scholarly journals Neither Here nor There: The Writing of Wystan Curnow 1961-1984

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Thomasin Sleigh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Postmodern Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Style Of Writing

<p>This thesis addresses the writing of Wystan Curnow from 1961 to 1984. Curnow has written a great deal throughout his life, and the challenge of this thesis has been to select an appropriate time frame and important texts to place within it. The period of 1961 to 1984 has been chosen because it encompasses the 1970s, an interesting decade of experimentation for Curnow and also because the early 1980s signal a shift in Curnow's work. I argue that Curnow's encounter with post-object art and the immediate, phenomenological writing he produced in response to this work gives way in the early 1980s to a style of writing directly informed by post-structural and postmodern theory. Further, this study looks not only at Curnow's criticism but also his poetry to reveal how, in their form and content, these two strands of writing together construct one of the first arguments for an 'avant-garde' in New Zealand art and literature.  The thesis is divided into four chronological chapters. These follow the course of Curnow's life from his birth in 1939 up until the publication of his seminal essay on Colin McCahon 'I Will Need Words' in 1984. The first chapter begins with the biographical background of Curnow's youth and education and considers the significance of the eminence of Curnow's father, Allen Curnow, in the decisions that Wystan Curnow has made throughout his career. This chapter then goes on to look at Curnow's experience in the United States, studying for his Ph.D. and engaging with contemporary American culture. Chapter two begins with Curnow's return to Auckland in 1970 and goes on to look at his important pieces of writing from the 1970s up until his return to New York on sabbatical in 1976. Chapter three focuses on this trip and the key texts which followed it. And finally, chapter four examines the early 1980s, the increasing influence of continental theory in New Zealand and the shift this precipitated in Curnow's writing.</p>

scholarly journals Neither Here nor There: The Writing of Wystan Curnow 1961-1984

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Thomasin Sleigh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Postmodern Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Style Of Writing

<p>This thesis addresses the writing of Wystan Curnow from 1961 to 1984. Curnow has written a great deal throughout his life, and the challenge of this thesis has been to select an appropriate time frame and important texts to place within it. The period of 1961 to 1984 has been chosen because it encompasses the 1970s, an interesting decade of experimentation for Curnow and also because the early 1980s signal a shift in Curnow's work. I argue that Curnow's encounter with post-object art and the immediate, phenomenological writing he produced in response to this work gives way in the early 1980s to a style of writing directly informed by post-structural and postmodern theory. Further, this study looks not only at Curnow's criticism but also his poetry to reveal how, in their form and content, these two strands of writing together construct one of the first arguments for an 'avant-garde' in New Zealand art and literature.  The thesis is divided into four chronological chapters. These follow the course of Curnow's life from his birth in 1939 up until the publication of his seminal essay on Colin McCahon 'I Will Need Words' in 1984. The first chapter begins with the biographical background of Curnow's youth and education and considers the significance of the eminence of Curnow's father, Allen Curnow, in the decisions that Wystan Curnow has made throughout his career. This chapter then goes on to look at Curnow's experience in the United States, studying for his Ph.D. and engaging with contemporary American culture. Chapter two begins with Curnow's return to Auckland in 1970 and goes on to look at his important pieces of writing from the 1970s up until his return to New York on sabbatical in 1976. Chapter three focuses on this trip and the key texts which followed it. And finally, chapter four examines the early 1980s, the increasing influence of continental theory in New Zealand and the shift this precipitated in Curnow's writing.</p>

Grosz, George (1893–1959)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara McCloskey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
New Objectivity ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Grosz

George Grosz was a leading artist of Germany’s early 20th-century expressionist, Dada, and New Objectivity movements. His works from this period remain celebrated examples of the modernist avant-garde. Grosz began his career as a student at the Dresden Academy of Art in 1909. In 1912, he moved to Berlin, abandoned the academic rigor of his earlier work, and became part of the Expressionist avant-garde. His paintings and drawings soon adopted the fractured planes, vivid color, and psychologically troubled content of Expressionist art. Grosz became politically radicalized by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He helped to found Berlin Dada during the war years. His irreverent cut and paste Dada collages of this period assailed not only the concept of ‘‘art,’’ but also the vaunted notions of culture, militarism, and national pride that were part of a German social order Grosz had come to despise. At the end of World War I, Grosz joined the German Communist Party and became its leading artist. He fled to the United States in order to escape persecution after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Grosz settled in New York, where he pursued his art under the utterly changed circumstances of exile.

Visualizing Music in the Silent Era: The Collaborative Experiments of Visual Symphony Productions

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-36
Author(s):  
MARY SIMONSON
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Visual Interpretation ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sound Image ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Silent Era

AbstractIn July 1922, the New York Times reported that the “encouraging little film” Danse Macabre was screening at the Rialto Theater in New York City. Directed by filmmaker Dudley Murphy, it starred dancers Adolph Bolm and Ruth Page in a visual interpretation of Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre that synchronized perfectly with live performances of the composition. While film scholars have occasionally cited Danse Macabre and Murphy's other shorts from this period as examples of early avant-garde filmmaking in the United States, discussions of the films are mired in misunderstanding. In this article, I use advertisements, reviews, and other archival materials to trace the production, exhibition, and reception of Murphy's Visual Symphony project. These films, I argue, were not Murphy's alone: rather, they were a collaborative endeavor guided as heavily by musician and film exhibitor Hugo Riesenfeld as by Murphy himself. Recast in this way, the Visual Symphony project highlights evolving approaches to sound–image synchronization in the 1920s, the centrality of theater conductors and musicians to filmmaking in this period, and the various ways in which filmmakers, performers, and exhibitors conceptualized the relationship between music and film, and the live and the mediated, in the final decade of the silent era.

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.

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