A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes

Twenty-five years after the publication of A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, the distinguished critic and arts historian Richard Kostelanetz returns to his favorite subject for a third edition. Rewriting earlier entries, adding hundreds of new ones, Kostelanetz provides intelligence and information unavailable anywhere else, no less in print than online, about a wealth of subjects and individuals. Focused upon what is truly innovative and excellent, he ranges widely with insight and surprise, including appreciations of artistic athletes such as Muhammad Ali, Johan Cruyff, the Harlem Globetrotters, and such collective creations as Las Vegas and his native New York City. Continuing the traditions of cheeky high-style Dictionarysts, honoring Samuel Johnson and Nicolas Slonimsky (both with individual entries), Kostelanetz offers a “reference book” to be enjoyed not only in bits and chunks, but continuously as one of the dozen books someone would take if they planned to be stranded on a desert isle.

Richard Kostelanetz is a prominent author, critic, and arts historian. Individual entries on Kostelanetz’s work appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster’s Dictionary of American Writers, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Directory of American Scholars, Who’s Who in America, NNDB. com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other distinguished directories. He lives in New York, where he was born.

THIRD EDITION

Richard Kostelanetz

With contributions by H. R. Brittain, Richard Carlin, Mark Daniel Cohen, John Robert Colombo, Tony Coulter, Charles Doria, Michal Ulrike Dorda, Nona Eleanor Ellis, Bob Grumman, Robert Haller, Geof Huth, Gerald Janecek, Carter Kaplan, Katy Matheson, Gloria S. and Fred W. McDarrah, Michael Peters, Douglas Puchowski, John Rocco, Igor Satanovsky, Nicolas Slonimsky, Fred Truck. Third edition published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Richard Kostelanetz The right of Richard Kostelanetz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Schirmer Books, an imprint of the Gale Group 1993 Second edition published by Routledge 2001 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kostelanetz, Richard, author. Title: A dictionary of the avant-gardes / Richard Kostelanetz. Description: Third edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018027789 (print) | LCCN 2018029413 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351267120 (Master) | ISBN 9781351267113 (Adobe Reader) | ISBN 9781351267106 (ePub3) | ISBN 9781351267090 (Mobipocket Unencrypted) | ISBN 9781138577305 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351267120 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Arts, Modern—20th century—Dictionaries. | Arts, Modern—21st century—Dictionaries. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—History—20th century—Dictionaries. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—History—21st century—Dictionaries. Classification: LCC NX456 (ebook) | LCC NX456 .K67 2019 (print) | DDC 700/.411—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027789 ISBN: 978-1-138-57730-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-26712-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times Ten and Futura Std by Apex CoVantage, LLC For Nicolas Slonimsky (1894–1995)

Cher maître

Contents

Preface ix

Introduction xiii

The dictionary 1

Biographical notes 461

vii

Preface

It takes approximately twenty years to make an artistic curiosity out of a modernistic monstrosity, and another twenty to elevate it to a masterpiece. Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective (1953)

My principal reason for having done, later redoing, activities, major historical precursors, some of whom and now redoing again a quarter-century after, a book worked centuries ago, are acknowledged as well. While of this title would be to defend the continuing rele- the epithet avant-garde is applicable to other cultural vance of the epithet avant-garde , which has frequently domains, this book focuses upon the arts, broadly con- appeared in my own critical writing. A second reason sidered. My first editor, a dance aficionado, proposed is that I enjoy reading cultural dictionaries myself and including the basketball player Daryl Dawkins for own a goodly number of them; but as my library has epitomizing “the slam dunk,” which is measurably a lacked any volume resembling a dictionary of avant- monumental choreographic innovation, though not gardes, the first reader for any book emblazoned with commonly regarded as such. My more recent edi- that title would be myself. A third reason is that I’ve tor made his unique contribution as well, and I now come to think there is only one art, called Art, and included the man whose alternative choreography thus that dance, literature, etc., are merely categorical changed competitive high-jumping. One recurring conveniences, designed to make the history and the theme is that avant-garde art doesn’t always come pre- material of Art more accessible to students and other tentiously dressed. specialized beginners. Proclaiming the avant-garde’s death is no more My basic measures of avant-garde work are first acceptable than the claim, from another corner, of esthetic innovation and then initial unacceptabil- one or another group to represent “the avant-garde” ity. Add to this my own taste for art that is extreme, to the exclusion of all others. The plural avant-gardes unique, distinct, coherent, witty, technological, and in the title is appropriate, as this book contains entries esthetically resonant. (An artist’s courage in the choice on individuals or developments representing opposed of subject, such as scatology, say, or child abuse, is not positions, if not contrary esthetics, both clearly innova- avant-garde if the artist’s esthetic is traditional. Nor is tive and initially unacceptable. As I warn in the entry the first painting by a three-handed dwarf avant-garde on Pluralism, beware of anyone or any group declaring by virtue of the peculiarities of its author.) It follows itself the sole avant-garde, especially if they exclude that the most consequential artists, in any medium, are or ignore people doing work that is roughly similar or those who make genuine discoveries about the pos- closely related. Be even more wary if they try to sell sibilities of art. Nonetheless, the best avant-garde art you anything, intellectual as well as physical. Suspect offers, much like the best traditional art, enlightened it to be a road map directing all traffic to a dead end. intelligence and heightened experience. This book is inevitably critical, not only in judg- Though one often hears about “the death of the ments but in the intelligence behind my selections, avant-garde” or “the crisis of the avant-garde,” usu- because it is impossible to write selectively about the ally from cultural conservatives or publicists with cem- avant-gardes, with any integrity and excellence, without eteries to defend, it is not the purpose of this book to seeming opinionated. (If you don’t like opinions, well, engage in an argument I take to be irrelevant at best. you’re welcome to read a bus schedule or any coun- Though most entries here feature modern avant-garde try’s tax code.) Given how much information is now

