began, which was a powerful popular architectural image in the early 20th century. In their multicolored response to bright sunshine they resemble the architecture of ANTONI GAUDI, the Barcelonan whose sun-drenched work Rodia might have seen (at least in photographic reproductions). Otherwise, the towers have no esthetic antecedents. Literally rooted in the fireplace of Rodia’s own house, the Watts Towers or the Los Angeles Watts Towers, as they are now commonly called, were constructed out of steel rods covered with cement that is reinforced with wire-mesh netting. Into the receptively wet cement Rodia put thousands of tile chips, broken bottles (especially if their glass was tinted), seashells, and anything else that might reflect the bright Los Angeles sun. The wealth of detail is awesome. No one examining the structure has found any bolts, rivets, or welds. As Calvin Trillin revealed, in a 1965 New Yorker profile, Rodia had no plans, no sketches, and no building permit. To judge by pictures taken at various times over the thirty-three years he was working on his towers, he actually tore down sections of them and

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started over when he felt that they did not match his image or when his image changed. Sometime before his death, Rodia abandoned his masterwork to live elsewhere in California. They are so strong structurally that they survived various severe tests. More than one commentator has identified the Watts Towers as Los Angeles’s (or America’s) equivalent of Athens’s Parthenon, as indeed they are. Nearly destroyed by public officials predisposed to condemn them as “unsafe,” they have survived, thanks initially to volunteer citizens’ committees.

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common with the work of GERMAINE RICHIER. However, where Richier drew her influence from SURREALISM and employed natural forms combined in irrational congregations, Roszak drew from ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM and developed a style that evoked archetypal dimensions of the unconscious mind, while remaining purely abstract. His disconcerting, fear-ridden images are never more than mere suggestions of natural forms, such as tree roots, insect anatomy, and skeletal structures. His sculptures do not function like mythic symbols, evoking buried emotions. They seem instead to be mad creations directly extracted from the unconscious mind. —Mark Daniel Cohen

ROSENBERG, HAROLD (2 February 1906–11 July 1978) When I first began writing about the arts, more than a half-century ago, Rosenberg’s writings about avantgarde art, in general and in particular, shaped ideas that I continue to hold. It was easy to be seduced by his humanistic image of Action Painting (which was his less successful coinage for ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM): “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to produce, re-design, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined.” The urgency of his prose suggested an art revolution as a surrogate for social upheavals that didn’t happen. However, before the 1960s were over, it was clear that Rosenberg no longer believed in his idea of the avant-garde – at least not in his critical practice. He was invited to become the art critic for The New Yorker, a forum quite different from the literary quarterlies and art journals in which his strongest essays previously appeared. Instead of pursuing his enthusiasms, he felt obliged to review whatever was currently “hot” or newsy in the art world, most of which he didn’t like (and wouldn’t have bothered with before, at least not in print) and sometimes scarcely understood. With increasing CELEBRITY, he became pessimistic and, alas, less consequential.

ROSZAK, THEODORE (1 May 1907–2 September 1981) Roszak was one of the sculptors referred to by HERBERT READ as a practitioner of the “geometry of fear.” The spiky, often bone-like metal sculptures to which he devoted himself after 1946 have much in

ROTH, DIETER (21 April 1930–5 June 1998; b. Karl-Dietrich R., perhaps) The most original and fecund Swiss artist of his generation, Roth began as a graphic designer, and so it is scarcely surprising that he published over a hundred books, many of which rank as extraordinary BOOKART. He also exhibited organic materials that change color, not to mention odor, over the course of an exhibition. Allan Kaprow remembers this 1969 piece: Twenty-odd old suitcases filled with a variety of international cheese specialties. The suitcases – all different – were placed close together in the middle of the floor, as you might find them at a Greyhound bus terminal. In a few days the cheeses began to ripen, some started oozing out of the suitcases, all of them grew marvelous molds (which you could examine by opening the lids), and maggots were crawling by the thousands. Naturally, the smell was incredible. Rot once collected two years of personal trash into transparent plastic bags that were stacked into two pyramids in Zurich’s Helmhaus. His favorite exhibition form became an INSTALLATION. In addition to giving concerts with instruments he was not trained to play (and frequently concocting new versions of his name, the most familiar alluding to the 18th-century French philosopher Diderot), Roth published highly innovative prose in more than one language. Fighting glib artistic classification, he often produced inscrutable ironic statements. Incorrigibly obsessive, he photographed all the buildings in ICELAND’s main city. He produced an installation with over two dozen video monitors

358 • ROTHKO, MARK simultaneously playing tapes of his mundane activities, including time spent on his can (toilet). He compulsively painted over postcards, particularly of London’s Piccadilly Circus, wittily entitling this project 96 Piccadillies (1977), incidentally claiming that “painting and drawing on unpainted or unmarked paper is harder to do than on paper with something already on it.” Etc., etc. Among Roth’s several magnum opi is Gartensulptor (Garden Sculpture) that began with a self-portrait made of chocolate and birdseed, placed upon a bird table, exposed to the elements. To this he added drawings, paintings, sculptures, and much else, all placed on trellises, as in normal gardens. Exhibited indoors in 1992 in Switzerland, it filled an entire room. A few years ago it was over 21 yards long; by 2000, after his death, perhaps 42 yards long. Had Roth lived longer, it could have become a monumental accretive masterpiece. I saw in Milan around 2013 a posthumous exhibition that filled a huge space. Honoring his memory, some admirers have founded Dieter Roth Academies in many countries around the world. Perhaps by the measure of sheer numbers and perhaps gross volume, no other contemporary artist (two generations younger than PICASSO) produced as much strong work.

ROTHKO, MARK (25 September 1903–25 February 1970; b. Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz) Born in Russia, raised in Portland, Oregon, Rothko passed through Yale University before coming to New York in 1925 and became for his next three decades one among many serious painters struggling there. Finally, in the 1950s, he realized his original, mature style of large rough rectangles shaped like the human palm, usually stacked one above the other, together filling nearly the entire field of a canvas. The rectangles have only slightly different hues, while the background color differs only slightly from that of the rectangles. Each area has not a uniform color but ever-changing tones, whose gradations become more apparent if the work’s visibly hand-painted strokes are looked at fixedly. Rothko painted around the edges of a canvas, leaving paintings unframed. He required that his paintings be displayed lower, closer to the ground, than is customary. What Rothko wanted to realize was unprecedentedly higher sublimity mostly through colors that weren’t visible outside his paintings. His works became

the foundation for subsequent artists’ exploration of surface tensions, original color relationships, and ways of negating suggestions of “depth.” To my mind, the most visible sign of Rothko’s influence has been the proliferation of nearly monochromic paintings in the past half-century.

ROUSSEL, RAYMOND (20 January 1877–14 January 1933) One of the great eccentrics of early modern French literature, Roussel was born rich and, shall we say, touched. A maniac in the true sense of the word, he wrote at nineteen a novel entirely in alexandrines (nearly 6,000 of them); he later used parentheses with an abandon that others find inspiring. An admirer of Jules Verne above all others, Roussel wrote about largely imaginary travels in Africa, first in prose and then decades later in verse, publishing both books under the same title, Impressions d’Afrique (1910, 1932). For the selfpublication of the verse novel, he used only the righthand pages, alternating his text with crude illustrations commissioned from a nobody selected by a private detective agency. Roussel’s plays are disjunctive, their titles coming from concluding lines that, as the British critic Rayner Heppenstall (1911–81) points out, “are equally unrelated to all that has gone before.” Because of his wealth, Roussel did not need to be popular, which he wasn’t anyway. The posthumously published Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Some of My Books, 1935) accounts for the liberties of extreme imagination, even in recalling one’s professional life and purposes. Perhaps because of his influence on EUGÈNE IONESCO and JOHN ASHBERY, among others, Roussel is continually revived.

ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART/ACADEMY OF MUSIC (1837, 1822) To a skeptical American, living in a culture which assumes any institution claiming “royal” must be breeding state factotums, the surprise is that some genuinely avant-garde people have passed through these essentially traditionalist graduate (i.e., postgraduate in Britain) schools in London. Among the alumni of the former were HENRY MOORE, DAVID HOCKNEY, BRIDGET RILEY, R. B. KITAJ, and the great South Asian choreographer Uday Shankar (1900–77), incidentally the father of the prominent sitarist Ravi S. (1920–2012). Between 1950

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and 1978, RCA students published Ark, which was at the time the most advanced British art magazine for its time (even publishing me in 1965, while I was still officially a student in London). Among those passing through its sibling RAM were the composers CORNELIUS CARDEW, JOHN TAVENER, MICHAEL NYMAN, and the violinist Irvine ARDITTI (1953). “Royal” notwithstanding, these institutions haven’t been total wet blankets.

RUBINSTEIN, LEV SEMENOVICH (19 February 1947) As one of the purest manifestations of MOSCOW CONCEPTUALISM, Lev Rubinstein’s works on cards consist mostly of fragments of text on separate index cards numbering from thirty to over a hundred, as the mental connection between the carefully arranged fragments is left to the reader to discover. He is a master of what he dubs the “quasi-quotation” in which the fragment sounding like a real quotation by, say, Pushkin or Chekhov was in fact invented by Rubinstein. His statement that “everything has already been written” refers to JORGE-LUIS BORGES’s story “The Library of Babel,” in which all possible books are to be found. Rubinstein’s focus is not on originality, but on the interaction of pieces of already familiar texts and styles. As each card is a unit of the structural rhythm, he performs the occasional blank ones with pauses of equivalent length. Rubinstein’s earliest Conceptualist piece, Program of Works (1975–76), is a set of five quite abstract studies of artistic context, authorship, and grammar. Later ones ranged from the numerological to full-fledged dramatic scenarios, such as a Dantesque journey through the underworld, poetic narratives of a Zeninclined schoolboy, or memories of colleagues and family (“This is me,” 1995). With this last work, Rubinstein completely abandoned his series of over three dozen “works on cards” and entered on a career as a singer and blogger. —Gerald Janecek

RUGGLES, CARL (11 March 1876–24 October 1971; b. Charles Sprague R.) Perhaps the most painstaking of the modern composers, Ruggles produced relatively few works that were constantly revised and rearranged, so that the

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complete Ruggles could easily fit onto two compact disks (in contrast to his contemporary Charles Ives, who produced bundles of music and rarely revised). He worked for thirteen years on an opera designed for his singer-wife, titled it “The Sunken Bell,” but never completed it. One reason why he finished so little was the lack of local support. Though his Sun-Treader was performed in Paris and BERLIN in 1932 (in performances conducted by NICOLAS SLONIMSKY), not until 1966, in Ruggles’s ninetieth year, was it premiered in his native country. Ruggles’s music is at once dissonant, expansive, weighty, and elegant. Speaking more technically, the younger composer Lou Harrison wrote that Ruggles’s music: is characterized by an absolute lack of negative spacing in the voices, which is to say that no voice is ever given over to repetitious arpeggiation or figuration of any kind. Each voice is a real melody, bound into a community of singing lines, living a life of its own with regard to phrasing and breathing, careful not to get ahead or behind in its rhythmic co-operation with the others, and sustaining a responsible independence in the whole polyphonic life. In those classically brilliant phrases incidentally is a definition of an American esthetic. Also a visual artist, Ruggles exhibited his paintings from time to time.

RUSCHA, EDWARD (16 December 1937; b. E. Joseph R. IV; pronounced Roo-SHAY) As a painter, he extended POP ART not with familiar images but familiar words, painted large, in a variety of technically imaginative ways. His more significant artistic departure was making books entirely of pictures. Though Ruscha’s meticulous paintings of words, usually in a modestly expressive shape, echo ROBERT INDIANA’s without transcending them, his truest early innovations were BOOK-ART, mostly self-published. The single most successful contains standard black-and-white aerial photographs of Los Angeles parking lots, most of them empty; the only words beyond the title page identify each lot’s location. Though one theme might be the peculiar beauty of such magnificent nonartistic edifices, Thirty-Four Parking Lots (1967) becomes a reiterated, scathing critique of Los Angeles urban design and its bondage to the automobile. Ruscha’s formally most remarkable

360 • RUSSELL, MORGAN volume, likewise self-published, is a strip of heavy paper that folds into the shape of a book, becoming a ladderbook, which can be “read” in either direction. Along the entire length of each edge run amateurish photographs of buildings on both sides of The Sunset Strip (1966), arranged bottom to bottom, separated only by a white space down the middle of the paper, becoming at once an innovative portrait and an alternative reading experience. Many younger book-artists have produced book-art homages to Ruscha, including myself. As a painter, he has been consistent to a level that marks him as limited. Incidentally, few major visual artists older than Ruscha have lived their entire professional lives in Los Angeles.

used capital letters to “take greater pleasure in ideally combining the noises of trains, explosions of motors, and shouting crowds than in listening again, for example, to the ‘Eroica’ or the ‘Pastorale.’” Russolo’s appreciation of noises made by nonpitched machines, many of them new to his time, incidentally forecast the music of GEORGE ANTHIEL, EDGARD VARÈSE, and JOHN CAGE, among others. Russolo also invented several intonarumori, or noisemaking instruments, even writing music for them.

RUTTMANN, WALTER (28 December 1887–15 July 1941)

RUSSELL, MORGAN (25 January 1886–29 May 1953) Intelligently he wrote:“My first synchronies represented a personal manner of visualizing by color rhythms; here my treatment of light by multiple rainbow-like solarwaves which, expanding into larger undulations, form the general composition.” By contrast to STANTON MacDONALD-WRIGHT, his coconspirator at the beginning of what they called Synchronism (1912), Russell stayed in France through both World Wars before returning to the US in 1946. MICHAEL SEUPHOR writes, “Russell’s ‘synchronies’ are distinguished from those of MacDonald-Wright by their mass, akin to the cubist preoccupation, but in a quite different register of colors.” Decades later, only the early paintings of both these men are appreciated and exhibited.

RUSSIAN FORMALISTS See FORMALISTS, RUSSIAN.

RUSSOLO, LUIGI (30 April 1885–6 February 1947) The notoriety of Russolo’s book L’arte dei rumori (1913, The Art of Noise) obscures the fact that he was mostly a painter (and one of five cosigners of “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,” 1910). His Treno in velocità (1911, Speeding Train) is said to be the first FUTURIST painting to use a speeding machine as both its subject and theme. His major canvases of the next few years explored motion in both machines and people – crowds, thunderbolts, automobiles, political protesters, etc. In his famous manifesto on noise, he

Though trained as an architect and painter, Ruttmann turned to film after serving in the German army in World War I, initially producing in the early 1920s hand-painted kinetic geometric films, to which he gave such abstract titles as Lightplay Opus One (1921). He also collaborated with LOTTE REINIGER. His reputation is based upon an imaginative 1927 “documentary” that captures a day in the life of a metropolis in less than one hour – Berlin: Symphonie einer Große stadt (Symphony of a Big City). Proceeding to a silent rhythmic beat, without a story or a protagonist, this film portrays scene after scene that are uniquely identifiable, even decades later, as BERLIN; precisely by being always about its title, which would seem pretentious if not true, Ruttmann’s film remains a model for subsequent urban portraits throughout the world. Early in the 1920s, Ruttmann discovered that film soundtrack could be edited for its audio possibilities alone and so, a generation before the availability of editable audiotape, made from recorded fragments an audio composition of sounds unique to Week End (in German as well as English) (1928), which, as a film devoid of images, remains a classic of avant-garde radio/electroacoustic art (still scarcely known, alas). Ruttmann advised LENI RIEFENSTAHL on the editing of Olympia, and in 1940 filmed the German invasion of France. The following year he was killed while making another newsreel at the warfront.

RUUTSALO, EINO (19 September 1921–2 April 2001) A Finnish POLYARTIST who attended New York’s Parsons School of Design in the early 1950s, Ruutsalo made KINETIC ART considerably different from the common run, in part because he often used language as

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his principal material. In his oeuvre are over forty short films (many of them made without a camera by painting directly on celluloid), numerous sculptures, paintings, and prints. Ruutsalo sometimes takes the same title through various media. A standard international history of film animation identifies him as “the most influential Finnish animator,” while another characterizes his ABC 123 (1967) as “a bizarre exploration of a printer’s notebook.” Ruutsalo spoke creditably of wanting “to move freely among the different areas of art, depending upon which mode of expression is required at the time. My aim is to avoid becoming confined to a particular mode of art.” By most measures, he ranks among the most under-known older polyartists.

RYMAN, ROBERT (30 May 1930) While art of one color no doubt remains a good avantgarde idea, it is hard to discern who in the second generation of monochromists is better and/or more original than the rest. There are general discriminations to be made between pure monochromists and those who would dilute their fields with alternative colors, and between those who use colors with varying degrees of seductive appeal, such as Marcia Hafif’s (1929) pink, and those who work only with the noncolors of black and white. Ryman has favored the second side in both of these dichotomies, preferring a white painting adulterated with various degrees of grayish shadings, often created in series of paintings, generally in a square format, initially looking similar in appearance but finally subtilety different. He experimented with different kinds of white paint and with a variety of surfaces, including plywood, fiberglass, and linen. While such works are individually impressive, a gathering of them makes clear, at least to me, that the better Ryman paintings are those with the faintest or most subtle shadings, especially if the monochromic fields are framed with edges painted a different color. However, at a 1992

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exhibition, Ryman’s second solo show at a Guggenheim Museum, the room in which they were displayed had over its windows tall, clean white curtains whose presence made the paintings look messy, if not uncharacteristically schmutzik.

RZEWSKI, FREDERIC (13 April 1938; pronounced re-ZHEF-ski) Notwithstanding the best education an American composer of his generation could have gotten at Harvard with Walter Piston (1894–1976) and then at Princeton with ROGER SESSIONS and MILTON BABBITT, Rzewski became a transatlantic composer, moving easily between the US and Europe. Indeed, few American composers of his rank have taught so long in Europe, in his case as a Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège, Belgium. As a performer, he collaborated in the late 1960s with Alvin Curran (1938) and Richard Teitelbaum (1939) as MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva), their name reflecting a European base, in live electronic improvisation. As a political composer, especially in the 1970s, he made music incorporating revolutionary slogans – The People United Will Never Be Defeated (1975, available in several different recordings) and North American Ballads (1979). As a masterful acoustic pianist, using a full palette of sound generation provided by the instrument (including closing the key-cover, drumming on its sides, etc.), Rzewski has performed and recorded his works. Perhaps the most ambitious is The Road (1998–2003), which has several parts, reflecting his notion of the work as “a novel” on the scale of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace that is also an extended solo-keyboard composition in the tradition of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Implicitly, The Road seems designed for final preservation in a reproductive medium that can hold several hours of continuous sound, such as a USB flash drive or a DVD disk used only for audio.

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SACHER, PAUL (28 April 1906–26 May 1999) In his twenties, Sacher founded a chamber orchestra and a choir in his native city of Basel, Switzerland; in the 1950s, he directed the local music academy. In between he toured as a conductor and incidentally married the widow of the founder of a large Swiss pharmaceutical firm. Thanks to her largess, Sacher personally commissioned over two hundred works from living composers, including several future classics. Later he began to collect original scores and then whole archives, typically purchasing for over five million dollars the entire IGOR STRAVINSKY horde soon after the composer’s death. As his collection is incomparable, it is housed in the Paul Sacher Foundation building in Basel. The book issued just before his death, Settling New Scores (1998), is, its peculiar title notwithstanding, an incomparable retrospective/memoir/catalog. Perhaps because such patrons are personally modest and/ or their efforts are taken for granted, extended appreciations of their contributions are scarce.

SAFDIE, MOSHE (14 July 1938) At Montreal’s EXPO 67, itself an awesome anthology of memorable innovations, the architectural star was Safdie’s Habitat 67 (1967), which was composed of prefabricated modular apartments stacked twelve high in various, apparently chaotic overlappings, all visually echoing an architectural sketch/proposal made by THEO VAN DOESBURG decades before. As Safdie’s steel-reinforced modules measuring 17½’ by 38½ have prefabricated bathrooms and kitchens, the apartments were nearly complete before being lifted into place by cranes. Precisely because the modules were not placed directly atop one another, but literally

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strewn over floors atop each other so that all of the apartments have at least three exterior views as well as a garden. Habitat 67 was so clever that I have never ceased to wonder since why it has not been replicated a thousand times since. Safdie’s later book, The City After the Automobile (1997) offers a critique of puffy POSTMODERNISM in architecture.

SAINT-PHALLE, NIKKI DE (29 October 1930–21 May 2002; b. Catherine-MarieAgnès Fal de S.-P.) The daughter of Parisian bankers, Saint-Phalle spent the World War II years in America before returning to her native country and beginning a distinguished art career. Married to the American writer HARRY MATHEWS, she produced in the early 1960s large plaster-coated assemblages of toys and junk embedded with tomatoes, eggs, and inkbottles that were meant not to survive as is/was but as post-targets for 22-calibre rifles that were handed to gallery-goers who were invited – no, encouraged – to fire away. By 1962, collaborating with JEAN TINGUELY, her principal companion at the time, she learned to fire at them herself and realized that sub-consciously she was taking revenge on her father (incidentally making her a feminist icon). She later remembered: In 1961, daddy, I would revenge myself by shooting at my paintings with a real gun. Embedded in the plastic were bags of paint. I shot you green and red and blue and yellow. YOU BASTARD YOU. When you saw me do this, did you ever guess I was shooting at you? With collaborators she produced in Stockholm Hon (1966) a zaftig woman some 77 feet long and 20 feet high, weighing several tons. Within the structure was

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an aquarium, a movie theater, and a planetarium. As few artists, especially women artists, were born to such well-managed wealth, consider that her art as well as her career might reflect such (mis)fortune.

SALZMAN, ERIC (8 September 1933–12 November 2017) One of the clearest and most accurate writers of liner notes and reviews of avant-garde music, as well as a twice-revised introductory book on 20th-century music, Salzman as a composer was devoted to his own idea of an innovative “music theater,” as he calls it, to distinguish his genre from opera, incidentally echoing the preferred coinage of the Austrian director Walter Felsenstein (1901–75). Salzman collaborated with choreographers, as well as formed a PERFORMANCE company called Quog; he codirected an annual music theater festival. The stylistic pastiche of his The Nude Paper Sermon (1969) successfully eschews obvious juxtapositions (the primary fault of simplistic collages) to mix a huge variety of both historical styles and musical articulations with a spoken narration (which provides, or parodies, a basso continuo) and electronic sounds, all around the unifying theme of “the end of the Renaissance – the end of an era and the beginning of another.” Although sometimes performed live, The Nude Paper Sermon was originally written for stereophonic tape to exploit opportunities peculiar to recording, which, if you think about it, might finally be a far more feasible medium for musical theater than live performance. More adventurous and energetic than most, Salzman also served at various times as the music director at a Pacifica radio station, a staff reviewer for New York City daily newspapers, a live concert impresario, college professor (briefly), and the editor of The Musical Quarterly from 1984 to 1991. In various ways, he worked with nearly everyone involved in avant-garde music. His daughter Eva S. (1960) is a poet residing mostly in London.

SAMARAS, LUCAS (14 September 1936) Born in Greece, Samaras came to America in 1948 and studied art and art history at Rutgers and then at Columbia University. With an essentially theatrical sensibility, he performed in early MIXED-MEANS THEATER while recognizing the artistic possibilities of his own body, which he later photographed promiscuously, initially with a Polaroid camera, sometimes

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altering the image through pressure during developing or by the addition of ink. As a sculptor, he began with boxed tableaux reminiscent of JOSEPH CORNELL, and then made geometric structures such as chairs or a cubed frame, commonly called “Untitled,” with protruding knives, pins, and tacks, which become erotic imagery also evocative of terror. Narcissistic beyond belief, Samaras used extended exposures to make images of himself nude hugging his nude self and even making love to himself. Many of these early photographs were collected in Samaras Album (1971), which ranks among the strongest BOOK-ART. Thanks to a loyal art gallerist, Samaras has since produced several more sumptuous Book-Art reasonably priced. Poses 1982–2010 (2010) is particularly brilliant with his color photographic facial portraits uniquely shadowed. One significant design departure introducing Chairs (2008) is an extended interview with his gallerist in which their words appear continuous within a single paragraph in two different typefaces. In Samaras’s prose book Crude Delights (1980) is some extraordinary (English) writing as writing. Even if one disdains SURREALISM or EXPRESSIONISM as much as the author of this dictionary, it is hard not to be impressed with Samaras’s autoportraiture that was strong enough to overcome the anti-Expressionistic sentiments that were pervasive in the 1960s. Samaras’s 1972 retrospective at the Whitney Museum ranks among the strongest ever from an artist less than 40 years old. Over the decades since, he has produced a wealth of art uniquely his, in sum reflecting a deeply fertile imagination.

SAMPLING (c. 1982) This is the preferred term for the technique of taking short melodic or rhythmic fragments of limited durations and incorporating these “samples” into a new composition. This was made possible by the invention of electronic equipment that can record or “sample” external sounds, store them digitally, and then, in the course of recalling them, enable a composer to re-create and/or change their pitch, duration, or other musical qualities. (That is why the virtuso vocalist Bobby McFerrin is characterized as the “human sampler.”) Its compositional significance is that sound sequences replace individual notes as the basic unit. Commonly used by RAP artists, who prompt controversy by drawing upon copyrighted recordings, sampling has raised difficult questions about the value

364 • SAN FRANCISCO MIME TROUPE of cultural property on the one hand and the freedom of the artist on the other. For example, if a rap artist extracts the basic riff from a James Brown recording, should he or she be forced to pay a royalty to Brown (or at least acknowledge the source of the riff)? What’s the difference between an artist filching a Chuck Berry riff on the guitar in a new composition and sampling the actual riff from a Chuck Berry recording? Didn’t MARCEL DUCHAMP “sample” Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, not to mention a J. L. Mott Iron Works urinal? Such questions of authenticity versus artistic license recur in the history of avant-garde creation. —with Richard Carlin

SAN FRANCISCO MIME TROUPE (1959–62; aka SFMT) Formed by R. G. Davis (1933), who directed the company until 1970, SFMT has specialized in political plays, sometimes called Guerrilla Theater because these works were often performed utdoors on portable stages, supposedly attracting people who would not normally attend an enclosed performance space. Mostly portraying capitalist oppression, SFMT performed pantomime in the raucous American tradition of BUSTER KEATON and Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), rather than the more precious mime of, say, Marcel Marceau (1923–2007). One mark of the SFMT performance style was the clever use of both large signs and songs in sneering at corporate capitalism. Telephone (1969) demonstrates how to cheat the telephone company by forging a creditcard number. After Davis’s departure, SFMT became a commune, supporting its activities largely by asking spectators for money, in the great tradition of street theater. Their longest and most complex work, a critical memorial to the American Bicentennial, False Promises/Nos Engañaron (1976, the Spanish meaning “we’ve been had”), takes place in 1898–99, portrays racism at the time of the Spanish-American War and incorporates, as its title suggests, both Spanish and English throughout. A book collecting several texts from 1970 to 76 gives individual credits that did not appear in the company’s programs. Among the counterculture stars passing through the SFMT were “Digger” Emmett Grogan (1942–78) and the concert producer Bill Graham (1931–91).

SAN FRANCISCO ORACLE (1966–68)

By the measures solely of Art, this was the most extraordinary newspaper ever published in America. Tabloid-sized, in perhaps its only concession to tradition, it featured outrageous color, swirling designs, various typography, mandalas, naked young people, apparent abstractions, and irregular columns, among other deviations never before seen in newsprint and scarcely seen since. The audacious visuals rendered the articles, often from serious writers, gratuitous. Reflecting imaginations fueled by hallucinogenic LSD, this Oracle seemed designed for readers likewise inspired. In spite of steadily increasing circulation and fame, with a maximum print run of 125,000 and a readership estimated at a half-million, it swiftly piffed, perhaps along with the Haight-Ashbury-San Francisco culture that supported it. While YouTube has offered a stunning collection of its pages, the complete Oracle is remembered with an expensive book and a cheaper CD-rom.

SANDLER, IRVING (22 July 1925–2 June 2018) In every art scene are intimate chroniclers, front-line historians, so to speak, who publish the first extended commentaries. For DOWNTOWN NYC art after World War II, no one has functioned as long and as completely as Sandler. When I first met him, around 1961, he was sitting behind the desk of an artists’ cooperative gallery on East Tenth Street, then the main drag, so to speak, of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. He was also writing appreciative reviews (in contrast to his more polemical precursors such as CLEMENT GREENBERG and HAROLD ROSENBERG), conducting long probing interviews later quoted by other scholars, and curating small exhibitions. Eventually Sandler, trained initially in American history (not art history), produced such measured, broadly conceived surveys as The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970), The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (1978), American Art of the 1960s (1988), and Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996), mostly about art he’d known for long, often about people he personally knew. Later came such memoirs as A Sweeper-up After Artists (2003) and Swept-Up By Art (2015). If Sandler ever made his own paintings, he didn’t exhibit, for better or worse. Nor did he publish other kinds of writing. Many lesser intimate chroniclers have written, less comprehensively, about other art scenes in America and elsewhere.

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SANT’ELIA, ANTONIO (30 April 1888–10 October 1916) He looked to the New World architecture for inspiration unencumbered by two thousand years of history. Sant’Elia looked beyond the realistic and rational typical of the International Style, choosing instead to focus on romantic aspects of technological development in the modern industrial city. Belonging to the ITALIAN FUTURIST movement, personally close to F. T. MARINETTI, he contributed the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture (1914) before dying in World War I. Though he never actually visited North America, Sant’Elia romanticized its industrial cities to draw an integral modern metropolis with several levels separating various urban uses, with sunken limited access highways spanned by bridges and aerial walkways linking various smaller scale buildings that would provide platforms for the several streamlined skyscrapers, all accessed by external elevator towers. Though he never completed a building, his visionary ideas for the modernist city appeared in hundreds of drawings mostly small in size, collectively titled the Città Nuova (“New City”), that have since influenced architects for a century. —Nona Eleanor Ellis

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In my library are other contemporary shuffle books, whose pages can be read in any order: B. S. JOHNSON’s The Unfortunates (London, 1969), Peter H. Beaman’s Deck of Cards (Pittsburgh, PA: 1989), Robert Grenier’s Sentences (Cambridge, MA, 1978), Richard Hefter and Martin Stephen Moskof’s A Shuffle Book I (New York: 1970), Henry James Korn’s The Pontoon Manifesto (1970), Elton Anglada’s untitled box (1973), PEDRO PIETRI’s I Never Promised You a Cheeseburger (n.d.), Arnold Skemer’s Momus (Bayside, NY, 1997), RICHARD KOSTELANETZ’s And So Forth (New York, 1979), Eric Zimmerman’s Life in the Garden Cards (2000), and Herta Muller’s Der Wächer mimmt seinen Kamm (1993, The Guard Takes His Comb). One formal distinction within this format separates those whose pages are printed in both sides from those that are not. Since printing individual cards is more expensive than printing bound pages, I produced in Back & Forth (2013) a perfectbound volume with both visual and verbal advice to cutout and then shuffle its pages whose relationship is back-to-back. Because Composition No. 1 must have failed in the bookstores (only to be republished for iPad in the 21st century), no American commercial book publisher has done anything similar since. My suspicion is that the esthetic potential of this looseleaf form is scarcely exhausted.

SAPORTA, MARC (20 March 1923–8 June 2009) In 1963, a hyperslick American publisher released an English translation of Composition No. 1, “a novel” apparently published the year before in Paris. It came as a box of loose pages that the reader is invited to shuffle “like a deck of cards,” because “the pages of this book may be read in any order.” More than once I’ve laid them out on the floor, picking up pages as one might colored sticks, reading scenes in the life of a Frenchman during World War II. Its pseudo-musical title acknowledges a debt to certain musical ideas new in the late 1950s. This combinatory book is so original it is not mentioned in Vivian Mercier’s Reader’s Guide to the New [French] Novel (1971), Nick Montfort, an MIT literature professor, has subjected the sheets to various readings. Saporta himself had an unusual life. Born in Istanbul of Sephardic parents, who took him to Paris in 1929, he spent the World War II years in Spain where he took a degree in law. Returning to post-World War II Paris, he worked in the copyright office of UNESCO before editing a magazine devoted to the study of the USA. He also published several other less experimental novels, including one with a pseudonym whose origin was revealed only after his death.

SAROYAN, ARAM (25 September 1943) Before he became a pop memoirist better than most, Saroyan was briefly a visual poet whose specialty was running words together to create something else that must be seen, because it could not be read aloud: “lighght,” “eyeye,” for two instances, the ideographic effect of the latter additionally benefiting from the suggestion of eyeglasses. A pioneering CONCEPTUAL poet, Saroyan also “published” in the mid-1960s a book that was simply a box of blank paper. For these significant GESTURES will his name be remembered, perhaps even better than his father William S. (1908–81), probably because the son never disadvantageously became “a CELEBRITY author.”

SATIE, ERIK (17 May 1866–1 July 1925; b. Éric Alfred Leslie S.) A slow starter, whose early adult years were devoted more to radical religion and politics than music (and his “music” mostly to tickling the ivories in Paris cabarets),

366 • SAVINIO, ALBERTO Satie returned to music school in 1905 for three years of intensive study. Not until 1915 did his more serious music begin to receive recognition, and his reputation has grown enormously since his death. The last decade of Satie’s life was consumed with such commissions as Parade (1917) for SERGE DIAGHILEV’s Ballets Russes; Socrate (1919), which is a symphonic drama for four sopranos and a small orchestra; and music for the RENÉ CLAIR film of the ballet Relâche (1924), whose original form was a comic masterpiece that Satie produced in collaboration with FRANCIS PICABIA and Jean Börlin (1893–1930) of the Swedish Ballet. Satie’s most popular compositions are short pieces for piano collectively known as Gymnopédies (1888). Others have programmatic titles (e.g., in the shape of a pear). His music frequently depends upon unresolved chords; some works encourage unconventional distributions of musicians in a performance space. JOHN CAGE uncovered certain radical experiments ignored by most Satie scholars, such as Vexations (1892–93), which is a page of piano music meant to be repeated 840 times (typically performed in 1963 by five pianists working round the clock), and furniture music that, because it does not require conscious listening, presages not only Muzak but BRIAN ENO’s ambient music. Satie was also a master of ironic aphorisms: “Although our information is incorrect, we do not vouch for it”; “I want to compose a piece for dogs, and I already have my decor. The curtain rises on a bone.”

SAVINIO, ALBERTO (25 August 1891–5 May 1952; b. Andrea Francesco Alberto de Chirico) The less famous younger brother of GEORGIO DE CHIRICO, Alberto early in his career adopted another surname for his public face. As an aspiring POLYARTIST he made visual art as well as literature, particularly excelling at painting and fiction, in addition to composing several autobiographies and a corpus of music including a few operas. In the first respect, he mixed FUTURISM with SURREALISM; Les Chants de la mi-mort (1914, The Songs of Half-Death), a dramatic poem that appeared with his own original illustrations, along with a piano suite of the same title, all of which were meant to be performed. Born in Greece of Italian parents and then educated in France and Germany, Savinio produced multilingual literature, which is to say texts incorporating several languages (that thus resist monolingual translation). By incorporating disparate strains, he made hodge-podge the unique esthetic SIGNATURE of his major works.

SCELSI, GIACINTO (8 January 1905–9 August 1988; b. Conte Giaconto Scelsi di Valva) Trained in twelve-tone technique in pre-World War II Vienna, Scelsi also studied Eastern musical philosophy, in which scales and rhythms are regarded not as independent structures but as reflections of psychology. From Buddhism he took the concept that every point is the center of the universe and thus he explored fractional tones around a center sound. His compositions are at once eclectic and eccentric, typically sliding up, down, and around a single tone for attenuated durations. In addition to knowledgeable essays on music, he wrote poetry in French; one of his best-known and most ambitious compositions, La Naissance du verbe (The Birth of the Verb, 1950), is a setting of one of his poems. After his death, another Italian composer claimed to have “ghosted” some Scelsi compositions from twelve-tone sketches.

SCHAFER, R. MURRAY (18 July 1933; b. Raymond M. S.) A Canadian composer who shared a prominent Toronto music teacher with his near-contemporary GLENN GOULD, Schafer was initially known for tape-recording “soundscapes” in various places around the world. This research informed a brilliant book about varieties of acoustic experience, The Tuning of the World (1977), which has the additional virtue of quoting past literature to discover what people heard at earlier times. As a literate musician of letters, Schafer has produced other expository books, including Creative Music Education (1976), and several chapbooks of genuinely experimental poetry and prose, some of it very good, in addition to editing and elaborately annotating Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism (1977), which is a model of an authoritatively annotated anthology. As a composer, Schafer is best known for his ambitious cycle of operas, among them Patria I (1966–72) and Patria II (1966–74), for which he also wrote the librettos and produced picture-filled scores that, because of superlative visual qualities, can be read apart from any musical experience (much like John Cage’s vivid Songbooks). Patria 3: The Greatest Show (1987–88) is set as an actual village fair or carnival. For Patria 4: The Black Theatre (1990), he recommends such settings as an abandoned factory or an underground mine. His

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book Patria: The Complete Cycle (2002) is rich and true about the obstacles in producing significant opera in North America. My Life on Earth & Elsewhere (2012) is an engaging autobiography whose turning point is his rejection of Canadian academia to live in a rural Ontario farmhouse. This lead in turn to his decision to become a selfpublisher for both his music scores and his book-art books. Perhaps because Schafer’s work is so various, while he’s been consistently productive (much like his near-contemporary, likewise an unaffiliated Canadian, JOHN ROBERT COLOMBO), considered critical writing about it is remarkably scarce.

SCHAPIRO, MEYER (23 September 1904–3 March 1996) Though his lectures and essays in art history tended to move spectacularly from A1 to A 2 through to A 20 without getting to some significant B, brighter students nonetheless loved his virtuoso displays of immense learning and thus unfamiliar information and cultural connections. In this respect most of his presentations differ from his “The humanity of abstract painting,” to quote the subtitle of his short appreciative book on PIET MONDRIAN, that posits persuasive conclusions about the greater visual intelligence necessarily informing painterly abstraction. One truth is that critics predisposed to the avantgarde differ from conservatives in discovering that they can make art in addition to writing about it. Schapiro produced throughout his life paintings and drawings that tended either to reflect his travels and his meetings with people or to realize abstractions. The latter, especially in WHITE & BLACK, I find more valuable. Unlike other professors at Columbia University, Schapiro resided in DOWNTOWN Manhattan, not just south of 96th Street but further south of 14th St. in Greenwich Village, placing him closer to the ART WORLD where he also had a commanding presence. Inexplicable it seems to me that Schapiro had fewer distinguished students than another personally impressive Columbia professor (of English) who likewise resided downtown, Mark Van Doren (1894–1972). The Columbia University professorial chairs bearing Schapiro’s name came from subventions not by him but by his brother, a highly successful real estate developer. Often is his surname misspelled “Shapiro,” sometimes persistently, even in vetted “scholarly” books written by illiterate professors (e.g., Sharon Zukin, sociology, CUNY).

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SCHECHNER, RICHARD See PERFORMANCE GROUP.

SCHEERBART, PAUL (8 January 1863–15 October 1915) A prolific German writer, active in pre-World War I BERLIN, Scheerbart published stories, novels, poems, and plays. He also illustrated some of his own works with stylized, imaginary scenes, theorized about perpetual motion, and envisioned a new architecture. His artistic philosophy, explained in Das Paradies, die Heimat der Kunst (1893, Paradise, the Home of Art), was based on fantasy, imagination, and a search for newness. Scheerbart’s writings employ a wit and humor that sometimes becomes grotesque and nonsensical. He often wrote about the cosmos – his “Asteroid Novel,” Lesabéndio (1913), presaging German science fiction. Other works were meant as social satire – Revolutionäre TheaterBibliothek (1904) is a collection of twenty-two “revolutionary” theater pieces. In his plays Scheerbart advocated extreme reduction and simplification of stage setting, plot, and dialog. Some works eschew language altogether, favoring pantomime, as in Kometentanz (Dance of the Comets, 1903), for which Scheerbart also created an accompanying score that would now be considered “noise music.” He favored experiment in poetry, creating, in addition to other works, three SOUND POEMS; one, for example, begins, “Kikakoku!/Ekoralaps!” Scheerbart attempted to create a perpetual motion machine. His plan and sketches for this project comprise the book Das Perpetuum Mobile (1910). Subtitled “The Story of an Invention,” this book could be considered an early example of CONCEPTUAL ART. Though unschooled in architecture, Scheerbart worked closely with the architect Bruno Taut (1880–1938) on the highly influential Glass Pavilion displayed at the German Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914. His manifesto Glasarchitektur (1914) – an important, prophetic work, if only for its influence on the INTERNATIONAL STYLE – remains among the few of his many books to be translated into English —H. R. Brittain

SCHILLINGER, JOSEPH (31 August 1895–23 March 1943) Trained as a conductor and composer at St. Petersburg Conservatory, he also studied philosophy and

368 • SCHLEMMER, OSKAR Eastern religions and later wrote both scientific essays and a volume of mystical poetry in Russian, in addition to producing drawings, designs, and photographs. After researching and recording native folk music of Georgian tribes in the Caucasus and organizing the first Russian jazz orchestra, he came to US in 1928 at the invitation of the academic philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) and was naturalized in 1936. Thinking that music should exploit advanced science, much as architecture did, Schillinger developed a theory of the arts that, to quote the composer/biographer Albert Glinsky (1952), was based on a conviction that natural laws and mathematical formulas operate on the molecular level in every artistic work. By discovering formulas and reapplying them, talent, he believed, could take a back seat to knowledge. In music, he dissected hundreds of ‘masterworks’ to discover what made them tick and distilled a canon of guiding principles. He applied his theorems ruthlessly, sparing no one. Schillinger’s writing included equations that some musicians found daunting. Once in New York, he allied with his countryman Leon THEREMIN and at his studio delivered lectures with such intimidating titles as “Statics and Kinetics of Musical Matter” and “Physical and Psychophysiological Nature of Sound.” Before long, the beneficiaries of Schillinger’s pedagogy included such popular musicians as Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Oscar Levant, Glenn Miller, Vernon Duke, and, most loyally, GEORGE GERSHWIN. Schillinger worked to extend his theories beyond music to the other arts, postulating “graphomatons” for producing linear designs and “luminatons” for projecting light designs, as well as imagining “dance with light, kinetic setting, puppets as partners, shadow plays, optical projections” and “three-dimensional kinetic Aromatons.” Schillinger’s own compositions include First Airplane Suite (1929) for THEREMIN and orchestra, which he premiered with Theremin himself as the soloist. As he died young, Schillinger’s thoughts are remembered in his widow’s biography and in a twovolume brick of a book some 1,640 pages in length, The Schillinger System of Musical Composition (1941; 4th ed., 1947, 2015), as well as The Mathematical Basis of the Arts (1943, republished online), both of which were posthumously published. Given how far “ahead of his time” his works and ideas were several decades ago, it’s surprising they’ve not become better known since.

SCHLEMMER, OSKAR (4 September 1888–13 April 1943) After undistinguished beginnings as a painter, Schlemmer made reliefs of concave and convex shapes and in 1921 exhibited abstract free-standing sculpture. On the faculty of the BAUHAUS from 1920 to 1929, he initially taught stone-carving and then theatrical design. Beginning with the Triadischen Ballett (1922, Triadic Ballet), he made padded costumes that resembled figurines more than traditional ballet garb, giving props and lighting as much presence as performers (presaging ALWIN NIKOLAIS, among others). The result was a CONSTRUCTIVIST theater more attuned to Bauhaus values (and contrary to EXPRESSIONISM). “Theater is the concentrated orchestration,” he wrote, “of sound, light (color), space, form, and motion. The Theatre of Totality with its multifarious complexities of light, space, plane, form, motion, sound, man – and with all the possibilities for varying and combining these elements – must be an organism.” Any traditional “dramatic” script was thus a “literary encumbrance” lacking “the creative forms peculiar only to the stage.” Schlemmer’s 1926 plans for a “total theater,” which would incorporate a deep stage and a center stage, in addition to a conventional proscenium and a fourth stage suspended above the others, still look radical today.

SCHMALTZ (forever) Initially meaning chicken fat in Yiddish, this is my favorite epithet for whatever’s superficially tasty in vulgar art, customarily complementing (or compensating for) weak or conventional quality(ies). Another more common definition is “excessive sentimentality” whose antipode is AUSTERE. Most unashamedly commercial produce, especially in films sponsored by Hollywood, but also in popular music prior to 1960, suffers from (and is defined by) a surfeit of schmaltz. It’s this anti-quality that incidentally makes high 19th-century Italian opera insufferable to me, though I’ll admit that otherwise intelligent colleagues disagree with me. Radio and television programs customarily called “soap operas,” because sponsored by detergent companies, succumb to its suds. So do “horse operas,” which was once a deprecating epithet for Hollywood films about the American west. Nearly all genuine avant-garde art is schmaltzfrei, which is to say (without italics) devoid of any ookey drip.

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SCHNEEMANN, CAROLEE (12 October 1939) An exponent of messy EXPRESSIONISM in several media, Schneemann introduced its esthetic to MIXED-MEANS THEATER in her Meat Joy (1964), which was commonly ranked among the best of its kind and was thus frequently reproduced, not only on stage but as a script. After the stage lights go out, colored spotlights flash through the darkness, revealing the performers slowly undressing one another, down to feathered bikinis. The couples engage one another slowly, their bodies clustering on the floor, their legs sticking out. The performers are given flashlights that they suddenly shine on one another. Apart from this group, a woman dressed as a serving maid tosses dead fish and chickens and other food onto the scene, which assumes the image of chaos until the lights are turned on. Schneemann has written: “Meat Joy has the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic.” Perhaps because nothing she had done before commanded as much respect, Schneemann titled a book-length retrospective of her work More than Meat Joy (1979).

