Afterword

2017 ◽  
pp. 216-226
Author(s):  
Daniel Kane
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York School ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Multiple Lives ◽  
The Way

Making it onto the Billboard Chart’s Top 100 list in 1980, the Jim Carroll Band’s hit single “People Who Died” had – and continues to have - multiple lives. The fifth track on the Jim Carroll Band’s first album Catholic Boy, “People Who Died” is name-checked in novels (Jennifer Ball’s Catalyst; Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores). It is summoned in autobiographies (Steve Rutz’s Renewing Your Mind; Vanessa Gezarri’s The Tender Soldier). We hear it in films as various as Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra Terrestrial; Fritz Kierch’s Tuff Turf; and Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. And yet, despite the way Carroll’s “People Who Died” has resonated across the decades, few critics even bother to mention that Carroll’s song is inspired directly by Ted Berrigan’s poem “People Who Died,” first published in 1969. This chapter analyzes how the last great punk song on the last great punk album was actually modeled on a New York School poem.

Frankenthaler, Helen (1928–2011)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christa Noel Robbins
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Atmospheric Effects ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
New York School ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
The Way

Helen Frankenthaler was an American painter known for her large, abstract stain paintings. Associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, Frankenthaler is thought to have shown the way out of a quickly ossifying New York School "style" by developing a technique that emphasized large areas of color over gestural and expressionistic brushwork. As an alternative to Expressionism, Frankenthaler soaked thinned-out paint into raw duck canvas, a technique she first applied in her 1952 painting Mountains and Sea. In staining paint directly onto the canvas, Frankenthaler demonstrated that modernist painting need not be beholden to Clement Greenberg’s anti-illusionistic concept of "flatness," which Greenberg developed in theorizing medium specificity (the idea that the materials used to create an artwork determine its appropriate form). Frankenthaler re-introduced an illusive quality into her paintings not through representational devices, but through the atmospheric effects that result when applying large fields of color to unprimed canvas. Medium specificity is maintained, however, in that canvas and paint are still "laid bare," but a reductive emphasis on flatness is replaced with what Greenberg would come to call "opticality." As one of the few female painters during the postwar period to gain commercial and critical recognition, Frankenthaler was an inspiration for several generations of female artists that followed.

Alice Notley’s Inhabited Spaces

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmine Shamma
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Spatial Theory ◽  
New York School ◽  
Frank O'hara ◽  
The Way

Though Berrigan and Notley were married, this chapter moves away from addressing coterie (as it has received thorough attention) to instead consider the way that the intimacy enforced by living in small spaces shaped the school’s tone and form. This chapter treats the school’s domestic poetry, focusing exclusively on Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses, a collection of poems devoted to remembering the spaces Notley inhabited, while locating the tendency to address lived-in space as one promoted by Frank O’Hara. Integrating urban and spatial theory to offer a psycho-geographic reading of this poetry, this chapter utilizes material from an original interview personally conducted with Notley devoted to spatial discussions. In this way, this chapter pays homage to previous studies of the school by offering a space for the living poets of The New York School to speak for themselves, while testing the validity of this study, within the study.

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.

The Beginnings of the Cult of Relics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wiśniewski
Keyword(s):  
Essential Element ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Hidden Knowledge ◽  
Physical Diseases ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Way

Christians always admired and venerated martyrs who died for their faith, but for a long time thought that the bodies of martyrs should remain undisturbed in their graves. Initially, the Christian attitude toward the bones of the dead, whether a saint’s or not, was that of respectful distance. This book tells how, in the mid-fourth century, this attitude started to change, swiftly and dramatically. The first chapters show the rise of new beliefs. They study how, when, and why Christians began to believe in the power of relics, first, over demons, then over physical diseases and enemies; how they sought to reveal hidden knowledge at the tombs of saints and why they buried the dead close to them. An essential element of this new belief was a strong conviction that the power of relics was transferred in a physical way and so subsequent chapters study relics as material objects. The book seeks to show what the contact with relics looked like and how close it was. Did people touch, kiss, or look at the very bones, or just at reliquaries which contained them? When did the custom of dividing relics appear? Finally, the book deals with discussions and polemics concerning relics and tries to find out how strong was the opposition which this new phenomenon had to face, both within and outside Christianity on the way to relics becoming an essential element of medieval religiosity.

Kierkegaard, Metaphysics, and Love

2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pattison
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gabriel Marcel ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Alternative Reading ◽  
The Way

AbstractNoting Heidegger’s critique of Kierkegaard’s way of relating time and eternity, the paper offers an alternative reading of Kierkegaard that suggests Heidegger has overlooked crucial elements in the Kierkegaardian account. Gabriel Marcel and Sharon Krishek are used to counter Heidegger’s minimizing of the deaths of others and to show how the deaths of others may become integral to our sense of self. This prepares the way for revisiting Kierkegaard’s discourse on the work of love in remembering the dead. Against the criticism that this reveals the absence of the other in Kierkegaardian love, the paper argues that, on the contrary, it shows how Kierkegaard conceives the self as inseparable from the core relationships of love that, despite of death, constitute it as the self that it is.

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