ix x • PREFACE commonly available on the Internet, I’ve tried here my personal feelings toward an artist, no matter what to offer guidance and secrets, along with insight and reviewers might have said about his or her work, no wit, not available anywhere else. Given the increasing matter what other factors might try to influence me, amount of information available in the 21st century, one working principle remains: If I cannot remember this new edition wouldn’t be worth anyone’s reading an artist’s work distinctly or I cannot from memory or purchasing otherwise. alone characterize it, it probably was not strong enough. One concern of any writer wanting to tell truths It follows that only art already lodged in my head is how much truth he or she can tell (or, conversely, will appear in my critical writing. One of my favorite fearing how much cannot be told). The best reason ways for my testing the true quality of any well-known for writing a book, rather than, say, magazine articles, artist’s work is to ask myself, as well as others, whether is that the critic fortunately need not worry about his any specific work[s] can be identified from memory. publishers’ constraints and biases that are customarily (No peeking or cheating allowed.) Thanks mostly to (if not necessarily) hidden. If this book didn’t surprise their professional hustling or fortunate transitory or offend, I would surmise that a putative reader had publicity, many artists’ names are more familiar than barely looked at its pages. Oh, yes, if any reader likes their works. Quite simply, what my memory chose to something in this book especially, please consider tell- remember for me became this Dictionary . In the back ing someone else. That’s how books of mine have sur- of my mind was the image of the great ERICH AUER- vived years after their initial publication. BACH, a German scholar living in Istanbul during Because this Dictionary was written not just to be World War II, writing his grandly conceived Mimesis consulted but to be read from beginning to end, it (1946) without footnotes, because useful libraries were eschews abbreviations that interrupt attention and far away. minimizes dependency on cross-references. My literary ambition encourages stylistic variety over unifor- II mity, even risking stylistic affectations here and there. I also cultivate the avant-garde value of SURPRISE, not [Apollinaire] had an uncanny instinct for detecting only in my selections but in my prose. If only because genius and for seeing the revolutionary quality of a I assume some readers might read only an entry or new idea or work of art. . . . He was frequently accu- two, certain choice remarks are repeated in various rate and perceptive to an astounding degree; and in places, often because they are worth repeating. Some his choice of who or what was significant he seems of the stronger circumlocutions are collected in an ON in retrospect to have been nearly always right. DEMAND book titled Artful Entries (2019). Edward F. Fry, Cubism (1966) I would have liked to have produced more entries on avant-garde artists new to the 21st century, who Another assumption is that what distinguishes major are true heroes at a time when the idea of an esthetic artists from minor is a vision of singular possibilities vanguard has been subjected to all sorts of Philistine for their art and/or for themselves as creative people. attack, and apologize now particularly to those indi- Trained elaborately in intellectual history, which for viduals, whoever you are, whose names will be featured me was mostly arts history, I necessarily focus upon in, yes, yet future editions. May I discourage any reader the very best – what’s most likely to be selectively from thinking that the length of an individual entry remembered. (“Cultural history,” by contrast, focuses measures importance, supposedly with more words upon what’s been popular, sometimes with only a cer- devoted to major artists than to minor. ‘Taint so, as tain group of people.) As an historian, I think I can length measures only centimeters. discern the future from the past and thus identify Just as most of the first edition of this book was writ- likely direction in high cultural produce. Because I ten in several months, so it was rewritten in 1999 and don’t often read newsprint, I can claim resistance to, if then again recently within a comparatively short time. not an ignorance of, transient promotions and fashions Both then and now I have typically drawn largely upon of many kinds. I necessarily learned early to respect my capacious memory and sometimes upon my earlier unique cultural excellence and now think that from reviews and notes that were generally made when I the beginning of my critical career, more than fifty first experienced something important. In writing criti- years ago, I’ve established a strong record of identify- cally about art (or in editing anthologies or even, say, ing new excellence that survives. By this measure, the in returning to restaurants), I have learned to trust my French writer Guillaume Apollinaire has long been memory to separate the strongest work from every- my hero, as I respect the fact that he, born Wilhelm thing else. One reason for my faith in memory is that Kostrowitzky, was commonly called Kostro, just as I’m it does not lie to me, which is to say that no matter called Kosti. PREFACE • xi