SCHOENBERG, ARNOLD (13 September 1874–13 July 1951; b. A. Franz Walter Schönberg) An essentially self-taught composer, he produced in his native Vienna his first major work, the popular Verklärte Nacht (1899, Transfigured Night) for string sextet, which is more commonly performed in an arrangement for string orchestra. Relocating to BERLIN in 1901, Schönberg worked at orchestrating operettas and directing a cabaret orchestra. Returning home in 1903 to teach, he befriended not only Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), the older prominent Viennese composer and conductor who supported Schönberg’s activities, but two younger men who became his most prominent protégés, Alban Berg (1885–1935) and ANTON WEBERN. Because Schoenberg’s harmonies in particular were so extreme, riots erupted at the premieres of his first two string quartets in 1905 and 1908. One result was to instill in Schönberg a fear of public performances; he preferred instead that audiences at his concerts be restricted. Around this time, he began painting with certain seriousness, in an Expressionist style that, differences in media notwithstanding, roughly resembled his music

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at the time. To a more contemporary eye, the images collected by Jane Kallir (1955) in Arnold Schoenberg’s Vienna (1984) suggest that his strongest paintings portray atmospheres, including in their title the word “gaze.” In 1911, Schönberg published his book Harmonielehr (Theory of Harmony), which he dedicated to Mahler’s memory. He moved again to Berlin, where he composed Pierrot Lunaire (1912), which remains among his most influential works, composed in an idiom customarily called ATONAL because the music eschewed dependence upon tonics and dominants. Returning to Vienna during World War I, Schönberg developed by 1923 his SERIAL method of composition, which is regarded as his extraordinary invention. (It is discussed in detail elsewhere in this book.) Invited to return to Berlin in 1925, where he was offered a professorship at the Academy of the Arts, the sometime self-taught avant-garde composer finally achieved bourgeois prestige and financial security However, once the Nazis assumed power, Schönberg, a Jew who had converted to Christianity, resumed his initial faith and departed for America, eventually settling in Los Angeles, where he taught at local universities. Though his archcompetitor IGOR STRAVINSKY had likewise immigrated to Los Angeles, the two men met only once, in passing. Becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1941, the Viennese composer incidentally Americanized the spelling of his surname from Schönberg to Schoenberg, which is preferred when writing about him in English. His serial innovation notwithstanding, most of Schoenberg’s compositions reflect the Expressionistic esthetics of his youth, sometimes in his choice of literary texts, often in the ways these texts are sung. Those less enthusiastic about serialism per se like to point out that most of his compositions do not strictly observe serial requirements and that his later compositions were less observant than those from the 1920s and 1930s. Schoenberg was at times a strong writer, initially in German, later in English, his best writing reflecting the influence of KARL KRAUS, likewise a Viennese. Of his essays, generally uneven in quality, the most masterful, such as “Composition in Twelve Tones” (1941), deal with his esthetics and compositional processes. Schoenberg’s example perhaps accounts for why composers are generally more predisposed than other kinds of artists (painters certainly, poets perhaps) to want to write well about their art. Like RICHARD WAGNER before him, Schoenberg also wrote not only the libretto but also highly detailed stage directions for his monumental opera Moses und Aron (begun in the early 1930s, but not premiered until 1957, after his death) and frequently revived since.

370 • SCHÖFFER, NICOLAS SCHÖFFER, NICOLAS (6 September 1912–8 January 1992) Though Schöffer is commonly regarded as among the most distinguished European KINETIC sculptors, his work is hardly seen in the United States and, worse, rarely written about in English. Schöffer belonged to a group of Parisian artists, gathered around the Denise René Gallery in the late 1950s, who appropriated industrial methods as a prerequisite to eliminating the purported conflict between science and art. Alastair Mackintosh speaks of Schöffer’s pieces having two parts: a solid sculptural core and its reflection cast upon a suitable surface. The sculptural half usually moves and is made of many small pieces of reflective steel, put together in a CONSTRUCTIVIST manner. The whole edific4e turns, and within its principal movement there is often other movement, creating a positive waterfall of light. Aimed at this are spotlights, often of different colors, which cast a huge shadow onto a screen. Mackintosh continues, “Frequently these pieces are equipped with CYBERNETIC systems that react to environmental influences. The largest outdoor pieces are often huge weathervanes reacting to wind speed, atmospheric pressure, sunlight, and so on.” Mounted on four wheels, Cysp I (1956), commonly credited as the first cybernetic sculpture, also figured in a ballet by the French Maurice Béjart (1927–2007) with music by PIERRE HENRY. Born in Hungary, Schöffer lived in France after the mid-1930s. Nonetheless, the Hungarian government named a museum after him in his hometown of Kalocsa. He is also the prolific author of books that remain untranslated, some of which propose leisure cities constructed on pylons raised above the earth in large enclosed spaces similar to those envisioned by BUCKMINSTER FULLER.

SCHOOL OF PARIS See NEW YORK SCHOOL, etc.

SCHOLEM, GERSHOM (5 December 1897–21 February 1982; b. Gerhard G. S.) As one of the major intellectual historians, he produced several scholarly masterpieces unraveling the

complex mysteries of Jewish mysticism and thus epitomizing avant-garde scholarship. Less familiarly, he also wrote poems early in his life, mostly in German (not Hebrew, his second language), most of them traditional in quality. The great departure was “Amtliches Lehrgedicht,” which Richard Sieburth (1949) translates as “The Official Abcedarium” (1917) for Greetings from Angelus (2018). Dedicated to his best friend for life, WALTER BENJAMIN, it was written in Switzerland while both were dodging the German conscription during World War I. With twenty-six stanzas, each with four lines, it proposed that the two men, frustrated in Teutonic academia, form a fictitious university with the older Benjamin as its rector. Neat, concise, and, yes, zany, the text was initially published as a chapbook printed by a Scholem brother. Sieburth notes that the “alphabetical form playfully imitates the lettristic declensions of the Kabbalists,” whose writings Scholem had already identified as his scholarly “field.” Having talked with Scholem more than once, I can testify that he knew and seriously rethought the issues and individuals of modern avantgarde writing.

SCHÖNING, KLAUS See RADIO ART, CULTURAL LEADERS.

SCHORSKE, CARL E. (15 March 1915–13 September 2015) Essentially an academic historian, he established with a single book a model for writing about the best in the avant-garde arts at a certain place in a certain time. A further achievement of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980) is relating these arts to the politics and sociology of their time. Unfortunately, though Schorske lived for thirty-five more years, publishing shorter texts here and there, he never did as well with such a grand subject again. Nor did anyone else duplicate his achievement with the arts at another time and another place, though opportune subjects might include Paris in the 1920s, London before World War I, the USA after World War II. Not only has INTELLECTUAL HISTORY since lost status in academia (to “cultural history,” which favors popular stuff), but so has polyarts history by trained historians. Schorske was also reputed to rank among the greatest improvising lecturers ever in American universities, no matter how populous his audience.

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SCHULDT (1942; b. Herbert S.) If book publishing is a wholesale business, issuing produce in editions of thousands, visual art is fundamentally retail, depending upon individual customers, generally few in number (compared to those required by publishers). From this difference in economic preconditions follow esthetic truths. The visual artist catering to a large audience customarily favors graphics that can be easily reproduced. Unless literary work destined for a small audience can be immediately sold, it is most likely to find its customers in art museums, universities, and small-circulation publications; if German or Dutch, perhaps at one of the more progressive radio stations. This last truth defines the careers of, say, LAWRENCE WEINER, customarily classified as a Conceptual Artist, and of (H.) Schuldt, a German residing for various spells in New York, Beijing, and his native Hamburg, whose writing in several media tends to be eccentric, obsessive, and precious. Typically, he took from a large American dictionary only words whose origins are German (e.g., weltschmerz, kaputt, gestalt), and from this limited vocabulary he composed poems, collectively titled Gerstaltschmerz, that, especially when read aloud, are meant to make sense to readers fluent in either German or English or, ideally, both. Schuldt has also for decades produced performances that were likewise extravagantly eccentric, obsessive, and precious. For a 2002 radio play he read aloud Friedrich Hölderlin verses to the American poet ROBERT KELLY who transcribed homophonically with American English words approximating their sounds. Schuldt then translated these sounds back into a German from Hölderlin’s time. Though he prefers to be known solely by his surname, mutual friends in Germany long ago knew him as Herbert.

SCHWANKOVSKY, FREDERICK (1885–1974; b. F. John de St. Vrain S.) By trade a high school teacher, he incidentally taught JACKSON POLLOCK, then a student at Manual Arts high school in Los Angeles in the late 1920s, that paint could be poured and dripped, as well as applied with a brush. That became a crucial determinant of Pollock’s mature style. According to the Los Angeles film historian William Moritz (1941–2004): Schwankovsky was also a color music enthusiast. He published a booklet for his students on color

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theory, which contained a color wheel: each color was assigned an equivalent musical tone, astrological sign, and emotion . . . . Schwankovsky often gave public performances with his wife, Nelly, playing on the piano the correct notes to match the colors he painted on a canvas. In his pioneering biography of Pollock, B. H. Friedman (1926–2011) writes: Schwankovsky, known as “Schwanie” at school, believed in complete openness to all kinds of experience – religious, esthetic, political. Besides the camp meetings, he took his students to a Theosophy church. He lectured to them on the ethics of vegetarianism. He performed experiments in extrasensory perception, especially as this related to a Universal Consciousness. One of those hidden inspirations behind the visible avant-garde, Schwankovsky stands as a model for his service. Among the other subsequently prominent painters to pass through Manual Arts High, decidedly less prestigious, and thus his classes were Philip Guston (1913–80; b. P. Goldstein) and Reuben Kadish (1913–92).

SCHWARTZ, FRANCIS (10 March 1940) A Texan long resident in Puerto Rico, Schwartz activities there began in the late 1960s with his involvement with the Grupo FIuxus (which operated independently, if barely aware, of the principal FLUXUS activities). He continued with PERFORMANCE that incorporates odors as well as sounds, and speech compositions that typically exploit his polylinguistic competence. Extending the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total artwork”), Schwartz added audience participation (customarily conducted from the stage, with the performers functioning around him, much like cheerleaders). His mammoth Cosmos (1980), based on the University of Puerto Rico campus, incorporated several musical performance groups with gymnasts and aquatic ballerinas, in addition to telephone contact with collaborating artists around the world. His Mon oeuf (1979) was a construction 7 feet high, 3½ feet wide, and 4 inches deep that, he writes, “was at once a sculpture, a mini-theater, and an instrument that had electronic music, aromas, video, temperature manipulation, and tactile stimuli.”

372 • SCHWARTZ, LILLIAN SCHWARTZ, LILLIAN (1927) Acknowledged among the major pioneers of computedassisted art, she began in the 1960s working with BELL LABS, where a staffer developed BEFLIX (1963) as a computer graphics language. The title of her animated film Pixillation (1970) identifies a kinetic visual effect for her intensely colored abstractions to which she added electronic sound. Schwartz later based several works on LEONARDO DA VINCI, as rich a source of inspiration as any, in one ingeniously suggesting visually that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa could be a selfportrait. As an Acknowledged Authority, she also coauthored The Computer Artist’s Handbook (1992) that many found influential until, as happened in other domains of computer art, later technological developments made computer animation easier.

SCHWARTZ, TONY (19 August 1923–15 June 2008) A veteran American audio artist, Schwartz in the 1950s pioneered the use of the recently developed portable tape recorder to capture, literally on the street, sounds that previously could not be brought into a radio studio (and thus to common acoustic experience). Sound of My City (1956), his audiotape portrait of New York people, won the Prix Italia for RADIO ART. Realizing that American radio after 1952 would be a less receptive medium for extended audio art than recordings, Schwartz produced several records, mostly about the sounds of his own neighborhood on New York’s midtown West Side, that represent a unique achievement. In addition to thousands of audio-based brief commercials for radio and television, Schwartz also wrote two provocative books on the media, extending MARSHALL MCLUHAN’s fertile ideas in specific ways.

SCHWARZ, ARTURO (2 February 1924) One of the great impresarios of the avant-garde, he has functioned impressively as a collector, a dealer in Milan, the author of catalog raisonné and other prodigious books on MARCEL DUCHAMP, and a philanthropist who gave several hundred works of DADA and SURREALISM to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Born Jewish in Alexandria, Egypt, from a German father and Italian mother, Schwarz moved to post-fascist Italy

in 1952, incidentally reviving the tradition, exemplified by NELSON MURPURGO before him, of Egyptian Jews participating in new Italian art. As a major Italian SMALL PRESS author, Schwarz has also published books and essays about Tantrism, Israeli art, alchemy, and the Kabbalah, as well as his own poetry. Working as an independent scholar, Schwarz was the first to discover MAN RAY’s verifiable birth name.

SCHWITTERS, KURT (20 June 1887–8 January 1948; b. K. Hermann Eduard Karl Julius S.) Born and raised in Hannover, a modest North Germany city roughly halfway between BERLIN and Cologne, Schwitters was denied membership in the Berlin DADA Club and so took the word “MERZ,” which he made the title of his Hannover magazine (1923–27). Schwitters’s initial masterpieces were brilliantly colored COLLAGES composed of printed ephemera, such as ticket stubs, used toward abstract ends (that is, an appreciation of the composition as a composition, rather than, say, a political commentary). What most impressed me about his visual art, in an exhibition at MOMA in the mid-1980s, was the small size of most of his works, few of them being larger than a foot square. (At that time this was the size more typical of East Village art shown in storefronts different from the barns of ARTISTS’ SOHO.) Schwitters also built within his home the Merzbau, which was a CONSTRUCTIVIST ASSEMBLAGE of discarded junk that eventually pierced the ceiling. Once the Nazis took hold, even the avowedly apolitical Schwitters fled to Norway, where he began a second Merzbau that was destroyed by fire after he left it, and then to England, where he began a third in a countryside barn, with funds from New York’s MoMA; it was incomplete at his death. Schwitters’s first major poem, Anna Blume (1919), is a Dada classic in which the conventions of love poetry are rendered nonsensical. His literary masterpiece is the Ursonate (1922–32), in which the musical form is filled with nonsemantic vocables for thirty-five minutes. Schwitters’s previously uncollected writings, which appeared in Germany in five rich volumes – over 1,700 pages in total length (1973–81) – establish him as a POLYARTIST.

SCOTT, RAYMOND (10 September 1908-8 February 1994; b. Harry Warnow)

SCULLY, VIN •

As the first great electronic musician born in America, he worked along the edges of avant-garde, popular music, and JAZZ. Trained initially at Brooklyn Tech high school, he would have continued in engineering, had not his older brother Mark Warnow (1900-1949), already an established musician, encouraged Harry to study music at Juilliard. Taking a pseudonym so that his brother could employ him, Scott formed a short-lived jazz band and worked in radio, typically devoting greater attention to adjusting acoustics and then, when in a recording booth, fine-turning the available technologies as his recordings’ own engineer. With his own studio, he invented many technologies for processing sound. He produced soundtracks for Hollywood films and even developed a primitive machine called the Videola by which a composer could view footage as he was making music for it. During the 1950s and 1960s, Scott developed and even patented such electronically produced consumer products as telephone ringers, alarms, chimes, and sirens. In 1969, the founding chief of Motown, Berry Gordy III (1929), the most successful producer of African-American popular music at that time, moved Scott from Long Island to Los Angeles to produce an “Electronium” that reportedly cost a million dollars, though it may have never been used for a Motown record. The final iteration of the machine was purchased by Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh (1950), who didn’t much use it either. On the side, Scott composed novelty melodies, such as “Powerhouse” (1937), that are best remembered for their frequent later use in WARNER BROTHERS CARTOONS. His final years were spent obscurely as a displaced New Yorker in Southern California.

SCOTT, WINFIELD TOWNLEY (30 April 1910–28 April 1968) Aside from what he did as an American poet and as the literary editor of a Providence (RI) daily newspaper, in both endeavors modestly conventional, he published personal notebooks that rank among the most extraordinary of their kind, initially for telling truths succinctly. Collected as A Dirty Hand (1959), elegantly designed by his friend MERLE ARMITAGE, these include such sharp remarks as: “Beware of all poems serving public occasions.” “One famous American family seems fated to contribute, every generation, a prominent poet – and each time over-rated.” W. T. Scott’s sad career also inspired Poet in America (1972) by Scott Donaldson (1928), who later published other biographies of more visible American writers. Smart this poet Scott was to publish with three names, which made him uniquely findable after the development of the INTERNET.

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SCRATCH ORCHESTRA See PORTSMOUTH SINFONIA.

SCRIABIN, ALEXANDER (6 January 1872–27 April 1915) Beginning as a composer-pianist in the tradition of Frederic Chopin (1810–49) and Franz Liszt (1811–86), Scriabin established his reputation with piano music, including ten solo sonatas (1892–1913), before pursuing, roughly after 1902, more radical ways. La Poème de I’extase (1907, The Poem of Ecstasy) incorporates original, complex harmonies on behalf of mystical notions derived from theosophy. In NICOLAS SLONIMSKY’s summary: Scriabin was a genuine innovator in harmony . . . . He gradually evolved in his own melodic and harmonic style, marked by extreme chromaticism; in his piano piece, Désir, Op. 57 (1908), the threshold of polytonality and atonality is reached; the key signature is dispensed with in his subsequent works; chromatic alternations and compound appoggiaturas [grace notes] create a harmonic web of such complexity that all distinction between consonance and dissonance vanishes. Building chords by fourths rather than by thirds, Scriabin constructed his “mystic chord” of 6 notes (C, F-sharp, B-flat, E, A, and D), which is the harmonic foundation of Promethee (1911). Also titled Poéme du feu, the latter included a score for a color keyboard designed to project changing colors programmed to individual notes (C major as red, F-sharp major as bright blue, etc.), because, to quote Slonimsky again, “at that time he was deeply immersed in the speculation about parallelism of all the arts in their visual and auditory aspects.” Because few composers subsequently adopted either his ideas for enhancing music with color or his mystic chord, Scriabin’s originality is currently regarded as a cul-desac. Just before his early death from blood poisoning, Scriabin was working on a “Mysterium” to be performed in the Himalayas. The independent American author and translator Faubion Bowers (1917–99) produced indispensable volumes about Scriabin.

SCULLY, VIN (29 November 1927)

374 • SCULPTURE At the PERFORMANCE art of announcing sporting events, he became the master, demonstrating for sixty-six years how it could be done best. In only the third decade of sports broadcasting he established the standard for everybody else, none of whom could do as well. In contrast to those announcers who needed to talk to an on-air partner, Scully worked mostly solo, especially in his later years, offering both descriptions of the latest activities and analytic commentary. His remarks and descriptions were memorable. Preparing for hours before every game, he had at hand information about the individual players he expected to see. His narration, literate beyond belief, included anecdotes and references to past players, all intimately articulated. His assistants testify that Scully could be fed bits of information that he would quickly turn into a vivid story. He paused frequently, in contrast to announcers who feel compelled wholly to fill acoustic space. Famed especially for narrating baseball, he also broadcast other sports at various times. When Scully finally retired in 2016, three people replaced him. Fortunate he was to have been his own “producer,” not listening to a hidden boss speaking into his earpiece, and lucky as well to have worked primarily for only one club, the Dodgers, even relocating with them from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, incidentally ranking among the few artists born in NEW YORK CITY to have succeeded as well after moving to southern California. (He is not Vincent Scully [1920–2017], a prominent architectural historian long teaching at Yale University.)

SCULPTURE No art has so radically redefined itself during the 20th century. What once simply defined objects on pedestals, customarily carved or modeled with materials meant to endure, usually with a front and a back, came to include perpendiculars meant to be viewed equally from all sides (BRANCUSI), gently kinetic structures (CALDER, RICKEY), humongous recarvings of hillsides (BORGLUM), objects low on the floor (JOEL SHAPIRO), holes in the earth (DE MARIA, HEIZER), accumulations of common objects (many), regatherings of natural materials (SMITHSON), mechanical theaters (RHOADS), rapidly moving objects (ANTHONY HOWE), temporary outdoor fences and wrappings (CHRISTO), sunken gardens (NOGUCHI), proscenium boxes (JOSEPH CORNELL), plates making shadows on a wall (ROBERT IRWIN), small figures distributed through public spaces (OTTERNESS), stones inscribed with words (IAN HAMILTON FINLAY), a row of Cadillacs

buried fronts down in the ground (ANT FARM), square plates laid flat on a floor (CARL ANDRE), heavy vertical objects that are physically intimidating (SERRA), live statuary performance (GILBERT & GEORGE), etc., etc. Departures from tradition though these are, all realize the ideal, articulated by GAUDIER-BRZESKA: “Sculpture is the art of expressing the beauty of ideas in the most palpable form.” I once insisted that my clear small jars (3 inches by 2 inches in diameter) containing words set in a circle (with their letters facing outwards) must be sculptures because they needed to be turned in the viewer’s hand simply to be read. Perhaps?.

SECOND VIENNESE SCHOOL (c. 1910) This epithet, once more popular, identified the composers gathered around ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, beginning with Alban Berg (1885–1935) and ANTON WEBERN, but also including former pupils who became prominent in their home countries – among them, Roberto Gerhard (1896–1970, Spanish) and Nikos Skalkottas (1904–49, Greek), even though the last studied with Schönberg not in Vienna but in BERLIN. Because these 20th-century composers were customarily regarded as pioneers, it wasn’t obvious that the first Viennese school was meant to identify F. J. Haydn (1732–1809), W. A. Mozart (1756–91), L. von Beethoven (1770–1827), and Franz Schubert (1797– 1828), who were, needless to say, a less cohesive bunch, since they lived in Vienna at different times and never met one another. The SVS description was finally pretentious, as geographical terms usually are in art, in this case capitalizing on the established musical reputation of Vienna; because “The Schönberg School” would have been a more appropriate, if less effective, banner.

SEGAL, GEORGE (26 November 1924–9 June 2000) During the 1960s, Segal produced a style of figurative sculpture that he presented surrounded by elements drawn from the popular culture. He created his figures by casting: he wrapped live models in bandages soaked in plaster of Paris, cut the cast to release the model, reassembled it, and painted it white. He placed his figures among actual paraphernalia and furniture typical of the consumer society. Situated in environments such as soda fountains, gas stations, and bedrooms, which

SERAFINI, LUIGI •

were filled with real counters, coffee machines, napkin holders, soda dispensers, gas pumps, chairs, and beds, his figures undramatically enact the mundane activities of daily living. Because of the roughness of the unfinished bandage-casts and their whiteness, the figures seem ghostly and lifeless among the real, colorful articles of their situations. They have an air of desolation. The effect is similar to the paintings of Edward Hopper, in which life feels empty and melancholic in the midst of a tawdry affluence. Once Segal found his formula, he stuck to it. He continued to work for more than three decades, and his art has never changed. Since each of his environments essentially resembles the next, his works taken together amount to minor variations played on a single theme. The first you see is evocative, the rest redundant.

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avant-garde exhibits at the local city museum, and has collaborated with such Western figures as JOHN M. BENNETT, Johann W. Glaw, Jon Held, Carlo Belloli, H. R. Fricker, and Pierre and Elsa Garnier. In 1998 he and Nikonova emigrated to Kiel, Germany. —Gerald Janecek

SEMIOBJECT (1900s–)

—Mark Daniel Cohen

Semiobjects are pieces of art made out of objects and signification. The poem-sculptures of some 1960s concrete poets are an example of this form, where objects from the real world were encrusted with words, helping to bridge the distance between the physical world and the mind’s world of meaning. The effectiveness of such realia is just that: that they force viewers to see themselves not just in a world of objects but in a semiotic universe, where the pieces of the world surrounding them are not just objects but meanings.

(19 March 1947–21 September 2014; b. Sergei Vsevolodovich Sigov)

—Geof Huth

SEGAY, SERGE

Of the late 20th-century Russian avant-gardists, Segay was perhaps closest to the roots of RUSSIAN FUTURISM. His higher education was in the area of theater at the Leningrad State Institute of Theater, Music, Art and Cinema (1979–85). He studied the original sources of the Russian avant-garde, sought out and became personally acquainted with surviving figures such as Vasilisk Gnedov, Igor Bakhterev, and Nikolai Khardzhiev, gathered collections of their works, and wrote scholarly studies of their contributions and those of other Futurists, with a special focus on theater. Consequently, his own poetry and book-works tend to resemble Futurist productions more so than the works of other TRANSFURISTS. His careful explorations of Russian sources nevertheless provided a solid base for his own further experiments and those of his wife, REA NIKONOVA, who was more inclined to invent directly rather than check for possible precedents. Segay was a master of ZAUM, a brilliant performer of his own SOUND POETRY, a vigorous user of mixed media in bookworks and visual poetry, and the inventor of rebus-like writing systems for poetry, ballet, and a variety of sign languages. His book-works are particularly inventive in form and medium, e.g. his anthology of Zaum uses a variety of materials (sandpaper, metal foil, etc.), and each section or word of text is hidden under a flap that the reader must lift in order to see the text. In the late 1980s and 1990s he became a pioneer mail-artist from his provincial homebase in Yeisk, organized a series of

SEMIOTICS (1980–?) What couldn’t have been said about the purported “study of signs and symbols” in its heyday, the 1970s, can be written now, which is to say that this term stands some decades later as the epitome of an academic fad – no more, no less – whose professors were sometimes called, no joke, “semioticians,” epitomizing in turn a lingo verging on JARGON designed to entice a self-selected few while alienating many. (Attempts to license its practitioners, much like doctors or plumbers are, fortunately failed.) Curiously, while prominent in certain backwaters, such semidiocy was unknown in others. About certain other “critical” tags, names now also forgotten, others claiming to be “avant-garde” but eventually becoming a cul-de-sac, some merely reinventing the light bulb while claiming original illumination, might similarly sad judgments be definitively made.

SERAFINI, LUIGI (4 August 1949) An Italian designer more inventive than most, he composed in Codex Seraphinianus (1981) an elaborate

376 • SERIAL MUSIC imaginary encyclopedia in a language alien to all and pictures containing a wealth of materials that don’t quite integrate with one another, in sum suggesting a diffuse alternative world that has led some to classify the book as a sophisticated kind of sci-fi, which perhaps it is. The quantity of inventions becomes a measure of its quality. The Argentinian-Canadian writer Alberto Manguel (1948), himself a sophisticated reader, remembers its arrival in an Italian publisher house where he was working in 1978: Instead of a manuscript, a large collection of illustrated pages depicting a number of strange objects and detailed but bizarre operations, each captioned in a script none of the editors recognized. The accompanying letters explained that the author, Luigi Serafini, had . . . also invented during two long years in a small apartment in Rome, were meant to explain the illustrations’ intricacies. Originally published in two silkbound volumes in Serafini’s native Italy (introduced by ITALO CALVINO) in an edition that has become rare, the Codex was reprinted in a single volume in America in 1983 and then in France a decade later. Something of a cult classic, it has inspired not only commentaries but a website devoted to deciphering what can be only scarcely understood, and then only in small parts. I think of this Codex as the kind of book that JORGE LUIS BORGES might have written if he could draw.

SERIAL MUSIC (c. 1910s) It was an extraordinary invention, really, even if serial music was later widely criticized as esthetically convoluted. As a radically different way of cohering musical notes, this was, literally, a new musical language that had to establish its own rules for organizing musical sounds (its own “grammar,” so to speak), its own patterns of procedures (syntax), and its own kinds of structures (sentences). In brief, ARNOLD SCHOENBERG postulated that the composer, working within the open range of twelve tones to an octave, could structure any number of tones (up to twelve), without repeating a tone, into a certain order of intervals that are called, variously, the “row,” “series,” or “set.” The German epithet is Zwölftonmusik. Another name more common in the 1940s than now is Dodecaphony, which is sort of Greek for twelve-toneness. Once the composer chooses a row, it becomes his or her basic pattern for the piece. This sequence of

intervals can be used in one of four ways: (1) in its original form; (2) in a reversed or retrograde order; (3) in an inverse order (so that if the second note in the original was three steps up, now it is three steps down, etc.); (4) in an inverted, reversed order. This row, we should remember, is less a series of specific musical notes than a pattern of intervallic relations. Suggesting that traditional musical notation is insufficient, the composer MILTON BABBITT, perhaps the foremost contemporary theorist of serial procedure, proposed instead that a row be represented in the following terms: 0,0; 1,1; 2,7; 3,5; 4,6; 5,4; 6,10; 7,8; 8,9; 9,11; 10,2; 11,3 with the first number of each pair marking the individual note’s position in the entire set. Therefore, as the left-hand numbers in each pair escalate from 0 to 11, the second number in each pair refers to that particular note’s intervallic relation to the first or base note of the row. (Because distances must necessarily be different, no number in the second part of each pair is duplicated.) If this row up were transposed up two intervals, we would then mark it as follows: 0,2; 1,3; 2,9; 3,7; 4,8; 5,6; 6,0; 7,10; 8,11; 9,1; 10,4; 11,5 This kind of notation illustrates the nature of the row, as well as how the elements relate to one another, more clearly than musical notes do; but these numbers, don’t forget, are like notes on a staff, which is to say instructions for producing musical sounds. Whereas note number 6 in the original numerical notation had the interval designation of 10, now it becomes 0, for what adds up to 12 becomes 0 (as 11 + 2 in note number 9 becomes 1). Once the row’s pattern is imposed upon musical notes, the numbers refer not just to specific notes but to what Babbitt called “pitch classes.” That is, if note number 6 in this row produces C-sharp, then serial composers can designate any of the C-sharps available to their instruments. Second, just as the notes of a row can be strung out in a line, so they can be bunched into a single chord. The row used in this illustration comes from Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron (1930–32). The fact that Schoenberg could successfully transform this basic material into various structures for a restricted evening-length opera demonstrates, quite conclusively, that the serial language is not as constricting as all the rules superficially suggest – tonal music, one remembers, has its rules too. Instead, just as twelve-tone procedure discourages the kind of repetition endemic in tonal

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music, so it creates its own kind of syntactical and grammatical possibilities. The history of the twelve-tone language has been rather checkered and its development uneven. Soon after Schoenberg invented it, it attracted adherents throughout Europe; by the late 1920s, Schoenberg was invited to succeed Ferrucio Busoni (1886–1924) as professor of composition at the Berlin Academy of Art. However, once the Nazis assumed power, Schoenberg, born a Jew but raised a Christian, resigned his post, emigrating first to England and then to America, where he eventually taught at UCLA. Soon after Fascist cultural authorities classified twelve-tone music as “degenerate,” other musicians devoted to the new technique either left German territories or went culturally underground, while ANTON WEBERN, deprived of his conducting jobs, nonetheless remained in Austria, where he eventually became a copyeditor and proofreader for the same firm that earlier published his music. After Schoenberg arrived in America (and respelled his surname), several important composers who were previously counted among its antagonists adopted the serial language: IGOR STRAVINSKY and ERNST KRENEK, among the immigrants; and among the American-born, ROGER SESSIONS, Arthur Berger (1912–2003), and even AARON COPLAND toward the end of his compositional career. Meanwhile, in post-World War II Europe, temporary converts to serialism included such prominent young composers as KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN and PIERRE BOULEZ, who differed from the Americans in declaring particular allegiance to Webern as purportedly the most consistent and rigorous serial composer (and thus more advanced than Schoenberg).

SERNER, WALTER (15 January 1889–20 August 1942; b. W. Eduard Seligmann) A poet, art critic, and the author of erotic detective stories that were revived in Germany decades after his death, Serner published the magazine Sirius (1915–16). He joined Zurich DADA, to which he was already predisposed, and copublished Zeltweg (1919) in collaboration with TRISTAN TZARA. Described by HANS RICHTER as “the incarnation of revolt . . . the cynic of the movement, the declared anarchist,” Serner could effectively climax an evening of short Dada performances. Manuel L. Grossman speaks of Serner making

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an entrance before an audience of a thousand carrying a headless dummy: Placing the dummy down, he went back behind the curtain and returned bearing a bunch of artificial flowers which he motioned for the dummy to smell. Laying the flowers at the dummy’s feet, he then proceeded to sit in a chair in the middle of the stage with his back to the audience and to recite from his nihilistic tract “Final Dissolution.” Richter remembers, “The tension in the hall became unbearable. At first it was so quiet that you could have heard a pin drop. Then the catcalls began, scornful at first, then furious. ‘Rat, bastard, you’ve got nerve!’ until the noise almost entirely drowned Serner’s voice.” Another account has him screaming “Viva Dada” during the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Le chant du rossignol. Though some historians wrote that Serner disappeared without a trace around 1928, both MARC DACHY and the catalog of a 1989 BERLIN exhibition assert that, in August 1942, Serner “was shipped with other deportees from Prague to Theresienstadt.” Dachy also reprints from the magazine 391 “Carpet [Notebook] du Docteur Serner,” which has Serner’s opinionated thumbnail sketches of his colleagues (e.g., “Tristan TZARA, tres intelligent, pas assez Dada”).

SERRA, RICHARD (2 November 1938) Serra’s innovation was to make three-dimensional visual art – sculpture – that emphasized presence over appearance and thus weight over even any illusion of lightness, let alone seductive beauty. He began by hanging a row of loops of rubber from nails in a wall (that even in their stillness resembled some of LEN LYE’s motorized sculptures exhibited around the same time) and by pouring molten lead into the corners of an exhibition space before pulling away a lead island whose jagged edge corresponded to the part remaining against the wall – in both cases revealing process. Later, Serra took large sheets of lead and propped them precariously against each other or against a wall, at times injuring people when they were moved. As an example of art with an aggressive presence, the curving wall of his mammoth Tilted Arc (1981) bisected a public plaza in lower Manhattan. The result was not just visually impressive but physically intimidating. However, as the steel began to rust, assuming a color associated with decay, it became an affront to the people

378 • SESSIONS, ROGER working there (and, incidentally, a blackboard for graffiti). People employed in the vicinity of the sculpture agitated for its removal and, after controversial hearings, in 1989 succeeded, illustrating the possibility of a distinguished artist making strong public sculpture that, as the street is not a museum, the public, alas, judged unacceptable. Most of his public art has since been mounted not in NEW YORK CITY where he still mostly resides but outside: San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; Bourdeaux, France; Puteaux, France; Bilbao, Spain; and Doha, Qatar. Sometimes in visual art especially, a New York artist no longer comfortable (or welcome) in his hometown shows in venues progressively further away. Though Serra has not exhibited any paintings, his drawings impressively reflect his aggressive temper. Taking a U Cal degree in English literature before a Yale degree in art, he can be remarkably articulate.

SESSIONS, ROGER (28 December 1896–16 March 1985) A brainy American composer who entered Harvard at fourteen, he later studied with Horatio Parker (who also taught CHARLES IVES) at Yale before beginning a teaching career at Smith College (1917–21) and the Cleveland Institute of Music (1921–25). Moving to Europe for several years, Sessions composed works reflecting the influence of IGOR STRAVINSKY and Ernst Bloch (1880–1959), a Swiss composer whom Sessions had assisted in Cleveland. Mostly in absentia, he collaborated in 1928–31 with AARON COPLAND, likewise Brooklyn-born, in sponsoring in New York what came to be known as the Copland-Sessions concerts, which were very influential at the time. (Curiously, the two men were born on the same Brooklyn thoroughfare only four years apart – Sessions at #417 Washington Avenue and Copland at #630). Frightened by Hitler’s rise, which he saw firsthand, he returned home in 1933, teaching successively at Boston University, Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, and then Princeton again, becoming among the first major American composers to realize that he could do his own work while teaching not at a “conservatory” but at a liberal arts university. (Among his contemporaries, Virgil Thomson, George Gershwin, Elliott Carter, and Aaron Copland all avoided permanent teaching positions, while the composers Howard Hanson and William Schuman, by contrast, ran music conservatories.) Sessions wrote books, including Harmonic Practice (1951), which became known in sophisticated classrooms

At an Ivy League university with a serious music program Sessions attracted many bright and ambitious students who would later have their own careers. Retiring from Princeton in 1965, he later taught at Juilliard, whose graduate programs have always produced visible professionals. More than decades after his death, Sessions is frequently cited in younger composers’ biographies, where teachers are customarily acknowledged (as in dance, but not in painting). Among those featured in this book Sessions is acknowledged by MILTON BABBITT, FREDERIC RZEWSKI, and ERIC SALZMAN. In Kyle Gann’s incomparably populous survey of contemporary American composers, American Music in the Twentieth Century (1997), for instance, Sessions is mentioned for also teaching David del Tredici (1937), John Harbison (1938), Ellen Taafe Zwilich (1939), Daniel Lentz (1942), and Tod Machover (1953), most of whom produced music distinctly different from Sessions’s own. Because few, if any, American arts professors, in any art, had so many distinguished students, Sessions became the model for younger composer/professors, though, if only because other universities imitated Princeton’s example in the 1950s and 1960s, no teaching composer had as many pupils who subsequently became prominent. Since few artists born in America ever become adept at other languages, it’s remarkable that Sessions’s selected correspondence includes letters initially written in French, Italian, German, and, yes, Russian. Perhaps because so much of Sessions’s time was spent teaching (and learning), the catalog of his works emphasizes substantial works, with remarkably few minor and occasional pieces. One theme of his music and musical career was increasing density, as Sessions progressed from works reflecting the influence of Igor Stravinsky in the 1920s to 12-tone compositions in the 1950s. His three piano sonatas (1930, 1946, 1965) exemplify this development, as the third is characterized justly as the “Hammerklavier of the twentieth century – half as long, with twice as many notes.” He became more prolific with professional security, after turning 60, as many of his best and most beloved pieces were written after 1957. Perhaps because he was fortunate enough to receive commissions to the end of his life, Sessions was especially productive in his seventies, when in John Harbison’s phrase, “contrasts [in his music became] more sudden, transitions more swift, sections less balanced, and motivic connections less literal.”

SEUPHOR, MICHEL (10 March 1901–12 February 1999; b. Fernand-Louis Berckelaers)

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Born in Antwerp of Flemish parents, he published from 1921 to 1925 in Belgium the journal Het Overzicht, which featured both art and writing. Moving to Paris, Berckelaers adopted a French name that scrambles the letters in Orpheus and founded a group, that included PIET MONDRIAN, and published a magazine, Cercle et carré (1929–30). In April 1930, he coorganized with JOAQUIN TORRES-GARCIA the first international exhibition of modernist ABSTRACT ART. As a preeminent person of arts’ letters, Seuphor wrote L’Art abstrait – ses origines, ses premiers maitres (1949), which became a standard guide to Abstract Art in the French-speaking world, as well as Dictionnaire de la Peinture Abstraite (1957), an informative and decisive guide that still stands among the best of its alphabetical kind. It is not surprising that in 1956 he wrote initially in French a major monograph on Mondrian, who influenced Seuphor’s paintings and graphic art, which were exhibited widely in Europe. Having also published experimental poetry, Seuphor could be a brilliant aphorist, especially about esthetic issues: “As for myself, I confess to a preference for clear-cut situations,” he once wrote, “for radical, and even extreme positions.” Me too, on all counts.

THE SEVEN ARTS (1916–17) This American literary magazine, which appeared only monthly from November 1916 through October 1917, resembles the initial The Dial (1840–44) in becoming more consequential after its premature death. Founded by James Oppenheim (1882–1932) and Waldo Frank (1889–1967), two upper-middling American writers, The Seven Arts quickly became prominent for opposing American involvement in the First World War. This prompted the principal backer to terminate her support before, worse, terminating herself. Among the avant-garde writers incidentally appearing in its pages were BENJAMIN DE CASSERES, and CARL VAN VECHTEN. Fortunately, a publisher specializing early in books for libraries reissued in 1963 the entire run in two thick volumes that are treasured by me.

SEVERINI, GINO (7 April 1883–26 February 1966) His initial achievement as a FUTURIST painter was adding the semblance of motion to CUBISM. Celebrating urban life, often with lavish colors, he preferred portraying fragments of people, particularly

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human performers, over the imagery of machines. His Pan-Pan at the Monaco (1911–12) so richly celebrated the anarchic joy of Parisian nightlife that it was prominently reproduced at the time. Severini’s visual celebrations of Paris compliment what his contemporary GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE realized in words. Additionally, Travelmemories (1909) stands as a protophotomontage. Though Severini quit school as a teenager, he nonetheless published in 1921 a treatise on mathematical theories of harmony and proportion and later an autobiography. Refusing the retrospectively smart “career move” of dying too young, Severini continued to paint and exhibit for decades, unfortunately with less celebrity or success.

SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM (26[?] April 1564–23 April 1516) Aside from his familiar literary achievements, credit Will with texts that have inspired a wealth of innovative moves by contemporary writers. The British OULIPOlian Philip Terry (1964) has subjected Will’s classic sonnets to a spectacular variety of changes, including in his own summary: removal of letters, permutations of word order updating, expansion, homophonic translation, subtraction, substitution, updating, “monovocalism,” “translexical translation,” and “exercises in style” in the tradition of RAYMOND QUENEAU. In my Kosti’s Sonnets (2017), I made all of Will’s 154 texts the underpinnings for increasingly obliterating typefaces that for framing depend upon deviance from the familiar text. By contrast, for his Ophelia und die Wörter (Ophelia and the Words) (1986), a radio play composed for Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the Austrian-German writer Gerhard Rühm (1930) extracted all key nouns and verbs from her speeches to rework only this limited vocabulary into a portrayal of her increasing madness, “losing her linguistic grip on the world.” Unaware of Rühm’s earlier move, PAUL GRIFFITHS, otherwise known as a prolific writer about classical music, wrote his OULIPOlian novel Let Me Tell You (2008) wholly from the 483-word vocabulary Shakespeare allotted to her in Hamlet. In her Nets (2004), Jen Bervin (1972) offers erasures leaving only a few words of every Sonnet. The Canadian writer Gary Barwin’s Servants of Dust (2015) deletes all words from the Sonnets, leaving behind only punctuation marks. In his The Others Raisd in Me (2009), another Canadian, Gregory Betts (1975), produced a book rich in ingenious erasures. While HARRYETTE MULLEN remade one sonnet as African-American, the British Canadian, Steve McCaffery (1947), in his

380 • SHAPIRO, JOEL Dark Ladies (2016), “pays homage to Shakespeare by both erasure and incorporation. Preserving the end rhymes of all 154 of his sonnets, in mirror-reverse order, and embedding stage directions from his comedic and tragic plays.” H. C. ARTMANN’s Ueberall Wo Hamlet Hinkam (1969, Wherever Hamlet Came) contains fifteen sheets in a box. Malcolm Green (1952), a British artist working mostly in BERLIN, has reworked Hamlet in several limited editions. Remember as well that ALFRED JARRY’s Ubu Roi (1896) redid Will’s MacBeth, as did EUGENE IONESCO’s MacBett (1972). Though the text of Die Hamletmschine (1977, Hamletmachine) by Heiner Muller (1919–95) is only several pages long and thus open to imaginative staging and interpretation, it remains the most-often-performed and thus best-known of the East German’s many plays. Other radical departures from Shakespeare no doubt exist. As the greatest writer provides a rich source, avant-garde artists take his writings to levels unknown before.

SHAPIRO, JOEL (27 September 1941) Shapiro’s early sculptures, created during the 1970s, stand in contrast to Minimalist works and their emphasis on self-reference: the presentation of a physical object whose presence is unmitigated by associations to other objects. Shapiro modeled small, rudimentary geometric forms that vaguely resembled houses, chairs, coffins, and bridges, demonstrating that any object, no matter how simple, bears a resemblance to some familiar shape. Their miniature size (most were under a foot tall) made them seem objects of thought, almost Platonic ideals, the essential forms upon which the elements of the world are patterned. In the late 1970s, Shapiro’s work changed to the style for which he is best known. He began arranging wood beams into assemblies that resemble the human figure in a wide variety of gestures and movements: running, sitting, dancing, crouching in despair, and stretching with exuberance. Initially as small as his earlier forms, these works seemed more like schematics of motion and gesture than like renderings of the human form; Shapiro soon started casting them in bronze and, in the 1990s, enlarged them to a scale larger than life. The use of simple rectangular beams echoed Minimalism, only here the association was not with familiar objects, but with the body. Although these sculptures seem at first like little more than stick figures, on a large scale they convey a sense of action, having been granted the precision

of mathematics, as if one were seeing the Platonic ideals of human attitude and poise. —Mark Daniel Cohen

SHAW, ARTIE (23 May 1910–30 December 2004; b. Arthur Jacob Arshawsky) One of the most brilliant and versatile figures in American arts history, he’s interesting for not becoming what he could have been. After beginning as a jazz clarinetist, widely regarded among the finest, whose instrumental tone was particularly fine, he developed a series of small bands, touring and recording, sometimes pop classics, sometimes more classical music, before disbanding them. Had he ventured into longer forms, Shaw, more than anyone else, could have developed what was later called Third Stream for fusing classical music with jazz. Though he was a celebrity who married and divorced movie stars such as Ava Gardner and Lana Turner, he retired from music completely in 1954, his professional silence of fifty years (after great prominence) exceeding for duration that of, say, MARCEL DUCHAMP’s. Instead, well-read and indubitably brainy, Artie Shaw wrote books: initially an autobiography also about the music business, The Trouble with Cinderella: An Outline of Identity (1952), which was reprinted with additional text in 1992 and 2001; some conventional fiction, and occasional rants. (Aware no doubt of the costs of Jewish ignorance of personal weapons in Europe during the 1940s, he also opened a rifle range.) The book I’d like to read is an unpublished autobiographical novel, reportedly a thousand pages in length, “The Education of Able Snow,” which perhaps realized his literary ambitions better than anyone knows.

SHELLEY, WARD (30 April 1950) While many visual artists have produced large diagrammatic paintings documenting this and that, none have realized the levels of intricacy and truth distinguishing Ward Shelley’s. On the Internet are thumbnails of his colorful flowcharts of the DOWNTOWN art world, the beat writers, ANDY WARHOL, FRANK ZAPPA, etc. Most of them in their original formats are several feet wide and a few feet high. Frequently they are reprinted both as wholes or in parts (including on the cover of a book of mine). Often has Shelley revised to acknowledge corrective information. Another major Shelley

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exhibition (2016) offered paintings of shelves of books’ spines – not just a single shelf but a whole gallery displaying hundreds of credible titles of his own creation.

