scholarly journals Abstract Expressionism Techniques in John Ashbery’s "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"

2018 ◽  
Vol 218 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Dr. Aseel Abdul-Lateef Taha,PhD
Keyword(s):  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Mental Image ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Inner Voice ◽  
Great Progress ◽  
Convex Mirror ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Postmodern Poetry ◽  
Innovative Techniques

John Ashbery (1927-) is one of the most prominent postmodern poets in America who is known for his innovative techniques. He continues to be the most controversial poet, as he disregards the laws of logic in picturing reality. Ashbery’s style is deeply influenced by the experimental methods of modern painting.  He has been mostly associated with Abstract Expressionism that signifies the great progress in the European avant-garde visual art. The Abstract expressionists often choose to present subjects in graceful distortion, rather than attempt to record life with absolute accuracy. Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is typical of ekphrastic poetry. It is inspired by a painting which has the same title by the sixteenth-century Italian painter, Francesco Mazzola. The painting is not a realistic portrait of the painter, for it is deliberately distorted as it would be in a convex reflection. Ashbery unfolds the essence of postmodern poetry which illustrates the inability of the forms of language to capture the reality beyond the mental image. Like the Abstract Expressionists, he makes of his poems a depiction of the real workings of the mind which is liberated from all the constraints.  Furthermore, the poem is a verbal depiction of the painting; it assumes and transforms the inner voice of the portrait.

scholarly journals A. Blok and poetic strategies of postmodernism

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-160
Author(s):  
Неля Магомедовна Шишхова ◽  
Кирилл Николаевич Анкудинов
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Actual Problem ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Poetic Expression ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Postmodern Poetry ◽  
Creative Forces

Анализируется поэзия А. Блока, ее взаимосвязь с реалистическими, семантическими и перфомативными аспектами творчества русских постмодернистов. Тексты рассматриваются как способ мотивирования поэтических знаков в постмодернистской традиции. Они позволяют контекстуализировать модели выразительности в авангардистской поэзии и выделить основные парадигмы в ее трактовке, адаптировать художественные приемы и поиски нового языка. Отдельное вимание уделяется особенностям поэтического высказывания и ее взаимодействию с пространством стиха. Интерес акцентируется на диалектике разрушительных и созидательных сил в деконструктивизме наследия Вс. Некрасова, Д. Пригова, Т. Кибирова и др. Обсуждается актуальная проблема для теории современной поэзии: что стало с постмодерном как языком описания эпохи в XXI столетии. Особое внимание уделяется преемственности новых концепций с предыдущей культурной традицией в негативной и позитивной версиях. Тема особенно актуализируется благодаря выраженному стремлению представить тексты А.Блока и постмодернистской поэзии как культурное выражение новейшего времени. An analysis is made of the poetry of A. Blok, its relationship with the realistic, semantic and performance aspects of the work of Russian postmodernists. Texts are explored as a way to motivate poetic signs in the postmodern tradition. They make it possible to contextualize models of expressiveness in avant-garde poetry and highlight the main paradigms in its interpretation, adapt artistic techniques and searches for a new language. An attention is paid to the peculiarities of the poetic expression and its interaction with the space of the verse. The interest is focused on the dialectic of destructive and creative forces in the deconstruction of the legacy of Vs. Nekrasov, D. Prigov, T. Kibirov, etc. The paper discusses the actual problem for the theory of modern poetry: what has become with the postmodern as the language of describing the era in the 21st century. Particular attention is paid to the continuity of new concepts with the previous cultural tradition in negative and positive versions. The theme is especially actualized due to the expressed desire to present the texts of A. Blok and postmodern poetry as a cultural expression of modern times.

Our Lady of Art

2020 ◽  
pp. 121-142
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Ferraro
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Sexual Intimacy ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Washington Square

Chapter 5 examines Willa Cather’s neglected story, “Coming, Aphrodite” in light of her fascination with the bodily presentation that Camille Paglia would later call “sexual personae”—for which Cather develops her own Marian interpretive sensibility, half Roman Catholic and half Pagan, as a deliberate counterforce to the Puritan heritage deflating U.S. artistic and expressive culture. In her twenties, Cather was a prodigious journalist fascinated by the radiant figurae of statuary, painting, drama, poetry, and fiction both home and abroad—which she interrogated in explicitly religious terms, with a particular affinity for both Marian-Catholic dissent from the Puritan denial of the senses and its alternative of graced intercession. Cather learns to invite readers to the redemptive power of forbidden love: sex for its own sake, adultery whether intermittent or sustained or only imagined, same-sex beatings of the heart and meetings of the mind. Then, in “Coming, Aphrodite!,” in a way more literal that her readers could possibly have expected, Cather stages the male gaze of an avant-garde, sexually disciplined and romantically impervious, young painter in Washington Square, Don Hedger, who finds himself in thrall—through a closet peephole!—to the artful exhibitionism in body and song of an equally ambitious, alternatively brilliant ingénue, Eden Bower. Their pas de deux produces a profound, profoundly mutual, yet never-to-be domesticated, sexual intimacy, non-reproductive but dually procreative—all of it conducted under signs of Roman Latinate and Indo-Latino Catholicism, including a story within the story entitled “The Forty Lovers of the Princess.”

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.