Because I resist doing anything professional, even As this book’s publisher contractually limited the a dictionary entry, that anyone else can do better, I number of words it would accept, I necessarily removed recruited colleagues to write as many entries as pos- some previous entries; but rather than consign them sible. These colleagues’ names appear after their to a dustbin, I decided to collect them into another entries (which are otherwise mine); it is not for noth- book tentatively titled, Earlier Entries, available from ing that their names also accompany mine on the title Archae Editions at Amazon CreateSpace. page. From the late Nicolas Slonimsky, I drew upon I am grateful to Richard Carlin for commissioning texts already published, thanks to our common pub- the first two editions before reprinting the second in lisher. Within the entries, small caps identify names and paperback, and now to Ben Piggott for contracting sometimes concepts that receive fuller treatment in an this latest revision for Routledge and Laura Soppelsa alphabetically placed entry. for expediting production. May I thank again Douglas My model arts lexicographer, who deserves the ded- Puchowski, now for finding illustrations. ication of this third edition as well as its predecessors, Because this book covers several arts, documen- was the great Slonimsky, who, incidentally, preferred tation is meant to be more useful than consistent or the epithet Lectionary to Dictionary because the for- pseudo-definitive. For instance, following Slonimsky’s mer term refers to reading, the second to speaking. (The example, Douglas Puchowski and I tried to include first edition of this book appeared before his centenary, complete birth dates and death dates, down to months 28 April 1994.) Another model for the writing of con- and days whenever possible, acknowledging that cise remarks is Ambrose Bierce, an American author sometimes so much detail was unavailable (particu- too opinionated to be “great,” but whose best writing larly about individuals not yet customarily included (see the entry on him) is nonetheless remembered. All in such compendia). To preserve an illusion of pris- of us who write dictionaries, whether authoritative or tine research, we could have removed entries whose satirical, are, of course, indebted to the British writer documentation was incomplete – by and large people Samuel Johnson, who also merits an individual entry. whose loss would not be noticed – but instead decided This Dictionary differs from others in the arts in that the inclusion of unfamiliar names was more emphasizing decisive esthetic characterization over, important. Some people alive when this was drafted say, a recital of institutional positions held, teachers have no doubt since passed on. or students had, prominent influences acknowledged, A book with so much detail about contemporary friendships made, or awards won. My implicit rules for figures will surely contain misspellings and other writing entries on individuals were that they should minor errors of fact, as well as unintentional omissions. be at least one hundred words long and that each If only to prepare for the possibility of a fourth edition, entry should portray a person or concept distinctive the author welcomes corrections and suggestions, by from all others. One self-test was whether I could nail email, please, if they are to go into a single repository, a subject in a particular way – not simply frame her c/o his eponymous website. No kidding. or him with common details but uniquely nail them. Since the author is an American who spent a year More than once I discarded a draft, including some studying at King’s College, London, and writing for about personal friends, because the results would look London media, he freely mixes British orthography suspiciously deficient for failing either of these two with American to a degree that partisans of one style requirements. (No one is done a favor if made to look or the other might find disagreeable. Consider, instead, less. I considered appending their names here, if only appreciating his transatlantic catholicity. Because this to honor them, but feared that such acknowledgment book contains more proper nouns, including names, might have an opposite effect.) Obviously, a book with than can be successfully indexed, it also appears as avant-garde in the title ignores those who have spent an ebook whose search mechanism should be able to their lives trying to be acceptable to one or another locate whatever lexical details the reader would like. orthodoxy (including some earlier avant-garde). —Richard Kostelanetz

Introduction

The avant-garde consists of those who feel sufficiently at ease with the past not to have to compete with it or duplicate it. Dick Higgins, “Does Avant-Garde Mean Anything?” (1970)

The avant-garde cannot easily become an academy, because avant-garde artists usually sustain the quality which made them avant-garde artists in the first place. The styles they develop will become academic in other hands. Darby Bannard, “Sensibility of the Sixties” (1967)

The term “avant-garde” refers to those out front forg- decadent art is created in expectation of an immediate ing a path previously unknown, a route that others will sale, academic artists expect approval from their social take. Initially coined to characterize the shock troops superiors, whether they be teachers or higher-ranking of an army, the epithet passed over into art. Used pre- colleagues. Both academic art and decadent art are cisely, avant-garde should refer, first, to rare work that essentially opportunistic, created to realize immedi- on its first appearance satisfies three discriminatory ate success, even at the cost of surely disappearing criteria: from that corpus of art that survives merely by being remembered. Both decadent art and academic art real- It transcends current esthetic conventions in cru- ize their maximal audience upon initial publication. cial respects, establishing discernible distance One secondary characteristic of avant-garde art is between itself and the mass of recent practices; it that, in the course of entering new terrain, it violates will necessarily take considerable time to find its entrenched rules – it seems to descend from “false maximum audience; and it will probably inspire premises” or “heretical assumptions”; it makes cur- future, comparably advanced endeavors. rent “esthetics” seem irrelevant. For instance, Suzanne Langer’s theory of symbolism, so prominent in the Only a small minority working within any art can ever 1940s and even the 1950s, hardly explains the new art be avant-garde; for once the majority has caught up of the past four decades. Relevant though Langer’s to something new, whether as creators or as an audi- esthetics were to the arts of Aaron Copland and Mar- ence, those doing something genuinely innovative will, tha Graham, among their contemporaries, theories by deﬁnition, have established a beachhead some- of artful symbolism offered little insight into, say, the place beyond. Problems notwithstanding, avant-garde music of John Cage or Milton Babbitt, the choreog- remains a critically useful category. raphy of Merce Cunningham, or the poetry of John As a temporal term, avant-garde characterizes art Ashbery, where what you see or hear is generally most, that is “ahead of its time” – that is, beginning something – if not all, of what there is. This sense of irrelevance while “decadent” art, by contrast, stands at the end of is less a criticism of Langer’s theories, which seventy a prosperous development. “Academic” refers to art years ago seemed so persuasively encompassing, than that is conceived according to rules that are learned in a measure of drastic artistic difference between work a classroom; it is temporally post-decadent. Whereas prominent then and what followed.