SHERMAN, CINDY (19 January 1954; b. Cynthia Morris S.) In Sherman’s distinctive self-portraits, she is dressed and made-up to portray scores of different women and occasionally men, but never herself. Sherman says her art deals with female stereotypes, and they are portraits not of how she sees herself but of how she sees men seeing women. Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, she studied at the State University of New York at Buffalo (BA, 1976). As a teenager she began to wear makeup to look more glamorous and found that she could turn herself into a different person by changing her appearance. In college she started making photo narratives starring herself. Sherman moved to New York in 1977, when she was awarded a NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS grant. Early recognition came in the late 1970s with a series of black-and-white photographs called “Untitled Film Stills,” showing Sherman as a B-movie actress in various poses. When the Metro Pictures Gallery opened in 1980, Sherman had one of the first shows, of her early color photos. It was the beginning of her success based in part upon exhibiting only in established art galleries, rather than among other known photographers. Over the years her repertoire of visual impersonations has included movie stars, centerfold nudes, fairytale characters, victims of disasters, and historical figures. Some of Sherman’s portraits have produced comic or grotesque effects with plastic body parts, dolls, and her own made-up body. Decades later, her work becomes more impressive when seen as a retrospective exhibition or in a book, the sheer bulk of her images testifying to the fertility of her imagination in fulfilling her unique style. —with Gloria S. and Fred W. McDarrah

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sketches in sequence. As such theater could be set up quickly, Sherman worked in a variety of nonstandard venues, including street corners and public plazas, on all the continents. Especially in mixing props not normally seen together (e.g., taking a telephone receiver from a flower pot, unscrewing the receiver’s cap to release rose petals, etc.), his works reflect collage. Sherman also made films and created extraordinary visual fictions that I have seen, even though they have not yet been published. In 1992, he founded The Quotidian Review, a “monthly magazine” to be wholly devoted to “new and recent artwork (verbal and visual) and articles by Stuart Sherman.” Such a personal periodical is not something every artist can expect to produce monthly.

SHORT FILMS (c. 1900) The great secret escaping canonical film criticism is that most of the greatest avant-garde films ever made are less than sixty minutes in length, some of them being shorter, often much shorter, if not as short as six minutes, which was the standard length for, say, WARNER BROTHERS classic cartoons. Some of these “shorts,” as they were commonly called, were made to be screened before the single feature-length film. This rule, also applicable to documentaries (e.g., PAUL FALKENBERG’s Pollock; films by the ScottishCanadian Norman McLaren [1914–87]), is no less true now than it was a century ago, when the most inventive directors proceeded with very modest budgets and, don’t forget, a recording medium far more costly than videotape or digital video. Aside from D. W. GRIFFITH and ABLE GANCE, consider as well that several prominent directors of feature-length films did their most extraordinary work in shorter lengths. Among those noted here were STANLEY DONEN and FREDERICO FELLINI. Why this truth about the esthetic superiority of short films escapes prominent film critics and historians escapes me.

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(9 November 1945–14 September 2001) In the mid-1970s, Sherman developed a sort of chamber theater, or miniature theater, which he called with some irony Spectacles, in which, customarily working solo, he presented for only a few minutes, through mime and the manipulation of objects, his responses to specific subjects, such as people or places he has known. A typical Sherman evening thus consisted of several

(1941–15 June 2013) As a very young man, he was the first influential gallerist not to have a permanent space or even to work through established institutions, instead operating initially out of a closet in a family apartment and then in spaces rented for brief periods around his native NEW YORK CITY. Working as a kind of guerrilla

382 • SIGNATURE representing early CONCEPTUAL ART, which was by definition physically slight, he made the printed catalog into an exhibition surrogate, beginning with Douglas Huebler: November, 1968, which had verbal descriptions, maps, and other sorts of documentation. The only address in the catalog was 1100 Madison Avenue, where the documentation and typescripts were kept in a closet, where the gallerist often greeted collectors “in his usual costume – bathing suit or undershorts,” according to LUCY R. LIPPARD. Later in 1968, Siegelaub published Lawrence Weiner: Statements, which had words and only words devoid of any visual supplements. Soon afterwards came the larger Xerox Book in which seven artists were allocated 25 pages apiece. Once his stable of artists was complete, he rented for a month office space in an otherwise vacant small brownstone on 44 East 52nd Street, which was a long stone’s throw away from MoMA but far from any other respectable galleries. Nonetheless, visitors came, including some art world heavies who later represented Siegelaub’s artists in their own institutions, such as the Swiss Harald Szeeman (1933–2005), who incorporated Siegelaub’s artists into his exhibition later in 1969, When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland. As for the first great sponsor of ephemeral American art, Siegelaub disappeared from New York to resurface in Europe, where in the 1970s he first became a publisher in France, and later in Holland, where, forever imaginatively enterprising, he established the Stichting Egress Foundation to study textile history, among other subjects. While still in New York, he co-wrote with the SoHo lawyer Robert Projansky “The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement,” which was designed to give the artists some profits from the subsequent sale of their works.

SIGNATURE This is a favorite honorific for whatever’s so unique in a work of art that the identity of its author is known, even if his or her name isn’t immediately visible. This quality is most obvious in works by the greatest painters. Consider JACKSON POLLOCK, PIET MONDRIAN, ALEXANDER CALDER, and E. E. CUMMINGS, among others. An established figure’s familiar signature is what an aspiring artist dare not imitate even if he or she can do it at all, unless to parody or to appropriate. The honorific is also useful in identifying the best classical music and literature. The realization of recognizable Signature is, simply, one sign of a mature artist. “Style” is a more common but less discriminative epithet for the same quality. Furthermore, one measure of an artist more fecund than most is the establishment of several

recognizable signatures, usually in the course of a long career – e.g., PABLO PICASSO.

SIGNOS (1969) Through the late 1970s into the 1980s, in my mail occasionally came from Cuba a package roughly 8 inches by 6 inches with string wrapped over grocery-bag paper. Inside was the latest number of a magazine titled Signos that was printed on inexpensive newsprint, published not in coastal Havana but inland in Santa Clara. Its theme, perhaps unique in Communist countries, was placing beside Cuban folklore several kinds of innovative writing including visual literature. Its founding editor was Samuel Feijóo (1914–92), himself an honored celebrity rewarded with prizes in the USSR, Poland, Bulgaria, and even Mongolia, notwithstanding his avant-garde interests. Perhaps because of his reputation as a distinguished Cuban writer who stayed in Cuba, his Signos survived longer than earlier Cuban literary journals edited by him. Into the second decade of 21st century, two decades after his death, new issues continued to appear, even though its gifts long before stopped arriving in my mailbox.

SILVY, CAMILLE (18 March 1834-2 February 1910) It seems that he, no one else, was the first photographer to discover that a representational picture could be imaginatively constructed. For the River Scene, France (1958), he shot one glass negative of the sky, another for the surrounding landscape, drew a line for the cloud’s lower edge, and then he used brushes and pencils on the trees, all in order to give each element a sharper definition. The British curator of photography Mark HaworthBooth (1944) reported in 1989, “It was the late Ansel Adams [1902-1984], one of the most accomplished landscape photographers ever, who pointed out this sleight of hand to my disbelieving eye.” Later Haworth-Booth wrote an entire book (1993) solely about this single photograph. A century and one-half later, all of Silvy’s meticulous reworking can be executed quickly and slickly with a computer program called Photoshop

SIMPSON, N. F. (29 January 1919–27 August 2011; b. Norman Frederick S.)

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Among the most original playwrights of his Englishspeaking generation, Simpson released remarkably few works, beginning in 1957 with A Resounding Tinkle. The play opens with Mr. and Mrs. Paradock purchasing for their suburban house an elephant that, since it is too large, they exchange for a snake, very much as suburbanites purchase and exchange new furniture. They then invite to their home two comedians who learnedly discuss Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter. The Paradocks seem unperturbed that their son has returned home as a woman. The author himself appears to apologize for the play, which he says came to him in Portuguese, which is alien to him, while I apologize for a summary that hardly equals the wild, fundamental absurdity of Tinkle. In another Simpson play, The Hole (1957), literally about a hole in the street, a crowd gathers around a “visionary” whose specialty is double-talk: I make a practice of eating far more than I need. And for that reason food is of no interest to me. I eat merely to put food out of my mind. I eat all the time so that I shall not be preoccupied with supplying my bodily needs so far as food is concerned. It leaves my mind free. As more people arrive, projecting their preoccupations upon the hole, their talk becomes a survey of suburban fantasies, beginning with sports, continuing through nature to crime and then political fantasies. All the metaphysical aura collapses when a laborer emerges to say the hole contains a junction box serving the electrical supply. This prompts incredible pseudophilosophical discussion. After everyone else departs, the self-styled visionary is still waiting for a revelation. One-Way Pendulum, subtitled An Evening of High Drung and Slarrit, portrays a family, the Groomkirbys, whose individuals are so self-preoccupied they barely make contact with one another. The climax of absurd events is their son’s confession that he has murdered forty-three people simply because he enjoys mourning for them. In addition to satirizing the idealized family and the legal system, the play mocks conventional playwriting in its ridiculous twists and turns.

SIMULACRA (1981) As the plural of a purportedly illuminating critical term (re)circulated by the Frenchman JEAN BAUDRILLARD, this means a likeness or representation. Sometimes used positively, usually negatively, simulacra

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has nothing to do with similarity, simplicity, simile, suspense, snapshot, smiley, or any other homonyms in either English or French. It had a brief currency in discussions of POSTMODERN representational art. Among other Frenchmen favoring the term is Alain Badiou (1937), whom I once heard read in English from a text that someone else must have translated for him, because he so often mispronounced English words whose sound he did not know, because they were unfamiliar to him. (Such a goof would be less likely in a Frenchman’s English conversation.) Badiou’s performance was so inadvertently funny, especially when he didn’t know why the audience were giggling – classic, really – that I’d gladly see it again. Simulacra is easily misspelled, perhaps creatively.

SINGLE-SENTENCE FICTIONS (1910–) Among the earlier modern writers to compose a narrative wholly within a single-sentence was RAMÓN GÓMEZ DE LA SERNA though I suspect that he was not aware of the critical concept of such a severe minimal/radical constraint. In late 20th-century literature, after the advent of OULIPO, the longest known to me come from the prominent Polish writer Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909–83) whose Bramy raju (1960, The Gates of Paradise) has a run-on sentence with 40,000 words (preceding a second sentence only a few words in length); the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal (1914–97), whose Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročilé (1964, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age) proceeds for 117 pages without a full stop/period; and Vanessa Place (1968), a Los Angeles writer (and appellate lawyer). For over 110 pages the subject of her Dies: A Sentence (2005) is language and war reflected through two veterans, one without legs, the other without arms. In British writer J. G Ballard’s short story “Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown” (1991), a discharged mental patient recalls his wife’s murder, his trial and eventually exoneration, all within a single-sentence with each word footnoted. A shorter classic single-sentence is Ernest Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” By contrast, my own adventure within this constraint has been compressing a wealth of narrative initially into single sentences roughly normal in length. The aim of my Complete Stories, collected as 1001 Stories Enumerated (2011), is suggesting an entire narrative within a single unit. My Epiphanies (1980–2011), by contrast, are meant to be the climax moment in otherwise nonexistent narratives, while Openings & Closings (1975) are, as their title says, just beginning or concluding

384 • SITE sentences that, independent of each other, suggest stories that might follow or might have gone before. In my more extreme Minimal Fictions (1994) and Micro Fictions (2010), I’ve tried to suggest within three words or less a narrative that ends with a full stop/period. For an example, consider: “Psychiatry.” Isn’t this surely a narrative incorporating within a single word a beginning and, thanks to the full stop/period, an end?

SITE (1969) The taken name of an architectural collaborative formed by the sometime sculptor James Wines (1932), who has remained its principal contributor, SITE became noted in the early 1970s for spectacular architectural humor. In the parking lot of a Connecticut shopping center, they buried automobiles to various depths, their upper parts encased in cement that visually echoes their original shapes, creating the image of a car cemetery. For the front wall of a Houston discount showroom, they composed a wall with falling bricks, suggesting the striking image of a collapsing building. In another showroom, the corner wall cuts away from the building to provide an entranceway, only to close up at night. Not only are the architectural images different, they are strong, giving SITE’s buildings a definition far more memorable than that offered not only by familiar post-BAUHAUS boxes but also radical alternatives to rigorous geometry.

SITE-SPECIFIC ART See INSTALLATION.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL See LETTRISM.

SKLADANOWSKY, MAX (30 April 1863–30 November 1939) The son of a magic lantern showman, he worked in collaboration with his brother Emil (1859–1945) in constructing a double projection machine that was patented in 1895 under the name of “Bioskop” (as it had two sets of film strips, each running at a speed of eight frames per second). Some historians credit Skladanowsky with the first public presentation of moving pictures in Germany

at the BERLIN Wintergarten on 1 November 1895, six weeks ahead of the Lumière brothers’ first public screening (though defenders of the Frenchmen respond that they had private presentations before 1 November). According to the Encyclopedia of European Cinema (1995), “Apart from this opening programme, which consisted of nine short sketches, Skladanowsky put together a second series of Berlin city views for touring through Germany in 1896–97 (Berlin Alexanderplatz).” However, as other projection machines were more successful, Skladanowsky retired his Bioskop and later had some modest success with the earlier pseudo-cinematic format of photograph flip books.

SLONIMSKY, NICOLAS (27 April 1894–25 December 1995; b. Nikolai Leonidovich S.) Initially famous as a pioneering conductor of American avant-garde music (whose 1931 premieres included EDGARD VARÈSE’s lonisation and CHARLES IVES’s Three Places in New England), he later became the most prodigious musical lexicographer – not only the author of such celebrated, stylish reference books as Music Since 1900 (1938; 5th ed., 1993) and Lectionary of Music (1989), but from 1958 to his death the sole editor/author of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (8th ed., 1992). Slonimsky was also a composer of works that are innovative and yet modest in ways that his books are not. His compositions are short, none being more than seven minutes in length, and are all scored for limited instrumentation (for, not unlike other avant-garde composers, he tended to write for himself and his immediate friends). These fall into three groups: songs, piano miniatures, and others. Five Advertising Songs (1924) is a suite composed to jingles that a recent immigrant found in the slick magazines of the time. The opening phrases become their subtitles: “Make this a day of Pepsodent!”; “And then her doctor told her . . .”; “Snowy-white”; “No more shiny nose!”; and “Children cry for Castoria!” The wit comes from setting distinctly American words to post-Rimsky-Korsakov harmonies that make such doggerel sound even more ridiculous. To my mind, these songs resemble DADA, especially in fusing conventional elements not normally found together and by that technique deflating all sides. For “Bach Dislocated,” the music of J. S. Bach’s C-minor Fugue starts in the correct key, only to shift down a semitone, and then continues similar shifting for the remainder of the piece. For “Czerny, Schmerny,” exercises from the most famous piano pedagogue of

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Beethoven’s time are played with one hand, while the other hand plays chords in a deviant key. Additional instrumental pieces begin with a radical structural premise. For “Studies in Black and White” (1928), Slonimsky posited a complex experiment in mutually exclusive counterpoint. Essentially, the right hand plays the white keys one note at a time in consonant intervals, and the left-hand plays only on the black keys. Though pieces with two hands playing in different keys should sound dissonant, the structure of alternate monodies creates the illusion of aural consonance. Just as Five Advertising Songs resembles Dada, “Studies” extends into music the esthetics of another European visual art development – CONSTRUCTIVISM, which deemphasized emotion and representation in favor of both pure abstraction and the fairly rigorous deployment of structural ideas. In the meantime, Slonimsky developed a theoretical interest in musical scales other than major, minor, or chromatic. More than two thousand of them were published as a book, Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (1947), which is a collection of “every possible succession of notes arranged by intervals as counted in semitones.” In his preface to this book, he compares his collection to language “phrase books and dictionaries of idiomatic expressions. But while phrase books are limited to locutions consecrated to usage, this Thesaurus includes a great number of melodically plausible patterns that are new,” which is to say hypothetical structures not discovered before. My own opinion is that such a gathering represents Slonimsky’s most extraordinary conceptual composition – a “big piece” for scales (or materials for extended composition) that epitomize his systematic intelligence and radical musical interests. It is not surprising that this Thesaurus is his most perfect book, the only one that has never been revised in seventy years, notwithstanding numerous reprintings.

SMALL PRESS (c. 1970) This has become the accepted term for modestly financed book publishers that issue the sorts of titles that commercial publishers would not publish. Customarily printing less than a thousand copies of any title (in contrast to the commercial publishers’ minimum of ten thousand), they tend to base their editorial selections not upon financial prospects but love, which may be literary love, political love, esthetic love, personal love, or even self-love. Thus, compared to commercial publishers, Small Presses have been particularly open to those who are generally excluded – political or sexual

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radicals, avant-garde writers, black writers, or religious writers, to name a few. Nearly all BOOK-ART and nearly all books by the writers individually featured in these pages come from Small Presses. In contrast to “general publishers,” Small Presses tend to specialize in one kind of book. Many are oneperson operations wherein the “publisher” functions as editor, designer, secretary, and delivery person, if not the printer as well. As loans for this kind of venture are not easy to come by, most alternative publishers are self-financed, their founders scarcely compensating themselves for their working time. Too many are excessively dependent upon a single individual’s health and energy. Only a scant few, unlike little magazines, are currently subsidized by universities or other cultural institutions. They are culturally invaluable, simply because the best of them print serious writing that would otherwise be lost.

SMARANDACHE, FLORENTIN (10 December 1954) Born in Rumania, emigrating to the US in the 1990s, he has worked as a professor of mathematics, most recently in Gallup, NM, who, in addition to work in his academic discipline, has generated highly inspired writing centered around several domains uniquely his, in his own summary: “paradoxism; paradoxist distich; tautological distich; dual distich; paradoxist quatrain; combinatorial drama; photo-video instantaneous diary; oUTERaRT.” Since Smarandache eschews modesty, consider websites with his work. One unique quality of his Fifth International Anthology on Paradoxism (2006, printed in Rumania) is untranslated texts printed in seventeen languages, including Tamil, Hindi, Arabic, and Hebrew. In some respect this Rumanian reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov’s Kinbote (from VK’s Pale Fire), who was VK’s ironic portrayal of himself as a literary visionary immigrant isolated in America. There are other innovative writers like Smarandache, descending from various exotic places, surviving better in American academia than they would back home. Indeed, American universities have been oddly more receptive to hiring avant-garde foreigners, mostly of indefinite reputations, than those first-rate and native-born.

SMITH, DAVID (9 March 1906–23 May 1965; b. Roland D. S.) On the one hand remembering his training as a painter who had assimilated Cubist lessons of diverse planes

386 • SMITH, JACK and ABSTRACT imagery and, on the other, his experience laboring on the assembly line of an automobile plant, Smith produced sculpture that measured its distance from the past by rejecting the traditions of modeling (carving the semblance of an extrinsic image out of a block of material) and representational space and proportion. The innovative equal of ALEXANDER CALDER, Smith assembled sculpture (which was generally welded) from contemporary industrial materials that were displayed for their own properties and identities – steel looked like steel, etc. Nonetheless, much like paintings, Smith sculptures tended to have both a front and a back and thus a preferred face for photographers. As early as the middle 1930s, Smith established artistic SIGNATUREs that he sustained for the remainder of his career: first, skeletal images in iron that he forged himself and, then, large metal abstractions with faintly representational semblances, such as Hudson River Landscape (1951). So inappropriate as a setting for his tall pieces was the enclosed space of traditional galleries that Smith himself would “house” his largest works on his own back lawn, exposed to the elements; and he was notoriously reluctant to sell them. (Nonetheless, when I visited his manor in Bolton Landing, New York, in 2006, nearly all were gone from his descending meadow.) By the 1950s, Smith had progressed beyond the Cubistic form of overlapping planes into favoring a flat and spineless sculptural field, usually circular in overall shape, populated with sparsely constructed images. Thanks for late well-earned fame, the last decade of his life was his best.

for theatrical PERFORMANCE that depended upon his own strong presence for their success. Ephemeral at their beginnings, mostly presented in his own living loft, witnessed only by a few, some of them are described in detail by STEFAN BRECHT. The British painter also known as Jack Smith (1928–2011) was a different person.

SMITH, JACK

A brilliant theoretician at a time receptive to radical esthetic theories, Smithson gained considerable influence mostly for advocating common earth as a material valid for sculpture. Because many of Smithson’s major sculptures no longer exist, perhaps the principal achievement of his career was making works that successfully survive in secondary literature, beginning with his own writings. In the second respect, the paradigmatic Smithson masterpiece is “Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan” (1968), which tells in elaborate prose of him placing mirrors in a sequence of Mexican places. Even though the placements were temporary, his text about them becomes so rich with insight and reference, with esthetic observations and stylistic flourishes, that a reader comes away believing that the activities may not have happened at all – that even the accompanying photographs (in color in the original periodical publication) may have been faked. (If so, so what.) The Spiral Jetty, the principal open-air project of Smithson’s short life, has survived only as a subject in

(14 November 1932–16 September 1989) A 16 mm. film so shocking in its content that it was legally proscribed soon after its birth, Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) became the mythic avant-garde American film, known at the time by all film students who thought themselves more sophisticated, in part because of its portrayal of the aftermath of a polymorphous orgy with a few females and several males, some of whom are dressed as women. Yet precisely because of its stylistic character, with sharp visual contrasts (such as quick shifts between close-ups and longrange shots), dizzying spins of a hand-held camera, and passages of overexposed footage, the effect is finally less pornographic than hallucinatory to an extraordinary degree. This impression depends as well upon a soundtrack full of harsh juxtapositions, ranging from non-sequitur Chinese music to a mixture of rock music with church bells. Smith also had a SOHO reputation

SMITH, TONY (23 September 1912–26 December 1980; b. Anthony Peter S.) After apprenticing himself to FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and practicing architecture for twenty years, this Smith emerged in the 1960s as an extremely MINIMAL sculptor, making large cubes, as tall as a man is tall, sometimes in steel, usually in wood, which were sometimes painted black to give them more presence with the illusion of density and weight. Some sculptures were composed of modular cubes that could be tastefully distributed, much as rocks in Japanese gardens. Smith’s rise in status from a friend of artists to an influential sculptor was meteoric; he was even featured on the cover of Time magazine. As a teacher, he could devote a sculpture course to the close reading of JAMES JOYCE’s FINNEGANS WAKE.

SMITHSON, ROBERT (2 January 1938–20 July 1973)

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a film. Smithson’s essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic” is a classic of alternative American autobiography. Precisely because his writings reflect both advanced literature and advanced art, they’ve come to epitomize what I have elsewhere called The Literature of SoHo (1981). Among his few surviving gallery pieces is a Corner Mirror with Coral (1989), now at the MoMA, where he put three mirrors along the walls and on the floor of a corner and then deposited coral fragments where the three mirrors meet. The common material comes through the mirrors to resemble floating crystal. ‘Tis said that Smithson’s favorite tools for making his sculptures were a bulldozer and a mirror.

SNELSON, KENNETH (29 June 1927–22 December 2016) If some visual art students at BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE took from ALBERS, and others learned personally from DE KOONING, Snelson followed yet another teacher who has passed through its western North Carolina campus, BUCKMINSTER FULLER, who gave him the concept of “tensegrity.” Snelson’s most familiar sculptures are polished aluminum tubes suspended in space by taut steel cables, so that if the viewer moves sufficiently far away, the cable disappears from the unaided eye, leaving the illusion of shiny objects suspended geometrically in space, in apparent defiance of gravity. They become one of the few examples of sculpture designed to be seen from a distance, and thus represent a position contrary to that of CARL ANDRE and GEORGE RHOADS, among others, whose sculptures depend upon the principle of revealing gravity. As a photographer, Snelson made highly detailed 360-degree photographs of cityscapes around the world: Paris, Venice, Rome, Siena, and Kyoto. Later he used computers to make pictures of otherwise invisible atoms.

SNOW, MICHAEL (10 December 1929) A pre-eminent Canadian POLYARTIST, Snow produced major films, exhibited memorable paintings and sculpture, played JAZZ (with less distinction), and authored first rank BOOK-ART. Much as I admire individual works of his, I find it hard to discern what principles, other than a certain cool cleverness, animate Snow’s entire oeuvre. Of his films, I was especially awed

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by Le Région Centrale (1970–71) for which he mounted a camera on a supple revolving tripod in a barren but beautiful area of northern Quebec. As the camera spins around at various angles for three full hours, we witness the changing colors of a barren beautiful landscape. Wavelength (1966–67) is a single, attentuated, forty-five-minute long zoom shot down the length of Snow’s New York loft. For the new baseball stadium in Toronto, Snow produced a group of striking gargoyles (1989). His Cover to Cover (1975) is a two-front book, composed entirely of photographs that bleed to the edges of 360 pages, that can be read in either direction, also requiring the reader to flip the book over somewhere in the middle. Some find significance in his cutout paintings, done throughout the 1960s, collectively titled Walking Woman because they portray a striding female. Much like his sometime wife Joyce Wieland (1930–98) and GLENN GOULD as well, Snow is a deeply Toronto artist.

SOCIÉTÉ ANONYME See DREIER, Katherine S.

SOHO, ARTISTS’ (c. 1967) Called SoHo because it lies SOuth of HOuston Street in lower Manhattan, the neighborhood became, especially in the 1970s, a center for avant-garde activities in American visual art, PERFORMANCE, music, MIXED-MEANS THEATER, CONCEPTUAL ART, and even literature, much as MONTMARTRE was to Parisian art nearly a century before. Though previously an industrial slum with empty open spaces called lofts, SoHo – bounded officially by West Broadway to the west, Lafayette Street to the east, and Canal Street to the south – from the late 1960s attracted artists looking for working space in empty industrial spaces. At first they rented from desperate landlords, later purchasing whole buildings that would then be divided among “coop” owners, most of whom also lived in their studios. Because this area was zoned exclusively for industrial activities, NEW YORK CITY required that artists who needed a lot of interior space to do their work (e.g., painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, playwrights, but not writers) obtain a city-certified “variance” to also live there. Precisely because no one had resided there before and nonartists could not do so legally, SoHo became a one-industry town, so to speak, within a larger city,

388 • SOMETHING ELSE PRESS perhaps the first legally exclusive artists’ enclave in the history of US cities. The art galleries came in the 1970s, followed by the boutiques that exploited SoHo’s growing reputation for advanced taste. By 1979 or so, the real estate prices suddenly escalated, discouraging the entrance of newcomers unless they were considerably wealthier than the previous inhabitants. So populous did the sometime industrial slum become that it is said in the 1980s that 25 percent of all the applicants for individual grants from the Visual Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts resided in zip codes 10012 (which is SoHo proper) and 10013 (the contiguous neighborhood of Tribeca), both of which are considerably different in both denizens and architecture from Greenwich Village to the north, the Lower East Side to the east, and the financial district to the south. By the late 1990s, new galleries for new art preferred Chelsea, on Manhattan’s lower West Side, which, much like SoHo was three decades before, was then an industrial slum undergoing renovation. In the wake of their departure, the spaces of SoHo got not pizza parlors or fast-food emporia, which couldn’t afford the streetlevel rents, but yet more high-end retailers exploiting its reputation for advanced taste. Stores with several thousand square feet of feminine cosmetics made it the Lipstick District. Note that this SoHo is spelled slightly but significantly differently from London’s Soho.

SOMETHING ELSE PRESS (1964–74) Though its efforts were taken too much for granted during its short lifetime, it is now clear that this SMALL PRESS was not only the most distinguished small publisher ever in America, it was the bookish equivalent of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE in the education of avant-garde intelligence, not just in America. Quite simply, SEP issued, in well-produced editions, the more experimental works of GERTRUDE STEIN, which were not available before in the United States; BOOK-ART books by CLAES OLDENBURG, EMMETT WILLIAMS, BERN PORTER, MERCE CUNNINGHAM, JACKSON MAC LOW, EUGEN GOMRINGER, Ruth Krauss (1901–93), Geoff Hendricks (1931–2018), and DANIEL SPOERRI, among others, including its founder and principal editor, DICK HIGGINS; and anthologies of both CONCRETE POETRY and radically alternative fiction. In its initial years, SEP also published major pamphlets, really among the best of their kind, by GEORGE BRECHT, JOHN CAGE, and ALLAN KAPROW, among others.

These books got around, as good books do (and still do), often passed on from one admiring reader onto others. It would be disingenuous for me not to acknowledge SEP’s impact on my own education in avant-garde arts. Perhaps the simplest measure of the void caused by SEP’s demise is that most of what it did, even by individuals of the first rank, is no longer in print anywhere. PETER FRANK produced an annotated bibliography with an intelligence reflecting that of his subject.

SONDHEIM, ALAN (3 February 1943) “A slmpla lp$f pf bra$d/ I survive by Windows into Your Late-Night Soul” is the way writer/teacher/videomaker/ cyberspace-theorist Sondheim’s “Tha Hermit” begins. Nothing earth-shakingly meta-Joycean about these words “pushed towards a kind of exploratory psychosis,” as their author says he tries for in his poetry – except that (1) they are a result of continuously rewritten creative computer programming, and (2) they later go through all sorts of transformations that make “Tha Hermit” (and other, often ambitiously lengthy, similar pieces) far more theme-and-variation than anything Joyce did. Sondheim has been esthetically active in computers since the 1960s, in 1971 creating a piece called “Typed Glossolalia: Computer Analysis of Determinism in Man,” which used punchcard entries done by Gregert Johnson. Seven years later his and Geralyn Donahue’s Texts appeared with a sampling of his computer-generated work (done on a Terak minicomputer using both the TF59 calculator and UCSD Pascal programming languages, two of the six or more computer languages Sondheim has “modified, denied, and confused” texts with, as he puts it). In short, Sondheim is one of our pathfinders from the page onto the screen and beyond. —Bob Grumman

SONFIST, ALAN (1946) His most conspicuous work has sat just beyond the edge of SoHo for decades. Behind fences perhaps 50 feet by 100 feet, it claims to be a recreation of what this patch of land was some centuries ago. Since it looks scarcely different from other undeveloped land in the rural exurbs of New York City, this foliage needs the frame of a single sign with its title, Time Landscape, even if devoid of the artist’s name, to become understood, if

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not significant. “Art in the Land” has been Sonfist’s theme since a lecture series at New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 1969. As his credentials as an artist are secure, he has since been invited to rework less favorably located landscapes around the world. He also edited Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art (1983).

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SOUND POETRY (See TEXT-SOUND)

SPATIAL FORM (20th century)

SONTAG, SUSAN (16 January 1933–28 December 2004; b. S. Rosenblatt) A sort-of minor celebrity for most of her adult life, she became an effective idiot-identifier for the discriminating avant-garde audience, which is to say that the cognoscenti knew that people praising her were inadvertently revealing that they were probably inastute. She produced criticism, fiction, plays, and films; yet in no genre was her work significantly innovative. About no avant-garde issue or individual was she especially insightful or original. Nor did her writings have identifiable influence upon successors doing innovative work or even writing about it. Indeed, all of it was formally quite conventional and intellectually constrained, even when sometimes pretending to be avant-garde (or promoted as such), all of which is unfortunate, because her effort reflects a seriousness and ambition that, were she not misrepresented or mislaid, might have been better, if not much better, for her future status. The British analog for Sontag was the British writer Edith Sitwell (1887–1964), who was likewise tall and photogenic.

SOULELLIS, PAUL (23 February 1968) As a major book-artist more prodigious than most, he has published in a variety of formats. Weymouths (2012), his masterpiece, is a portrait of a British town in twelve volumes. Some of his other books, mostly selfpublished, run 530 pages while others have less than ten. Some are printed on quality paper; others on newsprint. Some are small in format; others, large. While some are printed with a finite number of copies, others are available (theoretically unlimited) ON DEMAND. Some Soulellis books are physical; others, virtual. He also founded Library of the Printed Web, “a physical archive devoted to web-to-print artists’ books, zines and other printout matter,” which is kind of an ASSEMBLING. The book completely reprinting from its pages (2017) becomes a rich guide to avant-garde publishing new in the second decade of the 21st century..

This is a useful critical concept, initiated in 1945 by the scholar-critic Joseph Frank (1918–2013), to identify a major formal difference between 19th-century literature and certain major modern works. Whereas the former favored linear structures, the latter offered repetitions of elements that had to be connected across space, rather than through linear time. Therefore, a narrative does not move from A to B but through, say, A1, A2, B1, A3, B2, etc., to establish intermittent connections over pages. The epitome for Joseph Frank was DJUNA BARNES’s Nightwood. Like all good critical concepts, Spatial Form facilitates understanding not only the Barnes masterpiece but many other avantgarde narratives. An independent critic in 1945, Frank later earned a doctorate and became a Princeton professor who produced a prodigious multi-volumed biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1979, 1987, 1988, 1996, 2002) that was later abridged into a single huge book (2009).

SPECTACLES (GLASSES) (??) Credit whoever(s) invented and developed the process of grinding glass and then clear hard plastic to aid human vision, because for nearly all of us the processes of looking at art, as well as reading about it, would be impossible without them. One later development was vision aids that could be set directly on the eyeballs and are thus called contact lenses. While enhancing appearance for some people, these fail to hide unsightly “bags” that, especially in older people, develop directly under eyes and are sometimes hidden behind lower eyeglass frames. Another change came with tinted lenses that offered protection against sunlight’s bright rays. For reading and viewing art, however, the latter’s use is limited. Nonetheless, honor Saint(s) Spectacles, whoever she or he was, daily.

SPECTACLES (PERFORMANCE) (forever)

390 • SPEECH-SINGING This is an honorific for extravagant live performance customarily involving many people and more than one traditional art medium. To me, grand opera at its grandest is spectacle; so are most circuses and the great outdoor sports events. Among contemporary PERFORMANCE groups few have been as consistently spectacular as the French-Canadian CIRQUE DE SOLEIL, which has long been based in Nevada’s LAS VEGAS, which is itself a unique spectacle. Include here the Oberammergau Passion Play (1634) performed for centuries in a Bavarian Village, the “symphonic dramas” that the American playwright PAUL GREEN wrote for several southern states, and the Mormon pageant at Hill Comorah annually on Highway 21 between Manchester and Palmyra, New York. My own considered opinion holds that the greatest American theater is not literary, on the Anglo-European model, but performance epitomized by spectacle. So critically “underground” is this highly visible high art that, oddly, no American magazines or newspapers review it regularly (though I for one have more than once offered to do so).

and took his mother’s surname. Though a tall man, he initially mastered classical dance, becoming a male lead for the dance company at the State Opera of Bern. After staging avant-garde plays, he connected with FLUXUS in the late 1950s. In 1959 he founded Editions MAT (Multiplication d’Art Transformable), which produced three-dimensional objects for collectors. In the early 1960s he began tableau-pièges, sometimes called snare-paintings in English, where he took objects found on a table, affixed them to a backboard, and then mounted them on a wall, amusingly making the horizontal vertical. His chapbook Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard (1962, Anecdoted Topography of Chance) provided a text for EMMETT WILLIAMS and then others to re-anecdote, so to speak, in English. As later Spoerri works have focused upon food, he once fronted a restaurant wittily called Eat Art. Speaking English though he does as well as any other Swiss met by me, Anglo-American institutions haven’t much consumed him. Daniel Spoerri from A to Z (1991), an incomparably rich double-columned small-print dictionary published in Italy in English, verges on Jewish hagiography.

SPEECH-SINGING

SPOOKY, DJ

(1897, aka speech-song, sprechgesang, sprechstimme)

(6 September 1970; b. Paul Dennis Miller)

Extending the earlier use of recitative, which characterized spoken words in an operatic context, this epithet refers to vocalizations, customarily expressionistic, between speech and song. First used by Englebert Humperdinck (1854–1921) in an 1897 opera, it was strikingly developed by ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, especially in his Gurrelieder (1911), Die glückliche Hand (1910–13), Pierrot lunaire (1912), Die Jakobsleiter (1917) Moses und Aron (1932), and other pieces. For alternative musical notation, Schoenberg would use the letter X on a note stem, thus programming a uniquely modern sound. The music writer PAUL GRIFFITHS thinks Alban Berg developed the earlier departure by introducing “half sung” between Sprechgesang and song and that Pierre Boulez has refined the concept by requiring “spoken intonation at the indicated pitch” (italics mine).

Coming of cultural age in the early 1990s, Miller assimilated the technique of SAMPLING that was developed in electronic instruments and made it his esthetic. Essentially, bits are drawn out of extant materials and then enhanced and mixed with other samples. Developed initially in music, which Spooky has produced, the technique could be extended into the other arts. This Spooky has done, drawing upon contemporary continental philosophy, which he learned in college, producing books along with CDs and negotiating the possibly resistant ART WORLD with enviable skill. Much as he cultivates an African-American appearance, little in Spooky’s art reflects such particular origins. To his basic pseudonym, he sometimes adds: “That Subliminal Kid.”

SPOERRI, DANIEL

(23 July 1954, b. Ellen F. Steinberg)

(27 March 1930; b. Daniel Isaac Feinstein) One of the great European avant-garde careers began in Romania before he immigrated with his Swiss mother to neutral Switzerland during World War II

SPRINKLE, ANNIE

After several years as a pornography professional and sometime sex worker, she fell under the influence of a Dutch anarchist previously known for subversive radio events, Willem de Ridder (1939). Her unprecedented move came from exhibiting not just her naked body,

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which many did after 1970 or so, but her inner cervix, inviting audiences to inspect it with a speculum and a flashlight, reflecting to some people her earlier professional experience and to others the demystification of the female body. Offensive this was, not only to prudes but even to C(ynthia) Carr (1950), otherwise a positive PERFORMANCE reviewer, who wrote memorably: “But to look inside someone’s body is to see too much. Sprinkle had gone beyond nakedness to supernakedness that transcends sexuality: body interiors aren’t sexy.” True perhaps, even if “too much” is not much, but so what? Attuned to artistic lingo, she (or her manager) called her 1991 touring show “Annie Sprinkle – Post Porn Modernist.” Enterprising as well, Sprinkle published books and made films about herself, one of them explicitly titled Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle (1981). She called herself “a sex-positive feminist,” which is an epithet more persuasive to some than to others, and portrayed female orgasms as a quasi-spiritual experience. As a porn performer, Sprinkle was one of many; as a PERFORMANCE artist, she was original and unique.

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STEIN, GERTRUDE (3 February 1874–27 July 1946) Stein was, simply, the Great American Person-ofAvant-Garde Letters in that she produced distinguished work in poetry as well as prose, theater as well as criticism, nearly all of it unconventional, if not decidedly avant-garde. Stein could not write ordinary sentences if she tried, for, though her diction is mundane and her vocabulary nearly always accessible, her sentence structures are not. One early development, evident in Three Lives (1909, though drafted around 1904), was the shifting of syntax, so that parts of a sentence appear in unusual places. These shifts not only repudiate the conventions of syntactical causality, but also introduce dimensions of subtlety and accuracy. Instead of saying “someone is alive,” Stein writes, “Anyone can be a living one,” the present participle literally dramatizing the process of living. It is clear that two Gertrude Steins inhabit American literature’s canon. Those who prefer Three Lives and the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas tend to dismiss as “incomprehensible junk” an oeuvre that I find the richest experimental writing ever done by an

STANKIEWICZ, RICHARD (18 October 1922–27 March 1983) Stankiewicz is generally reputed to be the first to weld SCULPTURE together out of the lost junk of the industrial environment, preceding John CHAMBERLAIN’s assemblies of wrecked automobile parts by ten years. Through his use of industrial materials and techniques beginning in the mid-1950s, Stankiewicz became a direct descendant of ALEXANDER CALDER and DAVID SMITH. But, unlike them both, he did not polish and refine the look of his metal forms. His rusted and ruined pieces of broken machinery, pots, pulleys, scrap iron, gears, and chains retain their rude appearance; they brandish their corrosion. Even so, Stankiewicz’s completion of a mere 300 or so sculptures does more than reflect back to us the degradation and decimation of the world of the machine, or imply a critique of consumerism, as do the sculptures of Chamberlain. Stankiewicz’s creations animate the mechanical world. Playing with it and making it play, they conjure the discarded garbage of the machine era so that it may prance, posture, and loom – as if the industrial landscape were a fairyland, and the discarded materials of mechanization had collected together as goblins, trolls, mythical kings, and queens. —Mark Daniel Cohen

Figure 17 Gertrude Stein sitting on a sofa in her Paris studio. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540.

392 • STEIN, GERTRUDE American. Several decades after Stein’s death, even generations after it was written, much of this writing is not understood, is not taught in the universities, and is not even in print. In the unabridged, 925-page The Making of Americans (1926; first drafted around 1906–08, well before the innovative novels of JAMES JOYCE and WILLIAM FAULKNER), Stein developed what subsequently became her most notorious device – linguistic repetition. To be precise, she repeats certain key words or phrases within otherwise different clauses and sentences, so that even though the repetitions are never exact, this repeated material comes to dominate the entire paragraph or section, often becoming the primary cohesive force within an otherwise diffuse passage. As Stein neglected subject, setting, anecdote, conflict, analysis, and many other conventional elements, style became the dominant factor in her writing, more important than “theme” or “character.” Freed from conventional syntax (and the Aristotelian principles informing it), Stein was able to explore the possibilities of not just one but several kinds of alternative English. Having worked with accretion and explicitness, as well as syntactical transpositions, she then experimented with ellipses and economy; having written about experience with many more words than usual, she tried to write with far, far fewer. In Tender Buttons (1914), for instance, her aim was the creation of texts that described a thing without mentioning it by name. Other prose pieces by Stein have as their real theme, their major concern, kinds of coherence established within language itself: “Able there to ball bawl able to call and seat a tin a tin whip with a collar”; or, “Appeal, a peal, laugh, hurry merry, good in night, rest stole.” The unifying forces in such sentences are stressed sounds, rhythms, alliterations, rhymes, textures, and consistencies in diction – linguistic qualities other than subject and syntax; and, even when divorced from semantics, these dimensions of prose can affect readers. After experimenting with prolix paragraphs, Stein then made fictions out of abbreviated notations, such as these from “The King of Something” in Geography and Plays (1922): PAGE XVI. Did you say it did. PAGE XVIII. Very likely I missed it. PAGE XIX Turn turn. Not only does such compression (along with the omission of page XVII) represent a radical revision

of narrative scale, but writings like these also realize the French Symbolists’ theoretical ideal of a completely autonomous language – creating a verbal reality apart from extrinsic reality. However, whereas the Symbolists regarded language as the top of the iceberg, revealing only part of the underlying meaning, Stein was primarily concerned with literature’s surfaces, asking her readers to pay particular attention to words, rather than to the content and the motives that might lie behind them. What you read is most of what there is. Stein’s plays consist primarily of prose passages that are sometimes connected to characters (and other times are not). Only occasionally are characters identified at the beginning of the text, while the customarily concise texts rarely include stage directions of any kind. Stein was not adverse to having “Act II” follow “Act III,” which had followed a previous “Act II.” There is typically nothing in her scenarios about tone, pace, costumes, decor, or any other theatrical specifics – all of which are thus necessarily left to the interpretation of the plays’ directors. Because scripts like these are simply not conducive to conventional realistic staging, most directors have favored highly spectacular, sensorially abundant productions that incorporate music and dance, in sum exemplifying Stein’s idea of theater as an art of sight and sound. Stein’s essays were also unlike anything written before in that vein. In discussing a particular subject, she avoided the conventions of exposition, such as example and elaboration, in favor of accumulated disconnected details and miscellaneous insights, often frustrating those readers requiring accessible enlightenment. Stein’s reputation for distinguished prose has obscured her poetry, which was likewise concerned with alternative forms, beginning with acoherence, especially in her monumental “Stanzas in Meditation,” and including the horizontal MINIMALISM of oneword lines: There Why There Why There Able Idle Stein frequently boasted that in writing she was “telling what she knew,” but most of her knowledge concerned alternative writing. It is indicative that the principal theme of her essays, reiterated as much by example as by explanation, is the inventions possible to an author accepting the esthetic autonomy of English.

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STELLA, FRANK (12 May 1936) Hailed before he turned 25, Stella’s early canvases consist of regularly patterned geometric shapes painted with evenly applied strokes out to the canvas’s edge, so that the viewer cannot distinguish any one figure from the background, or form from content, or one image from any larger shape. These faintly mechanical paintings depend upon the appreciation of such strictly visual virtues as the relation of one color to another, the solidity of the geometric shapes, and the potential complexity of elemental simplicity, as well as Stella’s decidedly cerebral deductive solution to certain problems in painting’s recent history. ‘Tis said decades later that their appearance in a 1959 MoMA group exhibition prepared many minds to accept post-expressionist art. As the curator William Rubin wrote in 1970: “They seemed to many to have come virtually from nowhere, to have no stylistic heritage, and to represent a rejection of everything that painting seemed to be.” In 1960, the 24-year-old artist told an undergraduate art-school audience: I had to do something about relational painting, i.e., the balancing of the various parts of the painting with and against one another. The obvious answer was symmetry – make it the same all over. The question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth. A symmetrical image or configuration placed on an open ground is not balanced out in the illusionistic space. The solution I arrived at – and there are probably quite a few, although I know of only one other, color density – forces illusionistic space out of the painting at a constant rate by a regulated pattern. While respecting his initial achievements I didn’t notice his innovations during the 1970s as well as the critic Carter Ratcliff (1941). “With paper, felt, and painted canvas pasted to stretched canvas, he recapulated the geometries of the visionary modernists,” Ratcliff writes in his book The Fate of a Gesture (1996). “Stella exchanged canvas for wood; for paper and felt, he substituted more building materials – Masonite and Homasote. His collages were turning into low-relief sculptures.” Frank Stella’s later produce seems slighter; his activity less focused. In Klaus Honnef’s Contemporary Art (1992) is a two-page spread of works from 1986 to 1987. The earlier is an abstract TONDO painting resembling his art of two decades before, while the later incorporates different abstract patterns. Having begun as

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an artist who knew his one own truth, he later made work reflecting many other truths; so that Stella didn’t “sell out” as much as Sell Lots, perhaps more than any other American artist of his generation (and thus two decades older than, say, Jeff Koons [1955]).

