Charles Olson and American Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Mark Rothko

The Practice of the Self situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910–70) at the centre of the early postwar American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson’s work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson’s published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early postwar American modernism. The development of Olson’s work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists—including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage—The Practice of the Self offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of postwar American modernism.

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

Davis, Stuart (1892–1964)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annika Marie
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Street Life ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Urban Street ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ashcan School

Stuart Davis was a painter, printmaker, muralist, and arts activist who played a prominent role in the development of American modernism in the first half of the 20th century. Visually, he brought the formal and technical experimentation of the European avant-garde to depictions of the modernity of the American metropolis. As a prolific writer and powerful spokesman, Davis was a committed cultural advocate, working to explain and defend modern abstract art, promoting artists’ rights, and arguing for the democratization of culture and art’s formative impact on society. Davis’s early style relates to the Ashcan School, an early 20th-century brand of realism that combines a direct, spontaneous, journalistic naturalism with everyday scenes of urban street life. The turning point for the young Davis was the New York Armory Show of 1913. Through the exhibit Davis was exposed to Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Dada. However, Davis’s embrace of the formal rigor of European abstraction did not lead him to purely non-objective painting. Maintaining that form and content were equally important, he argued that European modernism’s visual fragmentation, instability, and simultaneity provided the visual means by which to express contemporary American urban life.

scholarly journals Rolling amnesia and the omnivorous now

2015 ◽  
pp. 76-88
Author(s):  
Lilly Husbands
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Single Frame ◽  
Phenomenological Experience ◽  
Animation Technique ◽  
Universal Nature

Throughout his career, New York-based experimental filmmaker and animator Jeff Scher has created animated works that are in dialogue with the diary film tradition in avant-garde cinema. Scher uses his distinctive single-frame rotoscope and collage animation technique to investigate the selective nature of memory and to celebrate the moments that constitute everyday life. Scher’s animated trilogy, You Won’t Remember This (2007), You Won’t Remember This Either (2009), and You Might Remember This (2011), depicts a series of everyday moments in the early childhoods of his two sons Buster and Oscar. The trilogy is centred on the mnemonic phenomenon that is referred to in developmental and cognitive psychology as childhood amnesia, which has presented problems for the philosophy of memory since John Locke first investigated the roles of memory and consciousness in the constitution of the identity of the self. Scher’s three portraits invite spectators to reflect on the mnemonic imbalance that is specific to this particular temporal situation—where the parent is able to remember what the child will ultimately forget—in both a distilled and heightened way. This paper investigates the ways in which the rotoscope collage technique employed by Scher in the You Won’t Remember This trilogy not only endows the works with a special capacity to emphasise the universal nature of childhood amnesia but also, conversely, resembles the phenomenological experience of remembering itself.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Natural History ◽  
York City ◽  
American Museum ◽  
Animal Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
African Mammals ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World

The introduction creates a context for a wide range of avant-doc films (that is, films that work in the zone between conventional documentary and what has usually been called “avant-garde” filmmaking), locating these films within the tradition established a century ago by the development of the habitat diorama of animal life, specifically the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The habitat diorama provides precise documentation of the specifics of animal life that is, insofar as possible, devoid of political argument. The aim of the habitat diorama, and of the films discussed throughout the book, is to be as purely educational as cinema can be: the creator of the habitat dioramas and the film documents discussed provide precise visions of what the makers believe we need to see, in order to understand more of the world around us.

Shaken into Seeing and Hearing

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-170
Author(s):  
Ryan Dohoney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
The University ◽  
The City

Chapter 3 chronicles the intersection of Feldman’s and Dominique de Menil’s spiritual aesthetics. It begins by reconstructing the conditions of their first meeting: the New York City Ballet’s 1966 performance of Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace, re-choreographed for George Balanchine. It goes on to document Feldman and de Menil’s 1967 collaboration on the gallery show Six Painters at the University of St. Thomas. Through her family’s patronage, as well as Dominique’s presence as self-installed head of the art department, the University became a major presenting organization offering avant-garde cultural events in the city. Six Painters featured paintings by Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Franz Kline. Feldman was also given a residency at the university in 1967, where he lectured on abstract expressionism and his own musical aesthetics as well as presented a concert of his music.