xiii xiv • INTRODUCTION

One reason why avant-garde works should be ini- fashion, for the emerging remunerative fashions can tially hard to comprehend is not that they are intrin- usually be characterized as a synthesis of advanced art sically inscrutable or hermetic but that they defy, or (whose purposes are antithetical to those of fashion) challenge as they defy, the perceptual procedures of with more familiar stuff. Whenever fashion appears to artistically educated people. They forbid easy access echo advanced art, a closer look reveals the governing or easy acceptance, as an audience perceives them as model as art from a period recently past. inexplicably different, if not forbiddingly revolution- The term “avant-garde” can also refer to individuals ary. In order to begin to comprehend such art, people creating such path-forging art; but even by this crite- must work and think in unfamiliar ways. Nonetheless, rion, the work itself, rather than the artist’s intentions, if an audience learns to accept innovative work, this is the ultimate measure of the epithet’s applicability to will stretch its perceptual capabilities, affording kinds an individual. Thus, an artist or writer is avant-garde of esthetic experience previously unknown. Edgard only at certain crucial points in his or her creative Varèse’s revolutionary lonisation (1931), for instance, career, and only those few works that were innovative taught a generation of listeners about the possible at their debut comprise the history of modern avant- coherence and beauty in what they had previously per- garde art. The term “avant-garde” may also refer to ceived as noise. artistic groups, if and only if most of their members It follows that avant-garde art usually offends peo- are (or were) crucially contributing to authentically ple, especially serious artists, before it persuades, and exploratory activity. offends them not in terms of content, but as Art. They The term is sometimes equated with cultural antag- assert that Varèse’s noise (or Cage’s, or Babbitt’s) is onism, for it is assumed that the “avant-garde” leads unacceptable as music. That explains why avant-garde artists in their perennial war against the Philistines. art strikes most of us as esthetically “wrong” before we However, this Philistine antagonism is a secondary acknowledge it as possibly “right”; it “fails” before we characteristic, as artists’ social position and attitudes recognize that it works. (Art that offends by its content descend from the fate of their creative efforts, rather challenges only as journalism or gossip, rather than as than the reverse. Any artist who sets out just to mock Art, and is thus likely to disappear as quickly as other the Philistines is wearing an old hat and thus not likely journalism or gossip.) to do anything original. Those most antagonized by the avant-garde are Esthetic conservatives are forever asserting that not the general populace, which does not care, but “the avant-garde no longer exists,” because, as they the guardians of culture, who do, whether they be see it, either academia or the general public laps up all cultural bureaucrats, established artists, or their epi- new art. However, it is critically both false and ignorant gones, because they feel, as they sometimes admit, to use a secondary characteristic in lieu of a primary “threatened.” definition. Avant-garde is an art-historical term, not a Though vanguard activity may dominate discus- sociological category. The conservative charge is fac- sion among sophisticated professionals, it never domi- tually wrong as well, as nearly all avant-gardes in art nates the general making of art. Most work created in are ignored by the public (and its agents in the cul- any time, in every art, honors long-passed models. Even ture industries), precisely because innovative work is today, in the United States, most of the fiction writ- commonly perceived as “peculiar,” if not “unaccept- ten and published and reviewed has, in form, scarcely able,” not only by the masses but by those who make progressed beyond mid-20th-century standards; most a business of disseminating culture in large quantities. poetry today is similarly decadent. Indeed, the pervasiveness of those perceptions of odd- The “past” that the avant-garde aims to surpass is ity is, of course, a patent measure of a work’s being not the tradition of art but the currently decadent fash- art-historically ahead of its time. Those who deny the ions, for in Harold Rosenberg’s words, “Avant-garde persistence of the avant-garde are comparable to those art is haunted by fashion.” Because avant-gardes in art who deny the existence of poverty, each by its fakery are customarily portrayed as succeeding one another, implicitly rationalizing retrograde attitudes and per- the art world is equated with the world of fashion, haps the retention of tenuous privileges. in which styles also succeed one another. However, Because the avant-garde claims to be prophetic, the in both origins and function, the two are quite dif- ultimate judge of current claims can only be a future ferent. Fashion relates to the sociology of lucrative cultural public. For now, future-sensitive critics should taste; avant-garde, to the history of art. In practice, proceed under the assumption that in their enthusi- avant-garde activity has a dialectical relationship with asms they might, just might, be askew.

ABISH, WALTER ABRAHAMSEN, HANS

(24 December 1931) (23 December 1952) Though he was born in Vienna, raised in Shanghai’s A prominent Danish composer, he had explored qui- Jewish community during World War II, and lived in etude – more specifically, how quiet music can be and Israel before emigrating to the United States, Abish has still be music. His masterpiece is Schnee (2006–08, published only in English. The distinguishing mark of Snow), which opens with string players barely scratch- his novel Alphabetical Africa (1974) is its severe coming their instruments in their upper registers before positional discipline. The first chapter has only words proceeding to louder sound. Because it starts so qui- beginning with the letter A (“Ages ago, Alex, Allen and etly, Schnee is better seen live to be heard. Early in Alva arrived at Antibes,” etc.). For the second chapter, his career Abrahamsen was praised for representing a he additionally uses words beginning with the letter B. New Simplicity in a false competition with serial music, Only by the Z chapter, which is in the middle of the as they came in time to co-exist. At a time when ampli- book, does the full alphabet become available, then to fication of music is so easy and widespread, his effort contract again to a conclusion composed exclusively of becomes ever more laudable. words beginning with the letter A. The next two Abish books are collections of stories, ABRAMOVIC, MARINA some of them more experimental than others. Each pair of paragraphs in “In So Many Words” is preceded (30 November 1946) by a numeral announcing how many words are in the following paragraph; while the second paragraph in Born in Belgrade just after World War II, she attended each pair, set in roman type, tells a dry story, the first the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade before begin- paragraph contains all of its successor’s words set in ning a career mostly of stunning PERFORMANCE italics in alphabetical order. In short, Abish displays a and installations. Initially she explored themes of pain fascination with numbers reminiscent of R AYMOND and duration, especially on herself. In Rhythm 0 (1974, QUENEAU , though lacking the latter’s extravagant in Naples), she invited spectators to use on her a range wit and audacity. of instruments including knives. Moving to Amsterdam It was Abish’s good fortune, or misfortune, to write in 1975, she met Uwe Laysiepen (1943), a German How German Is It (1980), a far more accessible novel known as Ulay. In their thirteen years together they that won him a Guggenheim fellowship, a CAPS did many prominent performances, including Relation grant, and later a lush MacArthur fellowship, in addi- in Space (1976), where they crashed their naked bodies tion to a contract from a slick publisher not otherwise into each other for an hour. In Night Crossing (1981), known for publishing avant-garde writers. The result they abjured talking and eating for more than two was Eclipse Fever (1993), a fiction far more conven- weeks, repeating this performance in various venues, tional than its predecessors, and Double Vision: A Self- mostly notably in Australia, where it was also called Portrait (2004), a modestly unusual autobiography. If Gold Found by the Artists (1981). They concluded their his writing fell into the capacious hole of the literary- collaboration with The Lovers: Walk on the Great Wall industrial complex, too bad. (1988), where they started at opposite ends of the