STELLA, JOSEPH (13 June 1877–5 November 1946; b. Giuseppe Michele S.) Born in Italy but immigrating to America before he turned 20, he became for his generation the epitome of a visual artist with one foot in America and the other in Europe. As a young artist in the USA, he was a remarkable draftsman whose early drawings of Manhattan slum life were praised as “Rembrandtesque.” Returning to his native Italy in 1909, he connected to the newly development art movement called FUTURISM that influenced his future work. While in Paris, he patronized GERTRUDE STEIN and Alice B. Toklas’s salon, where they “found the big and boisterous painter rather like Apollinaire; they both had a fund of sarcastic wit that was frequently turned on their hosts.” Returning to New York in 1913, Stella gave European Futurism an American cast with his painting Battle of Lights, Coney Island (1920), which generated much controversy at the time. Stella’s other NYC paintings likewise reflected Futurism in glorifying the products of new technologies. In his paintings about the Brooklyn Bridge (1919–20, 1939), as well as his masterful New York Interpreted (The Voice of the City) (1922) with five panels measuring 23 feet long and over 8 feet high, he discovered attractive spiritual auras in urban geometry. One misfortune of his career was that certain fashions died before he did, though decades later I for one treasure Joseph Stella’s best art. The later American painter also surnamed Stella is not a relation.

STEPPING (1900s) This is the favored term for an African-American innovative PERFORMANCE in which virtuosic dancers produce complex rhythms, often syncopated, a cappella, so to speak – solely through their hands and feet, sometimes adding spoken words. Dating back to the early 19th century, reflecting disciplines developed in the slave ships coming from Africa to America, Stepping influenced Negro-College MARCHING BANDS,

394 • STERN, GERD African-American tap dancers such as the NICHOLAS BROTHERS, and such popular Rhythm & Blues groups as the Temptations (1960–) and the Four Tops (1953–). It may (or may not) be related to another innovative a cappella choreography called curiously Double Dutch in which girls, usually African-American, leap stylishly between two long simultaneously spinning jump ropes while chanting “One boppity-bop, two boppity-bop,” etc., until tripped up. Double Dutch has reportedly become popular elsewhere in the world. Neither form of dance is easily learned; both require considerable practice.

STERN, GERD See USCO.

STEVENS, FRANCES SIMPSON (1894–1976) About some American artists too much is known; about others, too little. After graduating from Dana Hall, a girls’ prep school in Wellesley, MA, Stevens took a summer painting class in which she produced The Roof Tops of Spain (1912) that was included the following year in the legendary ARMORY SHOW, though she was still officially a teenager. That prompted Stevens to leave America for Europe where she became the only American of any gender included in the Esposizione Libera Futurista Internazionale (1915). Returning to America, Stevens married in Washington, DC, a Russian Prince in 1919 and sadly disappeared from the ART WORLD. The only work by her known to survive, Dynamic Velocity of Interborough Rapid Transit Power Station (1915), suggests, along with reproductions of works since gone, other paintings that might have been equally strong. Consider that, given so few surviving examples, she represents an opportunity for an adept forger to “discover” a century later an oeuvre attributable to her.

STEWARD, D. E. (29 April 1936; b. David Eyre S.) Much as the visual artist ON KAWARA painted the date of every day in his life for more than fifty years, so has this American writer made jottings, lots of notes no more than a few lines long – in sum, superficially digressive, devoid of full stops/periods, mostly

elegantly written. The theme is his highly personal perceptions reflecting a wealth of experience, including his readings and his travels. Initially written as collections for each month, these appeared regularly in literary magazines where, as Chroma, they acquired a growing reputation warranting their definitive appearance in five thick volumes (2017). May I venture that decades hence Steward’s mammoth Chroma will be examined closely, as closely as the Bible or any other literary classic has been studied.

STIEGLITZ, ALFRED (1 January 1864–13 July 1946) Had Stieglitz not existed when he did, the development of more than one American art would have been retarded. As an art dealer at 291 Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan during the first two decades of the 20th century, he exhibited initially photographs and then other avant-garde visual art, first European, eventually American, incidentally elevating the esthetic status of fine photography. His gallery presented the first American exhibitions of HENRI MATISSE, FRANCIS PICABIA, and CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, in addition to introducing GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, before she became Steiglitz’s wife, and MARSDEN HARTLEY, among many others. To the last artist/writer, 291 was “the largest small room of its kind in the world.” From his gallery Steiglitz published the periodical Camera Work (1903–17), which included not only photography and reviews of the visual arts but advanced American writing, such as one of the first appearances of GERTRUDE STEIN in print. Stieglitz also edited 291 (1915–16), which represented New York DADA. After the building at 291 Fifth (between 30th and 31st Streets) was torn down in 1917, Steiglitz’s work as cultural impresario continued in other venues to his death three decades later. As a practicing photographer, Stieglitz imitated various painterly styles, including Hudson River Impressionism (in a famous photograph of lower Manhattan behind the East River) and several kinds of abstraction. It is scarcely surprising that the “The Complete Illustrations 1903–1917” from Camera Work should come from a publisher based in Germany.

STEINBERG, LEO (9 July 1920–13 March 2011) At the close reading of visual art, at looking deeply and thoroughly, he was the master, able to talk succinctly

STOCKHAUSEN, KARLHEINZ •

about a single classic painting for more than one hour, relating significant details to each other and then formal observations along with personal reflections, all of them reflecting Steinberg’s hard-earned insights into identifying, or perhaps just imagining, an artist’s intelligent choices made long ago. Tour de force is a superlative that scarcely measures his brilliant presentations. (The only artist I’ve ever seen talk at such length with such detail about his own paintings was PAUL LAFFOLEY.) Steinberg’s respect for the higher intelligence in weighty painting is reflected in his stunning adage: “Anything anybody can do, painting does better.” His 1963 long essay on JASPER JOHNS, then still in his early thirties, established the latter’s reputation for higher artistic intelligence as nothing else could before (or since). Later Steinberg typically identified significance in the various portrayals of the infant Christ’s genitals. The penetrating theme of Steinberg’s 1962 essay on “Contemporary Art and the Plight of the Public” establishes, contrary to myth, that the major opposition to avant-garde work comes not from the general public, which doesn’t care, but from established artists, who do. True. His awesome presentations at the New York Studio School I personally treasured.

STOCKHAUSEN, KARLHEINZ (22 August 1928–5 December 2007) Stockhausen was at once the most successful and thus powerful of contemporary composers and, not surprisingly, probably the most problematic as well. His success is easy to measure – decades of support from the strongest European music publisher and the strongest German record label, not to mention the incomparably high-minded German radio stations. He received commissions from orchestras and opera houses all over the world; he had been a visiting professor in America and, as NICOLAS SLONIMSKY put it, “a lecturer and master of ceremonies at avant-garde meetings all over the world.” No composer younger than IGOR STRAVINSKY was as successful at getting the world’s major music institutions to invest in him. As a performer, he played only his own work, which is to say that sponsors inviting him knew in advance they wouldn’t get music by anyone else. If only to keep his patrons happy, Stockhausen produced a huge amount of stuff, often accompanied by willful declarations of embarrassing pretension. He became accustomed to charging fees that were high, if not ridiculously challenging, continually on the verge of pricing himself out of a career.

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The history of Stockhausen-envy and Stockhausenmockery is nearly as long as his career. I remember hearing, as early as 1962, the joke that “When Karlheinz gets up in the morning, he thinks he invented the light bulb.” The problems are harder to define: Egregiously uneven, his works often fall short of Stockhausen’s announced intentions, because they were not as inventive or pioneering as he claimed. Indeed, they were often patently derivative, of old ideas as well as new, and sometimes opportunistic in combining contrary esthetics. PAUL GRIFFITHS writes that “Stockhausen increasingly found ways of mediating between polar extremes, [in] his pursuit of unity in diversity,” which may be a rationale for what strikes others as opportunism. Stockhausen composed in various distinctive ways, with a succession of governing ideas. He was initially a serial composer concerned with extending SCHOENBERG’s compositional innovation beyond pitch to duration, timbre, and dynamics, to which Stockhausen added stage directions, distributing his performers over different parts of the concert hall. Gruppen (1959), for instance, requires three chamber orchestras and three conductors beating different tempi. Stockhausen meanwhile became involved with ELECTRONIC MUSIC producing in Der Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) an early classic of vocal processing that succeeded on disk, even though two-track stereo recording compromised its initial form of having five synchronized monophonic tapes resound through five loudspeakers surrounding the audience. By the 1960s, Stockhausen was incorporating various radical live human sounds (including screaming, stamping, whispering, whistling) that perhaps reflected new electronic possibilities. Later, with Stimmung (1967), Stockhausen appropriated ALEATORY esthetics by having dancers activate eggshells placed on the floor or piano wires strung across the stage. Kurzwellen (1969) depends upon sounds inadvertently discovered on shortwave radios at the time of the performance; in the current age of digital radio tuners, which are designed to exclude acoustic fuzz coming from unfocused reception and the static between stations, Kurzwellen must necessarily be performed “on original instruments.” With Hymnen (1967–69), Stockhausen adopted COLLAGE, producing a spectacular pastiche of national anthems that is, depending upon one’s taste and experience, either the last great musical assemblage ever or an example of how collage, the great early 20th-century innovation, has degenerated into an expired form. (I used to hold the second position on Hymnen until moving closer to the first.) By the

396 • STOKOWSKI, LEOPOLD late 1970s, the composer had appropriated Wagnerian operatic conceptions with Light: The 7 Days of the Week (1981–88), which is a cycle of seven operas, one for each day of the week (with no sabbatical). I could go on; he went on, for instance sending around the world fliers offering in the late 1990s a weeklong summer school, so to speak, on his own turf in Kürtin, outside Köln, with both performances and “courses” about his various works for 495 DM (or $330) payable to Stockhausen Stiftung fur Musik. Extravagant claims often seem a cover for an awareness of deficiencies that are identified by others. In JOHN CAGE’s classic quip: “He must have some talent. Some of his kids became musicians.” Though several books of Stockhausen’s miscellaneous writings have appeared in German, only one has been translated into English, curiously demonstrating that even careers of great success include dimensions of minor failure.

STOKOWSKI, LEOPOLD (18 April 1882–13 September 1977) Of all the famous 20th-century orchestral conductors, Stokowski, more than any other, was predisposed not only to new music but new technologies for both the production and reproduction of music. From his earliest years, initially with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Stokowski presented avant-garde compositions, often addressing the audience about them in advance, including both ALEXANDER SCRIABIN’s Divine Poem and ARNOLD SCHOENBERG’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 in 1915–16 and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1917–21) in 1931. Stokowski premiered EDGARD VARÈSE’s Amériques in 1926 and Alan Hovhaness’s (1911–2000) Mysterious Mountain in 1955, among many others. One astounding figure attributed to him is nearly a hundred American or world premieres during his twenty-three years at the helm of the Philadelphians. Extravagant by nature, Stokowski once engaged 950 singers, 110 orchestral musicians, and eight soloists to play Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (“of a Thousand”). He scheduled over five hundred performances of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. For the American premiere of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, he required eighty preparatory rehearsals and sixty stage rehearsals. When audience noises disturbed his performance of ANTON VON WEBERN’s sole symphony, Stokowski stopped conducting, walked off the stage, and then returned to repeat the work from its beginning. He embarrassed potential coughers by having his orchestra cough on

cue and mocked latecomers by having some of his musicians arrive late on stage in breathless haste. Stokowski was the first conductor to use a THEREMIN to boost the orchestra’s bass section. He starred in WALT DISNEY’s FANTASIA (1941). The only current American conductor to do as well by contemporary orchestral music is Dennis Russell Davis (1944), who has worked mostly, to no surprise, in Germany.

STRAUSS, RICHARD (11 June 1864–8 September 1949) This Strauss was a stolid German composer best known for his popular operas and symphonies; but toward the end of his life, he composed a work so original and transcendant that it alone places him in this book. Composed as World War II was coming to an end, commissioned by PAUL SACHER, Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945) ranks among the most remarkable summas, where an older composer, then in his eighties, takes his art to higher level. Scored for a chamber orchestra of only 23 strings, typically lasting less than thirty minutes, attenuated in tempo, its tone is profoundly dark, implicitly about the evils of World War II that he spent mostly in Nazi-occupied Austria, its title acknowledging negative changes to be overcome. Once heard, Metamorphosen asks to be reheard, which is, of course, more possible in recordings than in live performance, where it becomes the sort of piece that must close a concert because nothing can follow it.

STRAVINSKY, IGOR (17 June 1882–6 April 1971) Like the New York ARMORY SHOW of 1913, the Paris premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring; Vesna svyashchennaya in Russian) in the same year, with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky (c. 1889–1950), became a turning point in the development of the modernist arts. Outraged public reaction at the premiere – including catcalls, hissing, and a near riot in the audience – helped rally an audience predisposed toward the avant-garde, the occasion also becoming, for critics sympathetic to the new, a standard against which subsequent avantgarde art could be measured. Fortunate to be part of SERGE DIAGHILEV’s Ballets Russes, newly established in Paris in 1910, Stravinsky scored three of the dance company’s first important works: L’Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird, 1910), Petrouchka (1911), and, of course, Sacre. Two hallmarks

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of Stravinsky’s ballet scores were a reliance on folk melodies and harmonies, often sounding remarkably dissonant and strange to Western ears unfamiliar with Slavic traditions, and then heavy, shifting rhythmic patterns. After working sporadically with Diaghilev through the early twenties, Stravinsky turned his back on innovation, forging a “neo-classical” style that seems in retrospect a proto-POSTMODERNISM, paralleling the return of balletic choreography in the works of GEORGE BALANCHINE and classical literary ideals in the poetry of T. S. ELIOT. Making another radical shift in the 1950s, after the death of his archcompetitor ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, Stravinsky appropriated SERIAL MUSIC, always for pieces short in duration, nevertheless depending, as in his earlier music upon involving patterns, cycles, and other SIGNATURE moves. A smugly Olympian artist, he began in his late seventies to publish in collaboration with his American acolyte, Robert Craft (1923–2015), a series of “conversations,” books from supposedly reputable publishers, in which the master is portrayed suspiciously as speaking better, wittier English than anyone else actually heard from him. (Whereas some other elderly artists have younger female muses to reinvigorate their work, Stravinsky, securely married, had Craft.) Late in his long life, Stravinsky, like his near-contemporary PABLO PICASSO, lived off his reputation as a sometime innovator, rather than continuing to produce avant-garde work. Again much like his contemporary Picasso, Stravinsky developed the knack of earning the highest sums available during their long lifetimes, to the amusement and consternation of their colleagues. —with Richard Carlin

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near-vertical, so that two other dancers can hurl their bodies at the planks that then fall backwards to be picked up again, while the second pair of performers scamper off the mats. The process is repeated with other dancers. The piece’s accompanying music, the entire background sound, is the amplified noise of performers and boards; Matthew Ostrovsky’s sound design, here and elsewhere, enhances the impression of violence. This piece customarily runs seven minutes. In Look Up (1993), three harnessed dancers are suspended by ropes from the ceiling against a wall whose surface they bounce across. Another Streb classic, Breakthru (1997), is very brief, as a dancer propels himself through a pane of suspended glass, falling to the floor milliseconds before the shards do. “Don’t blink,” Streb advises. “It happens in a split-second.” Breakthru especially must be seen to be believed. Up (1995) is performed on a large, world-class trampoline between high ledges on the two short sides. The dancers jump onto the apparatus in various configurations, from various angles, and then leap into the air, sometimes repeatedly, before exiting onto side mats. The ways in which they fall onto the trampoline, often in pairs or trios (which is contrary to solo trampoline technique), is continually inventive and kinetically striking. All the action takes place in the air, illustrating Streb’s radical contention that “returning to the floor is the biggest obstacle to the advancement of action. I like to break Newton’s laws a lot.” Up and Breakthru, even more than Surface, are about trajectories, which is the ultimate theme of Streb’s dance – not movements, not poses, not couplings, not elegance, not stories, not even steps to accompany preexisting music. Nearly all her dance

STREB, ELIZABETH (23 February 1950) The central, radical idea of Streb’s choreography is the use of props not as extensions of a performer’s body, as ALWIN NIKOLAIS used them, but as resistances. So her dancers collide with walls, fall face down onto mats, perform inside boxes in which they can’t stand up, and rebound off trampolines. Streb’s dance is very physical, to be sure, but it’s also inventive and engaging as choreography. Her company has performed at such venues as the Coney Island boardwalk and the mall outside the Smithsonian as well as theaters and museums. One classic Streb piece is Surface (1993), in which two 100-pound, door-sized planks of wood lie on a padded floor. Two dancers raise the planks up to be

Figure 18 STREB Extreme Action Company performing TILT at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, November 2016. Photo by Ralph Alswang.

398 • STROBE LIGHT (and all the sound) results from executing a physical task, such as falling, tumbling, or colliding; key terms are velocity and impact. In this emphasis on trajectories, Streb’s dance resembles the circus – not only the three-ring Barnum but the more sophisticated CIRQUE DU SOLEIL. Two differences between the touring circus and her Ringside is that Streb’s performances are more austere, especially in costuming and lighting, and Streb doesn’t mind revealing, initially through sound, that her performers strain and sweat. Her pieces are more inventive than gymnastics, which typically comprise a limited set of moves performed ad nauseam.

STROBE LIGHT (1931-) The strobe, as it is commonly called, is an intensely bright, rapidly flashing light that, when directed at a moving object, appears to freeze its movement, often in a succession of postures. Invented by HAROLD EDGERTON, originally for the industrial purpose of examining the movement of machine parts, strobe lighting has since the 1930s enabled certain photographers to represent within a single image a sequence of moments occurring within a continuous movement. Aside from Edgerton, an early master was the Albanian-American Gjon Mili (1904–84), whose photographs regularly appeared in Life magazine. The strobe also became popular in the 1960s in some MIXED-MEANS theatrical performances and even social dance palaces (aka discos). The first strobes featured a revolving disk that passed in front of the light source; one advance in strobe design came from the development of electronic switching, which enabled the strobe user to adjust the flicker to speeds as quick as onemillionth of a second. Artists as various as USCO and WEN-YING TSAI incorporated strobes into their work; one sculpture by the latter focuses a strobe light on a shower to create the illusion of water dripping upwards.

STROHEIM, ERICH VON (22 September 1885–12 May 1957; b. Erich Oswald S., not Erich Hans Carl Maria Stroheim von Nordenwall, as was sometimes claimed) Born in Vienna, the son of a Jewish hatter from Prussian Silesia who had settled in Vienna (and was not aristocratic), Stroheim emigrated to America sometime between 1906 and 1909 and took odd jobs before

arriving around 1914 in Hollywood, where he soon began to work for and with D. W. GRIFFITH as an actor and assistant director, staring as a prototypical Prussian with a monocle highlighting his autocratic manner. Once World War I ended, as Stroheim’s acting opportunities declined, he turned to directing, beginning with Blind Husbands (1919), for which he also served as writer, art director, cinematographer, and actor. Stroheim’s great innovation as a director was the very long film. Extending the departure of D. W. GRIFFITH, whose Intolerance (1918) ran over three hours, Stroheim produced in Greed (1923–25) a film whose original version ran for several hours. Adapting Frank Norris’s brutally realistic novel McTeague (1899), Stroheim wrote at the time, I felt that after the last war [World War I], the motion picture going public had tired of the cinematographic “chocolate eclairs” which had been stuffed down their throats, and which had in a large degree figuratively ruined their stomachs with this overdose of saccharosein pictures. Now, I felt, they were ready for a large bowl of plebeian but honest “corned beef and cabbage.” As an avatar of epic-length epic films, Stroheim preceded LENI RIEFENSTAHL, ABEL GANCE, and ANDY WARHOL, among others. My hunch is that Stroheim learned from such literary examples as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the esthetic advantages to be gained from making a book bigger (in this case, longer) than normal. Needless to say, perhaps, once Stroheim finished Greed, his backers demanded that the director reduce forty-two reels to twenty-four, which they then felt was still too long for commercial release. When Stroheim refused to make additional cuts, the moneymen hired some hacks to reduce the footage first to eighteen reels and then to ten reels, which, when finally screened, got mixed notices. The cinema lexicographer Ephraim Katz (1932–92) writes that those “who had seen Stroheim’s forty-two-reel original version acclaimed it one of the great masterpieces of cinema art. The complete version is said to be preserved in the MGM vaults, but it hasn’t been seen by anyone in several decades.” From time to time, a three-hour version of Greed appears on American television, its stark imagery, especially of people in the desert, suggesting still what must have been a much greater work. Whereas a later Stroheim film, Queen Kelly (1928), was never finished, another sequel, Walking Down Broadway (1932–33), was never released. He returned to his earlier career as an on-screen Teutonic

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“You-Love-to-Hate.” Given the discriminatory mechanisms of critical art history, it is scarcely surprising that his bosses are forgotten while Stroheim is remembered. More importantly, the complete shooting script of Greed survives as a book that is a kind of conceptual art suggesting through words alone an esthetic experience that is otherwise physically unavailable.

STRUCTURALISM (1900s) A kind of critical thinking, originating in continental Europe (and thus not in England or the USA), supposedly examining the “meaning of signs, to explore the rules of different sign systems,” often producing obvious results – this seemed intellectually avant-garde to some in the late mid-20th century. Among its advocates were a multilingual, multidisciplinary crew including the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908– 2009), the Russian linguistics prof Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), and the Parisian literary critic Roland Barthes (1915–80). When structuralists’ capacity for generating fresh (if any) insights declined, if not evaporated, some proposed, you guessed it, a post-structuralism that claimed that these sign systems are not closed, as previously argued, but open. A post-post never materialized; it rarely does.

STURTEVANT, ELAINE (23 August 1924–7 May 2014; b. Elaine Frances Horan) Friendly with JASPER JOHNS and ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG in the 1950s, when they were all unknown, Sturtevant a decade later began to make by her own hand fairly exact replicas (and only replicas) of works by famous, mostly living artists. Among the modern masters whose work she replicated were MARCEL DUCHAMP, ROY LICHTENSTEIN, FRANK STELLA, ROBERT MORRIS, and James Rosenquist (1933–2017), sometimes with their cooperation (which is to say that they lent her work to be copied). Sturtevant customarily signed her replicas, further insisting that they differ from the originals, although in ways not immediately discernible. In a New York City exhibition in the mid-1980s, she showed one and only one replica of several contemporaries – one Stella, one Duchampian urinal – thus implicitly impersonating a collector proud of her masterpieces. While each was technically a forgery, a room full of such replicas represented an esthetic vision. Few

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exhibitions ever raised so many substantial questions about esthetic/financial value, authorship, professional integrity, and, yes, originality. (The obvious paradox is that such a meticulous duplicator can be so innovative.) Her work had museum shows, mostly in Europe, where she mostly resided. Not unlike other work so strong, Sturtevant’s has had its imitators, such as SHERRIE LEVINE (1947), who worked mostly with photographs (a medium in which imitation is easier to do), and MIKE BIDLO (1953), about whom PETER FRANK summarizes, “Bidlo’s work transforms the fetish of originality into the fetish of replication – the oxymoronic ‘original copy’ made flesh. He has refabricated Warhols, Pollocks, Brancusis, Legers, Matisses, Kleins, Cézannes, and numerous other modern museum pieces and auction-house goodies,” but, to define his own SIGNATURE, with less technical accuracy than Sturtevant.

SUN RA (22 May 1914–30 May 1993; b. Herman Poole “Sonny” Blount) Sun Ra began his avant-garde assault upon the music of planet Earth by not being born here. He claimed that he was from Saturn and that he brought with him his Solar Arkestra, a big band/commune/experimental art collective/invading force. Their weapons were instruments called the “space gong,” the “space harp,” and the “intergalactic space organ,” among many others. The Arkestra lived together in a big house and worked together under the leadership of Sun Ra, who produced the most experimental music ever made by a “big band.” (The Arkestra’s version of Duke Ellington’s [1899–1974] “Take the ‘A’ Train” on Live at Montreux [1976] is a famous example of the big band sound pushed to its limits.) As one of the pioneers of free jazz, Sun Ra’s music provided the earliest examples of that form with a large group. At his early earthly professional beginnings, in the ’40s, Sun Ra worked as pianist and arranger with the bandleader Fletcher Henderson (1897–1952), also choreographing shows. This experience shaped his Arkestra, whose performance became a multimedia event combining music, dance, singing, light shows, and film, along with African ritual and sci-fi theatrics. Before Ken Kesey’s (1935–2001) Acid Tests and before ANDY WARHOL opened the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Sun Ra’s “theater” was “psychedelic” without drugs. On stage the band wore robes and “space” hats. Their instruments were often modified Earth tools dug up in junk shops.

400 • SUPREMATISM As an influential force in new keyboards technology, Sun Ra was early in the mid-50s at using an electric organ. Notorious for pounding across keyboard aard registers with his fists, Sun Ra was also a very controlling force in his playing; his ideas and sound set the Arkestra off, as his keyboard sculpted its “compositions” and brought the other musicians back to Earth when the piece ended. The music of Sun Ra could be characterized as free JAZZ pushed through a sort-of orchestra: driving riffs, wild soloing, and flexible movement among musicians. (Pharaoh Sanders [1940], once an influential member of the band, went on to contribute to the late work of JOHN COLTRANE.) Free jazz always had its “spiritual” side, its concentration on music as meaningful expression beyond its sound, as in Coltrane’s late spiritual search and CECIL TAYLOR’s exploration of black consciousness. Sun Ra’s music was tied up to his visionary poetry, as he included many of his own texts on his album covers. An example: “Music rushing forth like a fiery law/ Loosening the chains that bind,/ Ennobling the mind/ With all the many greater dimensions/ Of a living tomorrow.” In his essential biography of Sun Ra, John F. Szwed (1936) describes the Arkestra’s place in modern music: “Black music represented for Western music a kind of pre-electronic distortion, an irruption into the system, a breaking of the rules of musical order; later electronic distortion itself became a technological emblem of the black component of Western art.” Sun Ra was an “irruption,” a sun gone nova through jazz. —John Rocco

SUPREMATISM See MALEVICH, Kasimir.

SURPRISE In his classic essay “L’Esprit Nouveau et les Poëtes” (1917), GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE formulated this simple appreciative principle for truly avantgarde art, in French: Mais le nouveau existe bien, sans être un progrès. Il est tout dans la surprise. L’esprit nouveau est également dans la surprise. C’est ce qu’il y a en lui de plus vivant, de plus neuf. La surprise est le plus grand ressort nouveau. C’est par la surprise, par la place importante qu’il fait à la surprise que l’esprit nouveau se distingue de tous

les mouvements artistiques et littéraires qui l’ont precedé. Simply, this emphasis upon surprise makes the New Spirit unprecedented not just for poets but also for all artists. May, by extension, this principle also measure any book about avant-garde arts, including this one, now published a century later.

SURREALISM (c. 1920) I would be remiss if I did not confess my reluctance to write this entry, from a lack of sympathy for the esthetics, the art politics, and even the practitioners of organized Surrealism. Consider for the second issue the authoritarian structure that placed ANDRÉ BRETON as a kind of pope who was forever excommunicating those with whom he disagreed or those who disputed his authority. (Would such “grotesque parodies of Stalinist purges,” in Paul Mann’s phrase, have been as feasible in a Protestant culture?) The epithet “Surrealism” comes from GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE, who used it in passing in the preface to Les Mamelles de Tirésias (implicitly raising the question, whose answer is not obvious, of whether someone of his antiauthoritarian temper would have survived as a designated Surrealist had he lived into the 1920s). Surrealist art and writing purportedly depended upon the unconscious as the source of images not otherwise available – and by extension upon deranged mentality – on the assumption that surreality offered more truth and insight than social reality. Within the corpus of Surrealist art can be found the revelation of unconscious imagery analogous to automatic writing, extending from the amoeba forms of Joan Miró (1893–1983) to the EXPRESSIONISTIC calligraphy of MARK TOBEY and JACKSON POLLOCK; neatly rendered representations of hallucinations, in Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) and RENÉ MAGRITTE (1898–1967); and COLLAGES and ASSEMBLAGES of unrelated objects supposedly making a surreality apart from the quotidian norm. Perhaps the principal index of Surrealism’s general deficiencies as a POLYARTISTIC movement is the absence of Surrealist music. After 1925, the Parisian Surrealists were forever arguing over politics, and it is perhaps an index of their general stupidity that, from 1927 through the mid1930s, they officially supported the French Communist party. The Surrealists always got a lot more attention in the press than other artists, even of comparable

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presence. As the critic HENRY MCBRIDE wrote in his newspaper column in 1936, “Whatever else you may say about Surrealism it sure is a great incentive to conversation, and the choice bits you overhear are always illuminating.” Another problem is that artists unaffiliated with the group accomplished its esthetic aims better – the American Theodore Roethke (1908–63), for instance, writing dream poems far superior to those by any Surrealist, and the Greek-American LUCAS SAMARAS epitomizing Surrealist sculpture. Though some current artists and writers profess an allegiance to Surrealism, they are rarely, if ever, of the first rank. Sexist beyond belief, they barely acknowledged women, not only among themselves but those doing similar work elsewhere, so that the American publisher/writer Penelope Rosement (1942) could long afterwards compile an anthology with 97 women from 28 countries. Enough already?

SURREPTITIOUS PHOTOGRAPHY It seems that the first great advance in the art development of the technology new to the 19th century came from taking pictures of people unaware that they were being photographed. While the identity of the photographer(s) initially discovering this possibility is probably unknown, among its masters early in the 20th century was the Berliner Erich Solomon (1886–1944), who, thanks to a camera hidden on his person, was especially skilled at revealing more about public figures than they probably would have wished. Much of WEEGEE’s later achievement depends his photographing people responding to his unexpected intrusive flash bulb. One theme of CLAYTON PATTERSON’s long videotape of the Tomkins Square Police Riot (1988) is that, as his subjects don’t acknowledge the camera that he held low on his hip, they behaved authentically. The later development of miniature cameras made surreptitious photography more common, often for investigative purposes, though less artful. Curiously, little notable art has depended upon the comparable technological development of surreptitious audio recording.

SURVEILLANCE CAMERA PLAYERS (1996) This NEW YORK CITY activist-performance group, founded by Bill Brown (1959), stages plays before the surveillance cameras abundantly located in city

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subways and parks. Following in the art/political tradition of the LIVING THEATER and the Situationists, the Surveillance Camera Players aim to draw awareness to the State’s authoritarian use of technology, as well as to how acceptant society has become of being watched. The group creates an intriguing scenario because, within their single performances, are two structurally different plays with varied casts and audiences. First there is the silent performance, at times George Orwell’s 1984, acted out before the surveillance cameras. Since these cameras do not record sound, the performers use large posters in place of spoken dialog. The cast consists solely of S.C.P. actors and actresses. The primary audience are the station attendants watching on their monitors, but may also include anyone viewing on an overhead monitor. The second play is not the actual silent performance, which is difficult to follow from many perspectives, but simply the theater created by the players performing before a manned surveillance camera. Structurally it is closer to a staged happening. The field becomes the entire subway station. The cast now includes the unknowing attendants, whose observing becomes part of the performance, and upon whose act(-ions) depend whether additional cast members, such as the N.Y.P.D., will be involved. The audience includes intrigued passersby and sometimes invited guests. The actions of one become theater for another, who – simply observing – creates theater for a third. The suggestion is that at times one can simultaneously be both audience and performer, or, in this case, surveillant, and surveilled. —Douglas Puchowski

SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES (1978) As a San Francisco envelope for high-tech art, this moniker has included many individuals, groups, and machines, mostly for performances as often abroad, particularly in Asia, as in the Western United States. Its guiding guru has been Mark Pauline (1953). Oddly I’d not known about them until writing this third edition and so quote secondary sources characterizing their spectacles as “noisy, violent, and destructive” initially in the tradition of JEAN TINGUELY. Many SRL members have gone on to be involved in other avant-garde artistic projects such as the Cacophony Society, the Suicide Club, The Haters, Robochrist Industries, People Hater, Seemen,

402 • SUTHERLAND, IVAN Burning Man, and robotics projects such as Battlebots and Robot Wars. Out of such audacious monikers are (were?) rock music groups also formed.

SUTHERLAND, IVAN (16 May 1938) Early in his engineering career, while a graduate student in computer science at MIT in the middle 1960s, he developed an innovative program that he called Sketchpad, because it enabled a user, with a kind of pen extending from his hand, to draw on the face of a computer screen lines that could be combined into shapes. Additionally, these figures could be copied, moved, rotated, and resized to the pen-holder’s taste. From this invention all interactive computer graphics descend. In the late 1960s, Sutherland co-created The Sword of Damocles, which describes machines put over both eyes to create three-dimensional displays. From this technical advance came the experience of VIRTUAL REALITY.

SUVERO, MARK DI See DI SUVERO, Mark.

SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE (1973) Of all the great buildings epitomizing innovative architecture in the late 20th century, this is perhaps the single most extraordinary, not only in its visible design but in its curious construction history. Within its arched shells are several theaters, various in size, the Sydney Symphony’s Concert Hall being the largest with 2,679 seats. Its setting on a cliff facing the city’s harbor enhances the complex’s iconic presence as its country’s biggest city’s principal sign for itself, much as the BROOKLYN BRIDGE has long served New York’s second borough. From the Australian artist Claire Krouzecky (1986) comes this testimonial: “I am always struck by the beauty of the tiles that cover the roof. Like the shell of a weird creature that has emerged from the harbor, the opera house sits there glistening in the sun.” The incremental assembly of the whole epitomized additive architecture as the construction took sixteen years and the cost increased from the first budget of $AUS7 million to a whopping $AUS102 million. When

Aussie politicians refused to pay the initial architect Jørn Utzon (1918–2008) in 1966, he returned to his native Denmark, never to set foot in Australia again, raising the question of who (or what) should be credited with the completed masterpiece. Though no performance venue quite so sculpturally grand was ever built anywhere again, some of its departures, especially the lack of visible right angles, influenced later architecture by Frank Gehry (1929) and Zaha Hadad (1950–2016), among others. Nonetheless, it brought to Australia’s biggest city more cultural credibility than any amount of money could buy.

SYNAESTHESIA (1900s) Color associations with certain sounds or tonalities are common subjective phenomena. It is said that Newton chose to divide the visible spectrum into seven distinct colors by analogy with the seven degrees of the diatonic scale. Individual musicians differ greatly in associating a sound with a certain color. The most ambitious attempt to incorporate light into a musical composition was the inclusion of a projected color organ in ALEXANDER SCRIABIN’s score Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), in which the changes of instrumental coloration were to be accompanied by changing lighting in the concert hall. The most common association between tonality and color is that of C major and whiteness. It is particularly strong for pianists, for the obvious reason that the C major scale is played on white keys. However, Scriabin, who had a very strong feeling for color associations, correlated C major with red. By all conjecture, F-sharp major should be associated with black, for it comprises all five different black keys of the piano keyboard, but Scriabin associated it with bright blue and Rimsky-Korsakov with dull green. Any attempt to objectivize color associations is doomed to failure, if for no other reason than the arbitrary assignment of a certain frequency to a given note. The height of pitch rose nearly a semitone in the last century, so that the color of C would now be associated with C-sharp in relation to the old standards. Some artists have dreamed of a total synaesthesia in which not only audio-visual but tactile, gustatory, and olfactory associations would be brought into a sensual synthesis. Charles Baudelaire said: “Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.” J. K. Huysmans conjured up an organ of liqueurs. He describes it in Chapter IV of his book À Rebours:

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Interior symphonies were played as one drank a drop of this or that liqueur creating the sensations in the throat analogous to those that music pours into the ear. In this organ of liqueurs, Curaƙao sec corresponded to the clarinet with its somewhat astringent but velvety sound; Kɒmmel suggested the oboe with its nasal quality; menthe and anisette were like the flute, with its combination of sugar and pepper, petulance and sweetness; kirsch recalled the fury of the trumpet; gin and whiskey struck the palate with the strident explosions of cornets and trombones; vodka fulminated with deafening noise of tubas, while raki and mastic hurled thunderclaps of the cymbal and of the bass drum with full force. Huysmans continued by suggesting a string ensemble functioning in the mouth cavity, with the violin representing vodka, the viola tasting like rum, the cello caressing the gustatory rods with exotic liqueurs, and the double-bass contributing its share of bitters. Composers in MIXED MEDIA, anxious to embrace an entire universe of the senses, are seeking ultimate synaesthesia by intuitive approximation, subjective objectivization, and mystical adumbrations. ARNOLD SCHOENBERG was extremely sensitive to the correspondences between light and sound. In the score

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of his monodrama Die glɒckliche Hand he indicates a “crescendo of illumination” with the dark violet light in one of the two grottos quickly turning to brownish red, blue green, and then to orange yellow. —Nicolas Slonimsky

SYNTHESIZER (c. 1955) This became the standard name for pre-COMPUTER electronic machines that produce musical sound by assembling specifications of its elements into a synthesis that, thanks to analogue conversion, can be heard as sound. The first sound synthesizers were, like the first computers, mammoth machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and could fill a room. However, once transistors replaced vacuum tubes, multiple production became feasible; once integrated circuits superseded transistors, portability became possible. ROBERT MOOG was a pioneering entrepreneur. Synthesizers could create sounds wholecloth or process sounds fed into them. Video synthesizers also exist, if less popularly, and have been used by STEPHEN BECK and NAM JUNE PAIK, among others.

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TALBOT, WILLIAM HENRY FOX (11 February 1800–17 September 1877) Talbot is generally regarded as the father of photography. He invented the negative-positive process that enabled the production of multiple prints on paper from a single negative, which became the basis of photography through the next century. A brilliant student at Harrow and Trinity College in Cambridge, Talbot was graduated in 1825. At heart an accomplished scientist, he was elected to the Royal Society in 1831. Like earlier inventors, he experimented with salt and silver nitrate and the camera obscura (Latin for “dark chamber”), and the possibilities of fixing the reverse image that it projected. In August 1835 he produced what has become the first surviving negative, a 1-square-inch image of a latticed window, taken with an exposure time of about thirty minutes. A scholar of many pursuits, Talbot left photography after those experiments, but in early January 1839, when he heard of the work of Louis Daguerre (1787– 1851), he feared that he might not receive credit for his findings, so he presented his “photogenic drawings” on 25 January and described his experiments in a paper presented to the Royal Society on 31 January. In 1843 he produced a book, The Pencil of Nature, with twenty-four photographs and text detailing the scope and potential of his calotype process. In June 1844 Talbot made a walking tour of Scotland and published a portfolio – the world’s first photo book without text – Sun Pictures of Scotland. Talbot went on to discover in 1851 a method for taking instantaneous pictures, invented a new photoengraving process the next year, and in 1854 created a traveler’s studio that combined a camera with two tanks, one for sensitizing wet plates and one for developing prints. Much of Talbot’s work was of scenes in and around his home, Lacock Abbey (now a photography museum) and its environs. He usually created simple documents

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of 19th-century life. In 1855 Talbot won the Grand Medal of Honor in the Paris Exposition for his contributions to photography and another major prize in BERLIN in 1865. Though he had by then essentially retired from photography to concentrate on mathematical theory, he was made an honorary member of the Royal Photographic Society in 1873. —Gloria S. and Fred W. McDarrah

“TALENT” This epithet is something glibly attributed to people working in the arts, though hard to measure, because not as respected as it used to be, particularly in the creation of innovative art, where, for instance, many important visual artists can scarcely “draw” and others overcome normally debilitating HANDICAPS. My own sense is that imagination, likewise hard to measure, but certainly palpable in innovative work, is more crucial. So is courage, which is even harder to measure in advance, though eventually palpable as well. And so, finally, is work-work, which is to say the results of focused effort functioning at its highest imaginative level.

TANERAIC (August 1968) Over the centuries, people have invented languages for many purposes. These planned languages often had one main purpose: to de-Babelize the globe, enabling people to live and function more comfortably and peacefully together. Other languagewrights had as their goal the development of a perfect language, a language that was logical, or a language that hearkened back to a pre-Babelian time when language was pure and singular, or a language without

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exceptions or ambiguity. All these languages failed, and the new ones invented continue to fail. But the planned language that succeeds the most in my mind is the hermetic language Taneraic. Devised by the Australian Javant Biarujia (8 August 1955), when the creator was only 13, Taneraic is a beautifully systematic language built not – as most planned languages are – on the roots of other languages, but out of the thin air of human imagination. The language developed from the modest cryptographic notations of a teenager into a language with inflections and set grammatical rules. Within two years of the inception of this language, Biarujia was using Taneraic to write a diary (quite Pepysian for a teenager), having studied English, French, Russian, Esperanto, and the national Creole of Indonesia on the way. By 1978, Javant Biarujia (both of whose names are Taneraic inventions) drifted away from the language, gave up writing a diary in Taneraic, and eventually began to forget his language. Having burned all the holographic Taneraic-English dictionaries, Biarujia discovered that the language was no longer open even to the inventor and had to rebuild and rediscover the vocabulary word by word. This act of invention (not of a play or a story or a painting, but of a language) so detailed, so exact, so real, to produce a language for the creator’s personal use alone, is the ultimate hermetic art: art for the artist’s sake. Occasionally, the lessons of learning the language are “poetic” in themselves: “Ava vayole esnula. Beqa an vayole esnula./We are friends. All of us are friends.” But what makes this language-making an art is the wonder the process creates, even as we can’t begin to fathom it all. —Geof Huth

TATI, JACQUES (9 October 1908–5 November 1982; b. Jacques Tatischeff, reportedly of Russian-Dutch-Italian-French descent) The most sophisticated of the modern comedy directors, Tati followed Chaplin’s precedent in both directing his films and playing the protagonist. Tati’s self-star is tall, gangling, clumsy, self-absorbed (if not oblivious) – a childlike innocent whose ignorance of social rules causes chaos around him. Because his second major film, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot/Mister Hulot’s Holiday (1953) did not depend upon speech, it was an international success. Indeed, the soundtrack is a brilliant mixture of noises, human grunts, snatches of distant conversation in different languages, and much else that would be dismissed as aural garbage did it not enhance the ambience of comic chaos.

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Tati’s first film, Jour de Fête (1949), portrays a provincial postman inspired by an American film about increasing efficiency. Mon Oncle (1958) was likewise an international success. Tati’s later films become more serious, their satire heavier (particularly in ridiculing modernization/Americanization), and less popular. Financing for subsequent projects became more problematic. “Confusion,” announced in 1977, never materialized, though it would have been only his seventh film in a career spanning three decades. Their classic qualities notwithstanding, Tati’s films have had remarkably little influence, perhaps because, even after the development of cheaper videotape, such oneperson creations are increasingly rare in feature-length filmmaking.

TATLIN, VLADIMIR (28 December 1885–31 May 1953) Commonly regarded as a founder and principal figure in Soviet CONSTRUCTIVISM, Tatlin returned to Russia after a 1913 visit to PABLO PICASSO’s Paris studio to make abstract reliefs composed of sub-art materials such as tin, glass, and wood. Always rivaling KAZIMIR MALEVICH, Tatlin called his art Productivist (and later Constructivist), in contrast to Malevich’s Suprematism. Nonetheless, their purposes were complementary. As the Paris art historian Andrei B. Nakov (1941) succinctly put it, “Tatlin’s sculpture is really free of any connection to extra-artistic reality in the same way as Malevich’s suprematist forms are purely non-illusionistic.” Once the Soviet Revolution succeeded, the government’s Department of Fine Arts commissioned Tatlin to design a Monument to the Third International (1919), which he exhibited only as a model. With a continuous sloping line resembling that of a roller coaster, this was intended to be 2,000 feet high and to contain assembly halls, smaller spaces for executive committee meetings, all within a central Lucite cylinder that would revolve mechanically. Though his proposal was never executed, thus exemplifying CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE, the architectural historian Kenneth Frampton (1930), for one, has measured, “Few projects in the history of contemporary architecture can compare in impact or influence to Vladimir Tatlin’s 1920 design.” After the Stalinist crackdown on vanguard art, Tatlin worked mostly on more modest applied projects, such as furniture design, workers’ clothing, and the like. Beginning in the late 1920s, he spent several years designing a glider plane that he called Latatlin. Though he died from food poisoning in Moscow

406 • TATTOOING in relative obscurity, an exhibition mounted there in 1977 included paintings, book illustrations, and stage designs. In PONTUS HULTÉN’s mammoth ParisMoscow traveling show (1979), which I saw in Moscow in 1981, Tatlin was clearly portrayed as a lost star, the exhibition there featuring his Letatlin.

Some of the more striking passages reproduce a lingo unique to the place:

TATTOOING

Actually an abridgment of a manuscript reportedly at least twice as long, this edition was meant to prompt sufficient interest to persuade a publisher to do the longer version. That never happened. Disillusioned with America, Tavel resided mostly in southeast Asia before his unfortunate death of a heart attack on a flight from BERLIN to Bangkok.

(forever) This is the modern name of a body art that comes from making permanent designs and drawings on human skin. In certain cultures, appropriate design can represent status. In others, such as modern America prior to 1980, tattoos generally reflected declassé living. They have since become more acceptable among the bourgeois in Western cultures, or at least their children, initially on body parts customarily covered by clothing, but more recently not. The most ingenious tattoos exploit the peculiar luminescence of human skin, or perhaps body movement, so that an image changes shape when a body part moves, etc. For some, the next step was piercing the body, not just in the ears, as women have done for decades, but elsewhere – nose, tongue, private parts of both men and women, often prompting questions, if not conversation, in otherwise icy social circumstances. Scholars appreciative of artistic tattooing, such as Professor Mark Taylor (1945, religion, Columbia U.), have traced it back to the Edo period of Japan at the beginning of the 17th century. Though this entry, requested by my second publisher as our book was going to press, is finally too POSTMODERN, too post-1980s, for my taste, it is reprinted here.

TAVEL, RONALD (17 May 1936–23 May 2009) The superficial record of his career identifies him as a principal contributor to the Theater of the Ridiculous, a 1960s development that was regarded as a successor to the THEATRE OF THE ABSURD. The credits for several ANDY WARHOL films, including The Chelsea Girls (1967) and Vinyl (1965), name Tavel as the scenarist. The hidden history is that around that time he also published an extraordinary novel probably more distinguished than his plays. Street of Stairs (1968) takes place in Tangiers, in which a large number of narrators, perhaps forty, tell of life in a circuitous, mysterious city.

Soden we shewit dirty fotografias, askin 3,00 francos por todo el colección. No needit! gettim in Neuva York! him says end looksit for mad. – D’acuerdo, you want for see dirty bad cine.

