Charles Bernstein: Avant-Garde Is a Constant Renewal

boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 215-230
Author(s):  
Ian Probstein
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York School ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Language L ◽  
Charles Bernstein ◽  
Private Matter

Abstract The essay explores the work of Charles Bernstein in light of constant renewal. John Ashbery, as one of the brightest representatives of the New York School, and Charles Bernstein, as a representative of the language (L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E), have similar attitudes toward language. They have much in common in terms of poetics: in the rejection of loud phrases, prophetic statements, emotions, confessionalism, and certain self-centeredness. Poetry is a private matter for both. Both have poetics built on the “oddness that stays odd,” as Bernstein himself put it, paraphrasing Pound's “news that stays news.” Both are aimed at renovating the language, and the verses of both are built on fragmentation, collage, moving from one statement to another without preparation. However, in Ashbery, whose poems are surreal, these transitions are smoother, based on an apparent connection, what Bernstein calls “hypotaxis” or “associative parataxis.” In contrast, Bernstein's poetry is built on parataxis; it is “bumpy,” in the poet's own words.

Denby, Edwin (1903–1983)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harris Feinsod
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
New York School ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Frank O'hara ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Downtown Scene ◽  
James Schuyler

Edwin Denby is best remembered as one of the preeminent critics of dance modernism, yet he was also an accomplished poet and an experienced dancer, choreographer, and librettist. Both his poetic gifts and his practical experience in the theater informed his dance criticism, first collected in Looking at the Dance (1949) and amplified in Dancers, Buildingsand People in the Streets (1965). As the title of his 1965 volume suggests, Denby placed primacy on the pleasures of perception, recording what he saw rather than advocating for a distinct point of view, as did his contemporaries Lincoln Kirstein and John Martin. Denby’s sensibility was widely admired in New York’s postwar avant-garde milieus, and he became an important friend, muse, mentor, and tutelary spirit to visual artists—including Rudy Burckhardt, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Alex Katz—and to New York School poets—especially Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Anne Waldman. In the last several decades of his life, Denby continued to be a key figure in the downtown scene across several performance genres.

In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (review)

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-191
Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York School ◽  
Avant Garde

scholarly journals Poeci-tłumacze jako „awangarda” lat 90.

Wielogłos ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 57-73
Author(s):  
Joanna Orska
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Experimental Poetry ◽  
New York School ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public

Poets-Translators as the “Avant-Garde” of the 1990s David Lehman in his book The Last Avant-Garde. The Making of the New York School of Poets sustains the avant-garde character of the New York School (painters and poets), pointing to the resistance of the public to their works as to one of the symptoms showing their anti-normative and emancipatory message. New experimental poetry in post-transformational Poland of the 1990s was, in general, following the innovations of foreign neo-avant-garde practices – in respect to the methods, interests, and creative ideas. The New York School tradition became the main source of inspiration, due to its reception by poets-translators of the circle of “Literatura na Świecie” magazine: Piotr Sommer, Bohdan Zadura, Andrzej Sosnowski, and Tadeusz Pióro. This article shows that their literary statements on art, which could be seen as programmatic in the avant- -garde way, displayed certain outlines similar to the New York School ideas. One might risk the thesis that at the turn of the centuries in Poland not only American neo-avant-garde poetry aroused the interest of Polish poets-translators. Also the programme of the New York School poets, however vague, became important for their experience and it was being “translated” alongside the poems, though its features would turn out different in Polish conditions.

Lassaw, Ibram (1913–2003)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther T. Thyssen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
New York School ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
The Family ◽  
Galactic Cluster ◽  
Brooklyn Museum

A sculptor of the New York School, Ibram Lassaw was born to Russian parents in Alexandria, Egypt. The family immigrated to Brooklyn, NY, in 1921, where Lassaw learned modeling, casting, and carving. He discovered avant-garde art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, and continued to study sculpture at the Clay Club from 1927 to 1932. An active participant in New York modernist circles, Lassaw was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Group (1935), and The Club (1949). Lassaw’s interest in cosmic and religious themes culminated in abstract sculptures for Jewish synagogues, such as Pillar of Fire (1953) at Temple Beth El, Springfield, MA. Known for his web-like structures, Lassaw dripped, fused, and spattered metal, embracing the resulting accidental contours that accrued on his gridded designs, as in Galactic Cluster #1 (1958, Newark Museum). He wielded the oxyacetylene torch like a paintbrush and the intricately structured wires twist, turn, and redouble like skeins of paint by Jackson Pollock. His work was included in the 1959 Kassel Documenta, which showcased American Abstract Expressionism.

The New York School, the Mainstream, and the Avant-Garde

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-378
Author(s):  
JOSH SCHNEIDERMAN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York School ◽  
Avant Garde

scholarly journals The Cage Case. Arts and Social Neuroscience

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amendola Alfonso ◽  
Jessica Camargo Molano
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Reference Model ◽  
Social Research ◽  
New York School ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Figurative Art ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Relationship

A great story told by a musician is the basis of the best stage experimentation of the second half of the 20th century. The musician is John Cage, whose work synthesizes the entire system of arts within the extraordinary world of the avant-garde. This great story begins with the experimental artistic activities which were developed in the 1920s, consolidated in the thirties and continued through the post-war period up to the dawn of the fifties. Apart from the socio-historical cross-section Cage’s experimentation provides, it is also a pretext for reflecting on the artist’s work as well as the relationship between neuroscience and art. Important contributions to this topic come from the neuro-scientific-social research on new expressions “of creativity, imagination, genius” (Pecchinenda, 2018). This study is based on the assumption that Cage was the forerunner of neuronal experimentation that would be central to the experiments and research of many other artists. The theoretical reference model can be found in the research of the neuroscientist Kandel et al, whose work was the starting point for this investigation. Kandel grasps the definitive break between scientific logic and humanistic sensitivity in the methodological reductionism practiced by neuroscience and in the experiments of contemporary creativity. According to Kandel, both neuroscience and artistic experimentation have similar objectives and problems, and in some respects seem to develop similar methodological practices. Kandel identifies the use of memory, synthesis and knowledge of the world in authors such as Mondrian, de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Louis, Warhol as well as the New York school of which Cage was an important member. The relationship between art and neuroscience is synthetized in the avant-garde action of Cage and in all the artists who launched continuous attacks against traditional forms. The transition from figurative art to abstraction is “comparable” to the reductionist process that is used in the scientific field to explain complexity and phenomenology. The prolegomena of this discourse are anticipated by a previous work written by Kandel in 2012 and can also be found in other studies on the relationship between neuroscience and art, in particular in the reflections of the neurobiologist and father of neuroaesthetics, Semir Zeki. Zeki analyzed artists work as a practice perfectly comparable to the research carried out by neuroscientists. Cage, the focus of this investigation, carried out a sound-stage-vision experimentation affecting theatre, media and art which can be examined from at least two different perspectives. The first concerns the definitive subversion of “innate rules of perception” (Kandel) and the second deals with the relationship between art and neuroscience.

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