1 2 • ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Chinese landmark, one crossing the Gobi Desert and ABSTRACT FILM the other treacherous mountain tops, until meeting on a bridge in the Shaanxi Province. After the legendary (1913) couple split, Abramovic returned to solo performances, including Biography (1992–96), a theatrical retrospec- In Art of Our Time (1939), the MUSEUM OF MOD- tive of twenty-five years of previous performances. In ERN ART ’s self-retrospective of its first decade, is a Cleaning the Mirror (1995, New York), clad in a long two-page final chapter, much shorter than its prede- white shift, in a dank and dark basement, she scrubbed cessors, that seems an afterthought, as indeed “Designs obsessively at large cow bones, removing bloody refuse for Abstract Film” probably was. It features Léopold that soiled her dress, creating, in RoseLee Goldberg’s Survage (1879–1968), a Russian then residing in Paris, judgment, “a metaphor for ethnic cleansing in Bos- who in 1913 produced a sequence of six paintings, Le nia [that was] an unforgettable image of grief for her Rhythme Coloré (Colored Rhythm), that he imagined times.” Seriously entrenched in her particular art, would become an animated film not from filming them Abramovic in 2005 presented at New York’s Guggen- but copying his designs directly onto celluloid stock. heim Museum Seven Easy Pieces in which she redid In his classic polemic, Survage suggested radically that wholly on her own classics initially performed by other abstraction in art says little until “it sets in motion, artists mostly (e.g., VITO ACCONCI , Valie Export when it is transformed and meets other forms, that it [1940]). In 2010 she became the first performance art- becomes capable of evoking a feeling.” He added, “It ist to merit a retrospective at New York’s MUSEUM is in this way that visual rhythm becomes analogous to OF MODERN ART. the sound-rhythm of music.” Though Survage’s proposal never advanced beyond a 1917 gallery exhibition prefaced by his friend GUIL- LAUME APOLLINAIRE , his fertile cinematic vision ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM was soon realized by VIKING EGGELING , HANS RICHTER , and WALTER RUTTMANN , among oth- (c. 1948) ers. The apex was perhaps Ballet Méchanique (1924) If only because it emphasizes esthetic qualities, this term made by FERNAND LÉGER and MAN RAY. Later has come to be the most acceptable epithet for the inno- in the 1920s came abstract films from OSKAR FIS- vative painting that became prominent in NEW YORK CHINGER; in the 1930s, from LEN LYE. One theme CITY in the late 1940s (and was thus sometimes called of their work is images unique to film. This quality the NEW YORK SCHOOL ). Drawing not only from became more obvious decades later with the develop- S URREALISM but from JAZZ- based ideas of impro- ment of abstract video with, for instance, fuzzy edges visatory gestural expression, certain artists laid paint that could not be realized with film. Indeed, when the on the canvas in ways that reflected physical attack, Cleveland art professor Bruce Checefsky (1957) ani- whether in the extended dripped lines of J ACKSON mated all twelve Survage paintings in 2005, they look P OLLOCK or in the broad strokes of F RANZ K LINE . like less like film than video. “Action painting,” another epithet once popular for this style of painting, was coined by the critic H AROLD R OSENBERG , who theorized that these abstractions represented the artist’s mental state at the moment(s) ABSTRACT GRAPHIC NARRATIVE of composition. One esthetic common to such paint- (20th century) ing was “all-over” composition, which is to say that the activity could be just as strong near the edges of the Where earlier examples existed, the epithet “graphic canvas as in the center, purportedly in contrast to the novel” wasn’t much heard until the century’s end. That more hierarchical focusing typical of traditional art. latter category classified spine-bound books whose pages W ILLEM DE K OONING’ s work is customarily were mostly frames with words and images more typi- placed within this term, even though his best paintings cal of comic strips. Two turning points in gaining critical acknowledge figuration and focusing; so are BAR- acceptability for this format came with the publication of NETT N EWMAN and A D R EINHARDT , perhaps Alan Moore and David Gibbons’s Watchmen (1987) in because they were roughly the same age as the oth- England and Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991) in America. ers (and resided mostly in NEW YORK CITY), even While commercial publishers have since issued though their art proceeded from decidedly nonexpres- many graphic narratives, what became more scarce by sionist premises. A European epithet for comparable comparison, still off the maps of both literature and art, painting was ART INFORMAL . were narratives whose visual content was simply shapes ABSURD, THEATER OF THE • 3 and sometimes just verbal symbols that evolved a story used to describe musical works of abstract quality with over successive frames or turned pages. One historic expressionistic connotations. A subsidiary genre of precursor was EL LISSITZKY ’s About Two Squares abstract music is ALEATORY MUSIC , in which the (1922), which curiously began as a children ’s book, per- process of musical cerebration is replaced by a random haps under the assumption that shapes are more com- interplay of sounds and rhythms. prehensible, surely more internationally understood, —Nicolas Slonimsky than words. (Should the reader take its images from the Internet, consider cutting them apart and reassembling to simulate the structure of a book with pages.) ABSTRACTION This form I discovered in the chapbook Artificiata (1969) by MANFRED MOHR, whose abstract verti- (c. 5000 B.C .) cal drawings weaved a narrative over successive pages, no matter if the book were read from its front or its This term generally defines artwork, whether visual, back. The initial achievement of SOL LEWITT ’s Arcs aural, or verbal, that neither represents nor symbol- Circles Grids (1972) was a bigger book, clearly for izes anything in the mundane world; but, because adults, where the narrative develops wholly through pure abstraction is primarily an ideal, the epithet also the changing configuration of lines over successive refers to work that at least approaches the absence of pages, thus fusing abstract art, which LeWitt also prac- identifiable figurative representation. Although some ticed, with the linear form of narrative. commentators make a case for abstraction as a new This recognition is important to me, because in the development in the history of visual art, such a gen- mid-1970s I produced Constructivist Fictions of sym- eralization necessarily depends upon ignorance of metrical line drawings metamorphosing in a systemic Islamic art that traditionally observes a proscription sequence. The theme behind the collective name was against graven images. (Those arguing for modern suggesting that the historic Constructivists would have abstraction as a development dismiss such Islamic art made these abstract graphic fictions, had they thought as “decorative.”) about making narratives. In collaboration with the ani- Abstract art in the West became avant-garde in the mator Peter Longauer (1949), I also produced from these 20th century, precisely because various styles of rep- drawings a short 16 mm ABSTRACT FILM (1978). resentation had been dominant for centuries before. Nonetheless, I find that whenever I try to explain Within modern abstract art are two divergent tradi- AGN to others, as I’m doing here, I am continually sur- tions, one emphasizing structure and the other favor- prised at how many people involved in both abstract ing expression; examples of both of these traditions art on one hand and narrative on the other can’t under- appear not only in painting and sculpture but also in stand it until they see an example. music and dance. One reason behind the oft-heard piety that “painting is more advanced than poetry” is that abstraction became more acceptable among visual artists than among writers in our century. ABSTRACT MUSIC