Tamayo, Rufino (1899–1991)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Locatelli
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
American Art ◽  
Latin American Art ◽  
Diego Rivera ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
Emotional Aspects ◽  
Poetic Realism ◽  
Jose Clemente Orozco

A Mexican painter and muralist of indigenous heritage, Rufino Tamayo was one of the most important representatives of figurative abstraction and poetic realism in 20th-century Latin American art. A supporter of the universalistic approach to art, in the late 1940s he started a controversy—the so called ‘‘polémica Tamayo’’—by positioning himself against the classical Mexican school and its ‘‘Big Three,’’ the muralists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and Alfaro Siqueiros. Contrary to the stress they put on art as political, Tamayo focused on its poetic and emotional aspects. Tamayo’s art is based both on Mexican figurative traditions (characterized by the rigor and geometry of pre-Hispanic sculpture and its imaginative and magical character), and on the influence of European and North American avant-garde movements, especially Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. His sensibility for nature and spirituality, his interest in ordinary people, and his ability to synthesize different pictorial languages with Mexican folk art and beliefs, have made him a very popular artist, nationally and internationally. Throughout his career Tamayo directed his effort ‘‘towards the salvation of painting, the preservation of its purity and the perpetuation of its mission as translator of the world’’ (Paz 1985: 23).

The Inner Voice of Strategic Leadership: How the Mind Can Influence an Organization's Capability

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (1) ◽  
pp. 13344
Author(s):  
Art Kleiner ◽  
William O'Rourke ◽  
George Roth ◽  
Jeffrey Schwartz ◽  
D Eleanor Westney
Keyword(s):  
Strategic Leadership ◽  
Inner Voice ◽  
The Mind

Diasporic Dialogues in Mid-Century New York: Stefan Wolpe, George Russell, Hannah Arendt, and the Historiography of Displacement

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIGID COHEN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Boundary Crossing ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Cultural Boundary ◽  
George Russell ◽  
Political Philosopher ◽  
German Jewish

AbstractThis article explores mid-century New York intellectual scenes mediated by the avant-garde émigré composer Stefan Wolpe (1902–72), with special emphasis on Wolpe's interactions with jazz composer George Russell (1923–2009) and political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75). Cross-disciplinary communities set the stage for these encounters: Wolpe and Russell met in the post-bop circles that clustered in Gil Evans's basement apartment, while Wolpe encountered Arendt at the Eighth Street Artists’ Club, the hotbed of Abstract Expressionism. Wolpe's exchanges with Arendt and Russell, long unacknowledged, may initially seem unrelated. Yet each figure shared a series of “cosmopolitan” commitments. They valued artistic communities as spaces for salutary acts of cultural boundary crossing, and they tended to see forms of self-representation in the arts as a way to respond to the dehumanizing political disasters of the century. Wolpe and Arendt focused on questions of human plurality in the wake of their forced displacements as German-Jewish émigrés, whereas Russell confronted dilemmas of difference as an African American migrant from southern Ohio in New York. Bringing together interpretive readings of music with interview- and archive-based research, this article works toward a historiography of aesthetic modernism that recognizes migration as formative rather than incidental to its community bonds, ethical aspirations, and creative projects.

Art and/or Revolution: The Matter of Painting in Postwar Japan

ARTMargins ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Erber
Keyword(s):  
Art Criticism ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Postwar Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Postwar Japan ◽  
Japanese Art

Japanese art critics of the 1950s perceived the locus of a new materialist aesthetics in the new trends of informal abstraction emanating from the United States and France. This revealed a stark contrast with the idea of individual freedom that informed North-American discourse on Abstract Expressionism. Focusing on the writings of Miyakawa Atsushi, Haryū Ichirō, and Segi Shinichi, this article explores the political significance of the question of matter in Japanese postwar art criticism and indicates its importance for the subsequent development of avant-garde art in 1960s Japan.

Invisible Terrain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Ross
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Sandy ◽  
John Ashbery ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Nature Poetry ◽  
New Realism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Second Nature ◽  
Vietnam Era ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The 1960S

In his debut collection, Some Trees (1956), John Ashbery poses a question that resonates across his oeuvre and much modern art: “How could he explain to them his prayer / that nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?” When Ashbery asks this strange question, he joins a host of transatlantic avant-gardists—from the Dadaists to the 1960s neo-avant-gardists and beyond—who have dreamed the paradoxical dream of turning art into nature. Invisible Terrain examines Ashbery’s poetic mediation of this fantasy, reading his work alongside an array of practitioners, from Wordsworth to Warhol, as an exemplary case study of avant-garde transvaluation of Western nature aesthetics. Ashbery takes his coordinates from a constellation of British, American, and continental European poetic and visual art practices—from romantic nature poet John Clare’s presentational immediacy to the French “New Realism” movement’s “direct appropriation of the real” in the early 1960s—that share an emphasis on somehow transforming the material of art into a “second nature.” Nature, as Ashbery and his company understand it, is a vanguard horizon, a metaphor for art, that which lies beyond “art as we know it.” The fact that the artist can never realize this aesthetic fiction—which overturns what we generally mean by “art” and “nature”—makes it all the more powerful as a tool for staking out the limits of art. In chronicling Ashbery’s articulation of “a completely new kind of realism,” Invisible Terrain tells the larger story of nature’s transformation into a resolutely unnatural aesthetic resource in twentieth-century art and literature. But in documenting Ashbery’s eventual turn against this avant-garde tradition—most conspicuously in his archive of campy, intentionally “bad” nature poems—the project also registers queer resistance to the normative concept of nature itself as a governing conceit for art. The story begins in the late 1940s with the Abstract Expressionist valorization of process, surface, and immediacy—summed up by Jackson Pollock’s famous quip, “I am Nature”—that so influenced Ashbery’s early quest for transparent, anti-mimetic modes of composition. It ends with “Breezeway,” a poem about Hurricane Sandy and climate change. Along the way, Invisible Terrain documents Ashbery’s strategic literalization of the stream-of-consciousness metaphor, his pastoral dispersal of the lyric subject during the politically fraught Vietnam era, and his investment in “bad” nature poetry.

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