The Case of the Falling S: Elizabeth Bishop, Visual Poetry and the International Avant-Garde

2019 ◽  
pp. 177-193
Author(s):  
Susan Rosenbaum
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Spatial Layout ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Visual Design ◽  
Visual Poetry ◽  
Avant Garde

This chapter reads Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Arrival at Santos’, with its famously odd breakage of the letter S from the word falls (‘Glen Fall / s, New York’), as an experiment in visual poetry shaped by the work of the international avant-garde. The breaking of a word between consonants is unusual for Bishop, but it was not at all unusual for her avant-garde precursors and peers. Scholars have explored Bishop’s relation to the visual arts as a painter of watercolors, as a lifelong student of modernist painting, sculpture, and architecture, and as a writer who derived poetic strategies from the visual arts and wrote many ekphrastic poems. However, we have paid less attention to the importance of the visual design and spatial layout of Bishop’s poems in the context of avant-garde experiments with visual poetry.

Reviews

Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-130
Author(s):  
Tru Leverette ◽  
Barbara Mennel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
Body Culture ◽  
Art School

Zélie Asava. Mixed Race Cinemas: Multiracial Dynamics in America and France (New York Bloomsbury, 2017). 216 pp., ISBN: 1501312456 (paperback: $35.96)Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler, eds. Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019). xl + 345 pp., ISBN: 9781501344787 (hardback, $110), (paperback, $29.95)

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.

scholarly journals Digitizing artist periodicals: new methodologies from the Digital Humanities for Analysing Artist Networks

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Thomas Crombez
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Digital Archive ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Socially Engaged Art ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
Post War

The research project Digital Archive of Belgian Neo-Avant-garde Periodicals (DABNAP) aims to digitize and analyse a large number of artists’ periodicals from the period 1950–1990. The artistic renewal in Belgium since the 1950s, sustained by small groups of artists (such as G58 or De Nevelvlek), led to a first generation of post-war artist periodicals. Such titles proved decisive for the formation of the Belgian neo-avant-garde in literature and the visual arts. During the sixties and the seventies, happening and socially-engaged art took over and gave a new orientation to artist periodicals. In this article, I wish to highlight the challenges and difficulties of this project, for example, in dealing with non-standard formats, types of paper, typography, and non-paper inserts. A fully searchable archive of neo-avant-garde periodicals allows researchers to analyse in much more detail than before how influences from foreign literature and arts took root in the Belgian context.

The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940-1985

1988 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Rosanne Martorella ◽  
Diana Crane
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Art World ◽  
Avant Garde

The avant-garde’s visual arts in the context of Santayana’s idea of vital liberty

Human Affairs ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Skowroński
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Universe

AbstractIn the present paper, the author looks at the political dimension of some trends in the visual arts within twentieth-century avant-garde groups (cubism, expressionism, fauvism, Dada, abstractionism, surrealism) through George Santayana’s idea of vital liberty. Santayana accused the avant-gardists of social and political escapism, and of becoming unintentionally involved in secondary issues. In his view, the emphasis they placed on the medium (or diverse media) and on treating it as an aim in itself, not, as it should be, as a transmitter through which a stimulating relationship with the environment can be had, was accompanied by a focus on fragments of life and on parts of existence, and, on the other hand, by a de facto rejection of ontology and cosmology as being crucial to understanding life and the place of human beings in the universe. The avant-gardists became involved in political life by responding excessively to the events of the time, instead of to the everlasting problems that are the human lot.

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