(1950s) ABSURD, THEATER OF THE Abstraction in music implies a separation of sonic struc- (c. 1961) tures from representational images, whether pictorial or psychological. Abstract music is the antonym of all musi- The epithet comes from Martin Esslin’s brilliant 1961 cal styles that are concrete or naturalistic; abstract works book of the same title. In the plays of S AMUEL B ECK- are usually short, athematic, and rhythmically asymmet- ETT and E UGÈNE I ONESCO , and to a lesser extent ric. Intellectual fantasy, rather than sensual excitation, others, Esslin (1918–2002) identified nonsensical and is the generating impulse of abstract music; its titles are ridiculous events that have sufficient metaphysical res- derived from constructivistic and scientific concepts: onance to suggest the ultimate absurdity, or meaning- structures, projections, extensions, frequencies, sound. lessness, of human existence. Reflecting philosophical The German composer Boris Blacher has developed existentialism, absurd writing represents an advance on a successful form of abstract opera in which concrete the literature incidentally composed by the existentialist action takes place in a swarm of discrete sonic parti- philosophers. If the latter sought a serious surface, the cles, disjected words in several languages, and isolated theatrical absurdists favored dark comedy in the tradi- melodic fragments. ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM , tion of ALFRED JARRY. The innovation was to dem- a term applied to nonobjective painting, is sometimes onstrate the theme of absurdity, in contrast to an earlier 4 • ACADEMIC CRITICS theater, identified with Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Perloff (1930), Henry Sayre (1949), Johanna Drucker Albert Camus (1913–60), where characters debate it. (1952), and Tyrus Miller (1963), among others, have By contrast, at the end of Ionesco’s The Chairs published similar volumes more recently. One fault evi- (1952), a particularly neat model of the convention, dent in these books is simply: When a professor writes a hired lecturer addresses a nonexistent audience in three words about an avant-garde subject, one of them an indecipherable tongue. This is the absurd surface. is likely to be superficial and a second to reveal igno- Because the lecturer’s message is supposed to rep- rance, even if the writing comes accompanied, as it usu- resent the final wisdom of a 95-year-old couple, the ally is, by encomia from other academics. (If you think meaningless message becomes an effective symbol for about the time and effort spent to get these blurbs, you the metaphysical void. In a more familiar example from begin to understand why such books disappoint.) SAMUEL BECKETT, two men wait for a mysterious Among the full-time academics who have writ- Godot, who obviously is not coming. On the strictly ten intelligent books on avant-garde art at one time theatrical influence of absurd theater, the Cambridge or another, count Sally Banes (1950) on dance, G ER- Guide to Literature in English (1988) says: ALD J ANECEK in two books on Russian literature, M ICHAEL KIRBY in The Art of Time (1969), Mark The carrying of logic ad absurdum , the dissolution Ensign Cory (1942) on German radio, John Tytell (1939) of language, the bizarre relationship of stage prop- in Naked Angels (1976), Jack Burnham (1931) on sculp- erties to dramatic situation, the diminution of sense ture, HUGH KENNER on BUCKMINSTER FULLER , by repetition or unexplained intensification, the L. MOHOLY - N AGY (though he actually worked as an rejection of narrative continuity, and the refusal to art-college administrator while writing Vision in Motion), allow character or even scenery to be self-defining Jo Anna Isaak (1952) in The Ruin of Representation in have become acceptable stage conventions. Modernist Art and Texts (1986), the British professor John J. White (1940–2015) on Literary Futurism (1990), and the (Thanks for this summary.) classicist Donald Sutherland (1915–78) writing in 1951 Fifty years ago, I found a similar absurdist style in certain on GERTRUDE STEIN . (One curious case was Roger early 1960s American fiction by JOHN BARTH , Joseph Shattuck [1923–2005], who wrote his great book on the Heller (1923–99), and T HOMAS P YNCHON , among French avant-garde, The Banquet Years [1958], before others. What seemed awesomely original and true in 1960s he became a professor and then, with false authority, theater and fiction, now strikes most viewers as dated. wrote garbage about avant-garde arts afterwards.) It is lamentable, alas, that this selective list is so short, professors remaining academic, while genuinely innovative art ACADEMIC CRITICS measures itself as avant-garde by maintaining a healthy distance from any academies. When professors discuss avant-garde art, particularly literature, they tend to focus upon the more conservative, more accessible dimensions of an artist’s work, ACCONCI, VITO in part to make their criticism more digestible to their students and colleagues, rather than pursuing radical (24 January 1940–27 April 2017) implications to their critical extremes. Thus, it becomes opportune for even an advocate of the more experi- He began as a poet and translator; and though Acco- mental GERTRUDE STEIN to confine discussion to nci subsequently had a distinguished career as a visual Three Lives (drafted around 1904) and/or The Autobi- artist, mounting exhibitions and producing videotapes ography of Alice B. Toklas (1933); an academic discus- as well as presenting live PERFORMANCE and sion of M ERCE C UNNINGHAM , say, will feature his INSTALLATIONS , his poetry remains his most inno- connections to ballet rather than his departures from vative work. One 350-line poem was distributed one it; V ELIMIR K HLEBNIKOV is portrayed as the epit- line per page over 350 separate sheets of paper, which ome of R USSIAN F UTURISM over his more radical were then bound into 350 copies of Acconci’s otherwise colleague A LEKSEI K RUCHONYKH . Academics uniform magazine, 0 to 9. His definitive work is Book tend as well to reveal incomplete familiarity with new Four (1968), which he self-published in photocopies. developments (especially if these would be unknown As literature on the cusp of CONCEPTUAL ART, it to their fellow professors). contains a series of self-reflexive texts, beginning with a The now-forgotten books that Wallace Fowlie pub- page that reads at its upper left: “(It stopped back.),” and lished decades ago epitomize such deficiencies; J. H. then at its lower right: “(This page is not part/of the four Matthews wrote comparable books later; Marjorie books/and is at the top),” with the page entirely blank ADORNO, THEODOR • 5 in between. Book Four concludes with a Gertrude Stei- identifiable theme but around consistent diction, certain nian text in which separate sentences, in sum suggest- literary forms, style, and upon other qualities unique to ing a narrative, are each preceded by the numeral “1. ” language. Its masters were GERTRUDE STEIN and, Of Acconci’s performance pieces, I remember best reflecting her influence, JOHN ASHBERY. Once the one in which he invited you into a kind of confessional latter became a professor at an American university, booth and told you an authentic secret; another in acoherence began to appear in the works of writing pro- which he sat at the bottom of a stairwell, blindfolded, grams’ alumni, nearly all born after 1960, their names with a metal pipe in his hand, defending the space in too numerous to mention, few (if any) of whom could front of him with a genuine violence; a third, Seedbed do it as well, though their books, as often “prose” as (1972), in which he purportedly masturbated under a “poetry,” often appeared with encomia from each other. sloping wood floor, letting spectators hear the sound of his effort. Recalling that Acconci attended New York City’s most rigorous Jesuit high school, I think he made ACTION PAINTING a Catholic art concerned with abnegation and spiritual athleticism. See ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM ; ROSENBERG , Besides performance pieces and writings, Acconci Harold. also