TAVENER, JOHN (28 January 1944–12 November 2013) Many people whose taste I respect consider Tavener the strongest composer of his (my) generation, recently in late middle age. Whether his music is avant-garde is an open question. On the one hand, he assimilated serial music and electronics; on the other hand, after his conversion to Greek Orthodoxy in 1976, his compositions often sound quasi-medieval in conventional forms, with standard instrumentation. His solo pieces, especially for cello, sound pure and meditative, while his choral works, often commissioned for public occasions, sound impure and bombastic. One oddity that I saw at Lincoln Center in the summer of 2002 was The Veil of the Temple that began late at night to go into the following morning. Supposedly about “spiritual reflection and transcendence,” incorporating stretches of silence, it was impressively ambitious. Perhaps this contemporary kind of neoclassicism accounts for why his music is frequently recorded in his native Britain. His name is often confused with that of John Taverner (c. 1490–1545), spelled slightly differently, whose music is authentically medieval.

TAYLOR, CECIL (15 March 1929) A reclusive musician who rarely performs and whose few available recordings are reportedly not always authoritative, Taylor is one of those rare NEW YORK CITY artists whose reputation gains from personal absence. Active as an African-American JAZZ pianist, poet, composer, and bandleader since the late 1950s, Taylor took compositional ideas from European

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Impressionism, relying more on tone and texture than rhythm and melody. His improvisations often featured highly energetic articulations, jagged starts and stops, abrupt changes in mood, and ever-shifting structures often devoid of melody or beat. Eschewing harmonic landmarks, he refuses to use a bassist; and when he plays piano behind a soloist, Taylor’s improvisations are less complementary than independent. When I heard his Black Goat performed at New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 1972, I found his favorite structure to be a succession of sounds, quickly articulated and followed by a pause, so that individual instrumentalists played vertical clusters at varying speeds. He also writes and sometimes recites his own odd poetry.

TCHELITCHEW, PAVEL (21 September 1898–31 July 1957) Hide and Seek (1942), which was long permanently exhibited at the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, is a uniquely eccentric painting that assembled a larger image from smaller complimentary images whose different identity became visible only on close viewing. Measuring over 6½’ by 7’, it especially instructed children (including myself once) about the possible ambiguities of painting, in this case about small children’s heads composing images of larger heads. (Decades later, after it was stored away, I miss seeing it again in visiting MoMA.) Otherwise, Tchelitchew had a rich career as a designer of theatrical costumes and sets, incidentally contributing illustrations to VIEW, which was edited by CHARLES HENRI FORD and Parker Tyler (1904–74), a film critic who published a lush biography of Tchelitchew (1967), whose name is best pronounced as Che-LEE-schev (with a soft SCH as in “sheer”).

TEACHERS Not only do the greatest produce their own avant-garde work but they teach many who later do likewise. In painting, few score as high as FERNAND LEGÉR; in classical music composition, the champs were ROGER SESSIONS and OLIVIER MESSIAEN. Whereas the three of them had many students, JOHN CAGE had fewer, mostly at New York’s New School in the 1950s where several in his class pursued visible careers. FREDERICK SCHWANKOVSKY should be remembered for teaching the painters JACKSON POLLOCK and Philip Guston while both were still in high school. In modern dance, most aspiring choreographers learn

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by dancing in senior choreographers’ companies, much as baseball players learn to manage a team by playing under senior managers. The reputation of collegelevel sports coaches, say, should depend not only upon how many games they win but by how many alumni become professionals. By this measure, the greatest were Eddie Robinson (1919–2007) at Grambling, John Wooden (1910–2010) at UCLA, and Joseph Paterno (1926–2012) at Penn State. It is unfortunate that too many courses in university creative writing and art are designed to teach not the making of distinguished work but what the teacher does (or did), ideally to pass whatever onto their students’ students and then their students’ students’ students. Superior teachers of art and writing also encourage greater esthetic intelligence in many more sometime students (than those who become professionals), beginning with their appreciation of excellence, though these effects are harder to measure.

TEIGE, KAREL (13 December 1900–1 October 1951) A true POLYARTIST in Czechoslovakia, Teige worked with distinction in graphic design and architectural proposals, poetry, and PERFORMANCE. Reflecting the influence of the BAUHAUS in nearby Germany, he favored CONSTRUCTIVISM that he blended not with DADA, as MOHOLY-NAGY did, but with SURREALISM. He thus preferred sensual, if not erotic imagery, within frames composed of horizontal, vertical, and parabolic lines. Typically, a 1938 Teige photocollage portrays a woman with gartered stockings in a Moscow subway station with a semi-circular ceiling. Later, he advocated the creation of Surrealist parks with abstract sculpture inspired by the human body. In 1920, while young, he joined other radical Czech avant-gardists in founding a group calling itself Devetsil, whose name refers to a common weed while combining the Czech words for Nine and Force. The group advocated unity among the various art forms and so produced not only book anthologies but also artistic festivals. Teige both edited and designed the principal publication, Red (1927–31), the name an abbreviation for Revue Devetsil, which published Czech avantgardists besides international celebrities. Once the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, Teige worked in internal exile. Though his earlier political biases predisposed him to favor the Soviet occupation of his homeland, he quickly fell victim to Stalinist authorities, who forbade him to publish or organize

408 • TELEGRAPHIC WRITING artistic activities. He died prematurely in 1951 of a heart attack, which is customarily understood to reflect a broken heart. The Communist state police, never kindly to avant-garde artists, reportedly confiscated all of his personal effects. If only for his attempt to make innovative art for larger publics, Teige was featured, along with JOHN HEARTFIELD, EL LISSSITZKY, and GUSTAV KLUTCIS, in the exhibition and book Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life (2011).

TELEGRAPHIC WRITING (20th century) A major literary departure in the 20th century, reflecting a technological invention outside literature, was the development of prose whose elliptical conciseness reflected the development of telegraphy. As messages sent through the new technology, unlike those in a letter sent through the post, had a cost per word, economics prompted senders to drop all words not deemed essential. Another mark of a telegram was containing only uppercase letters that, in turn, visually defined telegraphic style when it appeared in literary books. This style evolved in the 1990s with the invention of texting (sending short messages between computers and cell phones) that resulted in a more extreme post-telegraphic reduction because not words, but characters were limited in number. In the 21st century innumerable inventive abbreviations used in electronic messaging were joined by emoticons (punctuation marks arranged to resemble facial expressions) and emojis (small digital pictures representing feelings or concepts), thus further extending the impetus to contraction in literary communication. —with Shoshana Esther Stone

TELEVISION (c. 1930s) By adding sound to radio, television should have been hospitable to an avant-garde art; but precisely because it became so quickly a commercial medium for universal dissemination, that opportunity rapidly succumbed to the American genius for mass-merchandising a new technology that Europeans thought would belong exclusively to the elite (whether automobiles or motion pictures before television, or portable computers afterwards). Nonetheless, some imaginative early performers used television in ways radically different from the

common run, exploiting capabilities unavailable in film and live performance. Before the age of videotape and thus in live time, the comedian Ernie Kovacs (1919–62) tilted his camera to create the illusion that coffee was being poured at a diagonal impossible in life; he used two cameras to situate himself inside a milk bottle; he used smoke from a Sterno can to blur focus; he put two separate images in a split screen; he composed live video accompaniments to the warhorses of classical music; and he used an electronic switch to make half the screen mirror the other, enabling him to stage interviews and even sword fights with himself, etc. Because of the small scale of the early TV monitors (compared to the much larger movie screen or later television receivers), Kovacs was able to stage close-up sight gags: His femme fatale would, in David G. Walley’s words, “slowly turn her head to an admiring camera and then catch a pie in the face,” in an image that would not work as well on a big screen (and not at all on radio). Once videotaping was developed, producers could use such devices as instant replay for essentially MODERNIST techniques such as scrambling continuous time. Indeed, most innovations in broadcast television in the past quarter-century have come less from tinkering with the medium itself than from ingenuity with videotape and then digital storage. A further implication of the dissemination of the portable video camera and then the INTERNET was the possibility of circumventing television stations in the creation and distribution of VIDEO ART.

TER OGANIAN, AVDEY (9 December 1961) One variation upon artistic appropriation is Avdei Ter Oganyan’s portentously titled Some Questions of Contemporary Art Restoration (1993). It is essentially a men’s room urinal resembling Marcel Duchamp’s historic GESTURE that, having been smashed in the past, is visibly repaired with glue, which is to say that, even though it drew upon the same material (and alluded to a Duchamp sculpture likewise repaired from breakage), TO’s Some Questions would never be mistaken for the original. Once making a fairly accurate replica of a Jasper Johns encaustic painting, he left it outdoors in the Moscow rain, again producing a defective copy with considerably ironic weight. The epithet iconoclasm more accurately describes his work than others often so dubbed. In a 1998 Moscow art fair, Ter Oganyan performed an action he variously called “Young Atheist” or “Desecration of Holy

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Objects” during which he chopped up mass-produced Russian Orthodox icons with an axe and wrote obscene words on their faces. Visitors were also invited further to destroy icons themselves for a small payment. After a Russian court declared Ter Oganyan guilty of inciting religious hatred, he earned political asylum in Prague.

TEXT-SOUND (forever) As distinct from text-print and text-seen, text-sound refers to texts that must be sounded and thus heard to be “read,” in contrast to those that must be printed and thus seen. The term “text-sound” is preferable to “sound-text,” if only to acknowledge the initial presence of a text, which is subject to aural enhancements more typical of music. To be precise, it is by nonmelodic auditory structures that language or verbal sounds are poetically charged with meanings or resonances they would not otherwise have. An elementary example is the tongue twister, which is literally about variations on a particular consonant. This term is also preferable to “sound poetry” because several writers working in this area, including GERTRUDE STEIN and W. BLIEM KERN, produced works that, even in their emphasis on sound, are closer to prose than poetry. Only in recent times have we become aware of text-sound as a true INTERMEDIUM between language arts on the one side and musical arts on the other, drawing upon each but lying between both, and thus, as a measure of its newness, often unacceptable to purists based in each.

THARP, TWYLA (1 July 1941) Those familiar with Tharp’s later choreography, so popular in larger theaters, can hardly believe, or remember, that her dance was once avant-garde. At the beginning of her choreographic career, in the late 1960s, Tharp created a series of rigorously CONSTRUCTIVIST works that, in their constrained style, were never exceeded. Using only female dancers (and thus excluding any of the customary themes dependent upon sexual difference), she choreographed pieces such as Group Activities (1968), in which ten dancers, including herself, perform individualized instructions, themselves derived from a numerical system, on two sets of checkerboard-like floor spaces, creating an asymmetrical field of animate patterns, all to the accompaniment of only a ticking metronome.

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Performed totally without sound accompaniment on an unadorned stage, Disperse (1967) depends upon the ratio of 2:3, which requires the stage lighting to turn ever darker as the dancers move progressively into the right rear corner. In The One Hundreds (1970), Tharp recruited members of the audience to execute one hundred phrases. Her credo at the time: “Dance belonged to everyone, and everyone could be a dancer if the material was appropriate to them.” Tharp around that time also choreographed dances for previously unexploited spaces, such as Manhattan’s Central Park in the late afternoon. (I remember a rugby game beginning on an adjacent field.) About Tharp’s Medley (1969), which I saw on a parade ground the size of two football fields, someone (perhaps I) wrote: With the audience seated on a slope at one end, six girls in Miss Tharp’s company were at the other end of the field, looking small and remote. Gradually they moved closer, but never close enough for the public to see the intricate detail of the choreography. The climax of the performance came when thirty students joined the group and commenced one long sequence in which each person moved at the slowest possible speed, giving the effect of a field full of statues in a continuous but imperceptible state of change. Dance in the Streets of London and Paris, Continued in Stockholm and Sometimes Madrid had its premiere on two floors of the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut. As the critic Don McDonagh (1932) remembers it, The audience flowed in and around the performers at all levels and at times trailed them from one floor to another. There was no set position from which to view the dance . . . the nine dancers kept in touch with one another by means of verbal time checks called up the stairwell and by the use of video monitors connected to a closedcircuit television hookup between the various galleries. Composed in sections, this Tharp dance could be recreated to suit different venues. If you don’t believe my recollections of Tharp’s earlier choreography, consider this from The Performing Arts in America (1973): “Twyla Tharp is a choreographer whose ballets have no plot, no reference to character or emotion, no scenery or props, costumes only very rarely, and, above all, no music.” In this history of Tharp’s art, that was centuries ago.

410 • THEATER OF THE ABSURD THEATER OF THE ABSURD See ABSURD, THEATER OF THE.

THEATER OF CRUELTY See ARTAUD, Antonin.

THEATRICAL DÉCOR (20th century) To no surprise perhaps, the great innovations in this normally sleepy art (and sometimes in costumes as well) have come from prominent visual artists. Among the more memorable (decades later) were those by the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863–1944) for Henrik Ibsen productions in Paris early in the 20th century; PABLO PICASSO’s for Manuel de Falla’s Le Tricorne (1919), IGOR STRAVINSKY’s Pulcinella (1920), and de Falla’s Flamenco (1921); JEAN COCTEAU’s for Darius Milhaud’s Le Bœuf Sur Le Toit (1920); FERNAND LEGÉR’s for both Artur Honegger’s Skating Rink (1922) and Milhaud’s Le Création du Monde (1923); and DAVID HOCKNEY’s famously for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1975). MERCE CUNNINGHAM routinely commissioned painters to decorate his choreographies. In my own recent operagoing experience, few stage decorators can rival WILLIAM KENTRIDGE.

THEMERSON, STEFAN (25 January 1910–6 September 1988) Born in Poland, Themerson was initially a Warsaw painter who also made an avant-garde film, Europa (1931), that subsequently disappeared. Working with his wife Franciszka (1907–88), according to the Encyclopedia of European Cinema (1995), “They invented an apparatus for making photograms in motion, scratched and painted on film, and fused animation and photomontage with live action.” After serving in the Polish army in France during World War II, Stefan Themerson escaped Communism by emigrating to England, where he and his wife resided until their deaths, publishing poetry, fiction, and unclassifiable experimental writings almost exclusively in English, mostly with the marvelously titled Gaberbocchus Press (1948): among them, the novels Bayamus (1949, which includes typographic poetry), The Adventures of Peddy Bottom (1951), Cardinal Polatuo (1961), and Tom Harris

(1967); philosophical essays with titles such as factor T (1972); and St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio or Brother Francis’ Lamb Chops (1972), “an opera in two acts,” complete with a musical score, handwritten plot summaries, and sketches for stage designs (which is, of course, how proposed operas should be published). Respectful of avant-garde traditions, Themerson also produced a memoir, Kurt Schwitters in England (1958), the first English translation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1951), and, in a large-page format, an early English edition of Apollinaire’s Lyrical Ideograms (1968). A visual-verbal masterpiece is his “Kurt Schwitters on a Time Chart,” which initially appeared in the British magazine Typographica # 16 and then as a book published in Holland (1998). It is unfortunate that Themerson’s work isn’t often mentioned in histories of contemporary British literature, perhaps because like several other authors of avant-garde English literature written in Britain after World War II, he was born outside of the British Isles.

“THEORY” (1980–2010) This epithet identified a highfaluting mode of cultural explanation, not quite thinking, was during its heyday disliked by nearly everyone except its advocates, who necessarily strived for power in academic institutions. Inherently fanciful, often politically prejudiced simplistically, “theory” was more popular with professors of literature and philosophy than, say, with historians, who are by training more respectful of verifiable facts. Successful for a while, the epithet fell into disuse when its publicists retired or passed away. Art purportedly informed theoretically was short-lived, as balloons inevitably pop, to the surprise only of those clutching them. As BUCKMINSTER FULLER persuasively proclaimed as he watched the nickel he tossed into the air fall to the floor, “Nature’s 100% reliable.”

THEREMIN (c. 1920) One of the earliest ELECTRONIC instruments, named after its creator Léon Theremin (1896–1993; b. Lev Sergeyevich Termen), who invented it just after the First World War, this consists of two antenna emerging perpendicularly from a metal cabinet. Both poles respond not to touch, like traditional instruments, but to hand movements in the electrified air immediately around them. (Roberta Reeder and Claas Cordes write, “He

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created his instrument while working on an alarm system to protect the diamond collection at the Kremlin,” which seems obvious in retrospect.) One antenna controls the instrument’s pitch, the other its volume, together producing sustained, tremulous sounds that were particularly popular in horror films in the 1930s and 1940s. The principal Thereminist in America, if not the world, was Clara Rockmore (1911–98). One of Rockmore’s long-playing records was produced by ROBERT MOOG, who, before he made the SYNTHESIZER bearing his name, manufactured Theremins. More familiarly, a Theremin accompanied a cello to produce the “Good Vibrations” in a 1966 Beach Boys recording of the same name. During his eleven years in America (1927–38), Léon Theremin, according to his countryman NICOLAS SLONIMSKY, on April 29, 1930, presented a concert with an ensemble of ten of his instruments, also introducing a space-controlled synthesis of color and music. On 1 April 1932, in the same hall, he introduced the first electrical symphony orchestra, conducted by Stoessel, including Theremin fingerboard and keyboard instruments. He also invented the Rhythmicon [with HENRY COWELL], for playing different rhythms simultaneously. Theremin disappeared from New York in 1938 and was thought dead until he emerged from post-Soviet Russia in 1991, by then well into his nineties, to attend European music festivals. An illuminating biography (2000) by Albert Glinsky (1952) reports that Theremin, a devout Communist, voluntarily returned to the Soviet Union where he was imprisoned but kept alive to work especially on perfecting electronics for eavesdropping (including a self-powered bug embedded in a wall sculpture given to the American embassy in Moscow!). In the 1990s, in his own nineties, Theremin returned to New York City for a visit that is memorialized in an eponymous documentary film by Stephen Martin (1993).

THOMAS, DYLAN (27 October 1914–9 November 1953) Dylan Thomas was the first modern poet whose work was best “published,” best made public, not on the printed page or in the public auditorium but through electronic media, beginning with live radio, eventually including records and audiotape. So strongly did Thomas establish how his words should sound that it

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is hard not to hear his voice as you read his poetry; his interpretations put at a disadvantage anyone else who has tried to declaim his words since. Some failed to notice that he also exploited extended silences often a minute in length. It is not surprising that he also became the first prominent English-speaking poet to earn much of his income initially not from writing or teaching but from radio recitals, mostly for the British Broadcasting Corporation. (Given the American media’s lack of interest in poetry, it is indicative that Thomas’s sole peer as a reader of his own verse, Carl Sandburg [1878–1967], a quarter-century older, made his living mostly as a traveling performer of considerably less difficult poetry.) In 1946, Edward Sackville-West (1901–65) gushed: A verbal steeplejack, Mr. Thomas scales the dizziest heights of romantic eloquence. Joycean portmanteau words, toppling castles of alliteration, a virtuoso delivery which shirked no risk – this was radio at its purest and a superb justification of its right to be considered as an art in itself. Indeed, it could be said that the principal recurring deficiency of Thomas’s prose is the pointless garrulousness, filling space with verbiage, that we associate with broadcasting at its least consequential. Thomas’s Collected Poems (1952) reportedly sold 30,000 copies within a year after its publication – a number no less spectacular then than now – so popular did his own brilliant declamation make a difficult poet.

THOMPSON, FRANCIS (3 January 1908–26 December 2003; b. Eben F. T.) Though initially a painter, Thompson made several masterpieces of experimental short film that are generally omitted from histories and encyclopedias of the medium. The first short, New York, New York (1958, 18 min.), views the city through distorting prisms that function to exaggerate through visual abstraction its distance from nature. The second, To Be Alive (1962, also 18 min.), made with ALEXANDER HAMMID for the Johnson Wax Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, used three screens, of standard ratios of height and width, but with 15 inches between each one to distinguish them from the continuous horizontal screens of CINEMASCOPE and CINERAMA, which had been developed in the decade before. To Be Alive opens with high-speed shots of NEW YORK CITY simultaneously on three screens and subsequently depicts the maturation of people around the world. In

412 • THOMSON, VIRGIL one sequence, a prepubescent American boy is learning to ride a bicycle on one screen, a young Italian is learning to paddle a boat, and a similarly young African is learning to ride a mule. Disaster hits each simultaneously, prompting them to cry in unison. For many years after, To Be Alive was screened continuously at the Johnson Wax Factory in Racine, Wisconsin. For Hemisfair (San Antonio, 1968), Thompson and Hammid made US, which begins with the audience divided into three parts of a circle. When the walls between them are taken up, they are watching a circle surrounded by three screens, each 145 feet wide. For the Canadian Pacific pavilion at EXPO ’67 in Montreal, Thompson and Hammid made We Are Young (1967, likewise 18 mins.) for six separate screens. The three screens in the lower row were roughly 30 feet square; the three in the upper row were a little wider, much lower, and pushed forward about a foot in front of those below. As in To Be Alive, each screen is clearly separated from the others. Sometimes all six screens present the same image synchronously; at other times only one screen is used (while the others are blank). One particularly stunning sequence has the audience moving down six railway tracks simultaneously, each one turned to be perpendicular to the top of the bottom middle screen, the sound of six trains emerging from the amplification system. It seems inappropriate to write about this film as though it may still be available, because once the original venue was dismantled it was never seen again and, according to the filmmaker, may not even exist any longer. Having established a unique competence with expanded image films, Thompson produced several films in 70 mm. IMAX technology, including To Fly (1976), which, also at eighteen minutes, is an aerial tour of America from balloon ascent in the 1890s to space flight; American Years (1976, 45 mins.), which celebrates Philadelphia’s bicentennial as the first historic film show in IMAX. In 1998, Thompson at the age of 90 received from the LFCA (Large Format Cinema Association) the ABEL GANCE Lifetime Achievement Award, its name recalling the man whose films Thompson saw in Paris in the early 1930s, as his first exposure to the fertile possibility of multiple projection. The British poet similarly named F. T. (1859–1907) was someone else.

THOMSON, VIRGIL (25 November 1896–30 September 1989) A conservative tonal composer of rather simple works, Thomson had the good fortune to get involved in

the mid-1920s with GERTRUDE STEIN, his fellow American in Paris. Out of their collaboration came first “Capital Capitals” (1927), a uniquely brilliant (if under-recognized) art song for four male voices, and then Four Saints in Three Acts (1927–29), more famous, which was probably the most impressive deviant modern opera of its time. The plot was incomprehensible; so, at first, was much of the language. The sets by the New York painter Florine Stettheimer (1871–1948) featured cellophane. All the performers were AfricanAmericans, whom Thomson favored not only for the theatrical value of skin color but for their superior competence at clearly singing English words. (Some identify this as the first prominent 19th-century appearance of many blacks in roles that could have been given to whites.) The excellence of Four Saints depended on Thomson’s inventive settings of Stein’s fanciful, often repeated lyrics: Pigeons on the grass alas Shorter long grass short longer longer shorter yel low grass Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass also Pigeons on the grass To measure the difference, just compare Four Saints on the one hand with the colloquial slickness of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935) and, on another hand, the forgotten pseudo-traditional operas produced in the 1920s and ’30s. Though Thomson and Stein had to wait several years for the Four Saints premiere, which occurred in 1934, not in New York but in Hartford, CT, it received enough acclaim to have a Broadway run. A later Thomson-Stein collaboration, The Mother of Us All (1947), was less successful. By illustrative contrast, Thomson’s appropriation of Stein’s “Portraits,” which was a lesser genre for her, produced without her words lesser music for him. As chief music critic at the New York Herald-Tribune from 1940 to 1954, Thomson also wrote some of the strongest music criticism, measured sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, though his neglect of younger avant-garde composers makes him appear conservative in retrospect. The problem, in short, was that Thomson didn’t learn enough from Stein to advance his musical taste. The first fat biography of Thomson is a monumentally inept classic, as a humorless enthusiast produces page after thick page on a man renowned for his wit. Composer on the Aisle (1997) must be read to be believed. Consider how such books get written and then published, let alone blurbed and reviewed by colleagues with reputations to protect, and you can

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lament the decline of literary intelligence in America, or maybe just the evaporation of humor to a level more typical of, say, Soviet Russia.

TIFFANY, LOUIS COMFORT (18 February 1848–17 January 1933) Tiffany belongs here, no joke, because he repudiated ornate complexity fashionable in the mid-19th century to design glass lamp fixtures and window screens with uncommon geometries. Commonly classified as Art Nouveau, many Tiffany designs resemble Islamic art in their scrupulous avoidance of representation and thus suggest geometric ABSTRACT ART done decades later. Beginning as an Impressionist painter, Tiffany studied glassmaking in the 1870s and, at the end of that decade, opened a business devoted to interior decoration. In 1880, he parented “favrile” glass that had an iridescent finish. Quickly recognized for excellence, his firm was invited to redecorate the august White House in 1883–84. Tiffany persuaded churchmen to accept stained-glass windows with secular subjects. In his own time he was probably the best-known American artist in Europe. One of the most exquisite permanent exhibitions in Manhattan is that devoted to Tiffany’s art in, of all places, the New York Historical Society. He was the son of Charles L. Tiffany (1812–1902), who founded an eponymous New York jewelry firm, whose name is synonymous with superfluous luxury, which was perhaps a misfortune for the son, whose art realized elegant purity.

TIMES SQUARE SHOW See NINTH STREET SHOW.

TOBEY, MARK (11 December 1890–24 April 1976) Before becoming a profoundly original American painter, Tobey joined the Bahá’í religious movement and then studied calligraphy both in Seattle and in Shanghai. He was well into his forties before discovering his innovative calligraphic “white writing,” in which an unmodulated collection of lines, roughly equal in width, run to the edges of the image, at times creating a shimmering surface. As in the careers of KAZIMIR MALEVICH and PIET MONDRIAN before him, the turn to ABSTRACTION devoid of Nature reflected his religious faith, the Bahá’i believing in a common

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humanity and accessibility to all, notwithstanding cultural differences. Such Tobey paintings, also avoiding visual anchors, presaged the all-over images of a later generation (as JACKSON POLLOCK reportedly studied them closely) as well as both the OPTICAL ART and monochromic painting of subsequent periods. In the late 1950s, Tobey began to use broader strokes, as well as other colors, including black. Not unlike other spiritual Abstractionists, he had a taste for strong prose statements: “At a time when experimentation expresses itself in all forms of life, search becomes the only valid expression of the spirit.”

TOLSON, MELVIN (6 February 1898–29 August 1966) A professor who spent his entire adult life teaching at historic black colleges and coaching consistently successful varsity debate teams, Tolson was also a poet who raised outrageous parody to high literary levels. He was a great American DADA poet, though scarcely recognized as such, as he ridiculed the allusive techniques of the great moderns, beginning with self-conscious obscurity, in the same breath as certain African-American myths about Africa and much else: The Höhere of God’s stepchildren is beyond the sabotaged world, is beyond das Diktat der Menschenverachtung, la muerte sobre el esqueleto de la nada, the pelican’s breast rent red to feed the young, summer’s third-class ticket, the Revue des morts, the skulls trepanned to hold ideas plucked from dung, Dives’ crumbs in the church of the unchurched, absurd life shaking its ass’s ears among the colors of vowels and Harrar blacks with Nessus shirts from Europe on their backs. Perhaps because such lines offend as they honor (and were easily misunderstood as well), they were not easily published. Though his books appeared from general publishers, it is unfortunate that most recognition of Tolson’s innovative work has appeared in special situations reserved for African-American writers.

TOMLIN, BRADLEY WALKER (19 August 1899–11 May 1953) An abstract painter at a time when realisms were more fashionable, he sought to represent his unconscious not

414 • TONDO with lines, as in JACKSON POLLOCK, but with overlapping planes of various sizes and shapes in a crowded field. To some eyes, his strongest work approaches calligraphy with semblances of thick letters appearing mysteriously at varying degrees of depth. Tomlin’s In Praise of Gertrude Stein (1950) rivals PABLO PICASSO’s more famous portrait in honoring her. His masterpiece is the black and white Tension by Moonlight (1948), 32 inches by 44 inches. As Tomlin’s art matured only in the late 1940s, his strongest works appeared in the last five years of his shortened life.

TONDO (15th century; probably before) In contrast to rectangular formats for framing visual art, this circular form has become a profound constraint conducive to alternative imagery and structure. Used memorably by Michelangelo to portray The Holy Family (1506/08), the shape of tondo becomes an implicit halo. A circle also became the preferred form for medallions, or surrogate coins, sometimes with an image in relief. Among modern artists doing in a circle what cannot be done in a rectangle were ILYA BOLOTOWSKY especially, WILLIAM KENTRIDGE. JACKSON POLLOCK, SOL LEWITT, and L. MOHOLY-NAGY. Among those writers working with words in circles, rather than horizontal lines – making literary tondos, so to speak – are GERTRUDE STEIN, FERDINAND KRIWET, and myself. May we be surprised that no substantial book of art history/ criticism has been written about tondos.

TONE CLUSTERS

used tone clusters to be played by the palm of the hand in his Second Piano Concerto, a device that he borrowed expressly from Cowell, by permission. —Nicolas Slonimsky

TORRE, GUILLERMO DE (1900–14 January 1971) Born in Spain, where his literary talents were recognized while still a teenager, he drafted around 1920 a “Vertical Manifesto” for a movement titled Ultraism. Around the same time he collaborated in writing an automatic poem with TZARA and BORGES, whose sister he later married. Torre’s early poems, collected as Hélices (1923), includes calligrams and some of the first haiku written in Spanish. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Torre fled to Paris before resettling in Buenos Aires, where he became a professor of literature, an influential literary critic, and a first-rank literary historian. His major critical achievement was an expanding, essentially correct history of avant-garde literature that went through several editions. The 1925 first edition, Literaturas europeas de vanguardia, contained 390 pages, and was reprinted in 2001 and 2002. A greatly expanded second edition of 946 pages, Historia de las literaturas de vanguardia appeared in 1965, and was reprinted in 1971 in both one volume, and three smaller volumes of 363, 334, & 297 pages. Though translated into Portuguese, this has never been Englished. (I knew around 1964 an experienced translator, my former professor’s wife, who wanted to do it, only to be blocked when Professor Roger Shattuck gave it a negative notice.) Nonetheless, nothing else treats its subject so hugely and thoroughly.

(1912) The technique of tone clusters was demonstrated for the first time in public by HENRY COWELL at the San Francisco Music Club on 12 March 1912, on the day after his fifteenth birthday. It consists of striking a pandiatonic complex of two octaves on white keys, using one’s forearm, or a panpentatonic set of black keys, as well as groups of 3 or 4 notes struck with the fists or the elbow. Cowell notated the tone clusters by a thick black line on a stem for rapid notes or a white-note rod attached to a stem for half-notes. By a remarkable coincidence, the Russian composer Vladimir Rebikov made use of the same device, with an identical notation, at about the same time, in a piano piece entitled Hymn to Inca. Still earlier, CHARLES IVES made use of tone clusters in his Concord Sonata, to be played with a wood plank to depress the keys. Béla Bartók

TORRES-GARCÍA, JOAQUÍN (28 July 1874–8 August 1949) Born in Montevideo of a Catalan father and a Uruguayan mother, Torres-García studied and worked in Spain before coming in 1920 to New York, where he shared a studio with the painter STUART DAVIS at the Whitney Studio Club, making wooden toys that presaged his later CONSTRUCTIVIST painting. Relocating to Europe in 1922, Torres-García lived in Paris, where he befriended THEO VAN DOESBURG, PIET MONDRIAN, and MICHEL SEUPHOR, among others. Then in his forties, Torres-García collaborated with Seuphor in founding the periodical CERCLE ET CARRÉ and in organizing the first major ABSTRACT

TRANSITION •

ART exhibition (1930) with over eighty artists. Though I’ve never seen a copy firsthand (and don’t know where to find), reproductions and descriptions suggest that Torres-García’s Structures (1931), a sort of visual scrapbook, ranks as monumental BOOK-ART. Mindful of his different origins, he also organized the first exhibition in Paris of such Latin American artists as the Mexican muralists JOSÉ CLEMENTE OROZCO and DIEGO RIVERA. Returning to his native Uruguay in 1933, after more than four decades away, Torres-García published manifestos, organized the Asociación Arte Constructivo, lectured widely, and founded both an art school and two magazines, in addition to writing a thousand-page book, Constructive Universalism (1944). His idiosyncratic paintings favored ideographic images within a grid. Though his name may be forgotten in Europe and North America, Torres-García was one of those modernists who redirected the course of Latin American culture.

TRANSFURISTS The only Russian group in the post-Stalin period to have a close relationship to the RUSSIAN FUTURISTS consists of a husband and wife team, SERGE SEGAY and REA NIKONOVA and Nikonova’s brother-in-law, BORIS KONSTRIKTOR, plus a number of other, less constant associates. Their orientation toward the original avant-garde began in the 1960s in Sverdlovsk (now, again, Yekaterinburg) under the name of the Uktus School (1964–74), after a local ski jump, and from the beginning included experimental activities in the visual and verbal arts simultaneously. While some of their works were not innovative when compared with developments in the West, they were created independently, since access to Western sources of information was somewhat limited at the time. Nikonova and Segay published a journal, Nomer (1965–75, 35 issues) in one copy; and the group was one of the first to produce works of a minimalist or conceptualist sort. After the couple returned to Nikonova’s birthplace of Yeisk on the Azov Sea in 1974, and the existing issues of Nomer were confiscated by the police, they began to issue a new journal, Transponans (1979–86, 36 issues), this time in only five copies (the legal limit at the time) that gradually grew in size and elaborateness of means. Since the issues were all handmade, it was possible to vary and combine materials, use elaborate original collages, hand coloring, original sketches, unusually shaped and cutout pages, to spectacular effect. Contributors to the journal included a wide range of contemporary avant-gardists, such as Dmitry Prigov, Genrikh Sapgir, A. Nik, Igor Bakhterev (the last surviving member of

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the OBERIU group), Yuri Lederman, Anna Alchuk, and many others. Toward the end of its existence, the journal took on the unique shape of what Nikonova dubbed a “rea-structure,” in which groups of pages were cut in a variety of shapes, such as triangles, M’s, and squares within one issue. While a certain genetic link to the primitivism and ZAUM of Cubo-Futurism is evident in many of their products, the group has nevertheless also created a large body of fresh and unprecedently inventive poetry, visual art, theater pieces, handmade bookworks, mixed media, and intermedia works under rather difficult circumstances. —Gerald Janecek

“TRANSGRESSIVE” (1980s) Not avant-garde. Just socially and morally challenging when it first appears (though probably not for long) and thus sometimes opportunistically dubbed “avant-garde.” Typically such art is not difficult, which is to say that it’s easily made and easily understood.

TRANSITION (1927–38) The most distinguished avant-garde magazine of its time, it was founded by EUGENE JOLAS, a polylingual American long resident in Paris. In its pages appeared early texts by SAMUEL BECKETT, BOB BROWN, and GERTRUDE STEIN; reproductions or pictures of art by ALEXANDER CALDER, MAN RAY, CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, L. MOHOLY-NAGY, and PABLO PICASSO; and even musical scores by AARON COPLAND and HENRY COWELL (in a departure distinguishing it from other literary-art magazines before or since). Transition also sponsored symposia on such questions as “Why Do Americans Live in Europe,” “Inquiry on the Malady of Language,” “Inquiry into the Spirit and Language of Night,” or the puzzling early versions of JAMES JOYCE’s Work in Progress (later published as FINNEGANS WAKE). So strong has the aura of transition been that other literary and art magazines founded by Americans in Paris have tried to recapture it, with less ambition and, alas, less success. Complete tables of contents of all 27 issues appear in 44 pages of the Dugald McMillan history. Around the year 2000 I was given bound copies of the complete run by the widow of a colleague who had received it from his favorite professor, so treasured are

416 • TRNKA, JIRˇÍ its issues. Three different book anthologies selecting from its pages have appeared.

ˇÍ TRNKA, JIR (24 February 1912–30 December 1969) Having created a puppet theater before World War II, Trnka set up in 1945 a film studio in Prague that specialized in puppet animation, which depends not upon drawings in sequence but on the movement of threedimensional figures on a field. Unlike American animators, who were restricted to short films, Trnka founded his reputation on a feature, Špaliček/The Czech Year (1947). His principal achievement is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Sen noci svatojánské) (1959). Ruka/The Hand (1965) is a parable about the role of the artist under Communist totalitarianism.

a 640 × 480 × 256 color monitor,” it became inoperable when Apple upgraded the Macintosh operating system from 7.Ox to System 8. “Unfortunately, nothing can be done about this except a complete rewrite,” Truck wrote me at the end of 1998, and I have since moved on to other things, motivated in no small part by the fact that digital art has a life expectancy of about 6 weeks due to the constant shifting of operating standards. My new work is focused on output that cannot be affected by changes in the hardware or operating system software. See www.fredtruck.com. Milk Bottle Reliquary is a compendium of all his sculptures since 1998, both real and virtual (www.fredtruck. com/reliquary/). Truck has become, in short, the epitome of the advanced literary-computer artist, more experienced and better prepared than most to work into the 21st century.

TRUCK, FRED

TSAI, WEN-YING

(6 September 1946; b. Frederick John Allender)

(13 October 1928–2 January 2013)

Born in Iowa, where he still lives, Truck produced a chapbook of hieroglyphic VISUAL POETRY, Tangerine Universe in 3 Refrains (1975), in addition to Loops!! (1978), an edition of fifteen jars, each containing a Mobius strip, among other unusual literary objects. An early user of desktop computers, Truck began publishing his Catalog of the Des Moines Festival of the AvantGarde Invites You to Show (without really being there) (1979, 1982, 1984) out of his house. George Maciunas, FIuxus, and the Face of Time (1984) he describes as “a graphically indexed study of Maciunas’s work,” which he printed on two long, continuous sheets of computer paper. In 1985 Truck cofounded the Art Com Electronic Network, an early “electronic publishing medium uniting menu-driven magazines, a bulletin board service for performances and discussion of art,” for computer-modem-assisted artists hooked into the WELL, a national arts network. In continual contact with other artists similarly advanced, Truck from 1986 through 1991 worked on “an artificially intelligent art work, ArtEngine, which applies heuristics to graphics and text analysis.” His book Archaeopteryx (1992) has “designs for an artist’s flight simulator based on LEONARDO DA VINCI’s flying machine, which flies in visual reality.” Bottega (1995) was probably the first CD-ROM produced by an artist in America. Designed for a Macintosh computer with “8 megabytes of RAM and

Tsai called his innovative work Tsaibernetic Sculptures (in a play on “CYBERNETIC”), which became his generic term for nearly one hundred unique objects that are similar in their operations but different in measurements and details. Born in China, trained at American colleges in engineering, which qualified him for years of work as a project manager in the construction industry, Tsai deduced in the 1960s that he could combine engineering with his painterly interests, producing sterling examples of avant-garde technological art. Influenced by an USCO exhibition in 1966, he used a flickering STROBE LIGHT that was aimed at shiny flexible rods with tops the size of bottle caps. Thanks to a motorized base, these rods could shake at variable speeds. The strobe light, flickering at a slightly different frequency, caught these vibrating rods in a succession of striking postures. Because the result was the anthropomorphic illusion of dancing, he transformed a firm material, steel, to look as though it had lost its rigidity One improvement in the evolution of this genre was the ability to change the flickering speed of the strobe in response to either sounds in the surrounding space or the spectator’s proximity to a sensing device in the sculptures themselves, making them a pioneering example of responsive or cybernetic art (which I take to be technically more advanced than artistic machines that move autonomously). Another later development was making the upright rods out of fiberglass, rather than stainless steel. Though no two

TUCKER, WILLIAM G. •

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of disparate images. In his remarkably sensible Duchamp (1986), the French critic Jean-Christophe Bially (1949) writes:

Figure 19 Wen-Ying Tsai Square Tops, 1967. Stainless steel rods with aluminum squares on plywood plate, electric motor, stroboscopic light, and electronic audio feedback control. Photo by Eugene Edward Weise. © Tsai Art and Science Foundation.

of these Tsai sculptures are identical, they resemble one another much like siblings in a family that, at last count, is still growing. Of Tsai’s other KINETIC sculptures, UpwardsFalling Fountain (1979) is particularly impressive, creating an illusion that must be seen to be believed. As the water falling from a vibrating showerhead is illuminated by a strobe, the droplets are caught dancing in response to sound; at certain strobe speeds, the droplets appear to be moving upwards, violating all rules of gravity. Living Fountain (1980–88) is a yet larger water sculpture, incorporating a showerhead 3 feet in diameter, plus three concentric circles of water jets, all installed above a basin 12 feet by 16 feet. Here the strobe is designed to respond to combinations of changes in audible music, random sensors, audio feedback controls, and a computer program.

TU M’ (1918) One measure of Marcel Duchamp’s genius is that even his initially off-hand works can be esthetically loaded. When his principal early patron, KATHERINE S. DREIER, asked in 1918 for a painting to hang above a bookcase, Duchamp provided his last canvas, over 2 feet high, nearly 10 feet wide, with a curious collection

The tentativeness of the title alone (Tu m’ . . . , which looks automatically in French as the beginning of “you bore me”) betrays his lack of enthusiasm for the medium. Even so, with that consistency of purpose that we have come to expect to from him, he made use of the opportunity to try out a number of ideas relevant to his concerns at the time. The painting contains several different elements: shadows of Readymades, a trompe-l’oeil painted tear in the canvas held together by real safety-pins; various approaches to supplying the illusion of volume, both by the superimpositions of layers of colour and by the inclusion of a real bottle brush projecting at right angles from the painted surface. Tu m’ became an anthology of Duchamp’s capabilities. The theme of this summary is that even such a modest work demonstrates esthetic intelligence (which differs from scholarly intelligence) that only an intelligently original artist can show.

TUCKER, WILLIAM G. (28 February 1935) One of the New Generation British sculptors of the early 1960s, Tucker presented sculptures not much different from those of his contemporaries, but he accompanied them with an intellectual program of surprising rigor. In his writings, Tucker located the significance of sculpture in its condition of being an object – in its stable and unchanging nature. In essence, sculpture is the fixed point in a turning world. Despite the cogency of Tucker’s thinking, his early works added little to the ground that was already being covered by PHILIP KING. In the middle of the 1980s, Tucker turned to a style completely different from that of his previous efforts, and far more his own. Tucker began modeling by hand large and ponderous masses that look half like nearly formless lava boulders and half like human figures committing heroic gestures. In their craggy appearance, they harken back to the rough surfaces of Alberto Giacometti (1901–66) and GERMAINE RICHIER. But unlike his predecessors, Tucker walks the line between the formed and the formless, creating shapes that seem as much the byproducts of geological forces as human images produced by a human being. —Mark Daniel Cohen

418 • TURRELL, JAMES TURRELL, JAMES (6 May 1943) The deepest truth of his most remarkable career, considering five decades of it, was that he knew from the beginning that his medium would be light. He didn’t discover light after a career of exhibiting objects or a period of theorizing. His first exhibition, in 1967, just two years after his graduation from college, consisted entirely of projections within a museum space. He then created, in his own Southern California studio, a series of light-based installations by cutting slits into the walls and ceiling to let sunlight sweep through his space in various configurations, as he used lenses to refract it strategically. The first Turrell work I saw was Laar (1980). On the far side of a darkened room appeared to be a large, gray monochromic painting. As I moved closer, it retained that identity, its surface shimmering, much as good monochromic painting sometimes does. Only when I was literally on top of the work, close enough to bump my head into it, did I discover that, surprise, what looked like a monochromic rectangle is really a hole in the wall – or, to be more precise, an open window into a three-dimensional space filled with grayish light. If only to accentuate the illusion of a palpably different world, I could feel that the air behind the aperture had a perceptually different weight – heavier to my extended hand. In a later variation, Daygo (1990), shown at the Gladstone Gallery in New York in 1990, I stuck my head through the rectangle and noticed purplish light fixtures that were otherwise hidden from me. In either case, the effect was magical, the illusion of palpable nothing, really, is an extraordinary creation. For decades, Turrell has worked in remote northern Arizona on transforming a volcanic crater into a celestial observatory. The “Roden Crater Project,” as he calls it, should be a masterpiece. However, until it is complete, as well as more popularly accessible, my Turrell nomination for the contemporary canon would be Meeting, as installed in 1986 at PS (Public School) 1 in Long Island City. Viewers are asked to come no earlier than one hour before sunset and to stay no later than an hour after sunset. They are ushered into a former classroom, perhaps 20 feet square. Most of the ceiling has been cut away into a smaller rectangle, leaving the sky exposed. (It looked like clear glass to me until I felt the temperature change.) Though benches are run along the walls, it is perhaps more comfortable to lie on the floor rug, looking skyward. Along the top of the benches runs a track, behind which is a low level of orange light, emerging from tungsten filaments of thin, clear, meter-long, 150 watt Osram bulbs. (Having no

visible function before sunset, these lamps make a crucial contribution to the subsequent illusion.) What Turrell realized in his Meeting is framing the sunsetting sky, making its slow metamorphosis visible, in an unprecedented a time-dependent visual experience, literally a nature-based theater, that proceeds apart from human intervention. The sky looks familiar until it begins to turn dark. Lying in the middle of the floor, I saw the sky pass through a deep blue reminiscent of YVES KLEIN. Above me developed, literally out of nowhere, the shape of a pyramid, extending into the sky; and as the sky got darker, the apex of the navy blue pyramid slowly descended down into the space. Eventually it vanished, as the square became a flat, dark gray expanse, looking like nothing else as much as a James Turrell wall “painting,” before turning a deep uninflected black that looked less like the open sky than a solid ceiling. Now, I know as well as the next New Yorker that the sky here is never black; there is too much ambient light. What made the sky appear black was the low level of internal illumination mentioned before. (You can see the same illusion at an open-air baseball night game where, because of all the lights shining down onto the field, the sky likewise looks black.) I returned on another day that was cloudier than before, to see textures different from those I remembered. On the simplest level, what Turrell does is manipulate the natural changing colors of the sky, first through the frame that requires you to look only upwards, and then with thoughtful internal illumination that redefines its hues. What is also remarkable is how much intellectual resonance the work carries to a wealth of contemporary esthetic issues, such as illusion/anti-illusion, painting/theater, unprecedentedly subtle perception, the use of “found objects” (in this case, natural light), and conceptualism (bestowing meaning on apparent nothing), all the while transcending all of them. I personally thought of John Cage’s 4′33″, his “noise piece,” in which he puts a frame around all the miscellaneous inadvertent sounds that happen to be in the concert hall for that duration, much as Turrell frames unintentional developments in the sky. Meeting is essentially theatrical in that its PERFORMANCE must be experienced over a requisite amount of time; no passing glance, as well as no single photograph, would be appropriate. Indeed, though Meeting could have been realized technically prior to the 1950s, there was no esthetic foundation for it prior to then. Another likely Turrell masterpiece I’ve not experienced firsthand is in West Cork, Ireland: The Sky Garden at Liss Art Country House Estate (1992), which reportedly has unusual acoustics as well.

