Lou Reed: “In the Beginning Was the Word”

2017 ◽  
pp. 40-69
Author(s):  
Daniel Kane
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Free Association ◽  
Andy Warhol ◽  
New York School ◽  
Syracuse University ◽  
Velvet Underground ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Drag Queens

This chapter analyzes the ways in which Lou Reed’s vision of himself as a writer informed his music and lyrics for the Velvet Underground and his solo career. I track how Reed’s engagement with Andy Warhol and the New York School of poets complicated and troubled his otherwise relatively traditional views of the Poet as oracular figure. The chapter pays special attention to Reed’s stories and poems published in his collegiate-era mimeographed journal Lonely Woman Quarterly, analyzing how these works ultimately fed into Reed’s music and lyrics in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Mixing a world-weary, vernacular tone with bursts of inspired disjunction, or interrupting a straightforward narrative with Joycean free-association, Reed used the journal to sketch the personae that were to prove obstinate presences throughout his career. Reed’s porn-freaks, alcoholics, suburbanite wannabees, drag queens, hustlers, and junkies all got their start at Syracuse University, accompanying Reed on his journey from Lewis to Louis to Luis and, ultimately, Lou.

The 1979 American Punk Art dispute: Visions of punk art between sensationalism, street art and social practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-466
Author(s):  
Marie Arleth Skov
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
Andy Warhol ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Social Art ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Art School

In May 1979, a conflict arose in Amsterdam: the makers of the exhibition American Punk Art clashed with local artists, who disagreed with how the curators portrayed the punk movement in their promotion of the show. The conflict lays open many of the inherent (self-) contradictory aspects of punk art. It was not merely the ubiquitous ‘hard school vs. art school’ punk dispute, but that the Amsterdam punk group responsible for the letter and the Americans preparing the exhibition had different visions of what punk art was or should be in respect to content and agency. Drawing on interviews with the protagonists themselves and research in their private archives, this article compares those visions, considering topics like institutionalism vs. street art, avantgarde history vs. tabloid contemporality and political vs. apolitical stances. The article shows how the involved protagonists from New York and Amsterdam drew on different art historical backgrounds, each rooted in the 1960s: Pop Art, especially Andy Warhol, played a significant role in New York, whereas the signature poetic-social art of CoBrA and the anarchistic activity of the Provos were influential in Amsterdam. The analysis reflects how punk manifested differently in different cultural spheres, but it also points to a common ground, which might be easier to see from today’s distance of more than forty years.

Eli Lederhendler. New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 1950–1970. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001. xix, 275 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 394-395
Author(s):  
Deborah Dash Moore
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Syracuse University ◽  
The 1960S

The first thing a reader should know about this book is that it was written from Jerusalem. No Jewish city in history, certainly no diaspora city, can hope to compete with Jerusalem. Looking down from Jerusalem, New York looks decidedly grim. As Lederhendler notes with admirable brevity, the “events of May–June 1967 threw into relief the apparent gulf between Israelis (who could fend for themselves) and Jews (who could not)” (190). Diaspora condemns Jews to mere ethnic existence, to life as one group among others. In the 1960s New York Jews recognized “that Diaspora life had become existentially problematic” (190). They faced “cultural despair,” decline of community, and a loss of nerve that challenged their earlier, “utopian” optimism about urban life, its freedom, and its Jewish possibilities (87).

The Screen Scene: Andy Warhol, the Factory and Home Movies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Monteiro
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Andy Warhol ◽  
Strict Adherence ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personality Differences ◽  
The People ◽  
Family Home ◽  
Intimate Relations ◽  
The 1960S

In his prodigious output of hundreds of films throughout the 1960s, Pop artist Andy Warhol cultivated an approach to making and viewing movies that borrowed heavily on the conventions of family home-movie culture. Warhol’s Factory studio in New York and his entourage of so-called “Superstars” functioned much like a family of misfits. This chapter explores film’s role in this context, analysing how Warhol combined improvised scenarios with personality differences to forge or reinforce intimate relations through filmmaking. It argues that his tendency to screen these films in the Factory—often before the people who appear on screen—functioned as a means of identifying, describing, and securing a nucleus of close social relations. Through comparison with the rhetoric of home-movie advertising and guidebooks, it teases out ways Warhol’s films paradoxically became avant-garde distortions of home-movie practices through strict adherence to suggestions and tips given to home-movie practitioners.

Bahá’u’lláh’s Influence on the New York School of Painting: The “Unapprehended Inspiration” of Newman and Rothko

1991 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-89
Author(s):  
Ross Woodman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
New York School ◽  
The World ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
The Veil ◽  
The City

As members of the New York School of painters, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko announced not only the passing away of an entire creation but also the bringing forth of a new one. Though unaware that they were living and painting in the City of the Covenant whose light would one day rise from darkness and decay to envelop the world even as their painting of light consciously arose from the void of a blank canvas, Newman’s and Rothko’s work may nevertheless be best understood as a powerful first evidence of what Bahá’u’lláh called “the rising Orb of Divine Revelation, from behind the veil of concealment.” Their work may yet find its true spiritual location in the spiritual city founded by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on his visit to New York in 1912.

Ted Berrigan’s Stanzaic Spaces

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmine Shamma
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
John Donne ◽  
New York School ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Verse Form

After suggesting (and agreeing) that Berrigan led the Second Generation New York School, this chapter treats the actual forms of Berrigan’s poems, focusing on his sonnets to show that these poets interpret poems as spaces in which to recreate rooms. Berrigan, perhaps more obviously than any other New York School poet, took deliberate steps towards integrating aspects of traditional poetic verse form: Where John Donne encouraged: “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms,” Berrigan retorts (repeated throughout his Sonnets): “Is there room in the room that you room in?” riddling the form with domestic, urban and aesthetic complications. Berrigan explained to an interviewer: “I always thought of each one of my poems, like the sonnets, as being a room. And before that, I used to think of each stanza as being a room.” Accordingly, this chapter examines Berrigan’s stanzas as rooms, arguing that this responsive poetic form functions organically.

Edwin Denby’s Objectivist Modernism and the New York School

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York School ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Dance History ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Objectivist Theory ◽  
Biographical Approach

Whereas chapter 2 examines the emergence of a social modernist theory of ballet in the 1930s, chapter 3 illustrates a new ballet modernism arising in the 1940s through the contributions of Edwin Denby. Denby’s primary innovation to American ballet theory was to reassign dance meaning from social or political themes to the intrinsic properties of the movement itself. This chapter takes a biographical approach to Denby’s criticism to situate this theoretical shift in ballet within the interdisciplinary New York School, in which he was extensively involved, and in which similar challenges to the relation of art and politics were being made by painters, photographers, and composers. This chapter demonstrates that Denby was the architect of a new objectivist theory of dance, which relocates the emergence of objectivism to a much earlier point in dance history, and in a different genre, than previously acknowledged. More than any other critic, Denby was responsible for connecting this objectivist theory of dance to Balanchine’s American neoclassicism, formulating the set of aesthetic principles that still shapes our idea of American ballet to date.

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