made a series of films and videotapes. In the late 1980s, he turned to architecture and landscape design, producing proposals then works whose humor, if not ADORNO, THEODOR silliness, are striking, though different in quality from his previous work in other forms. A rich career as vari- (11 September 1903–6 August 1969; b. T. Ludwig ous as Acconci’s merits a long biography. Wiesengrund) Essentially a philosopher, sometimes classified as a ACKER, KATHY social theorist, he also wrote books about music that are admired by some and loathed by many. They are filled (18 April 1947–30 November 1997; b. Karen Alexander) with sentences that are hard to decipher and thoughts that, even if understood, seem to go nowhere. Often She was a prolific, brilliant writer who had two subjects: Adorno is simply wrong, as when he opens a paragraph previous literature that she would exploit for her own with the declaration that “Stravinsky also asserts his right novels, sometimes appropriating whole chunks without to an extreme position in the modern music movement,” acknowledgment, and unfettered female erotic experi ence. because IGOR STRAVINSKY spent most of his career C. Carr in the Village Voice speaks of “female narrators separating his work from esthetic extremism. Plentiful who seem interchangeable from book to book, different Adorno references to both Karl Marx and SIGMUND names tagged to the sound of one voice raging – obscene, FREUD contribute to an illusion of critical weight. As cynical, bewildered, and demanding to fuck.” I’ve Adorno writes in pretentious, jargonious [sic ] language noticed that women tend to be more enthusiastic about that is meant to impress with its cumbersome sentences her books than men, placing her perhaps as a principal and highfalutin diction, rather than communicate from successor to Anaïs Nin (1903–77), who pioneered the one person to another, his books on music in particu- representation of female eroticism. Perhaps because lar are valued by people who don’t know much about her prose was more accessible than distinguished – and the subject. It could be said that their principal implicit called more postmodern than modern – Acker was one theme is the intimidating power of Teutonic language of the few SMALL PRESS writers to be received by and perhaps the intellectual privileges (aka indulgences) commercial publishers without significantly compro- available to those who wield it. Some people have a taste mising her radical sensibility. A prominent DOWN- for this kind of criticism, just as others have a taste for TOWN New York arts/literary prize was named after S&M. So be it. Adorno reportedly advised the German her (with me among its many recipients). author Thomas Mann (1875–1955), likewise an exile in America during World War II, on the musical intelligence in the latter’s novel Doctor Faustus (1947), which may or ACOHERENCE may not account for that book’s musical irrelevance. The music that Adorno composed, which is sometimes men- The literary equivalent of ATONALITY , not quite tioned to enhance his authority, is tonal and thus closer to abstract, acoherence describes writing that makes sense, Alban Berg (1885–1935) than to ARNOLD SCHOEN- that organizes itself, not with an ostensible subject or an BERG. (In truth, I wrote this entry only because 6 • AFFIRMATIVE ACTION my initial publisher insisted that this Dictionary should AFTERIMAGE acknowledge Adorno. If only because his name is still remembered, it appears in this third edition.) This is an honorific developed in the visual arts that is applicable to other arts. In the former, the term identifies what stays in the viewer’s mind after the work AFFIRMATIVE ACTION containing it is no longer visible. Such surviving presence measures the strength of that image. I once heard This is the principle that certain “minorities” disad- the American painter Ben Shahn (1898–1969), near vantaged in the past should be accorded preference, the end of his life, say that he wished he’d made films literally positive discrimination, in future competitions. instead of paintings because of their greater leverage While perhaps valid in hiring for positions, it’s counter- at implanting afterimages. The musical analogies are productive in art, especially in group exhibitions where melodies and even arrangements that stay in listen- weaker work from members of certain “disadvantaged” ers’ heads. In literature, consider the value of lines group(s) inadvertently makes everyone similarly or characters so strong they are remembered. Con- tagged look inferior. If then, superior artists suppos- versely, whatever lacks such surviving presence, what’s edly benefitting from AA are discredited. By contrast, not remembered, was ipso facto probably not worth consider that the measure of a strong competitor is a remembering. refusal to accept the leverages of AA. Were it offered to the boxer Mike Tyson, he would have knocked out his smug benefactor, perhaps to the latter’s surprise. AGAM, YAACOV Sometimes I suspect that the sponsor of this sort of discrediting procedure really wants to undermine the (11 May 1928; b. Jacob Gipstein) claims of the minority. While rewriting this third edition, I received an unsigned letter postmarked Albany, An Israeli, the son of a rabbi, Agam studied with NY, insisting upon “Conditions: (1) Your included art- JOHANNES ITTEN in Switzerland before moving ist list should be comprised of at least 50% women.” to Paris as a very young man, creating the epitome of Didn’t this come from some subvert ultimately want- Jewish rationalist art that, thanks to his artistry, realizes ing to see inferior women diminish superior artists? irrational ends. Respecting the biblical commandment That I’d rather not do. proscribing graven images, Agam works with simple One odd development has been that pure preju- geometric illusions, such as a LENTICULAR surface dice, which was once thought discreditable, is waved whose imagery changes as the viewer moves from side proudly without shame. That’s a shame. to side. Even though nothing physical changes, this spectator shifting creates the illusion of kinetic art. Essen- tially, Agam made lenticulars bigger, much bigger, such AFRICAN ART as one 30 feet square, Complex Vision (1969), in Bir- mingham, Alabama; or very tall, such as the Aenaitral From the first decade of the 20th century, African art Tower that at 48 feet became the interior centerpiece of attracted avant-garde visual artists for its alternative his retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum ways of portraying the human body, particularly by elon- in 1980. Thinking yet bigger, Agam later painted the gating features. Some of the FAUVES collected it, as walls of tall hotels. One departure came from casting did HENRI MATISSE who by 1908 owned more than a lenticular circularly, as in a multi-level spinning foun- one dozen African sculptures. African representational tain in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv, Israel. restructuring later influenced CUBISM , one of whose Agam has also made transformable sculptures practitioners particularly appreciated its incorporating composed of modular elements that can be variously “twenty forms into one.” More than others, PABLO manipulated by spectators – that exist, indeed, only PICASSO exploited African esthetics so profoundly through audience interaction. The French arts histo- and prolifically. The summa of its influence came when rian Frank Popper (1918) speaks of the German critic CARL EINSTEIN published Neg- erplatik (1915), which analyzed its formal qualities. As inventions, ranging from a single print to the early as 1935, New York’s MUSEUM OF MODERN holograph [sic ] by way of multigraphs, poly- ART mounted an exhibition mostly of sculpture, as well morph graphics, interspaceographs, environmen- as publishing a catalog, African Negro Art . Oddly, nei- tal graphics, primographics, and video graphics. ther African music nor African literature had a fraction Agam’s other achievements include construc- as much influence upon Western avant-garde practice. tions with artificial light, water-fire sculptures, ALBRIGHT, IVAN • 7