TWOMBLY, CY •

His work is commonly connected to that of ROBERT IRWIN, fifteen years older, likewise hailing from Southern California, as both feature light in their art. However, whereas the older artist uses objects to shape light, Turrell simply frames light. Esthetic geniuses both are.

TUTUOLA, AMOS (20 June 1920–8 June 1997) Nigeria’s most original novelist was a thinly educated war veteran who wrote English as only a Nigerian could. “I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age,” Tutuola’s first book begins. “I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. In those days we did not know other money, except COWRIES, so that everything was very cheap, and my father was the richest man in our town.” And his language gets only more original. Because Tutuola reportedly grew up speaking Yoruba, he makes authentic errors of English grammar and spelling on every page; yet his several novels have clear plots, usually about a protagonist with (or with access to) supernatural powers, who suffers awesome hardships before accomplishing his mission. One scholar reports that educated Nigerians were extremely angry that such an unschooled author should receive so much praise and publicity abroad, for they recognized his borrowings, disapproved of his bad grammar, and suspected he was being lionized by condescending racists who had a clear political motive for choosing to continue to regard Africans as backward and childlike primitives. Even with modest success, authentically original artists will always be attacked for some purported deficiency or another.

TWELVE-TONE MUSIC See SERIAL MUSIC.

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(1964), made this classic for CINEMASCOPE projection. Because 2001 is not often publicly available in that form, we tend to forget how it filled wide, encompassing screens with memorable moving images, all of which had an otherworldly quality: the wholly abstract, richly textured, and incomparably spectacular eight-minute “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” (as the clumsy subtitle announces the sequence); the stewardess performing her routine duties in the gravity-less spaceship; and the opening scenes in the space vehicle (which are filled with more arresting details than the eye can comfortably assimilate). Rather than focusing our attention, the movie consistently drives our eyes to the very edges of the screen (much like another CinemaScope masterpiece, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, 1962), in the course of emphasizing the visual over the aural. Over two hours long, 2001 has only forty-six minutes of dialogue, making it in large part, paradoxically, a mostly silent film for the age of wide-screen color, incidentally placing it in the great avant-garde tradition of mixing the archaic with the new as a way of eschewing expected conventions. Indicatively, 2001 ends with several minutes of images-without-words, rather than, say, an exchange of lines. The central image of the monolith, whose initial mysteriousness is reminiscent of the whale in HERMAN MELVILLE’s Moby-Dick, becomes a symbol whose final meaning is revealed as literally the sum of the movie itself, putting a seal of accumulated perception upon the preceding action. One is surprised to recall how many intelligent people, including prominent reviewers, disliked 2001 at the beginning, and how many parents were less enthusiastic than their children. “I ought not to have found this surprising,” wrote the physicist Freeman Dyson (1923), “for I am myself of the generation that was bowled over by Disney’s FANTASIA thirty years ago, while our sophisticated elders complained in vain about our shocking bad taste.” Even though 2001 alludes to Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon (1902), there has not been anything like it since, whether for small screens or large; it’s too bad that the large-screen motion-picture theaters capable of showing it best (and, say, Lawrence of Arabia) are by now nearly extinct.

2001

TWOMBLY, CY

(1968)

(25 April 1928–5 July 2011; b. Edwin Parker Twomby, Jr.)

Stanley Kubrick (1928–99) was an intelligent and morally sensitive filmmaker who, in the heady wake of the success of his second-best early film, Dr Strangelove

As an eccentric American painter emerging in the wake of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM but preceding MINIMAL art, he produced with paint, crayon,

420 • TYPEWRITER and sometimes even pencil many large visual paintings and drawings with a scattering of delicate marks, some of them suggesting calligraphy, that at their best evoke invisible spiritual realities. His work gains from echoing ancient graffiti often found in holy places. As nobody else’s visual art looks like Twombly’s, several paintings gathered together within a single room can realize an impact greater than the sum of its parts. The British critic David Sylvester (1924–2001) once judged that their delicacies are best seen under natural light.

TYPEWRITER This 19th-century invention changed writing, not only when authors such as Henry James (1843–1916) dictated to secretaries who transcribed on the new machine, but when writers typed themselves. In the mid-20th century came electric typewriters that enabled writers to enter more words quicker, leading many to compose longer sentences. (I know; I can remember when I first got mine.)

TYPEWRITER LITERATURE (c. 1940s) Poets such as E. E. CUMMINGS and CHARLES OLSON used the typewriter to create expressive alternative spacing between words. To the latter writer, “It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtaposition even of parts of phrases.” Composing literature directly on the typewriter also enabled authors to exploit its capacity for regularizing inscriptions and, better yet, for giving publishers camera-ready pages to print, rather than allowing typesetters to falsify the spacing and other design dimensions. Though certain typewriters presaged computers in permitting closer spacing of lines and/or letters, the creation of expressive shapes was possible on all typewriters. Among those making poems in this way were two older poets with conservative tastes, William Jay Smith (1918–2015) and May Swenson (1913– 89), in both cases briefly, and then younger poets, among them DOM SYLVESTER HOUÉDARD and KARL KEMPTON. Robert Caldwell (1946) founded his periodical Typewriter (1971) on the reasonable assumption that such writing deserved an outlet of its own. More interesting, to my mind, were

the novels composed on the typewriter and printed directly from a typescript: the original edition of RAYMOND FEDERMAN’s Double or Nothing (1971), Willard Bain’s Informed Sources (1969), and especially Guy Gravenson’s brilliant The Sweetmeat Saga (1971), in which fragments are splayed rectilinearly across the manuscript page. Marvin and Ruth Sackner, the most ambitious American collectors of visual poetry, produced an anthology The Art of Typewriting (2015). Since the early 1980s, authors have used home computers to produce camera-ready pages that approach (but don’t quite equal, especially in the lack of subtle kerning) the appearance of professional typesetting.

TZARA, TRISTAN (16 April 1896–25 December 1963; b. Samuel or Sami Rosenstock) A Rumanian Jew who left his native country at nineteen, Tzara almost always wrote in French, initially as a cofounder of Zurich DADA in 1917 and then as a SURREALIST in Paris from 1920 to 34, when ANDRÉ BRETON ousted him from the club for his deviant radicalism. He remains the only poet/poet to make substantial contributions to both French movements. The critic Marc Dachy credits Tzara with giving French poetry a new impetus, a sudden acceleration. He took unpunctuated free verse, inherited in part from GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE and BLAISE CENDRARS, and transformed it into an extraordinarily powerful instrument. By exciting the latent energies in language he created an extreme poetry filled with vertiginously polysemic meanings and the novel rhythms of substantives flashing by like telephone poles seen from a speeding car. Apart from this achievement, Tzara wrote a great long poem, L’Homme approximatif (1931, The Approximate Man), and a classic proto-CONCEPTUAL manifesto in the form of a poem: To make a Dadaist poem/ Take a newspaper./ Take a pair of scissors./ Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem./ Cut out the article./ Then cut out each of the words that make up this article & put them in a bag./ Shake it gently./ Then take out the scraps one

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after the other in the order in which they left the bag./ Copy conscientiously./ The poem will be like you. In his autobiography the American composer OTTO LEUNING recalls of Tzara: “He used bells, drums, whistles, and cowbells, beating the table to punctuate

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his declamations and to invite the audience to participate in his performance. He would curse, sigh, yodel, and shriek when the spirit moved him.” This model of the Jewish émigré avant-garde literary activist, working in a country and language both not his own, has inspired certain later poets similarly situated.

U

UBAC, RAOUL (31 August 1910–24 March 1985) Essentially a journeyman artist working along the fringes of SURREALISM, he should be remembered for a single monumental work – Le Combat de Penthésilée (1939, Battle of the Amazons), a solarmontage of female body parts, exemplifying the Surrealist obsession with life and death. Culturally, it recalls World War I and presages World War II. Technically, to realize a rich image that, when reproduced, seems so much larger than 10 3⁄4 inches by 15 5/8 inches, Ubac combined negatives in various sophisticated ways. A lesser Ubac work looking roughly similar, but produced differently, is Le Mur (1937, The Wall). Otherwise, Ubac, born French in Belgium, produced high reliefs and murals, in addition to magazine covers and illustrated books.

UITTI, FRANCES-MARIE (c. 1948) An American who has spent most of her life in Europe, she has lived mainly in the Netherlands. Initially a supremely accomplished cellist, Uitti has worked closely with a number of major figures – including JOHN CAGE, GIACINTO SCELSI, and the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen (1939). Her most distinctive contribution is the development of a method of playing the cello with two bows (in one hand) simultaneously. This enables her to create three- and fourpart polyphony, giving the instrument the potential for unprecedented harmonic richness. Luigi Nono (1924–90), Scelsi, Sylvano Bussotti (1931), György Kurtág (1926), and Vinko Globokar (1934) have all written works for her virtuosity with this technique. It figures in her own compositions and improvisations, along with other novelties favored by her, including six-string cello, prepared cello, viola da gamba, and

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various electronic modifications. Uitti’s own compositions, which seem most influenced by Scelsi, have a brooding, meditative quality that is perhaps best represented on the LP The Second Bow (1980). —Tony Coulter

UKELES, MIERLE LADERMAN (25 September 1939) A courageously unfashionable artist who has pursued the implications of her chosen subject, Ukeles has focused on the business of garbage in NEW YORK CITY since publishing her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art. For one of her pieces, Touch Sanitation Performance (1978), she endeavored to shake hands individually with all of the city’s sanitation workers; for the multi-part Sanitation Celebrations (1983), she made The Social Mirror, “a mobile public sculpture” that was actually a sanitation truck “clad in hand-fitted tempered glass mirror with Plexiglas trim,” and instructed six other three-wheeled sweepers to perform a five-part “Futurist Ballet” on Madison Avenue. For the World Financial Center, she made Ceremonial Arch Honoring Service Workers in the New Service Economy (1988). Though Ronald Reagan’s head of the National Endowment for the Arts once ridiculed awarding her work a government grant, he lacked sufficient religious sophistication to notice that, as an observant orthodox Jew, Ukeles was basing her art upon rituals of cleansing. It is not for nothing that she has also proposed MIKVA (1986), or a ritual bath of female purification. “Her vision unfolds in her artistic decisions,” the Jewish Museum’s exhibition catalog tells us, “which derive from a personal interpretation of rabbinical injunctions relating to the specifications for constructing a mikveh.” Ukeles has been artist-in-residence at New York City’s Sanitation Department for decades.

ULYSSES •

ULRICHS, TIMM (31 March 1940) A distinguished German POLYARTIST, Ulrichs has worked with various ideas in VISUAL POETRY, PERFORMANCE, graphics, and sculpture, in a great variety of formats. For himself, he has taken the banners of total Kunst and Totalkünstler (total artist). His work is very popular with German KUNSTHALLEN, which are city-sponsored exhibition spaces more predisposed to avant-garde shows than, say, the comparable American venue of university galleries. Even though Ulrichs speaks English fluently and has even exhibited English-language visual poetry: roseroseros erose roseroseroseroserose eros his work is rarely seen in the United States.

ULYSSES (2 February 1922) Born on James Joyce’s fortieth birthday, Ulysses is the center of his oeuvre. The experiments in realism and language in Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) are the basis of the day given in Ulysses. Beginning in Dublin at 8:00 am on the morning of 16 June 1904, the book ends early the next day, as Molly Bloom fades into sleep. Many of the characters who appear in Joyce’s early books show up during this day in Ulysses: it is a continuation of the adventures of the autobiographical Stephen Dedalus in the Dublin of Joyce’s earlier fiction. However, if this modern epic is a continuation of Joyce’s writing, it is also a radical break with his own work and that of early MODERNISM. Thus it lies at the very heart of what we now call high modernism. At the end of the novel, after Molly puts the book to sleep, there is this tag: Trieste – Zurich-Paris 1914–1921 Three cities and seven years are the geographical and temporal markers of a literary revolution. From the experiments of Ulysses-especially its later chapters – spring Joyce’s “nightbook” called FINNEGANS WAKE. But, as with everything to do with Joyce, we must begin with a city not named here – a city “named” throughout his writing. Joyce maintained

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that if the entire city of Dublin were burned downa real possibility after the events of 1916 – it could have been rebuilt, brick by brick, from the pages of Ulysses. What is fascinating about Joyce’s composition of Ulysses is that his conception of the entire book changed as he wrote it. These changes did not occur on the level of plot but in the novel’s “styles” and experiments. Through the help of EZRA POUND, who aided Joyce with almost everything during this time, including advice about good eye doctors, chapters of the novel were serialized in the pages of The Little Review in New York and, in London, in The Egoist. The serialization in The Egoist ended after only three chapters because the magazine could not find an English printer who would agree to set type for it. The Little Review had more success, as fourteen installments of the novel appeared in its pages between 1918 and 1920. But in 1920 four issues of the magazine containing excerpts from the novel were seized and burned by the US Post Office. The Little Review’s editors, Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, were put on trial for publishing obscenity. Faced with the loss of The Little Review as an outlet for his writing, Joyce spent more time revising earlier parts of the book and expanding later ones. The opening chapters of Ulysses are marked by Joyce’s development of the interior monologue. In the second half of the book, Joyce’s experiments in technique and form are intensified. The tenth episode, called “Wandering Rocks,” depicts a simultaneous moment with many different characters moving through the streets, homes, shops, and pubs of the city. The eleventh episode, “Sirens,” is in the form of a fuga per canone (A fugue according to rule), while the twelfth episode, “Cyclops,” analyzes the violence inherent in colonialism and the Irish nationalist response to it by injecting seemingly dissociated stylistic parodies into the “realist” setting of a pub. Joyce’s experiments reach a climax in the fifteenth episode of the novel called “Circe.” Here the very form of the novel breaks apart to reveal what the French critic Helene Cixous (1937) calls an “opera-out-of-gear,” or a play “out of control” because everything that has happened in the novel up to this point recurs and impossible things happen (objects speak, ghosts emerge, Shakespeare himself appears in a mirror wearing horns, Leopold Bloom gives birth to multiple children, and Dublin itself is burned down after a Black Mass). In a famous review of the novel, T. S. Eliot pointed to the “mythical method” in Ulysses as a technique “of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” The

424 • UNDERGROUND COMIX description of this “method” seems to have even more relevance for that other key text of 1922, The Waste Land. The battles over Ulysses that still rage are concerned not with the novel’s subject matter but with the establishment of a definitive text. Since the first (Paris) edition was filled with errors, there have since been ten other editions that have likewise been contested by textual scholars. In 1986, Hans Walter Gabler, a professor in Germany, issued with the original American publisher what was called “the corrected text.” However, his “corrections,” along with several additions, were quickly questioned, most notably by John Kidd of Boston University. This dispute placed Random House in the odd position of keeping in print two different editions of Ulysses (Gabler’s and a 1961 text it was intended to supersede). As a high modernist text, Ulysses remains a fluid odyssey that denies “meanings” and interpretative theories at the same time that it resists textual standardization. —John Rocco

UNDERGROUND COMIX (1968–) The first question that comes to mind about underground comix (the x in the last word being the preferred spelling within its universe) is “Why are these avant-garde?” Often seen as nothing more than a grandchild of the Tijuana bibles of the 1930s through 1950s, underground comix showed their vanguard colors by their disdain for conservative mores, their frenetic devolution of the narrative form, and sometimes by their style of drawing, which could erupt in a flow of interconnected images of sex, violence, and drug use, blowing apart across a single page the safe and easy reliability of the middle-class life most of the artists had come from. This artform may appear mainstream because of its mode of publication, but at heart underground comix presented a serious break with the traditions of the past and were an examination of the possibilities of the medium. This movement, in its narrowest form, never moved out of the 1970s – everything since that time (even the continuing work of R. CRUMB, one of its stars) being actually post-underground. This mode of expression became more varied and less underground as it evolved, even though many continued to apply the term to the underground’s successors. Primary among the latter work is the rich vein of graphic novels created in the last few decades, which includes autobiographies, coming-of-age stories,

SURREALISM, horror fiction, and even reportorial comics. —Geof Huth

UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE (1935) The hidden truth, which should not be forgotten, is that this government-funded economic safety net has done more for American artists, both avant-garde and traditional, in times of genuine economic need than all of the Arts Councils combined and perhaps all private patrons as well. Only when the latter become as effective as the former at fundamental support will they have earned genuine respect from the community of artists.

UNITED STATES (1776) America has historically been a country hospitable to avant-garde art, in spite of an oppressively commercial civilization and an uneven history of patronage by individuals and the state. The United States was founded on the ideals of freedom and independence, no less for art than for enterprise, and so artistic possibility becomes entwined in entrepreneurial opportunity. The archetypal American creative artist has been the “pathfinder” who leaves, often with naive motives, the confines of “civilization,” a metaphor for conventional, historically European notions of artistic possibility, to explore the uncharted frontier, sometimes achieving a “breakthrough” into esthetic territory unknown before. What particularly characterizes American explorations is the willingness of certain supreme individuals to pursue esthetic ideas literally, wholeheartedly, and unself-consciously to ultimate and unprecedented ends. In a culture in which politics and, alas, arts patronage even at its best have been limited by the art of the possible, the best American art exemplifies the politics of the impossible. America became the Western world’s artistic virgin land, as many of the compositional ideas that have strongly influenced the organized European avant-gardes – from Edgar Allan Poe’s Symbolist poetic theory through Henry James’s and WILLIAM FAULKNER’s fictional techniques to JOHN CAGE’s notions of aleatory music – have been American in origin. This tradition accounts for why America’s greatest representational arts – fiction as well as painting – tend, in contrast to European, to

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be more visionary and mythic (penetrating to the hidden essences of life), rather than concrete and realistic (encompassing a wealth of verifiable experience).

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (1967–70) A sort of rock band formed in 1967 by Joseph Byrd (1937), an avant-garde composer who had worked with LA MONTE YOUNG and TERRY RILEY, this group featured Byrd himself on pre-SYNTHESIZER electronic sound generators, Dorothy Moskowitz (1940) on vocals, and others playing electronic percussion, an electric violin, and a fretless guitar-like bass. Not unlike FRANK ZAPPA, they tried to incorporate avant-garde ideas into rock music, such as using a ring modulator to alter singers’ voices in live time. In spite of initial support from a large record company, they lacked the popular appeal of, say, Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. This US of A performed with a 3-foot by 4-foot neon American flag whose red and white stripes flashed alternately. They sometimes dressed as businessmen in suits, priests with Roman collars, or Japanese World War II soldiers with rifles and bayonets. “We were a Left Wing band (for ex: ‘Love Song for the Dead Che’),” Byrd once wrote me, “but one which had no constituency among the political Left.” Once the group disbanded, Byrd produced under his own name The American Metaphysical Circus (1969). Many other pop musicians have nonetheless followed the group’s precedent of using newer electronic instruments in live time. Few histories of rock music acknowledge US of A, even though I saw them live at Fillmore East. Not even The Rolling Stone’s otherwise compendious and thick Encyclopedia of Rock (third edition, 2001) has an entry on it. Sad.

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USCO (c. 1965–70) In the era of “hippie” collaboration, USCO was the epitome of a POLYARTISTIC commune – literally meaning Us Company, or Company of Us. The three principals were Michael Callahan (1944, initially a technician), Steve Durkee (1938, originally a painter), and Gerd Stern (1928, historically a poet). Collectively USCO produced striking posters, KINETIC sculptures, a mixed-media discotheque, kinetic information displays, and MIXED-MEANS theatrical events. Their masterworks were kinetic ENVIRONMENTS filled with paintings, objects, audio, slides, films (sometimes looped), colored lamps, and a pulsing STROBE LIGHT. The one I remember best, and which incidentally influenced many artists who saw it, was at the Riverside Museum in Manhattan in May 1966. The space was filled with elemental symbols and materials: male and female, heartbeats, and seven spheres representing seven planets. “We also had five elements,” Durkee told me. We had sand in the box in the middle; fire in the candles; we had air; we had water in the fountain around the periphery of the column, which was also the lingam inside the yoni – a psychosexual situation. There was an ‘om’ tape playing on a stereo tape recorder. ‘Om’ was the original sound of the universe. What we had in that room, in short, was everything that is. After USCO disbanded in the 1970s, Callahan later worked as a technician at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center, Stern in a family food business, and Durkee in architecture.

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VALDEZ, LUIS See EL TEATRO CAMPESINO.

VAN DOESBURG, THEO (30 August 1883–7 March 1931; b. Christian Emil Marie Küpper) Theo Van Doesburg was, like his near-contemporary MOHOLY-NAGY, a POLYARTIST excelling at two or more nonadjacent arts – painting, architectural design, criticism, and creative literature. In the first respect, he was famous for rigorously geometric, CONSTRUCTIVIST paintings, such as Composition XI (1918) and Counter-Composition XIII (1924), and then for deviating from his fellow Dutchman PIET MONDRIAN by introducing diagonals into his art. For his second art, consider particularly his CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE in the form of spectacular models, such as the Color Construction (1922) prepared with Cornelis van Eesteren (1897–1988), which simply has planes (floors) different in size stacked upon each other without any windows or a roof. Van Doesburg’s critical essays are filled with incisive distinctions and stunning prophecies, for he had mastered the manifesto writer’s art of resonant sentences: “We are painters who think and measure”; “in the name of humanism one has tried to justify quite a lot of nonsense in art”; and “the best handicraft is the one which displays no human touch.” Van Doesburg’s contributions to more imaginative writing began with his second DE STIJL manifesto (1920), which was devoted to “literature.” If only to distinguish the DADA side of his activity from the Constructivist, he coined not one but two PSEUDONYMS, I. K. Bonset and Aldo Camini (the former echoing a Dutch phrase for “I am crazy”), and then worked to

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preserve their secrecy. Whereas Bonset published poetry (reproduced in facsimile in Nieume Woordbeeldingen [1975]), Camini wrote essays. My favorite Bonset text is “VoorbijtrekkendeTroep” (Marching Infantry, 1916), a sound poem reprinted in Carola GIEDION-Welcker’s extraordinary Anthologie der Abseitigen/Poètes à l’lcart (1965), which has never been translated, alas. In part because van Doesburg’s work was so various, his achievement remains incompletely understood, even decades after his death. Consider this special insight from his comrade MICHEL SEUPHOR: “We can see or read between the lines that for van Doesburg the terms art, spirituality, abstraction, universality, and religion were identical.”

VANDERBEEK, STAN (6 January 1927–19 September 1984) His earliest distinguished work was animation that depended upon collaging images found in popular magazines, sometimes abetted by his own drawings, all reminiscent of outrageous SURREALISM. VanDerBeek also made ink drawings directly on an animation stand, documenting their progress on film. Possessed of a restless, forward-looking imagination, VanDerBeek used television imagery in film as early as One (1958–59) and computer graphics in the mid-1960s, collaborating with Ken Knowlton at BELL LABS in producing nine computer-generated films between 1964 and 1970, some of which he called Poem Fields (sometimes, Poem Fields), because they combine words with rapidly moving abstractions In the mid-1960s, next to his own residence in THE LAND, VanDerBeek erected a small hemispheric (dome-shaped) building that he envisioned as a prototype for multiprojection spaces, which he called the “movie-drome.” Audiences were instructed to lie down at the outer edge, with their feet toward the center of the dome, looking up at an abundance of moving images.

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Unfortunately, VanDerBeek was more adept at envisioning than finishing; and once he became a full-time college professor, beginning in the 1960s, his propensity for procrastination increased. Another tragedy was that, not unlike other forward-looking artists, he died too soon to exploit subsequent technologies. Some of his children became artists, honoring their father, who died when they were young, in a 2010 exhibition and illustrated book of their works along with his.

VAN GOGH, VINCENT (30 March 1853–29 July 1890) The best case for his originality comes from the art historian MEYER SCHAPIRO, who, in a classic monograph on the Dutch painter (1968), identifies him as the first to portray all of his “aspiration and anguish [within] his art, which thus became the first example of a truly personal art, art as a deeply lived means of spiritual salvation or transformation of the self.” The visible measure of his superhuman effort is intensity, especially evident in his later works, where every square millimeter is expressively articulated. Typically, his portraits are not austere but turbulent to their very edges. Van Gogh’s example of a higher esthetic/spiritual autobiography influenced later artists, even if their work looked ostensibly different.

VANTONGERLOO, GEORGES (24 November 1886–5 October 1965) One of the youngest members of the group founding DE STIJL, this Belgian rejected MONDRIAN’s strict insistence upon only horizontal and vertical lines. In addition to introducing diagonals and then curves, Vantongerloo favored mathematics, thinking that his works would thus reveal universal truths unavailable to artists unfamiliar with math. To him a measure of beauty is ∞ + 1. What resulted were, first, geometric constructions in the early 1930s – paintings and sculptures with curves and spirals set against straight lines; wire constructions in the 1940s; and then colored Plexiglas objects in the 1950s. About his Composition Green-Blue-Violet-Black (1937), in the Guggenheim Museum’s permanent collection, the curator Vivian Endicott Barnett (1944) writes, “The artist has arranged the five rectangles of decreasing width in a counterclockwise spiral beginning at the lower right and ending at the center. This spiral progression is, in turn, a variation of the Golden Section.” Vantongerloo’s principal protégé was the SWISS MAX BILL,

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who organized several Vantongerloo exhibitions. Though his paintings pale beside Mondrian’s, Vantongerloo remains a hero to those respecting the recurring aspirations for a rational art.

VAN VECHTEN, CARL (17 June 1880–21 December 1964) One of the great early publicists for the avant-garde in literature, dance, and music, born in the same year as APOLLINAIRE, Van Vechten began as a newspaper reporter and then joined in 1906 the New York Times as a music critic and later a Paris cultural correspondent, collecting his better journalism into books: Interpreters and Interpretations (1917, 1920) and Excavation: A Book of Advocacies (1926). Very sociable, Van Vechten gave his loyal book publisher, young Alfred A. Knopf (1892–1984), a reputation for avant-garde intelligence that might have otherwise been unavailable. Prior to GERTRUDE STEIN’s celebrity in the mid-1930s, Van Vechten was Stein’s most effective advocate in America, remembering this relationship, along with others similarly enthusiastic, in his Sacred and Profane Memories (1932). It was appropriate that he was invited to edit Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (Modern Library, 1946), which succeeded for decades in presenting the most accessible Stein texts (while barely acknowledging her more experimental, more extraordinary work) and thus became a totem to be tumbled for those, like myself, favoring the more avant-garde Stein texts. An esthetic pioneer, Van Vechten published one of the first American books exclusively devoted to dance criticism, as well as a remarkable appreciation of domesticated cats. His most important book of fiction, Nigger Heaven (1926), is remembered for its sympathetic portrayal of Harlem life and emerging cultural activity, as well as his courageous insistence upon an epithet subsequently judged more notorious. (Profoundly unfortunate is unwanted censorship by later fashion.) His posthumously published Daybooks (2007) epitomize the higher cultural gossip. As a literary patron, Van Vechten established the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University. He recommended younger African-American writers such Langston Hughes to Knopf. His 15,000 photographs, particularly of prominent artists and writers in the 1930s and 1940s, became the foundation of important documentary collections at the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART and elsewhere. If not for his (and others’) recognizing the importance of individuals

428 • VARÈSE, EDGARD initially obscure, much important arts history would have been lost. Van Vechten wore more than one finger-ring and wrist bracelets long before other men did and publicized art especially by fellow homosexuals without, as was standard then, acknowledging their difference. Certain enthusiasms that seem acceptable today were radical then; for, if Van Vechten is barely remembered today, a principal reason is that he was in several crucial respects too far ahead of his time. He published little in the last two decades of his long life.

VARÈSE, EDGARD (22 December 1883–6 November 1965) A Frenchman who studied in Italy and lived in BERLIN before emigrating to America in 1915, Varèse developed the concept of “organized sound” that eschewed precise pitch and other traditional musical structures for alternative kinds of musical coherence. His monumental lonisation (1931) is a wholly percussive piece that employs such nonmusical sound generators as sirens, sleigh bells, and brake drums that, incidentally, have indefinite pitch. To say that this short work, only several minutes in length, sounded like nothing done before it would be an understatement. Writing in 1967, only a few years after I first heard lonisation, by then more than three decades old, I was still awed by it, observing then: The interaction of such large blocks of unusual percussive material produced a chaotic sound so distinctly unlike any previous musical experience that laymen and critics condemned the piece as merely noise (that was ‘not music’) and even professional composers feared that the apocalypse – the end of music – had come. What happened, however, was that the acceptance of lonisation, along with Varèse’s idea of “organized sound,” created a precedent for further music with imprecise pitch and alternative acoustic structuring. One measure of this change in thinking is that lonisation, a work requiring many rehearsals for its premiere, is by now frequently performed by amateurs. (Misspelling it in the American way, as “Ionization,” is an illiteracy comparable to adding an apostrophe to FINNEGANS WAKE – something that most readers would miss and, alas, ignorant copyeditors would “fix.”) Varèse was neglected for most of his professional life; not until 1955, for instance, when he was over 70, was he elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Long alienated here (but faithful to his

American wife, the literary translator Louise Norton [1891–1989]), he continued to use French titles for his compositions; for a while spelled his first name as Edgar. He frequently left New York for the American southwest, where HENRY MILLER found him in the early 1940s and wrote a memorable appreciation, “With Edgard Varèse in the Gobi Desert.” Indeed, because Varèse’s innovations were initially unacceptable, they remain so incompletely understood that debate over them continues among a curious diversity of admirers. JOHN CAGE always honored Varèse as a precursor of the chaotic tradition of modernist music; the sophisticated rock musician FRANK ZAPPA staged in New York at his own expense an evening-length concert of Varese’s music in 1981; and MILTON BABBITT, as a serial theorist, has found complex structures in Varèse’s work more typical of his own, post-Schoenbergian kind of music. Varèse’s close colleague NICOLAS SLONIMSKY reports: “On the centennial of his birth, in 1983, festivals of his music were staged in Strasbourg, Paris, Rome, Washington, DC, New York, and Los Angeles.” Not unlike his near-contemporary ANTON WEBERN, Varèse finished few pieces, each being remarkably different from the others; each can be admired for various reasons. My own choice for his second innovative monument would be Poème électronique (1958), which ranks among the early masterpieces of music wholly for the medium new to the post-Second World War period – magnetic tape. Commissioned for Philips Radio’s three-peaked pavilion designed by LE CORBUSIER at the Brussels World Exposition, this eight-minute example of organized sound was densely composed, from sound sources both human and mechanical, to emerge through four hundred separate loudspeakers, sweeping through the space as “continuous arcs of sound.” To quote from the liner notes to the first recording: The sound itself was accompanied by a series of projected images chosen by Le Corbusier, some of them photographs, others montages, paintings, printed or written script. No synchronization between sight and sound was attempted by the two artists; part of the effect achieved was the result of a discordance between aural and visual impressions. . . . The audience, some fifteen or sixteen thousand people daily for six months, evinced reactions almost as kaleidoscopic as the sounds and images they encountered. Varèse’s widow, also known for her literary translations, published only the first volume of a promised fuller biography.

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VASARELY, VICTOR (9 April 1908–15 March 1997) Vasarely has so popularized his work, mostly through the medium of prints, that it is hard to remember that he was once a genuinely innovative optical artist. Born in Hungary, Vasarely moved to France as a young man. His generative idea was to use an array of simple geometric forms to create, on a two-dimensional static canvas, the illusion of movement. At times the illusory activities are so contrary and intense that the painting cannot be stared at without inducing dizziness. Implaccably undecorative, they could destabilize residential spaces and so belonged in museums. As he later ran unmodulated colors through his structural innovations, later Vaserelys were more accommodating. His son Jean-Pierre V. (1934–2002), professionally known as Yvaral, also became a geometric artist as a founding member of GRAV (Groupe de recherche d’art visuel).

VAUGHN-JAMES, MARTIN See GROSS, Milt; VISUAL POETRY.

VAUTIER, BEN

curtain will rise at 21:30 and fall at precisely 22:30. Absolutely no one will be allowed to attend.” Vautier also likes to write in large letters conundrums that are considerably wittier than similar to later pseudoaphorisms by JENNY HOLZER. Though his art could be easily (and cheaply) exhibited, it isn’t, sadly.

VELVET UNDERGROUND (c. 1966–72) As one of the first DOWNTOWN Manhattan rock bands, initially championed by ANDY WARHOL, the Velvet Underground participated in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Warhol’s multimedia discotheque on St. Marks Place in 1966. Their leaders were the singer/ songwriter Lou Reed (1942–2013) and the string player John Cale (1942), who had previously performed with LA MONTE YOUNG. Their choice of subject matter (drug addiction, street life, tortured sexuality) and their contemptuous attitude toward their audience placed them squarely against the more listener-friendly groups like THE BEATLES. Their songs were longer than standard pop/rock fare, and they made no attempt to polish the rough edges off their performances. Not unlike many other avant-garde combines, the Velvets had a greater impact after they dissolved, incidentally influencing the punk-rock movement of the 1970s. —Richard Carlin

(18 July 1935) Born in Naples of a Swiss-French father and an Irish mother who came of age in Egypt, Vautier gravitated in the mid-1950s to Nice, France, where he has worked ever since. One mark of his art is ironic audacity, which begins with his signing his works only “Ben,” with large, open letters whose calligraphy reeks of egotism. In 1962, he exhibited himself with a sign reading: “Look at me; that’s enough.” Here and elsewhere, Vautier’s essential move is to give esthetic value to common things, such as his lying face down on a busy sidewalk or by entitling and affixing his “Ben” signature to anything offered to him, at once enhancing and depressing it. His Nice store, initially called Laboratorie and then renamed Galeries Ben Doute de Tour, is now owned by the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Pompidou. Among other clever Vautier work is “Postman’s Choice” (1965), which is classic MAIL ART because it must travel through the public post. As each side of the standard card bears its own stamp and address, it is up to the unwitting postman to decide who its recipient will be. For 16 June 1966 (Bloomsday to Joyceans) he announced a performance entitled No One. “The

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VERTOV, DZIGA (2 January 1896–12 February 1954; b. David Abelevich Kaufman) Among the greatest early films about the production and experience of film, his “documentary” Man with a Movie Camera (1929) portrays people and other moving objects filmed unaware of a camera and thus seen as never before. The recurring motif of one man with a camera on a tripod becomes the principal AFTERIMAGE, all in a silent WHITE & BLACK style reflecting WALTER RUTTMANN’s Berlin (1927) made only slightly before. Vertov’s style of rapidly moving from one image to another, shooting subjects at different distances, sometimes splitting his screen and both speeding up and slowing down, epitomizes MONTAGE meant to reflect modern life and machinery; the aim of his Kino-Eye was revealing images “inaccessible to the human eye.” Influential at the time for the quality of its imagery and editing, as well as its anti-theatrical bias, Man with a Movie Camera established a standard for documentaries in general and films about film in

430 • VIDEO ART particular. Later filmmakers outside Russia appropriated Vertov’s name to advertise their own higher ambitions. Music groups and composers such as MICHAEL NYMAN have added soundtracks to Vertov’s silent footage. Vertov himself made other films before dying young of cancer. His younger brother Mikhail Kaufman (1897–1980), who appeared as the onscreen cameraman in his older brother’s classic, later made his own films in Russia while their much younger brother Boris Kaufman (1906–80) went West, studying film in Paris and later working in America where he won an Academy Award for “Best Cinematography” in On the Waterfront (1954). So richly various was the fate of these siblings.

VIDEO ART (c. 1960) The pioneer here was NAM JUNE PAIK, who realized early in the 1960s that magnets applied to points outside a live TV screen could distort its kinetic image. Paik later placed an electrified wire across a reel of recorded videotape, thereby causing erasure every few seconds. Additionally, he was among the first to assemble several monitors into unified objects called video sculptures. Once the portable video camera became commercially available, artists were among the first to purchase it. I remember ROBERT WHITMAN using one to tape his outdoor MIXED-MEANS piece in 1967, no doubt discovering on the small screen an image considerably different from that available on black-andwhite film. Two years later, I saw Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider’s Wipe Cycle, which exploited the new medium’s capability to produce quickly a picture of the scene before it, making video different from film, which needs to be photographically developed before being shown. Technically, video depended upon advances in the technology of magnetic tape that was previously used for sound recording (in contrast, say, to HOLOGRAPHY, which depended upon film technology). Though video producers could use switchers and other devices to combine images in live time (such as splitting the screen image into discrete parts or setting foreground images against a different background), one audio technique that at last count could not be reproduced was MULTITRACKING, which is the layering at equal strength on a single tape of separately generated video material. Once the cost of portable cameras decreased, video became a popular art medium, much like

photography before it, so that one measure of artistry became the creation of work different from the very common run. Some used video to document live performances; others, such as AMY GREENFIELD, exploited its different scale to “film” performances that were never meant to be seen live. STEPHEN BECK eschewed the camera completely for synthesizers that could create images never seen before; BILL VIOLA (1951) and Bucky Schwartz (1932– 2009), among others, realized perceptual incongruities unique to the new medium, while Davidson Gigliotti (1939) and Mary Lucier (1944) used several monitors to portray a continuous image that ran from screen to screen. It was perhaps unfortunate that video art developed in the 1970s and 1980s, when certain content-based fads became more acceptable in critical discourse than before. By the 21st century, many prominent video artists had done work that dated, not for technical reasons (as the best early photography is still exhibited), but because of transiently fashionable content. It is indicative that the esthetics of COLLAGE, long passé in all other arts, had a currency in video art, along with literal representation, journalistic commentary disguised as Leftish agitprop, and, alas, a limited sense of what this new medium can do.

VIENNA ACTIONISTS (c. 1960–71) This became the standard English name for a loose group of Austrian visual and PERFORMANCE artists who made such extreme activities as selfmutilation, blood rituals, and even orgies acceptable in ART-WORLD contexts. Always more present in continental Europe than in England or America, the VA moniker includes Hermann Nitsch (1938), Otto Mühl (1926–2013), Günter Brus (1938), and on their fringe Rudolf Schwarzkogler (1940–69), who, exploiting their group’s reputation, became notorious for a mythical self-castration he didn’t actually do. They depended first upon sympathetic audiences for their initial performances and then upon secondary reportage that would interest a larger audience than wouldn’t dare attend a live performance. The prominent Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell (1919– 2011) once approvingly quoted an UCSD English professor’s deprecation of a New York Nitsch performance that, given patent factual errors, neither had actually seen. (For such fakery, students were customarily flunked.)

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On the other hand, from the performance reviewer C(ynthia) Carr (1950), generally sympathetic to “transgression,” comes this shocked summary in 1988: Twenty years later they haven’t lost their capacity to shock. Each film/“action” is an orgiastic mess of collapsed boundaries: food poured over a penis, a chain of assfuckers standing knee-deep in a pond, someone shitting on a guy’s face, and other now art-historical acts between consenting adults. The “action” I found completely unwatchable was an orgy that included the slow slaughter of a swan. A British artist residing mostly in BERLIN, Malcolm Green (1952), edited an anthology of VA writings (1999). Since they were all men, an important development came with women respecting their challenge, such as the Viennese artist known as Valie Export (1940; b. Waltraud Lehner). Indeed, she joined Peter Weibel (1945), later a distinguished German media-arts activist, in editing the monumental anthology Wien: Bildkompendium Wiener Aktionismus und Film (1970) that established their reputation, at least within certain circles, in Europe.

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VIEW (1940–47) Founded and edited in New York by CHARLES HENRI FORD, then a young American who had lived in Paris in the 1930s, View intended initially to publish European artists and writers who had fled to America at the beginning of World War II. Indeed, in its pages appeared ANDRÉ BRETON, MAX ERNST, MAN RAY, and the poet Edouard Roditi (1910–92). Nonetheless, it served a more important function in publishing, amongst the famous Europeans, certain American writers and artists who were young at the time – JOSEPH CORNELL, Paul Goodman (1911– 72), Paul Bowles (1910–99), and Parker Tyler (1907– 74), many of whom would become more prominent in later decades. (Breton, partly out of priggish distaste for the homosexuality he found in View, established his own magazine, VVV [1942–44], which he typically claimed was the only true SURREALIST publication in America.) A posthumous anthology of selections from View’s pages (1991) is subtitled “Parade of the Avant-Garde,” which indeed it is. Consider how few literary/art magazines look as percipient when a selection from their pages appears a half-century later.

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(late 1950s) Several of the most experimental German-language poets gathered in Vienna in the late 1950s, and, in the manner of ambitious Europeans (but not comparable Americans), declared themselves a groupgroup: Friedrich Achleitner (1930), H. C. ARTMANN, Konrad Bayer (1932–64), Gerhard Rühm (1930), and OSWALD WIENER. They worked with visual poetry, language games, and alternative structures, among other innovations. Gerhard Rühm’s Mann und Frau (1972), for instance, is a book approximately 8½” square with pages composed of lines, large alphabet letters drawn the hand, pages cut horizontally in half, and a few German words. The importance of the Vienna Group in Europe notwithstanding, few English translations of their work exist, none of them particularly complete. Certain discriminating German-speaking colleagues of mine consider Wiener’s Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa (The Improvement of Middle Europe, 1969) the most substantial experimental novel after ARNO SCHMIDT’s works. The standard German anthology of the Vienna Group suffers from the omission of another Viennese poet, Ernst Jandl (1925–2000), who in certain respects seemed more interesting (if only for his poems originally in English).

(5 August 1908–7 February 1997) Born in the Philippines, when it was still an American colony sort of, and educated at the universities of New Mexico and Columbia, he preferred to work not in the languages of his home country but in English. For his Have Come, Am Here (1942), he claimed a new rhyming scheme that he called “reversed consonance”: “The last sounded consonants of the last syllable, or the last principal consonant of a word, are reversed for the corresponding rhyme. Thus, a rhyme for near would be run; or rain, green, reign.” Innovative, I suppose, but not influential. His next departure marked Villa as a typographic poet in the tradition of E. E. CUMMINGS, focusing upon expression through visible inventions. His “Sonnet in Polka Dots,” for instance, consists of fourteen lines of just the letter O, distributed horizontally as though the letters stand for words. Other Villa poems have syntactically normal sequences of words, punctuated, however, with commas that give them a different rhythm and meaning: “Moonlight’s, melody, alone, has, secrecy,/ To, make, watermelons, sweet, and, juicy.” Villa also wrote heightened prose reflecting his colonial upbringing.

432 • VILLA-LOBOS, HEITOR Perhaps because of his exotic background, his work in the 1950s was accepted by mainline magazines and commercial book publishers who wouldn’t otherwise accept such experimental writing. However, as he didn’t exploit his special background as well as, say, Joseph Brodsky (1940–96) in the next generation, Villa fell into obscurity, even while residing in Manhattan’s West Village. Sad it was that later avant-garde poets tended to forget about him, at least until Penguin published Doveglion: Collected Poems (2008).

VILLA-LOBOS, HEITOR (5 March 1887–17 November 1959) The most prominent Brazilian composer of his generation, Villa-Lobos had an illustrious career that began with his collecting of folk songs in his native country. The pianist Artur Rubinstein (1887–1982), meeting him in Brazil, asked for a composition, which VillaLobos produced as Rudepoema (1921–26), a work for solo piano that was technically so daunting that only the greatest virtuosos could play it. In 1923, VillaLobos went to Europe, where he stayed for several years establishing his reputation as a Brazilian abroad, which is to say an exotic in Europe. Returning home in 1930, he became active in music education, eventually founding a conservatory. Essentially self-taught as a composer, he developed graphic notation, using the shapes in drawings and photographs as outlines for his melodies. For instance, The New York Skyline (1939) reportedly depended upon a photograph for initial guidance. Prolific, he produced over 2,000 discrete compositions. Villa-Lobos’s principal compositional departure, which had considerable influence, was combining Brazilian folk rhythms with J. S. BACHIAN counterpoint, producing nine numbered pieces for various instrumental and vocal ensembles. The most famous is probably Bachianas brasileiras #5 for the unusual combination of voice and eight cellos. Apart from everything else Villa-Lobos did, these “re-Bachs” have survived, initially for establishing one way of appropriating the 18th-century German master for the 20th century.

VIOLA, BILL (25 January 1951) He was probably the first major video artist to begin in video, rather than working through other arts before making his initial videos. One source reports that while in high school, in Queens, NY, in the 1960s, he was captain

of a “TV Squad,” whatever that was at the time. In the early 1970s, he studied at Syracuse University (NY), where students developed a video production facility named Synapse. (I had my first video production residency there in 1975.) Upon graduating, Viola worked as a video technician at a Syracuse art museum and performed live electronic music with DAVID TUDOR. Thanks to generous support from institutions around the world, as well as a wife who has been an MAP (a model artist’s partner), Viola has since produced an abundance of video pieces exploring several themes: changes in speed and size, stillness, alternative perception, mysticism, dualisms, spectator participation, etc., mostly portraying common themes. Though none of the parts are particularly excellent, the sum has represented an incomparable achievement for decades. Indicatively, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art gave him in 1998 not only a retrospective exhibition but a richly illustrated catalog copublished with Flammarion (Paris), all thanks to David A. Ross (1949), then the Whitney’s director, who had a quarter-century before been at Syracuse’s Everson the first video curator at any museum (and before that, Viola’s college buddy). Once NAM JUNE PAIK became less productive, Viola became the token video artist in larger less specialized art venues. One quality making them attractive to art museums is the acknowledgment both explicit and implicit of classic paintings. Whenever any cultural dummy dismisses as a waste the history of funds to emerging non-commercial artists, reply that Viola’s superlative achievement couldn’t have happened without them. Indeed, he ranks among the best examples of a grants-made major contemporary artist.