Lola Ridge's Pivotal Editorial Role at Broom

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-291
Author(s):  
Belinda Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
Modern School ◽  
The Arts ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Privately Owned

Many scholars know lola ridge (1873–1941) as a passionate, irish-born american poet and activist whose poetry was of-ten tied to American subjects, employed various traditional and avant-garde styles, invited a diverse readership, and “expressed a fiery awareness of social injustice” (Kay Boyle [McAlmon 15]). Her time as magazine editor, however, continues to be overlooked. In 1912 Ridge founded the Ferrer Association's journal Modern School and edited its first issue (Avrich 166). The periodical started as a radical, politically based newsletter for parents but soon became less political, publishing artistic and literary work by students of the association's school. Between late 1918 and early 1919, Ridge oversaw, along with several other associate editors, three issues of the avant-garde poetry journal Others. Ridge also organized the Others Lecture Bureau, which toured parts of the Midwest and hosted several literary parties for magazine contributors and supporters (Churchill 58). Ridge's leading editorial role occurred from February 1922 to April 1923, when she served as the American literary editor of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts. Broom was an elaborate magazine praised by many, including William Carlos Williams, who exclaimed, “What a magazine that was! Too expensive for its time but superb to hold in the hand and to read” (187). Although publications that discuss Broom largely marginalize Ridge, the correspondence between her and Broom‘s expatriate editor and publisher, Harold Loeb, in files in Princeton's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections labeled “Broom Correspondence of Harold Loeb, 1920–1956,” shows that from the New York office Ridge orchestrated the magazine's recovery, making it one of the most widely circulated privately owned literary magazines of its time. She also created the magazine's standout “all-American” issue, which pushed against European influences and presented modernism as an American project in its own right. Ridge's pivotal role at Broom is noteworthy because the disagreements she had with Loeb highlight prescribed roles female editors encountered, polarize the modernist debates on both sides of the Atlantic, show her confronting one of modernism's well-known artists, and demonstrate how the fallout over the American issue irrevocably affected Broom‘s future.

de Zayas, Marius (1880–1961)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabiola Martinez-Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Aesthetic

Marius de Zayas was a Mexican caricaturist, writer, collector, dealer, and curator who formed part of the New York avant-garde, and did much to promote European modernism in the United States. Through his writings, curatorial, and creative work, de Zayas helped to lay the foundations of American modernism, and to assert the centrality of primitive art to the modernist aesthetic. Exhibited for the first time in 1913, de Zayas’ abstract portraits are some of the earliest examples of avant-garde production the United States. These drawings reflect his engagement with the aesthetic explorations of the European avant-gardes, and the challenges posed by photography to the tradition of Naturalism in Western art. Marius de Zayas’ work was instrumental in promoting a transnational exchange of art and ideas between Europe and the Americas. In his conception of modernism, primitive art was the source of formal experimentation, but also of spirituality and transcendence. His contribution to the history of modern art in the United States remains to be appropriately acknowledged, but it is there for anyone who cares to read his How, When and Why Modern Art Came to New York written for Alfred Barr towards the end of his life.

Motherwell, Robert (1915–1991)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Education ◽  
Art Teacher ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Synonymous Term ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
Post War ◽  
Symbolic Content

Robert Motherwell was one of the central founding members of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s and served as its major theoretical spokesman throughout his career. The youngest figure in the New York School (a synonymous term he coined for Abstract Expressionism), Motherwell was one of the few who received a formal university education, which is reflected in his extensive series of published critical writings and his prolific activities as a book editor, lecturer and art teacher. Trained in philosophy and art history, Motherwell’s diverse intellectual interests also included modernist literature, psychoanalytic theory and radical politics, which deeply informed the symbolic content of his art. Motherwell is notable for aligning the artistic traditions of School of Paris modernism with the progressive formal and thematic concerns associated with the post-war American avant-garde. In contrast to other Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, who forged signature painting styles, Motherwell actively experimented with a variety of abstract modes and media, but is most renowned for his innovative production of collages and celebrated series of paintings the ‘‘Elegies to the Spanish Republic’’.

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