VIRTUAL REALITY (c. 1990) In 2000 I wrote: This is a technology whose artistic possibilities have scarcely been discovered. Thanks to glasses over your eyes and earphones over your ears, your eyes and ears can be infiltrated with materials that transport your head into other realms. The visual element in particular generally comes from a computer. Because firsthand experience of virtual reality is scarce, the idea of virtual reality has probably had more imaginative impact. Not untypically, the book Virtualities (1998) is less about virtual reality as such than short video installations as “undoubtedly the most complex art form in contemporary culture.” Rethinking, nearly two decades later: “Virtual” was coined around 1960 by computer developers for “not

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physically existing but made to appear by software.” In TED NELSON’s classic formulation, “Reality we have to take as a given; virtuality is whatever we make it.” The epithet Virtual Reality enters art discussion in the 1990s to identify technical getups involving headphones, goggles, and electrified gloves that, once turned on, so to speak, create for the individual spectator some other worldly non-psychedelic experience. Since its commercial uses were flight simulation, automobile design, military training, and electronic games, by the middle 2010s over 200 companies were reportedly developing products exploiting VR, while other major corporations had research departments working on it. When I saw in the 1990s a presentation for artists by the sometime musician Jaron Lanier (1960), then VR’s Johnny Appleseed, I expected more VR art, which didn’t happen or at least has not happened yet.

VISUAL ART Not too long ago this epithet encompassed painting, sculpture, and perhaps prints. However, from the 1960s onwards other sub-terms became popular among people trained in and appreciative of visual arts. Among these new monikers were environment, installation, book-art, performance, photography, video art, and, most radically, conceptual art. Individuals trained in the visual arts began to produce works falling into two or more of these new categories. Once these new sub-arts were exhibited within art galleries and discussed in magazines traditionally covering painting and sculpture, they could be taught in classrooms in art colleges (though less likely in liberalarts universities). For a while, especially in the 1970s, the new arts were portrayed as being at war with the traditional arts, which were sometimes deemed “dead.” However, even within the recognizable media of painting, sculpture, and drawing the strongest avant-garde works have survived.

VISUAL FICTION See VISUAL POETRY.

VISUAL POETRY (c. 325 B.C.) This is my preferred term for minimal, customarily nonsyntactical language that is visually enhanced to a significant degree. It differs from PATTERN POETRY, where the edges of conventionally syntactical horizontal

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lines define a perceptible shape; from CONCRETE POETRY, which at its purest identifies a materialist attitude toward language, wholly apart from syntax and semantics; and from whatever it was that WILLIAM BLAKE did (consider, word + image). Thus, the term “visual poetry” is applicable to the word-signs of ROBERT INDIANA, “eyeye” of ARAM SAROYAN (with its hint of eyeglasses), “Forsythia” of MARY ELLEN SOLT, PAUL VAN OSTAIJEN’s “Zeppelin,” and the door-high towers of JOHN FURNIVAL, among many others. It differs as well from Poesia Vivisa, which was an Italian term, popular in the 1970s, for visual art that incorporates words, usually handwritten, along with pictures, usually photographs, largely for political content, and thus formally updates the genre of William Blake. Replicas of the last appeared in the 21st century, mostly in America. An extension is Visual Fiction, which is the preferred term for narrative that depends upon changes in roughly continuous pictures, usually eschewing words. Among this art’s major practitioners are FRANS MASEREEL, DUANE MICHALS, MILT GROSS, and LYND WARD.

VITACCHIO, ALBERTO (28 October 1942) With his wife Carla Alba (1935), Vittachio edited out of Torino, Italy, a polylingual magazine Offerta Speciale (1978–2018), which pioneered in publishing innovative texts in various languages without translation. For his own creative work, his specialty is texts based upon a great variety of books and authors, among them GERTRUDE STEIN, John Dos Passos, Frank Kafka, and Jorge Amado. His masterpiece is Landlessness (2016), which a book-length visual-verbal appropriation of, and thus commentary upon, in original American English, HERMAN MELVILLE Moby-Dick – literally a classic on a classic. One hidden truth is that a substantial body of distinguished avant-garde writing in English has been written by Europeans who also publish in their mother tongues – not only Vittachio but ERNST JANDL, DIETER ROTH, Caroline Bergvall (1962), and FERDINAND KRIWET, among others.

VKHUTEMAS (1920–25 or 1931) The Soviet term for Higher Technical-Artistic Studios, established first in Moscow in 1920 and then in both

434 • VOLLMANN, WILLIAM T. Petrograd and Vetebsk the following year. Independent of one another, they nonetheless became important for teaching and theoretical discussions, especially of CONSTRUCTIVISM. Among the artists on the faculties were KAZIMIR MALEVICH, WASSILY KANDINSKY, ALEXANDR RODCHENKO, and VLADIMIR TATLIN. A sort of visiting lecturer at that time, NAUM GABO remembered

(fictional) self-inventions. Among the visuals here are block-prints and drawings made by Vollmann himself. Such an original visible example suggests that his private book-art might be equally strong.

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seven departments: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Ceramics, Metalwork and Woodwork, Textile, and Typography, but general discussions were held and seminars conducted among the students on diverse problems where the public could participate, and artists not officially on the faculty could speak and give lessons. Gabo continues, During these seminars, as well as during the general meetings, many ideological questions between opposing artists in our abstract group were thrashed out. These gatherings had a much greater influence on the later development of constructive art than all the teaching. One sign of the quality of its education is student work that has survived, even if its artists are not remembered. For an example, consider the pastiches made in 1924 from MAYAKOVSKY poems by a student named Yuri Rozhkov, who is otherwise forgotten. (As recently as 2015 were they exhibited in New York.) Qualitatively, the Vkhutemas academies represented the Soviet equivalent of the Bauhaus, though, like so many other independent movements in Russia at the time, they fell by the early 1930s under central party control.

VOLLMANN, WILLIAM T. (29 July 1959) Aside from being a legendarily productive novelist and long-winded reporter on contemporary violence, he has also explored BOOK-ART, initially with volumes, often hand-made in very limited editions, that he’s neither exhibited nor distributed, selling them, he claims, to collectors already appreciative of his book-making. In the one audacious volume publicly published, The Book of Dolores (2013), with pictures accompanied by his words, Vollmann portrays himself as a chubby middle-aged woman in a rich variety of costumes and poses oddly reminiscent of CINDY SHERMAN’s

One of the most adventurous women of American arts history, forgotten at home perhaps because her name sounds so un-American, she initially followed her prominent father into international journalism. While reporting from Moscow from 1929 to 1932, she discovered FAUVES paintings that revived her dormant earlier interest in producing visual art. Though her own initial paintings were landscapes, she learned about abstraction from fellow artists active in New York during the 1930s and so early joined AMERICAN ABSTRACT ARTISTS whose president she later became. Also working as an art writer, she was invited in 1941 to interview PIET MONDRIAN, who had recently arrived in New York. After publishing soon afterwards the first English-language appreciation of the Dutch artist, she translated his challenging essays into acceptable English, introducing them to America as no one else could have done. Her intense memoir of Mondrian in New York appeared in Arts Yearbook 4 (1960). So well known was her association with Mondrian that his executor had to wait until she died, some forty years after Mondrian, to offer a SoHo gallery an exhibition purportedly replicating his New York studio! With abstract shapes and sharp edges, such as squares within squares, Von Wiegand’s own paintings from the mid-1940s reflected his influence. Around that time, she discovered through Far Eastern religion and Theosophy another direction in her abstract art that became more colorful. Not until 1982, just before her death, did an American museum (in Miami) offer her a retrospective. If only to honor her richly adventurous career, she merits a book-length biography.

VORTICISM (1913–18) Perhaps the most provocative movement in the history of British visual art, Vorticism began over a quarrel between the London critic Roger Fry (1866–1934) and the writer-painter WYNDHAM LEWIS when the latter declared an allegiance to ITALIAN FUTURISM, which had just emerged on the continent. Reflecting

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Italian influence, the Vorticists produced visual art filled with angular lines and poetry filled with hysterical declamations, some of which appeared in Lewis’s two-shot magazine BLAST. Vorticism is sometimes characterized as the most advanced version of British ABSTRACT ART. Among those joining Lewis were younger artists such as David Bomberg (1890–1957) and HENRI GAUDIER-BRZESKA, and emerging writers, such as EZRA POUND, who coined the term “Vorticism,” and T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) who wrote the “Vortex” manifesto in 1913. Hulme’s 1914 lecture on “Modern Art and Its Philosophy” is said to be the best introduction to Vorticist esthetics. Perhaps for the same reasons that British cultural institutions ignored DADA and hardly acknowledged SURREALISM, Vorticism did not survive the end of World War I.

VOULKOS, PETER (29 January 1924–16 February 2002) Voulkos is broadly recognized as being single-handedly responsible for the emergence of ceramics as a serious art form in the mid-20th century. After studying in 1953 at BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE, where he met WILLEM DE KOONING, JOSEF ALBERS, ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, JOHN CAGE, and MERCE CUNNINGHAM, Voulkos went to New York and became infused with the artistic ferment of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. Although Voulkos practiced in many sculptural forms over the course of his career, most of his work was in ceramics that display a number of affinities with the Abstract Expressionist movement. His sculptures are purely self-referential, executed as variations on traditional ceramic forms. Voulkos models and throws clay bottles, bowls, plates, and large vessels (some of which stand over 4 feet tall), which he breaks apart and reassembles, leaving holes and internal edges, and incises with seemingly random lines and markings. After firing, he generally leaves his works unglazed. They are filled with a compulsive, nervous energy, similar to the paintings of JACKSON POLLOCK and de Kooning. And they are, at least presumably, expressive of his subjective state at the time of

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their making. It is easy to argue that Voulkos’s ceramics are lacking in any perceptible message or intellectual content, and that they remain, like many ordinary ceramics works, merely decorative objects. However, except for the difference in medium, the same objection can be made to many Pollock paintings. —Mark Daniel Cohen

VVEDENSKY, ALEKSANDR (6 December 1904–20 December 1941?) The Russian poet Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedensky studied in the Institute of Artistic Culture, a St. Petersburg art school dominated in the 1920s by the Futurists and headed by KAZIMIR MALEVICH. In his early work, Vvedensky quickly moved from following ideas of poetry radical in its phonetics (ZAUM) to poetry radical in its semantics. His creative breakthrough pointed the way out of the post-Zaum gridlock. A group of young poets including DANIIL KHARMS joined him and formed a group called OBERIU (1926–31). As Stalin’s regime was suspicious of any writing of a “difficult” or “coded” nature, all of the OBERIU members were detained in 1931 and the group dissolved. Vvedensky’ writing grew much darker in the 1930s and became more sophisticated, evolving from the direct attack on the “rational/meaningful,” to the synthesis of different semantic/poetic devices (defamiliarization, substitution, etc.) and from his philosophic views into a highly original literal style. The long poem “God Possibly Surrounds” (1931) is a key to understanding the coherent poetic universe developed in his later work. In 1941, at the start of World War II, Vvedensky was arrested and during a forced evacuation. None of his major works were published in his lifetime. Only about a quarter of his writing has survived. As far as the Russian-born author of this entry is aware, the only Vvedensky works available to American readers are the unsatisfying George Gibian translations and the much better 1998 New York Off-Broadway production of the Vvedensky play Chrismas at Ivanov’s (1938). —Igor Satanovsky

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WAGNER, RICHARD (22 May 1813–13 February 1883) Aside from his indisputable contributions as a composer, credit him with three extraordinary departures: The first is attenuated music mostly devoid of any semblance of sprightly rhythm. Slowness became his SIGNATURE move that made his music instantly identifiable to listeners after hearing only a few bars. In part because his music is so drawn out, Wagner’s operas often run twice the length of the customary maximum of 150 minutes, incidentally disregarding the conventions of Italian operas popular elsewhere in the 19th century. That Wagner’s elongated operas have overcome this forbidding DISADVANTAGE, to be widely performed to this day, is a measure of their superior substance. With this departure, he perhaps originated the principle, more familiar in 20th century architecture, that less can be more or, in his case, slower can be faster, sort of. His second departure is the ideal of a Gesamtkunstwerk, as he called it, usually translated as a Total Work of Art, where the composer prescribes all elements within a theatrical presentation – not only its scenery and specific theatrical effects but, in a precedent rarely imitated, its libretto. Skilled at coining intimidating Teutonic words, Wagner called his last opera, Parsifal (1882), a Bühnenweihfestspiel (a stage-consecrating festival play, maybe) and Zukunftsmusik (music of the future, probably). His third extraordinary achievement was getting a government, in his case Ludwig II’s Bavaria, to top other bidders in building exclusively for him a theater north of Beyreuth, Germany, officially known as Richard-Wagner-Festspielhaus (1876), solely for showcasing his operas, as indeed it does to this day. Seating nearly two thousand people, with an orchestra pit unusually under the stage (rather than in front of it), this Festspielhaus has acoustics so fine that recordings are still made there.

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Are MARK TWAIN, CHUCK JONES, and myself scarce in finding Wagner’s Teutonic extravagance to be funny? After reading Twain’s “At the Shrine of St. Wagner” (1891), see Jones’s What’s Opera, Doc? (1957), perhaps the single greatest seven-minute Hollywood cartoon ever made, that redoes Wagner so memorably the generations of younger Americans can recall Porky Pig’s “kill the wrabbit.” (Over one hundred times have I enjoyed this classic.) Nonetheless, the last time I saw a Wagner opera at New York’s Metropolitan Opera (his Parsifal, 2018), nobody else was laughing, at least not audibly. Too bad the great Twain wasn’t seated beside me to appreciate such CONCEPTUAL (ir)reverence.

WALDEN, HERWARTH (16 September 1879–31 October 1941; b. Georg Lewin) After writing music reminiscent of Claude Debussy (1862–1918) and poetry reflecting the influence of his first wife, Else Lasker Schüler (1869–1945), Walden founded the consequential BERLIN-based periodical Der Sturm (1910–32, The Storm), publishing Futurists along with EXPRESSIONISTS in addition to poets such as AUGUST STRAMM and painters. Ever enterprising, he also founded an art school and a book publishing company with the same name. In 1912, Walden opened an art gallery named after his magazine and was the first to exhibit several artists who later taught at the BAUHAUS, in addition to others based elsewhere in Europe, including more women than customary at the time; his gallery survived for a dozen years. Reacting to the rise of Fascism in Germany, Walden allied with the Communist party in 1929, foolishly emigrating in 1932 from Berlin to the Soviet Union. After being falsely accused of treason, he died in a Soviet prison in 1941. Because he was so much more than just an art dealer, Walden is among the few

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members of his trade to be honored, let alone remembered, decades later.

WARD, LYND (26 June 1905–28 June 1985) An American visual fictioneer, Ward credited the Belgian FRANS MASEREEL as the “first to go beyond the idea of a short sequence of pictures” in making extended visual narratives, ofte book-length, that differ from comic strips, say, but resemble certain silent films in completely eschewing words. Ward’s favorite pictorial medium, the woodcut, ideally suited his taste for heavy shading, which in turn reflected a penchant for melodramatic moralizing. Ward’s first visual narrative, God’s Man (1929), starkly portrays with one image to a page a young artist in a hostile world, while a later work, Wild Pilgrimage (1932), turns upon the clever device of changing color when the narrative portrays the protagonist’s inner thoughts. One difference between Ward and Masereel is that the former exploited the freedoms of a book page to produce with narrative drawings that are not uniform but different in size. Ward’s career as a book-artist ended late in the 1930s, which is unfortunate, because he had a sure sense for making pictures that gather meanings as the reader turns the page, becoming a precursor to EDWARD GOREY and DUANE MICHALS, among other firstrank visual storytellers, as well as Eric Drooker (1957), whose Flood! A Novel in Pictures (1992) likewise opens by portraying a young artist in a hostile city.

WARHOL, ANDY (6 August 1928–22 February 1987; b. Andrew Warhola) Surely the most audacious of those artists initially classified as POP, Warhol created in the early 1960s representational paintings that, in retrospect, seem designed to violate several earlier rules for “high art.” Originally a commercial artist with a reputation for drawing shoes, Warhol used silkscreening processes to transfer photographs and advertising imagery to fine-art canvas. Whereas most artists create images he “found” them, mostly familiar, that were transformed – enlarged, recolored, reshaded – to emphasize pictorial qualities partly reflective of the silkscreening process, and partly reflective of Warhol’s tasteless use of flat coloring. Initially a graphic artist, Warhol repeated images interminably in grids previously unknown in representational art, audaciously drawing upon popular iconography, as in 210 Coca-Cola Bottles (1962); horrifying

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public events, as in Atomic Bomb (1963), Car Crash (1963), and Race Riot (1964); and the faces of either celebrities (Jacqueline Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor) or art collectors, who were flattered by being subjected to the same style of repetitive portraiture as that accorded celebrities, nearly all signs of aging neatly removed. While his initial strategy was making the familiar unfamiliar, his celebrity paintings delivered the converse truth developed by commercial advertising – that reproduction in many venues can successfully make something unfamiliar very familiar. Around this time Warhol also made radically underedited films that depended upon the casual performances of eccentric, moderately compelling people (none “stars,” though some aspired to be) and then upon projection at speeds slower than the customary twenty-four frames per second, sometimes for several hours at a stretch. Of the latter, none rivaled Chelsea Girls (1966), which became less insufferable when Warhol cleverly projected two images simultaneously, side by side. In Outer and Inner Space (1966), he made ingenious use of an early video recorder, in this case to “film” a comely young woman named Edie Sedgwick (1943–71), responding in live time to a video image of herself. The film critic J. Hoberman (1948) writes, “Becoming in a sense her own audience, the ‘live’ Sedgwick often seems startled, distracted, even sometimes distressed by the effect of having her own voice whispering in her ear.” Though Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) (1967) remains a model of inventive BOOK-ART, his other books, mostly of transcribed prose or modest collections of drawings, did not survive as well as his most famous aphorism: “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” Warhol was also one of several nouveau celebrities, the poet ALLEN GINSBERG being another, who made unashamed homosexuality more acceptable, at least to the mass media, if not to sophisticated society in general. No other possibly major modern painter learned to capitalize so well upon what was once called “selling out” (his only rival for this superlative being SALVADOR DALI), and none ever earned so much money, manufacturing thousands of images. Though the subversive point of Warhol’s esthetic strategy was obliterating the distinction between high art and graphics, the distinction nonetheless survived, while many patrons-come-lately who thought they were commissioning or purchasing high art got stuck with decoration, while certain Warhol dealers reportedly still have lots of unsold stock. Since forgeries were easy, while too much was produced by assistants before receiving Warhol’s signature, the estate

438 • WARNER BROTHERS CARTOONS shrewdly established an “Authentication Board” that, however, once its decisions were disputed, was dissolved after sixteen years. Indeed, consider that Warhol’s most subversive achievement, whose full measure is not yet apparent, might have been getting a large number of moneyed people to overpay, not only for his art and the brica-brac of his estate but for the publication of books by and even about him. Though accurate figures are hard to come by, consider that, though Warhol probably earned more money than any other artist in history, perhaps no other artist disappointed so deeply the moneyed people investing in him. Why Warhol gave up producing experimental art remains a mystery; perhaps he thought he could do nothing else new and so feared becoming, say, another WILLEM DE KOONING, who would spend half of his adult life haunted by an inability to produce work equal to his acclaimed earlier masterpieces. Perhaps Warhol lost heart after being seriously wounded in 1968. He sought stardom because he thought it would increase the monetary value of everything he produced (and at times should have discarded), as indeed it did. As Warhol no longer made consequential art, it was no small achievement for him to remain to his death a pseudo-cultural celebrity in this fickle country, surviving the mistaken predictions of those who thought him strictly a fifteen-minute man, but also becoming an unfortunate model for aspiring younger artists who con themselves into believing that publicity – any publicity – can be more important than respect from professional peers or critics. Perhaps Warhol’s most extraordinary posthumous creation, meriting the greatest respect, was an eponymous foundation that rivals the less prosperous Pollock-Krasner for ranking as the most consequential of its kind. Rachel Bers’s slipcased three-volume report on the first twenty years of its activities (2007) is awesomely incomparable – indeed, measurably avantgarde in its own way, implicitly demonstrating the truth that private foundations can better support excellence in American art than all the government agencies combined.

WARNER BROTHERS CARTOONS (1930–68) Collectively, they were the best; only the FLEISCHERS’ studio came close. (DISNEY became generally more skilled at merchandizing.) The artists working at Termite Terrace, as the Warner cartoon production studio was called, had a rich collection of mature characters

(including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Speedy Gonzales, Porky Pig, Sylvester & Tweety, the Road Runner and his pal Wile E. Coyote), the most virtuosic vocal stylist of all in MEL BLANC; and the strongest music director in Carl Stalling (1891–1972), whose most memorable compositions were released in the 1990s on audio-only compact disks (sans images). Since the Warner fare was six-minute films that were meant to be screened before the feature, the Hollywood studio chiefs didn’t much care about content, let alone form. Nor did the Hollywood censors of the 1940s and 1950s oversee, enabling Warner cartoon directors to slip through certain images that would have been unacceptable in feature films. Some of the spiky quality of Warner toons comes from working for a mentally absentee unit boss who reportedly opened group screenings with “Roll the trash.” These short films might have been forgotten when Warner ceased producing them in 1969, were their handiwork not revived on television, initially for children on Saturday mornings, eventually for adults with the establishment in America of a cable television channel that initially broadcast film cartoons around the clock. (One truth that should not be forgotten is that Warner toons, unlike Disney’s, were originally made as much for adults as for children.) What continually impresses me esthetically about the best Warner cartoons is how much action and characterization is compressed into their standard sixminute form. Nearly all the Warner toons were made by four directors – Robert McKimson (1910–77), Friz Freleng (1906–95), Robert Clampett (1913–84), and CHUCK JONES. Another masterful animator, TEX AVERY, collaborated with them at the beginning in the 1930s, but left around 1940 to create his havoc elsewhere, fortunately leaving behind his most successful creation – Bugs Bunny. A second truth is that two choice characters – Bugs and Daffy Duck, different though they are – inspired the best Warner work. My own additional thesis is that the very best Warner toons involve music, usually classical music: What’s Opera, Doc (1957, dir. Chuck Jones), The Corny Concerto (1943, dir. Robert Clampett), The Rabbit of Seville (1950, dir. Charles M. Jones), all of which I’ve seen many times, and would gladly see again anytime. Though I’ve been watching Warner toons with enthusiasm for decades, I cannot tell for sure, unless I know in advance, which of the four directors is responsible for which films, so dominant was their influence upon each other and/or the studio style. Thanks to my preference for these six-minute gems, I find it almost impossible to sit through feature-length films and so rarely do. In 1985, Warner’s, not Disney’s, became the first animation studio to have a full-scale retrospective at

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MoMA, which, in addition to screening their films regularly for a few months, put the animators’ drawings on its walls. Reviewers of this exhibition dubbed the Warner masters “among the century’s great humorists,” as indeed they are, “who have made an invaluable contribution to the culture that only in recent years has begun to receive the outpourings of appreciation it deserves.” In the 1990s, a much larger corporation still partly named Warner sponsored first Tiny Toon Adventures, their first animated series produced expressly for television, and then Animaniacs, a television series that seemed better than other later toons, if only for attempting with sporadic success to capture the quality of these classic Warner shorts.

WATSON, JAMES SIBLEY, JR. (10 August 1894–31 March 1982) One of the forgotten figures in the history of American cultural excellence, Watson was, in the 1920s, the new publisher/proprietor of the monthly THE DIAL, the most prestigious American literary magazine of that decade. Earning a medical degree in his spare time he also began an ethnographic study of British Columbian native peoples. In the 1930s, Watson collaborated with others in making experimental films that are still shown (and available on for viewing on the Internet): The Fall of the House of Usher (1933, produced with Melville Webber [1871–1947]) and Lot in Sodom (1935, with Webber and the composer Alec Wilder [1907–80]). While the former film, which Watson himself photographed, uses prisms, mirrors, and distorting lenses to expressionistic effects, the latter, with the addition of sound, has a richer plot. Telling of sensual corruption, this film depends less upon plot than upon the rhythmical presentation of symbolic scenes. The film historian Lewis Jacobs (1904–97) writes:

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much as avant-garde writers ignored commercial publishing. As a certified physician, on the faculty of the medical school at the University of Rochester from the 1940s into the 1960s, Watson did pioneering research in cineradiography, also called cineflurography, following the gastrointestinal track with X-ray motion picture film, as a rare example of an avant-garde artist becoming an advanced scientist, similar, say, to the Russian composer Alexander Borodin (1833–87), who was also a distinguished chemist. Not to be forgotten should be Watson’s personal patronage, not only as a collector of visual art (who purchased, say, E. E. CUMMINGS’s paintings when few others would) but also as a hospital physician. Around 1981 I saw on the desk of KENNETH BURKE an invoice from Rochester’s Strong Memorial Hospital itemizing several procedures for the total cost to Burke of a few hundred dollars. When I mentioned this document to another physician once connected to Strong, he judged, simply: “Somebody else is paying the real bill.”

Its brilliant array of diaphanous shots and scenes – smoking plains, undulating curtains, waving candle flames, glistening flowers, voluptuous faces, sensual bodies, frenzied orgies – were so smoothly synthesized on the screen that the elements of each composition seemed to melt and flow into one another with extraordinary iridescence. Watson was among the first to call himself “an independent film producer,” the term declaring proudly that he worked apart from the commercial studios,

Figure 20 Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, Los Angeles. Photo by Doug Puchowski.

440 • WATTS TOWERS (OR LOS ANGELES WATTS TOWERS) WATTS TOWERS (OR LOS ANGELES WATTS TOWERS) See RODIA, Simon.

WEBERN, ANTON (3 December 1883–15 September 1945; b. A. Friedrich Wilhelm von W.) It was Webern, more than any other composer born in the 19th century, who explored the possibility of less becoming more, which is to say the esthetics of MINIMALISM. Indicatively, the initial Columbia Masterworks edition of his The Complete Music fits on only four long-playing disks, with eight sides, containing less than three dozen works. Raised in Vienna, taking a doctorate in musicology (and thus perhaps becoming the first academically certified musicologist to become a distinguished composer), Webern was ARNOLD SCHOENBERG’s initial pupil, and he wrote the first critical appreciation of his master’s music. Along with Alban Berg (1885– 1935), a less avant-garde composer, Webern was in almost daily contact with Schoenberg from 1906 to 1912. Meanwhile Webern earned his living as a conductor, mostly of provincial and radio orchestras (before the latter became more prestigious). Though subsequent composers admire Webern’s strict observance of SERIAL rules, the layperson tends to hear his works as spare, intricate, and nonrepresentational. Webern’s compositions are typically for small ensembles; several of them incorporate poetic (German) texts. At the premiere of his Six Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 6, on 31 March 1913, “Hissing, laughter, and applause vie[d] for prominence during and immediately after the new Webern pieces [were] performed,” according to Richard Burbank. A group of composers and musicians, mostly unknown and conservative, attend[ed] this concert intent on causing a disturbance. Webern shout[ed] from his seat that the human baggage must be removed from the concert hall. The police arrive[ed] and [were] ineffective in securing order. I remember a week-long Webern festival at Juilliard in early 1995, when a short piece played on various instruments by three students was followed by another miniature played by, say, five different students and then yet another with four more students, and so on, apparently drawing upon an endless supply of accomplished young performers. I realized that perhaps the

most appropriate performance medium for Webern is not an orchestra or even a single chamber group but, uniquely perhaps, a populous, first-rank music conservatory. Not until Opus 17 (1924), Drei geistliche Volkslieder (Three Spiritual Folksongs, sometimes translated as Three Traditional Rhymes), does Webern fully adopt the Schoenberg formulation of the SERIAL row. Of Opus 21 (1928) and Opus 22 (1930), the conductor Robert Craft (1923–2015) wrote, “Here is Webern writing small sonata-breadth pieces with expositions, developments, recapitulations, codas, and with his only material the purest of contrapuntal forms, the canon.” Opus 21, in particular, broaches subsequent multiple serialization, allowing the particular tone-row to influence other musical dimensions. The music writer PAUL GRIFFITHS contends that only in his Symphony (1928) does Webern finally realize “the potential of the new technique for creating densely patterned music.” Everything he composed thereafter was strictly serial. Unlike his mentor Schoenberg, Webern did not double back. In the early 1930s, he incidentally produced a brilliant orchestration of the Recercar from J. S. Bach’s A Musical Offering. Though his compositions were proscribed by the Nazis, Webern continued to live in Austria during World War II, working as a music publisher’s proofreader. While taking a pre-bedtime smoke outside at his son-in-law’s rural house, he was accidentally shot dead by an American soldier. To certain prominent younger European composers immediately after World War II, Webern became an influence greater than his sometime teacher Schoenberg.

WEEGEE (12 June 1899–26 December 1968; b. Usher/Arthur H. Fellig) A naturalized New Yorker of Polish birth, he adopted the name Weegee by Americanizing the orthography of the “Ouija” board and liked to call himself “Weegee the Famous,” which would be an embarrassing claim, were it not indeed prominent, at least among photographers and newspaper readers. Essentially self-taught in photography, he worked at various times as an assistant to commercial photographers, as a darkroom helper, and as a streetwise freelance before becoming a professional employed mostly by newspapers. A serious crime photographer, Weegee lived for many years across the street from Manhattan’s police headquarters. He obtained a special radio that received emergency signals initially destined for firemen and the

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police; he also installed a portable darkroom in his car. Customarily sleeping fully dressed, he arrived early at New York crime scenes, eventually claiming to have photographed more than five thousand violations in ten years (or more than one every day). As a photographic artist, Weegee’s forte was distinctively realistic pictures, customarily of shocking nighttime urban scenes. Depending upon a Speed Graphic camera and a brighly intrusive flashbulb, his best pictures emphasize black and white, to the neglect of gray, which was otherwise thought to be the most subtle color in black-and-white photography. In the 1950s, more conscious of himself as an artist, Weegee began adopting mirrors and kaleidoscopic lenses, among other visual reprocessors, also producing a body of distinguished abstract and abstracting work. However, even photographs produced with these means depend upon familiar subjects: in Italian critic Daniela Palazzoli’s (1942) summary: Marilyn Monroe with her mouth stretched out in a grotesque kiss, Elizabeth Taylor with exaggerated elongated eyelashes. . . . And Charles de Gaulle, too, all nose and ears, Dwight D. Eisenhower with a smile stretching from eye to ear, Khrushchev like a Roman emperor as seen by Walt Disney. For a 1948 film usually screened as Weegee’s New York, he drew upon primitive color film to shoot Manhattan at a very slow speed early in the morning, so that moving lights become a blur, the colors of flashing signs superimpose, and the sunrise becomes a momentous event. For background music he used Leonard Bernstein’s Fancy Free (1944), which never sounded so good. In the film’s second half, depicting a crowded Coney Island on a sunny summer’s day, Weegee’s camera is insultingly nosy, watching people dress and undress, fat girls sunbathing, and so forth. Because of his favoring cheap color stock, the sand often looks like snow and beach eroticism is washed out. Its eccentricities notwithstanding, Weegee’s ranks among the great NEW YORK CITY films. Incidentally, a Hollywood producer purchased the film rights to Weegee’s Naked City book, but had the final film directed by another. A 1997 Weegee retrospective at New York’s International Center of Photography was a rich first-rank exhibition, establishing previously unknown excellence as only a pioneering retrospective can.

WEIDENAAR, REYNOLD (25 September 1945)

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A trained ELECTRONIC MUSIC composer who became a major video artist, Weidenaar brought to the new medium a technical sophistication rare among his colleagues. His video, more than most, depends upon KINETIC visual synthesis and optimal picture processing to realize imagery unique to video and yet painterly (as he is the son of a noted Michigan painter of exactly the same name [1915–85]). He also composes his soundtracks, producing audiovideotapes that are best seen on projection televisions and heard through hi-fi stereo audio systems, rather than the tiny speakers customary with television monitors. Whereas other prominent video artists established themselves through exhibitions in art galleries, Weidenaar has favored festivals of video, film, and electronic music, often winning prizes. His very best work, Love of Line, of Light and Shadow: The Brooklyn Bridge (1982), a masterpiece that I have seen many times without decreasing pleasure, which indicatively won an international prize, scarcely resembles the video ART more prominent in the 1980s and 1990s. A sometime professor with a doctorate, Weidenaar also produced both a book and a documentary video on Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium, the first musicmaking machine.

WEINBREN, GRAHME (1947) Early at computer-assisted interactive VIDEO ART, he exhibited in 1987 The Erl King, which defined possibilities previously unknown. Working in collaboration with the videographer Roberta Friedman (1948), drawing upon Franz Schubert familiar lieder as a continuous soundtrack, Weinbren offered a screen whose images changed in response to the viewer’s immediate touch, thus extending IVAN SUTHERLAND’s invention from only two decades before. Weinbren’s available screens included visual illustrations along with translations into English, all options reflecting a filmmaker’s superior sensitivity. Whereas the original production required several machines, Weinbren recreated it for a single computer in the 21st century. Though impressive at the time, intelligently interactive video has been scarce in art since; among the few in this tradition has been Toni Dove (American, 1946). Weinbren has also filled large screens with much smaller palettes interacting with each other, “multiplying and intermingling narratives,” in his phrase. In addition to making documentary films and co-developing a high-definition cinema technology, Weinbren, once a professor of philosophy, also writes intelligently.

442 • WEINER, LAWRENCE WEINER, LAWRENCE (10 February 1942) Included in SETH SIEGELAUB’s photocopied book Statements (1968), which is commonly considered as initiating CONCEPTUAL ART, Weiner offered this prophetic “Declaration of Intent”: 1 The artist may construct the piece. 2 The piece may be fabricated. 3 The piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership. The key ideas here are that work can come only from “the artist,” who is not a layperson; and that acceptance by a sufficiently sophisticated recipient certifies its status as Art. What followed for Weiner was a series of verbal statements, sometimes descriptive, customarily about esthetic experience, mounted in large clear type on the walls of a gallery or a museum. For decades since, what might be abstract poetry to some thus becomes displayed as visual art despite possessing minimal visual distinction. Though for that insufficiency Weiner’s name is often omitted from histories of contemporary visual art, the Whitney Museum in 2008 honored him with a retrospective. That last fact measures a remarkable achievement. Otherwise, Weiner, in addition to SIGNATURE wall installations, has produced innovative short films, videos, and BOOK-ART.

WEISS, IRVING (11 September 1921) Perhaps what is most interesting about Weiss as an avant-garde figure is the extent of his roots in tradition. His Visual Voices, for instance, weds the most upto-date visual poetry techniques to poems dating back to the Elizabethans and earlier – as when he shows us Robert Herricks 17th-century poem, “Delight in Disorder,” from the side (so that a line beginning with “K” is rendered with a capital I, and one beginning with an “A,” as several do, is rendered with the same letter, but with its top horizontal missing, to make an amusing light joke, but also heightening the wantonness of Herrick’s picture of the “sweet disorder” in a woman’s dress by depicting it stealthily peeped-at, as well as suggesting something of its rhythm with the dance of full and partial

I’s); or when Weiss entirely fills a page with sometimes overlapping, repeating, floating, colliding lines from several relatedly romantic classic poems, including the one about Campaspe playing at cards for kisses, in “Reverberations: Night Mind Anthology.” Identities (2011) is a strong collection of his visual writing. Weiss and his wife, Anne D. W., were the authors of the Thesaurus of Book Digests: 1950–1980 (1981), which, though mostly mainstream in its coverage, included entries on such avant-garde works as RICHARD KOSTELANETZ’s Assemblings (1967) and Possibilities of Poetry (1970). Always interested in intermedia, Weiss taught courses like The Avant-Garde and Mass Culture, Literature and Print, Words and Images before retiring from SUNY-New Paltz. Aside from his visual poetry, his most notable achievement in literature was his translations of the Mauritian-French writer Malcolm de Chazal (1902–91). —Bob Grumman

WELLES, ORSON (6 May 1915–9 October 1985) By most measures, Welles was the most inspired and courageous creator of live theater ever in America; incidentally, he directed at least two great movies and was a masterful radio artist. Running away from Kenosha, Wisconsin, his birthplace, Welles made his way to Dublin, Ireland where, at the precocious age of sixteen, he joined the famed Abbey Theatre; within five years, he was back in the United States directing audacious adaptations of Shakespeare, in addition to new plays, initially for the Federal Theatre Project and then for his own Mercury Theatre. Invited to work in radio, Welles made it a medium for the adaptation of classic literary narratives, including Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and both Seventeen and The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. His 1938 production of H. G. Wells’s novel Invasion from Mars (popularly known as War of the Worlds) was so acoustically realistic that it created a panic across the nation. Welles’s first feature-length film, Citizen Kane (1941), weaves a complex story through the memories of several narrators, using wide-angle photography that enabled him to shoot continuous scenes by moving his camera and his actors, instead of by using conventional cutting. Drawing upon his radio experience, in only the second decade of sound films, Welles made feature films based on sound, not only of speech but of silence, as in the great scene where Kane surveys his abundant collections. (It was not for nothing that the

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complete soundtrack of Kane was once available on two long-playing records.) My own opinion holds that The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) is the greater film, if only for its soundtrack, drawing as it did upon Welles’s radio production, made only a few years before, of the text of Booth Tarkington’s novel. Using such radio conventions as a spoken introduction and spoken closing credits (including Welles’s identifying himself under the image of a fat microphone), the film incorporates sensitive acoustic shifts between foreground and background and overlapping conversations. As his biographer Charles Higham (1931–2012) put it, Just as we constantly see people framed in uprights, half-glimpsed through doorways, or reflected in mirrors and windows, so we hear their muffled voices through doorways or in the far distance of rooms, floating down a stairway or mingled with the measures of a dance or the hiss and clang of a factory. The tragedy of Welles’s life was that he wanted most to make additional major films that, for various reasons, not entirely his fault, were never funded. Instead he produced minor works, none of which ever equaled the first two. It is easy to say in retrospect that his last forty years could have been better spent working in those two media whose production costs are generally lower, in which his genius was already established: live theater and radio. Incidentally, though most colorized versions of black-and-white classics are embarrassingly bad, the brown-tinged Ambersons, most frequently seen on Turner Network Television, is not.

WERKMAN, H. N. (29 April 1882–10 April 1945; b. Hendrik Nikolaas W.) A Dutch artist and typographer in northern Holland, working apart from his countryman contemporaries connected to DE STIJL, he began as a commercial printer/publisher, founding in Groningen a periodical with an English title, The Next Call (1923–26, 9 issues), which included experiments in block printing and other unusual materials, usually with abstract imagery. Thanks to his inventive intelligence and technical skills, The Next Call looked and felt like no other magazine. At his best, Werkman made letters dance. By its fifth issue, avant-garde artists elsewhere in Europe gladly offered their contributions to his magazine. Werkman’s single strongest production is Alleluia (1941), an eight-page booklet setting with words alone a traditional Dutch Easter hymn (whose melody,

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‘twas assumed, was already familiar). Werkman also made TYPEWRITER poems and produced SOUND POETRY. Remaining in Holland during the Nazi occupation, he continued publishing, clandestinely, until caught and shot just days before Groningen was liberated. Much of his art was destroyed during the battle for liberating his city. As he had neither pupils nor protégées, Werkman’s subsequent influence was indirect.

WEST, MAE (17 August 1893–22 November 1980; b. Mary Jane W.) Aside from her achievements as a film star and sometime playwright, she will always be remembered as the master of a certain kind of aphorism that depended less upon a declared statement than innuendo, customarily implying sexual activity without saying so: CLERK: Goodness, what beautiful diamonds. WEST: Goodness has nothing to do with it, dearie. MAN: Tonight, you were especially good. WEST: Well. When I’m good, I’m very good; but

when I’m bad [pause], I’m better. It’s not the men in your life that matter; it’s the life in your men. Between two evils, I generally like to pick the one I never tried before. Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me? She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong. No one had written any texts like these before her; few since. Rare is the radical theme that women can control men. Curiously, she is among the few women authors included in the canonical anthologies of aphorisms. Otherwise, consider among her extraordinary achievements that she became in the 1930s a Hollywood “sex symbol” though she was only 5 feet tall and had already passed 40.

WEST, NATHANAEL (17 October 1903–22 December 1940; b. Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein) An essential prerequisite of radical thinking, especially about art, is considering the opposite of any opinion entrenched in established taste. If the standard judgment holds that the writings of Nathanael West steadily improved to The Day of the Locust (1939),

444 • WHITE & BLACK which appeared just before his premature death in a Southern California car crash, let me propose a contrary judgment more appropriate for the theme of this book. West’s most original, certainly most audacious book was his first one, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931). Begun in Paris in 1927 and finished in New York by 1929, Balso Snell is implicitly SURREALIST at a time when realism was becoming the norm for American writing, while forecasting later West fiction in its satirical bites. Indeed, as a perverted fantasy about a trip through the anus of the Trojan Horse, it has scant connection to anyone’s experience. Consider the following passage that incidentally acknowledges a surrealist claim about dreams as a fertile source for art: Balso dreamt that he was a young man again, lurking in a corner of the Carnegie Hall lobby among the assembled friends and relatives of music. The lobby was crowded with the many beautiful girl-cripples who congregate there because Art is their only solace, most men looking upon their strange forms with distaste. But it was otherwise with Balso Snell. He likened their disarranged hips, their short legs, their limps, their splay feet, their wall-eyes, to ornament. These strange foreshortenings, hanging heads, bulging spinesacks, were a delight, for he had ever preferred the imperfect, knowing well the plainness, the niceness of perfection. Knowing that he was moving into offensive territory (that would later be consigned to a Politically Incorrect trashcan), West continued: Spying a beautiful hunchback, he suddenly became sick with passion. The cripple of his choice looked like some creature from the depths of the sea. She was tall and extraordinarily hunched. She was tall in spite of her enormous hump; but for her dog-leg spine she would have been seven feet high. Moreover, he could be certain that, like all hunchbacks, she was intelligent. If any of the self-conscious Parisian Surrealists could have read English in the early 1930s, they would have been lucky to write as imaginatively in French. Whereas DADA’s nonsequiturs attracted West’s sometime brother-in-law S. J. PERELMAN, West began as the truest American Surrealist, only to become something else, to our loss. Acknowledging perhaps the concerns of his more established literary friends, West’s next books had progressively more social relevance. As Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) portrays the life of a lovelorn newspaper

columnist, A Cool Million (1937) is a needlessly forgotten satire of fascism, and The Day of the Locust (1939) mocks Hollywood in a far slicker style and structure than West had used before. Though the last has always been his most popular book, what this literary decline also reflected, in my judgment, was West’s relocating to Hollywood in 1933 to earn a better living (whereas he had previously been a night clerk in a New York hotel).

WHITE & BLACK (forever) In my most profound opinion, these are the only two colors worthy for contemporary art that includes hues. All other colors belong to “illustrations.” Among the great artists working with these truly primary colors are FRANZ KLINE, MANFRED MOHR, JORGE POSADA, ON KAWARA, FRANÇOIS MORELLET, and JOHN FURNIVAL, all of whom primarily refuse the seductive vulgarity of other colors. What’s more remarkable and scarcely noticed is that several prominent visual artists who, though normally favoring colors, have produced some of their strongest work as white and black: PIET MONDRIAN, JACKSON POLLOCK, WILLEM DE KOONING, FRANK STELLA, JASPER JOHNS, BRADLEY WALKER TOMLIN, et al. The Guggenheim Museum in 2012 launched an exhibition wholly of PABLO PICASSO’s white & black art, recalling that his magnificent Guernica eschewed vulgar colors. Some artists have made black a defining mark of their art – Pierre Soulages (1919) and Aldo Tambellini (1930), the otherwise disparate pair suggesting that working mostly in black could bring a long life. A rarer few have realized excellence in just shades of black (AD REINHARDT) or just white tones (ROBERT RYMAN, ROBERT IRWIN). I say “white & black,” rather than the customary black & white, because, in my judgment, white contains more truth. Nothing more needs to be said by me here (except that “color blind” I’m not).

WHITE WHITE (1918) Though earlier painters might have painted wholly white canvases, only in the 20th century does White White art establish its own tradition. Among the first was KASIMIR MALEVICH’s Suprematist Composition: White On White (1918), which is actually a bluish white square placed at a slight angle within a larger white square. A one-third century later, ROBERT

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RAUSCHENBERG painted white canvases meant to be palettes for shadows in their surrounding spaces. Later in the 20th century, ROBERT RYMAN explored various degrees of off-white in large square canvases that looked uniquely his. Certain sculptures by JEAN ARP and CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, among others, benefit from white stone. All these differ from blank books (perhaps Blank Books), common among book-artists in the late 20th century, that are usually unmarked white pages (thus merely white, rather than white white) bound within a bookish frame. Simply, a white surface to which white paint or ink has been added differs from a white surface free of any marks, which is customarily about absence, even if framed. (I know because I’ve done both blank books and white white writing.)

WHITEREAD, RACHEL (20 April 1963) The British sculptor Whiteread has managed to become one of the few contemporary artists with a unique subject, which she achieved by inverting a traditional principle of visual art. She has transformed negative space into positive, by the process of casting the spaces that objects occupy, the spaces that separate them, the spaces they enclose. She has cast mattresses leaning against walls, the areas below bathroom sinks, bathtubs, and in one instance, an entire house. The fact that she generally selects domestic articles adds a human dimension to Whiteread’s works, and their staid, lifeless, usually white appearance gives them the look and air of cenotaphs. There is a touch of the morbid about them, as if they were the death masks of the kind of articles we use daily. The impression is confirmed by the title of one of her best known sculptures: Ghost (1990), a cast of the interior of a room, with the outer surfaces of the enormous block bearing the impressions in reverse of the door, door knob, molding, even cracks in the plaster. Despite the touching quality of many of her sculptures, in sum they come across as gimmicky, as a single mechanical process, repeated over and over, that has little to do with the application of skill or talent. —Mark Daniel Cohen

WHITMAN, ROBERT (1935) More than a half-century after the fact, Whitman’s reputation remains based upon a single innovative work

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of visual theater, Prune. Flat. (1965 – sometimes spelled without the periods), which will always be, for those who have seen it during infrequent revivals, a masterpiece of MIXED-MEANS THEATER. It opens with a film whose image is a movie projector, implicitly announcing that one theme is cinematic images. The film then shows a grapefruit (whose image nearly fills the screen) being cut by a knife. After other images, a tomato appears, which is also cut, small black egglike objects pouring out of it. When the tomato-cutting sequence is repeated, two young women dressed in white smocks and white kerchiefs walk in front of the film screen, the film blade appearing to cut through them as well. As the film shows the two women walking down the street, one slightly behind the other, the same two women walk live across the stage, at an angle perpendicular to their images on the screen, but in a similar formation. Later in the piece, the image of a woman undressing and showering is projected directly on a full-length body of one of the women performers; but once the film shuts off, the woman who appears to be undressed is suddenly revealed to be clothed. The subject of Prune. Flat, is the perceptual discrepancies between filmed image and theatrical presence, and it differs from other mixed-means theater not only in its precise control but in its visual plenitude. I appreciated it no less in its 2016 revival than in its 1966 premiere. Robert Whitman Playback (2003) is a richly produced book.

WHITNEY, GERTRUDE VANDERBILT (9 January 1875–18 April 1942) Perhaps because she was also a working artist, whose large sculptures are still visible in public spaces, she became the most enlightened art patron in early 20thcentury America. In addition to founding in 1930 on her family’s Greenwich Village property the museum that still bears their name, she purchased paintings, bankrolled the International Composers Guild to promote the performance of new music, organized exhibitions for other institutions, and hosted the best artists’ parties (that are generally more important for visual artists than, say, writers or composers). In his autobiography Artist in Manhattan (1940), Jerome Myers (1867–1940) recalls: a veritable catalog of celebrities, painters and sculptors. I can hardly visualize, let alone describe, the many shifting scenes of our entertainment: sunken pools and gorgeous white peacocks as line decorations spreading into the

446 • WHITNEY, JAMES gardens; in their swinging cages, brilliant macaws nodding their beaks at [the painter] George Luks as though they remembered posing for his pictures of them; [the painter] Robert Chanler showing us his exotic sea pictures, blue-green visions in a marine bathroom; and Mrs. Whitney displaying her studio, the only place on earth in which she could find solitude. Here the artists felt at home, the Whitney hospitality always gracious and sincere. Only the ARENSBERGs came close at NEW YORK CITY artists’ hosting, albeit for a shorter time. B. H. Friedman’s large biography of Gertrude Whitney (1978) benefits from quoting extensively from her own journals, while Rebels on Eight Street (1990), a brilliant book by Avis Berman (1949), suggests that the genius behind the initial Whitney Museum was her sometime secretary and exhibitions manager Juliana Force (1876–1948).

WHITNEY, JAMES (27 December 1921–8 April 1982) Very much an American West-Coast pioneering hightech artist, he was born in Pasadena and lived his entire life in Southern California. In collaboration with his older brother JOHN, both of whom studied advanced music composition, he made in the 1940s short abstract animations reflecting OSCAR FISCHINGER’s earlier efforts but adding a more contemporary soundtrack. Given limitations in the technologies available at the time, they were very ingenious and economical. Variations on a Circle (1942), made with 8mm. film (then more popular for shooting home movies), ran for twenty minutes. Becoming more interested in spirituality, James Whitney on his own produced Lapis (1993–66; 10 min., 16 mm) the classic intricate mandala animation incidentally favored by viewers high on hallucinogens.

WHITNEY, JOHN (8 April 1917–22 September 1995) Likewise born in Pasadena, he attended Pomona College, with a year off for studying music composition in Paris, before creating, with some collaboration from his brother JAMES, Five Film Exercises (1940–45). Here and there in Southern California, John Whitney worked at local universities and film studios producing titles and sequences, often building his own machinery,

until he became in 1966 a designated artist-in-residence at IBM in Los Angeles where he developed motion graphics. By the next decade, he moved from analogue computers to those that are strictly digital, again adding his own sound to his films. Sometimes John Whitney enlisted collaboration from his sons Mark, John, Jr., and Michael. The Whitney Brothers’ best films join FANTASIA and those by the WARNER BROTHERS in illustrating my thesis that the greatest film animations were based upon music.

WIENER, OSWALD (5 October 1935) As a profound cultural adventurer, he has explored several domains, some of them excellently. Late in 1950s Vienna he worked by nights as a trumpeter in jazz groups and by day in early data processing. As a prose writer initially part of the VIENNA GROUP mostly of poets, Wiener produced die verbesserung von mitteleuropa (1969, 1985, The Improvement of Middle Europe), which some German critics rank among the greatest experimental novels. (Only parts were ever published in English translation.) After studying mathematics and computer science in BERLIN in the early 1980s, Wiener became a professor of esthetics at the Dusseldoft Art Academy. As a chef and restaurateur, he also ran the most literary knipe (pub) in Berlin in the early 1980s. Here I once heard him talk enthusiastically about spending his summers in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada, typically going where no one else would.

WIGMAN, MARY (13 November 1886–18 September 1973; b. Karoline Sophie Marie Wiegman) A pioneer of German EXPRESSIONIST dance, Wigman began her training with the music theoretician Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950), who created “Eurhythmies,” in Hellarau near Dresden. She later collaborated with the movement analyst Rudolf van Laban (1879–1958), who developed a movement notation system called Labanotation. Dancing barefoot, exploring primitive rhythms and motifs, experimenting with costumes, props, and masks, Wigman created numerous distinguished solos and group works. Largely abstract, frequently dark or angst-ridden, these pieces focused on fundamental forms and essential emotions. Wigman also incorporated improvisation into her framing system.

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Many important German modern dancers attended her school, as did Hanya Holm (1893– 1992), who was her assistant and later came to America, sponsored by the impressario Sol Hurok (1888–1974), to open a Wigman school. As a modern American dance pioneer and influential choreographer, Holm taught ALWIN NIKOLAIS, influencing his practice along with that of his associate, MURRAY LOUIS. —Katy Matheson

WIKIPEDIA (2001) An extraordinary 21st-century creation, this virtual institution developed a continually revised and expanding encyclopedia of knowledge. I doubt if anyone predicted it. Transcending the BRITANNICA, which dominated the Higher Information Biz if not for decades but for whole centuries, Wikipedia depends upon volunteers around the world to initiate entries and then correct, expand, and update them. Precisely because it operates without gatekeepers, Wikipedia exemplifies leaderless anarchism without honoring that epithet. Indicatively, avant-garde arts and artists are not excluded. Not as accurate as, say, Britannica (as I know from comparing two entries on me), Wikipedia actually reflects voluntary admiration, if not someone else’s love, for the chosen subjects. Regarding entries on artists it offers some hidden truths. Simply, if a figure of some prominence lacks an individual Wikipedia biography, consider that no one loves her or him enough to have initiated one. Secondly, if an entry details an artist’s career with, say, positions and even awards without characterizing her or his work, the implicit conclusion is that little can be said about her or his work as such, even by voluntary admirers. So attractive has the Wikipedia invention become that what began in American English now has comparable (if smaller) encyclopedic repositories in many of the world’s other languages.

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proto-modernist theme was that art is primarily about materials and experience indigenous to art. Few writers in any language could create so many memorable knockout lines, whether in speech or in print, especially about art, artists’ lives, and the artistic process. Among them: The artist is the creator of beautiful things. Art never expresses anything except itself. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. If you are an artist at all, you will be not the mouthpiece of a century, but the master of eternity. No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. There seems to be some curious connection between piety and poor rhymes. Good artists give everything to their art and consequently are perfectly uninteresting themselves. [Upon arriving at New York City customs immigration] I have nothing to declare except my genius. In his tragically short life, Wilde was also a successful playwright; a father whose sexual tastes were primarily homoerotic; a litigant in a monumental libel case; a jailbird; and a bankrupt. About the last his monumental quip was, “I’m dying beyond my means.” It is scarcely surprising that plays, films, and other literary works have been based on his life, his smug detractors looking ever more foolish. My admittedly alternative opinion is that none of Wilde’s other work is finally quite as memorable as his aphorisms, which is to say that their excellence establishes a measure not equaled anywhere else in his work, perhaps because, to quote Wilde against himself, his life was not “perfectly uninteresting.” Nonetheless, theater professionals tell me that his greatest play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), can still be presented, even by amateurs, more successfully that other British plays from their time (e.g., those by George Bernard Shaw, say).

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(16 October 1854–30 November 1900; b. O. Fingal O’Flahertie Wills W.)

(18 June 1889–10 June 1968; b. Richard Edgar Løvstrøm)

The avant-garde Wilde is less the dramatist, who worked safely within Victorian conventions, than the essayist, particularly as an aphorist whose principal

Wilfred is commonly credited as the first modern artist to use electric light not for illumination but as an autonomous artistic medium. Wilfred called this art

448 • WILLIAMS, EMMETT “Lumia,” which might have become more important than his own name had his contemporaries been able to do it as well. He began in 1905, he wrote, “with a cigar box, a small incandescent lamp, and some pieces of colored glass.” By the 1920s he had developed the clavilux, a keyboard controller for light projectors and optical amplifiers, such as lenses and filters, which could endlessly vary the forms and colors of projected light. As the critic Donna M. Stein writes, “The simplest clavilux consists of at least four projection units, each regulating a different function. Registers permit the coupling of one or more of the projection units to any of the manuals.” While several Wilfred claviluxes were permanently installed, he made portable models for recital tours. He also accompanied classical music concerts on his clavilux and designed stage backdrops. Wilfred had his own midtown Manhattan theater, Grand Central Palace, until it became an induction center during World War II. ‘Tis said that young JACKSON POLLOCK, while a student in New York in the early 1930s, regularly visited Wilfred’s “studio (named Institute of Light), where he sat for hours watching the gradual trajectories of colored lights in Wilfred’s Lumia compositions, swinging his head around to follow as if he recognized the trajectories as Wilfred’s gestures.” Wilfred’s last successful innovation was the freestanding light box whose screen would present, thanks to cleverly complementary color wheels, a continuously original visual stream whose AFTERIMAGE would be not one or another picture but a constant, ingratiating flow. I remember one on exhibition through the 1960s in the basement (yes, basement) of the MoMA. Titled Lumia Suite (Opus 158), 6 feet high and 8 feet across, it kept the eyes of the queuers occupied while they waited to enter the adjacent movie theater. This light machine seemed at the time an image-model for the rear-projected JOSHUA LIGHT SHOW behind rock-music performances at the legendary Fillmore East theater (1966–71). Wilfred also wrote Projected Scenery: A Technical Manual (1965) that is filled with rich suggestions. Among the younger light artists favoring projections, perhaps the most ambitious and prolific was a German woman known only as Rosalie (1953–2017, b. Gudrun Müller), who did nearly all her work with German theaters from the mid-1980s into the 21st century. Though I never saw her presentations firsthand, the large illustrations in a thick book emblazoned with her name and “light art” (2011) are suggestive and impressively dazzling.

WILLIAMS, EMMETT (4 April 1925–14 February 2007) Williams became the only prominent American scribbler of his generation to become intimately involved, beginning in the 1950s, with the European intermedia avant-garde. By the 1960s, he was active in FLUXUS. As an American who has found more acceptance for his work abroad, Williams produced straight poetry, VISUAL POETRY, VISUAL FICTION, ARTIST’s BOOKS, prints, paintings, TEXT-SOUND, and PERFORMANCE, working with a variety of radical ideas that he tended to use sparingly. As a creative writer, he has favored such severe constraints as repetition, permutation, and linguistic MINIMALISM. In Sweethearts (1967), his BOOKART masterpiece, the eleven letters of the title word are visually distributed over 150 or so sequentially expressive pages. The work as a whole, when read from right to left (much like a Hebrew book), wittily relates, solely through typographical rearrangements, the evolution of a man-woman relationship. In America in the 1970s Williams spent several years trying without success to secure a permanent academic position such as his affable personality merited. After 1980, he survived better in (West) BERLIN. Once there, his second wife, Ann Noel (1944; b. Ann Stevenson), became the author/artist of exquisite book-art.

WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS (17 September 1883–4 March 1963) The more avant-garde W. C. Williams was less the poetplaywright-fictioner than the essayist who, out of his broad and generous sympathies, coupled with his professional independence as a family doctor in suburban working-class New Jersey, was able to appreciate many of the most radical developments of his time. (This stands in contrast to T. S. ELIOT, who ignored them, reportedly keeping Williams unpublished in England during their almost common lifetimes.) In this respect, consider not only Williams’s early appreciation of GERTRUDE STEIN and JAMES JOYCE’s Work in Progress (aka FINNEGANS WAKE), but the essays and notes posthumously published as The Embodiment of Knowledge (1974). “Pure writing is represented by all whose interest is primarily in writing as an art, of far more interest to them than what it conveys,” Williams states there. “Writing as an art is of course completely inundated by journalism, which is meant to ‘put something over.’ But

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all other writing is more or less in the same class with journalism.” Vehemently opposed to Eliot’s high-literary bent, deriding his The Waste Land at a time when it was almost universally regarded as the greatest achievement of American literature, Williams emphasized the search for American speech and imagery. In his rewriting of American history (in In the American Grain [1925]), Williams was perhaps the first to question the white/European bias of most other accounts. Williams’s more avant-garde creative work was largely forgotten in his lifetime. In the early 1920s, he published a series of books, including Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920) and Spring and All (1923), which were inspired by his friendship with the DADA artists in New York. Kora in Hell has examples of automatic writing, followed by brief explications (the scientist in Williams could not let these little pieces of SURREALISM go unexplained). Spring and All features a mock critical introduction, upside-down chapter heads, and other typographical abnormalities. The unnamed poems often comment ironically on the texts that precede or follow them. (Predictably, when these poems were reprinted during Williams’s lifetime, the experimental prose sections were removed and the poems given conventional titles.) At this time, Williams also wrote his first extended work of prose, The Great American Novel (1923), which makes fun of sentimental fiction by portraying a romance between a little Ford roadster and a truck. Williams’s later, long poem, Paterson (1946–62), incorporates historical FOUND TEXTS, overheard conversations, short lyric fragments, letters from friends, including young ALLEN GINSBERG asking for advice and Williams’s sometime college buddy EZRA POUND giving it, all on the theme of one American’s search for his local roots. —with Richard Carlin

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birds that he could find in North America, eventually picturing 264 kinds in nine volumes titled American Ornithology (1808–14). Both The Wilson Journal of Ornithology and the Wilson Ornithological Society are named after him. He was remembered in a 1961 biography by the prominent magazinist Robert Cantwell (1908–78). Nonetheless, Audubon surpassed Wilson both scientifically and artistically.

WILSON, EDMUND (8 May 1895–12 June 1972) As a reviewer seriously engaged with new developments in the 1920s, he concluded the decade by writing Axel’s Castle (1931) that became an influential introduction to T S. ELIOT, MARCEL PROUST, JAMES JOYCE, GERTRUDE STEIN, and advanced developments around and before them. In America especially, Wilson was particularly important at legitimizing FINNEGANS WAKE, then still called Work in Progress. By the end of the 1930s, however, he became more interested in Marxism, so that by the time literature became his central interest again in the 1940s and 1950s, he barely confronted new art, except in passing remarks that usually reflected his RETROGRADE taste. Wilson also produced poems and other creative texts, a scant few of which are legitimately innovative. Because these last are rarely acknowledged, let alone reprinted, let me cite the ballet “Cronkhite’s Clocks” that first appeared in Discordant Encounters (1926) but was omitted from Wilson’s Five Plays (1954), or “The Three Limperary Cripples” that appeared in NoteBooks of Night (1942), which includes this marvelous passage: “I would rawer read This Side of Paralyzed by F. Scotch Fitzgerald, or ls(!) by hee-hee cummings, or a transformation by Ezra Penaloosa of the lyrics of Bertran van Boren.” When Wilson was repackaged for more conservative readers during the 1950s and 1960s, these more experimental texts disappeared from current print.

(6 July 1766–23 August 1813) Though JOHN JAMES AUDUBON is commonly credited with encyclopedic drawings of American birds, his work followed earlier documentation by a more pioneering Scotsman who came to America in 1794, soon after his release from prison for writing an insult of a powerful mill owner. While in the US, Wilson continued publishing poems that were admired. At the beginning of the 19th century, while based in Pennsylvania, he resolved to illustrate all species of

WILSON, IAN (1940) Among the more ineffable avatars of CONCEPTUAL ART, he began as a sculptor who in 1972 told an interviewer: “The last sculpture I made was a white chalk circle drawn on the floor. It was more interesting to talk about it than draw it.” Since then to the ART

450 • WILSON, ROBERT WORLD he offers undocumented conversations, once called “oral communication” and later “discussion.” After such a framed engagement Wilson offers the collector/patron the possibly significant GESTURE of a document certifying that the conversation happened. That’s it. His background as an exhibiting sculptor, along with his traveling among visual artists, functioned to establish within the tradition of the ART WORLD some value for his object-free move. On Wikipedia once was this appreciation that may or may not be extravagant: He has been compared to the Socratic philosophers but if there is a similarity between his practice and theirs, it probably lies mainly in the fact that everything we have from that period of philosophy takes the form of secondary fragments embedded in other texts. One of Ian Wilson’s more prominent collectors has, no joke, proudly exhibited his personal collection of Ian Wilson documents among other CONCEPTUAL ART prizes.

WILSON, ROBERT (4 October 1941) As an American theatrical artist trained in visual art, Wilson knew from the beginning that his theater would emphasize striking images and then peculiar movements over scripts. His early PERFORMANCE also revealed his predisposition toward thinking big – using larger theaters, more performers, and gigantic props (requiring greater funding) than his theater predecessors did. Though much more abundant in some respects, Wilson’s theater broached unprecedented slowness in the movements of the principal performers. Wilson used amateurs who were clearly amateur, as well as physically impaired “freaks” who had never before appeared on stage, let alone much in public. Some of his images, such as a chorus of “black mammies,” could be audacious beyond belief. Much like J. S. BACH, say, Wilson would incorporate portions of earlier pieces into new ones that had completely different names. He produced silent operas with non-linear narratives, epitomizing in his performances the theatrical development of SPATIAL FORM. Wilson’s single masterpiece, of those I have seen, was The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973), which ran for some twelve hours, filling the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music with several score performers and many props. Its first three acts incorporated much

of an earlier Wilson piece, The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (1969), while the fourth act included much of Deafman Glance (1971). In the first act, as dancers move about the stage, one performer obliquely refers to Stalin by giving an effectively concise summary of dialectical materialism, itself spoken against background music drawn from various sections of Gabriel Fauré’s Messe de Requiem (1886–87). In the last act, a chorus of ostriches danced in unison. What did not initially make sense as intellectual exposition or as a theatrical script seemed reasonably coherent as a MIXED-MEANS performance experience. I’d see it again any time, which is, alas, unlikely. Much of Wilson’s later theatrical work was the production of operas in collaboration with composers as various as RICHARD WAGNER and PHILIP GLASS, more often in Europe than in his native America, where few of his American admirers have seen enough of it to make any definitive generalizations. He has been particularly receptive to accepting European commissions to produce “interpretations” of historical personages or events (much like the American playwright PAUL GREEN, who made commissioned pageants for some Southern states). Proscenium stages may be his preference or an unfortunate limitation. Wilson also has generously exhibited videotapes, drawings, furniture, costumes, and theater props in museums both prominent and obscure around the world. His early theater inspired elaborately detailed appreciations, really a model of their exhaustive kind, by STEFAN BRECHT, who published them in the 1970s in English not in America, where they were written, but in Germany.

WINES, JAMES (27 June 1932) See SITE.

WINTERS, YVOR (17 October 1900–25 January 1968) It was KENNETH REXROTH who often reminded readers that before Yvor Winters became an apostle of classicism (and a Stanford professor) he was an experimental poet whose forte was MINIMALISM, especially in the appreciation of nature. Thus, Winters’ poem “The Magpie’s Shadow” (1922) has sections such as “The Aspen’s Song,” which reads in its entirety: The summer holds me here.

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Or “Sleep,” which reads: Like winds my eyelids close. Or “A Deer”: The trees rose in the dawn. These sentences are, to my mind, poetic, rather than fictional or expository, if only for their conciseness and lyricism. Other examples of early Winters can be found, along with his later, far more traditional work, in editions of his complete poetry. Winters’s mature criticism was based upon the unfashionable premises that the best poetry is morally edifying and that criticism, as well as poetry, should favor rational statements about human life that are easily paraphrased. Winters was among the first literary critics to write appreciatively of American-Indian poetry, even praising in the 1920s “translations that can take their place with no embarrassment beside the best Greek or Chinese versions of H. D. and Ezra Pound and will some day do so.” His wife was the novelist Janet Lewis (1899–1998), whose intelligent historical novels are remembered, especially for their elegant and evocative prose.

WITTENBORN, GEORGE (13 May 1905–15 October 1974) The proprietor of a prominent Manhattan bookstore specializing in art books otherwise unavailable even in NEW YORK CITY after World War II, this immigrant from Germany also became a small publisher, reissuing in English translations many important avantgarde books by GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE, VASSILY KANDINSKY, L. MOHOLY-NAGY, and the American architect Louis Sullivan (1856–1924), in addition to commissioning the literate painter ROBERT MOTHERWELL to edit the monumentally significant anthology The Dada Painters and Poets (1951) and hiring the literate designer PAUL RAND to do covers and typography. Between the complementary activities of publishing and retailing, Wittenborn made available thoughts and images that would have otherwise been hidden and, as a result, had an immense, if implicit, influence on the literacy of visual artists, first in New York and, by extension, all over America from the 1940s into the 1970s. The strongest monument to his influence is Artists’ Handbook: George Wittenborn’s Guestbook, with 21st Century Additions (2008), a 10-pound brick with alphabetical tabs framing mostly

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drawings of artist-customers’ hands during its golden years, supplemented by contributions from later artists, all remembering the bookseller four decades after his death. One of his sometime employees, Jaap Reitman (1942–2016) established a similar store in the 1970s; but whereas Wittenborn was located uptown, first on East 57th Street and then upstairs at 1018 Madison Avenue, near major museums, Reitman situated his bookshop downtown in artists’ SOHO. Because Reitman was a sensitive retailer who respected the interests of his DOWNTOWN customers, many of which knew him as familiarly as he knew them, his bookshop had a similar influence upon the literacy of consequential artists in the 1970s and 1980s, before closing in the wake of SoHo’s decline as an artists’ hothouse. A comparable bookseller in West Germany (Köln) has been Walther König (1939).

WOLFF, CHRISTIAN (8 March 1934) As a precocious teenager in the early 1950s, Wolff joined the circle that included JOHN CAGE, EARLE BROWN, and MORTON FELDMAN, with whom he continued to be associated while pursuing academic degrees in the classics, which he has taught at Harvard and later at Dartmouth. One mark of Wolff’s early music was a limited number of pitches – three for his Duo for Violin and Piano, four for Trio for Flute, Cello, and Trumpet (1951), tending, in David Revill’s words, “to encourage concentration on individual sounds and their combinations rather than progressions.” The result was static, if not pointillistic, like some ANTON WEBERN compositions, though proceeding from different nonserial premises. Wolff later pioneered in the use of “scores” whose instructions were words or charts (or both) and in offering variable directions on how one performer could respond to the moves of another, as though the musicians were playing a game. In the 1970s, Wolff incorporated leftist political criticism into his work, at times drawing upon traditional radical texts and songs. “Wolff began writing works less as experiences for the audiences than as models for social interaction,” according to Kyle Gann. One of the most ambitious of these works is Changing the System (1972–73), in which the performers must collaborate on group decisions about when and what to play. One premise of Wolff’s middle-period music, like that

452 • WOOD, BEATRICE made by other political composers, is that it is as performable by non-musicians as well as by professionals. The first book solely about his work has come in 2012 from the BYU professors MICHAEL HICKS and Christian Asplund (1962).

WOOD, BEATRICE (3 March 1893–12 March 1998) A legendary woman artists’ woman artist, she began as a young American preppy studying both acting and painting in Paris before World War I, when both MARCEL DUCHAMP and the French writer HENRIPIERRE ROCHÉ courted her. In New York in 1916, the threesome created the early DADA magazine The Blind Man, which was initially intended to defend the artistic value of Duchamp’s Fountain (ostensibly a urinal). She became prominent in the Manhattan salon sponsored by Walter and Louise ARENSBERG (at 33 West 67th Street). Relocating after World War II to Ojai, CA, Wood continued working mostly in ceramics, which she produced with avant-garde distinction, until her death, a few days after her 105th birthday. “I owe it all to chocolate and young men,” she (in)famously claimed.

WOOSTER GROUP

(1943–87); the kinetic sculptor James Seawright (1936) and his wife the choreographer Mimi Garrard (1937); the critics Max Kozloff (1933) and Annette Michelson (1922). GEORGE MACIUNAS ran and derailed FLUXUS out of the #80 coop that he organized. The sculptor Charles Ross (1937) was one of its original partners (before he moved to a larger space across the street), while the choreographer TRISHA BROWN instructed her husband Joseph Schlichter to walk from their seventh-floor LIVING LOFT perpendicularly down the outside of the building and the writer/video artist Douglas Davis (1933–2014) had his studio in its basement until he died. Edit DeAk (1948–2017) and Walter Robinson (1950) published their newsprint Art-Rite (1973–78) out of #147. Long above the Paula Cooper Gallery, itself at 155 Wooster Street for decades, George Waterman (1937) amassed the hugest personal library of books about modern art. Nomadic art gallerists such as Larry Gagosian, Brooke Alexander, Charles Cowles, Colin de Land, Barbara Gladstore, and Heiner Friedrich occupied various sometime industrial spaces for various lengths of time. The war photographer Myles Tierney, Jr. (1965–99), grew up on Wooster Street. I lived there as well from 1974 to 2010, though I did not become aware of the measure of this entry until I moved away (to a less fertile address). I’ve read here and there about certain streets in Paris as comparably hospitable to excellent artists, especially around rue de Champagne-Première in pre-World War II France; but documentation is scarce.

See PERFORMANCE GROUP.

WOOSTER STREET (MANHATTAN)

THE WORM (1991)

(1966–99) At the height of ARTISTS’ SOHO, West Broadway was the main commercial thoroughfare, thanks to prominent galleries; but on Wooster Street one block parallel to the east, five blocks long, were the more significant DOWNTOWN arts institutions, beginning with the Anthology Film Archives, the Drawing Center, and the Kitchen for long spells: the PERFORMANCE GROUP/WOOSTER GROUP and the WALTER DE MARIA Earth Room permanently, in addition to many significant avant-garde figures – among them, the theater artists RICHARD FOREMAN, Kate Manheim (1945), and Hanne Tierney (1940); the arts archivist Larry Qualls (1945); the painters Michelle Stuart (1933), Joyce Kozloff (1942), Suzanna Tanger (1943), and Christopher Wilmarth

Measurably the longest comic strip ever, this also ranks among the most original and suggestive. In 1991, over one hundred cartoonists came together in a London shopping mall to paint 250 panels, each roughly 1 foot wide, to the length of 250 feet. The script provided by the British writer Alan Moore (1953) chronicles a cartoonist’s effort to finish his work. It begins with him reading a script, documents various stages, and ends with a panel entirely black, captioned, “To be continued.” Though the original Worm has disappeared, the effort is remembered in a book (2000). As an extremely extended narrative composed by many hands, The Worm echoes the famed Bayeaux Tapestry from centuries before. It also establishes a multitudinous compositional precedent that could be realized in other arts,

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such as, say, a mile-long poem or even as a work of architecture.

WRESTLING (forever) There have been two kinds. One is a sport in which evenly weighted men compete to score a pin down or at least score points within several time-limited “rounds.” The second is a theatrical PERFORMANCE historically originating in circuses in which oversized men, more recently sometimes women, pretend to a combat that is sometimes roughly rehearsed. These “wrestlers” are essentially showmen experienced at engaging a live audience. Adopting a PSEUDONYM has encouraged the best of them to develop a public persona different from their private personalities. The popularity of this art rises and falls in various places at various times, often depending upon the singular attraction of stars such as GORGEOUS GEORGE, who developed this vulgar SPECTACLE to a higher (or lower) level. Consider that President Donald J. Trump (1945) learned certain theatrical skills from sponsoring this kind of wrestling, becoming a star (under his birth name) whom people love to hate but will pay to see and, in his case, for whom they vote.

WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD (8 June 1869–9 April 1959) The ideal of Wright’s architectural philosophy was organicism, which he defined as successfully relating a

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building both to its intrinsic purposes and its surrounding environment, so that “inside” and “outside” blend into each other. “Thus environment and building are one,” he wrote in A Testament (1957). Planning the grounds around the building on the site as well as adorning the building take on a new importance as they become features harmonious with the space-within-to-be lived-in. Site, structure, furnishing – decoration too, planting as well – all these become one in organic architecture. That accounts for why, in his private homes, such as the legendary Falling Water (1936), Wright’s architecture melts into its landscape and looks as though it belongs precisely where it is set. On the other hand, like other megalomaniacs, Wright didn’t always follow his own rules, creating in the original Guggenheim Museum in NEW YORK CITY (1959) an awkward showcase for both works of painting and sculpture that nonetheless conquered ventilation problems, which typically plague other museums. Wright’s Guggenheim, as it is commonly called, attained sculptural qualities by climaxing earlier Wright penchants for spirals and inverted ziggurats that visually echo VLADIMIR TATLIN’s legendary monument, in addition to constantly impressing its peculiarities upon everyone entering it. Not unlike other architects with few buildings to construct, Wright produced a wealth of essays and books thanks in part to his publishing patron, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. (1910–99), whose father had also commissioned Falling Water.

X

X, MISTER He’s interesting to me as an intelligent artist who never produced comparably intelligent work. Knowing and liking him for decades, I can’t explain why not. Well-educated in France, always sympathetic to avant-garde aspirations, he came to America initially in the 1960s as a subsidized guest of a graduate school program. In America he would have graduated summa cum laude from an arts college or perhaps a research university. For some five decades, he has written, lectured, and exhibited both in America and in his native France, indeed maintaining studios in both countries. He married intelligent women and cultivated intelligent friends. He reads art magazines in more than one language. Nonetheless, he didn’t quit as most do when they fail to earn the success they wished; nor did he languish as a tenured academic. I’m not aware of any personally selfdestructive habits, such as drugs or drink or laziness. My friend’s works should be as brilliant as he palpably is, in both English and French; but if any are, nothing has come to my attention. While his professional résumé is a mile long, indicatively nothing is claimed for any particular work, not even in his own publicity. Why he disappointed, not only himself but those around him, I can’t identify, the question thus puzzling as well as challenging me. Did he fail to develop any strong idiosyncratic ideas? Or the unique SIGNATURE that marks major art? Is the answer simply that personal brilliance doesn’t necessarily generate artistic excellence? I withhold his real name(s) because he’s actually several people, including some women, and I’ve known in passing yet more undaunted artists like him.

XENAKIS, IANNIS (29 May 1922–4 February 2001)

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Born Greek in Rumania, Xenakis was trained in architecture in Athens; between 1947 and 1959, he worked with LE CORBUSIER, reportedly contributing to the spatial installation of EDGARD VARÈSE’s Poème électronique at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. While working in architecture, he studied music with OLIVIER MESSIAEN and Darius Milhaud (1892–1974). Using various kinds of mathematics, Xenakis has advocated what NICOLAS SLONIMSKY called “the stochastic method which is teleologically directed and deterministic, as distinct from a purely aleatory [i.e., JOHN CAGEAN] handling of data.” The composer JOEL CHADABE identified Xenakis’s indebtedness to statistics and systems theory outside musical traditions: He heard the cicadas of a summer night as clouds of sound made up of particles too small to be treated as individual events but understandable as statistical system, with energy distributions, and he thought of pizzicatos, for example, as events that could be understood and controlled with a mathematics based upon probabilities. Xenakis also founded and directed the Centre d’Études Mathématiques et Automatiques Musicales in Paris (and for a while a comparable Center for Mathematical and Automated Music in America), purportedly in competition with PIERRE BOULEZ’s IRCAM. All the verbal claims notwithstanding, much of Xenakis’s music has thickly atonal textures, which sound like bands of frequencies in the tradition of tone clusters, often distributed among many loudspeakers. For the French pavilion at Montreal’s EXPO 67, Xenakis also created, as an accompaniment to his audiotape, a spatially extended flickering light show.

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XEROGRAPHIC ART (1970s–) This mode of art began to flourish in the 1980s with the improvement and the nascent omnipresence of the effective photocopier. (It is hard for us to remember now how poor in quality photocopies were prior to the 1970s and how daunting any photocoping was before 1965.) Although xerographic art can take many shapes (including simple image degradation and serial imagery), its major form is a method of collaging, occasionally called xerage or xerolage. While some xerages are merely photocopied collages, constrained by the somewhat limited reproductive

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capabilities of available photocopy machines, the most expressive examples bring together elements in new and interesting ways: by actually copying (rather than pasting) one image over another, by combining different colors of monochromic xerography, by degrading individual images, and by distorting images after computer scanning. With the advent of digital photocopiers in the 21st century, xerographic art has been diminished. The accuracy of these new copiers produces a sharper image, and generational xerographic degradation no longer creates the muddy look so prized by the xerographic artists of the 1980s. —with Geof Huth

Y

YALE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS (c. 1960) While liberal arts institutions at various levels tend to have continuous reputations, arts colleges go up and down, which to say that they have stronger years and weaker ones, often inexplicably. Consider that among those getting a graduate degree in the visual arts at Yale around 1960 were RICHARD SERRA, EVA HESSE, CHUCK CLOSE, Nancy Graves (1939–95), Rackstraw Downes (1939), Janet Fish (1938), Brice Marden (1938), and both Sylvia Plimack Mangold (1938) and Robert Mangold (1937). Though they came to Yale from disparate colleges and places, they and yet other contemporaries all had visible arts careers. Though I’ve personally known several of these artists, I’ve never developed a clear notion of why Yale should have been so much stronger then than either before or later. Putting aside one hypothesis about the quality of the tap water in New Haven at the time, I sense that they learned to learn more from each other than from their teachers and then developed their arts further as they all moved to DOWNTOWN Manhattan, many of them becoming early residents of ARTISTS’ SOHO. One truth about the development of consequential artists is what happens to them within the initial few years after they finish schooling.

YI SANG

While working as an architect for the Japanese occupiers of Korea, Yi Sang published poems initially dismissed as incomprehensible. Some involve numerals that are reversed left to right (as though seen in a mirror). Another poem, “A Memorandum on Line No. 1,” is ostensibly a grid of dots, arrayed ten across and ten down, with numbers in sequence along the top from left to right, and along the left margin from top to bottom. Accompanying this simple image is a series of ten numbered statements. These can be read into the grid both horizontally and vertically. One is “(The cosmos is of power by power).” Three reads: “Quietly make me a proton of an electron.” Seven reads: “The smell of taste and the taste of smell.” In an inspired interpretation, professor Kim regards this poem as reflecting “quantum physics, which represented new ideas about existence in modern physics, replacing Newtonian-classical physics” and thus that line seven illustrates, “according to the theory of relativity, two events which are seen as occurring simultaneously by one observer may occur in different temporal sequences for other observers [as] all measures involving time and space lose their absolute significance.” Admittedly, Kim’s pioneering readings represent an intelligence developed sixty years after the “incomprehensible” poems were written – indeed, sixty years after the poet died; but if Kim is persuasive, then Yi Sang ranks among the great avant-garde poets.

YOUNG, ARTHUR M.

(14 September 1910–17 April 1937; b. Kim Hae-gyeong) An architect, graphic designer, and typographer, he was in his short life also a poet whose most prophetic work, according to Min-Soo Kim (1961), “consists of persistent time-space conceptions as shown in the domain of modern visual arts.” As professor Kim has it, Sang’s work reflected Western advances in modern design as developed in the 1930s, particularly by MOHOLY-NAGY.

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(3 November 1905–30 May 1995; b. A. Middleton Y.) An American eccentric inventor who dabbled in philosophy and astrology, among other precious activities, he gained renown for designing the sleek first Bell Helicopter. Technically, Young is also credited with inventing “the stabilizer bar” that was used in many early helicopters after World War II. Principally for the

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quality of its design, the Bell Helicoptor entered the canonical MoMA collection. Early in the 1970s Young founded an Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, CA. His magnum philosophical opus, a commercially published book titled The Reflexive Universe (1976), offers a theory of evolution that synthesized, in one summary, “geology, biology, anthropology, psychology, and parapsychology.” Later Young books appeared necessarily from smaller publishers. Only in America perhaps do successful industrialists retire early to write eccentric books. Of the name partners in Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge, very much about post-World War II aerospace engineering, Simon Ramo (1913–2016) wrote The Islands of E, Cono & My (1973) and Tennis by Machiavelli (1984), while Dean Wooldridge (1913–2006) published an awesomely peculiar mechanistic psychology as The Machinery of the Brain (1963). More eccentric yet is Four Jews on Parnassus (2008), an imaginary conversation among WALTER BENJAMIN, THEODOR ADORNO, GERSHOM SCHOLEM, and ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, all heavy-hitters, by the chemist Carl Djerassi (1923–2015), who developed during the 1950s a pill providing women with birth control, before writing plays, novels, and tracts that literary commentators rarely acknowledge. Believe me. Nothing in this entry is imaginary.

YOUNG, LA MONTE (14 October 1935) The truest MINIMAL composer, this Young has devoted most of his professional life to exploring

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the possibilities of a severely limited palette. After beginning as an audacious post-Cagean composer who, among other stunts, released butterflies into a performance space as a piece of “music,” he hit upon The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys (1964–) in which Young along with a few colleagues produce a continuous, barely changing, harmonic (consonant) sound that is amplified to the threshold of aural pain. Designed to last several hours, filled with dancing overtones, the piece is usually performed in a darkened, enclosed space that contains the odor of incense and projected wistful, abstract images made by his wife Marian Zazeela (1940). (Sometimes called The Theater of Eternal Music, the resulting concert could be accurately classified as an ENVIRONMENT, which is to say an artistically defined space.) Though audiotape recordings of this work exist, in my experience The Tortoise works best as a theatrical experience that depends upon multisensory overload to move its listeners. Young’s other major composition is The WellTuned Piano (1964), a five-hour piano work (in the great tradition of comparably exhaustive keyboard pieces by J. S. BACH, Dmitri Shostakovich [1906– 75], Paul Hindemith [1895–1963], JOHN CAGE, and WILLIAM DUCKWORTH), in which Young plays a Boisendorfer piano that has been retuned to just intonation. To the charge, heard often, that Young’s music represents a “dead end,” consider From Ancient World (1992), a composition by his sometime piano tuner Michael Harrison (1958), who develops a harmonic piano that realizes a different form of just intonation with twenty-four different notes within an octave.

Z

ZAPPA, FRANK (21 December 1940–4 December 1993; b. Francis Vincent Z., Jr.) Familiar from his youth with avant-garde composers such as EDGARD VARÈSE, and thus musically more sophisticated than others involved with 1960s rock, Zappa tried at various times and in various ways to introduce avant-garde elements into the formally expansive popular music of the late 1960s. Because successful pop musicians were allowed to transcend the short time limits of the 45 rpm disk to create long-playing 33 rpm records, Zappa’s group, the Mothers of Invention (1964–69; 1970–71; 1973–75), produced music in twenty-five-minute stretches; the result were “concept albums” that he released on a label appropriately named Bizarre. Some of the stronger works mocked California fads and popular music itself. Freak Out (1966) includes “Return of the Son of Monster Magnet,” subtitled “An Unfinished Ballet in Two Tableaux,” which appropriates the techniques of MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE.

Figure 21 Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention with The Joshua Light Show at Fillmore East (1968). Courtesy of Joshua White.

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I once saw Zappa in a performance when he instructed various sections of the Fillmore East audience to perform preassigned sounds in response to his hand signals from the front of the stage. Once we got going, he said to himself, audibly and with proud irony, “wouldn’t PIERRE BOULEZ like that?” Here and elsewhere, Zappa’s conceited sense of humor is refreshing to some and disaffecting to others. He produced, with less success, not only orchestral scores but eccentric motion pictures, such as 200 Motels (1971) and Baby Snakes (1980). He was to his death perhaps the only alumnus of 1960s rock still capable of generating an esthetic surprise. Innately irrepressible, Zappa also released synthesizer arrangements of an 18th-century composer authentically named Francesco Zappa.

ZAUM (1912) Coined by a RUSSIAN FUTURIST, probably ALEKSEI KRUCHONYKH, to indicate language that was indefinite or indeterminate in meaning (and phonetically translated as “zaum,” to indicate the palatalized “m”), this term literally means something “beyond or outside of reason or intelligibility”; common English translations are “transrational,” “trans-sense,” or “beyond-sense” language. The idea of writing poetry in invented words was suggested to Kruchonykh by DAVID BURLIUK in December 1912. By March 1913, the former published his notorious poem “Dyr bul shchyl,” which is generally considered to be the first work of Zaum, though VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV had for several years before this been producing poetry with obscure coinages. The principal difference is that Khlebnikov apparently intended that his experiments be eventually understood, and thus that they be conceptual demonstrations of language’s creative potential to renew itself with ancient Slavic

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linguistic resources, whereas Kruchonykh intended, at least in the initial stages, that his Zaum be indeterminate in meaning, though not meaningless. Such indeterminate meaning was based on the suggestiveness of sound articulations and roots. By dislocating language units ranging from phonemes to syntactic structures, Kruchonykh created a whole range of types of Zaum, often combined within a single work. One measure of true Zaum is that it should not be able to be motivated or decoded by such factors as onomatopoeia or psychopathological states. In 1917–19, he created a series of “autographic” works in which the verbal elements were sometimes reduced to a minimum of letters and lines. Thereafter, however, as Kruchonykh moved closer to the mainstream, Zaum appeared only as spice in otherwise non-Zaum works, sometimes arguing for the psychological motivation of such effects. By 1923, Kruchonykh had ceased experimenting with the use of Zaum, though he continued to theorize about its importance. Other major Zaumniks were ILIAZD, Igor Terentyev (1892–1937), and Aleksandr Tufanov (1887–1942). Some avant-garde painters, such as KAZIMIR MALEVICH, Olga Rozanova (1886–1918), and Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958), also experimented with Zaum as an analog to abstraction. Because Zaum is usually considered the most radical product of RUSSIAN FUTURISM, its value is still, decades later, the subject of fierce dispute. —Gerald Janecek

ZELEVANSKY, PAUL (10 September 1946) Trained in painting, Zelevansky developed in his twenties a unique and precociously mature style of VISUAL POETRY that mixes texts of his own authorship, set with various typefaces (including rubber-stamped), with graphic drawings. Zelevansky makes each medium of communication as important as the others, so that his works take their rightful place in a tradition that includes both WILLIAM BLAKE and Hebrew illuminated manuscripts. This style informs not only the modest Sweep (1979), but a highly ambitious epic about a historical culture, The Hegemonians, filled with both literary and visual references. Issued as a trilogy, The Case for the Burial of Ancestors (1981, 1986, 1991), for depth and scope, ranks among the strongest bookart. Zelevansky has exhibited pages from it along with sculptures and other artifacts relating to the project.

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After working briefly with theater music, he authored one of the first narratives exclusively for computer interaction, Swallows (1986), only to encounter the principal difficulty in distributing literature on computer disk – the systems that could read Swallows (Apple lie, II+) were neither universally popular nor long-lived. Later, Zelevansky created computer-assisted response displays for the Queens Museum in New York. As a sometime educator, he wrote about visual literacy. His wife Lynn Z. (1947) had a distinguished career as a museum administrator.

ZINES See MICROPRESS.

ZUKOFSKY, LOUIS (23 January 1904–12 May 1978) There is no doubt that Zukofsky did something unprecedented in literature, particularly in poetry, but exactly what is hard to say, even four decades after his death. To point out that he was obscure or that much of his work remains incomprehensible is merely to avoid the issue of whether greater understanding is possible. Zukofsky worked with unusual forms, including a numerical counterpoint in his early classic “Poem Beginning ‘The’”; he produced a highly unusual musical Autobiography in collaboration with his wife, Celia (1913–80). He began in 1927 a “poem of a life,” A, that for its ambition conceptually echoes the Cantos of EZRA POUND, whose closest Jewish friend Zukofsky probably was. A differs significantly from other extended contemporary poems in revealing little about its author. HUGH KENNER called it “the most hermetic poem in English, which they will still be elucidating in the 22nd century.” Those appreciative of intricacies indigenous to poetry regard Zukofsky’s translation of the Latin poet Catullus (1969) as awesomely complex. His son Paul Z. (1943–2017) was for many years a distinguished interpreter of avant-garde American music, initially as a violinist, later as a conductor. Celia Z.’s self-published American Friends (1979) is a widow’s remarkable tribute to her late husband, a classic of its rare kind, that prints passages by him beneath relevant fragments written by historic Americans.

Biographical notes

H. R. Brittain, after interning with Richard Kostelanetz, became an actor in New York City. Richard Carlin, long an editor in New York book publishing, commissioning the first two editions of this Dictionary, now works for Oxford University Press, in addition to writing his own books mostly about music. Mark Daniel Cohen works as a professor of philosophy and an assistant dean at The European Graduate School. John Robert Colombo, see entry. Tony Coulter conducts a regular program of new music at WFMU-FM in New Jersey while residing in Portland, OR. Michal Ulrike Dorda, once in New York, may now be residing in Berlin. Charles Doria has published books of his poetry and translations from classical languages. Nona Eleanor Ellis, an architect and sometime professor of architecture, has worked for decades in financing real estate. Bob Grumman, see entry. Robert Haller worked for many years at the Anthology Film Archives in New York. Geof Huth, see entry.

Carter Kaplan, see entry. Katy Matheson (1948–2005) was a dance writer based New York City. Gloria S. & Fred W. McDarrah together produced The Photography Encyclopedia (1998). By himself, Fred was long the staff photographer at The Village Voice. Michael Peters lives and teaches in upstate New York. Ben Piggott, now an editor at Routledge, commissions books on theater and sells basketball cards in London. Douglas Puchowski’s elaborate bibliographies for the second edition of this Dictionary appeared eponymously as his Documentation (2018). John Rocco, after interning with Richard Kostelanetz, became a professor of English at SUNY Maritime College in Throgs Neck, NY. Igor Satanovsky, born in the Ukraine in 1969, works as a designer in New York publishing, in addition to publishing the Russian-language literary journal Novaya Kozha. Nicolas Slonimsky, see entry. Fred Truck, see entry.

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