and monumental mixed media works such as the rectangles within rectangles, which he considered scru- fountain at the La Défence complex near Paris. pulously neutral shapes, Albers created paintings and drawings based primarily upon the relationships of Books about his work also document radical alterna- shapes and of colors. His series “Homage to the Square” tives to a focused proscenium theater and vertical walls reportedly includes hundreds of paintings that are not that respond with sounds to spectators’ movements. only distinctly his, but they also suggest alternative direc- Agam is also known for a type of graphic known as an tions, as only the best teacher’s art can. That his book Agamograph, which uses lenticular printing, for illu- Interaction of Color (1963) has gone through several sory kineticism. editions, one posthumously revised by the art historian Especially in public spaces, Agam’s sculptures, at Nicholas Fox Weber (1947), testifies to its value. once very Jewish and very Parisian, appear both brilliant Perhaps because Josef’s art was so unique, while and tacky, or brilliantly tacky, or uniquely impressively he held an academic position bestowing professional tacky, to a high degree. Much like MARC CHAGALL , power, his work was included, ‘Tis claimed, in several likewise a Jewish immigrant to France, Agam earned hundred group exhibitions. The fact that little need be enough sponsors (and survived long enough) to take said about his art should not diminish any estimate of his initial original ideas, even if intrinsically limited, his achievement. through a rich variety of imaginative variations.

ALBERT-BIROT, PIERRE ALBERS, ANNI (22 April 1876–25 July 1967) (12 June 1899–9 May 1994; b. Annelise Fleischmann) An inventive writer, frequently acknowledging GUIL- By common consent, the most distinguished modern LAUME A POLLINAIRE (though the latter was four textile designer, she began in the weaving workshop years younger), Albert-Birot produced texts that were at the Weimar BAUHAUS , where she met and mar- experimental in all sorts of ways. He edited the maga- ried JOSEF ALBERS. Likewise she favored geometric zine SIC (1916–19), its title an acronym for Sons Idées imagery in her art. When the school moved to Dessau, Couleurs (Sounds Ideas Colors). In its pages appeared it developed a new focus on production over craft. This figures associated with ITALIAN FUTURISM , SUR- prompted Anni A. to develop designs for manufacture REALISM , and D ADA , along with chapters of his that considered such factors as light reflection, sound novel Grabinoulor (1919). Barbara Wright (1915–2009), absorption, durability, and materials that would mini- who specialized in translating avant-garde French texts mize wrinkling and warping. into English, succinctly describes Albert-Birot’s princi- Once both Albers came to America, they taught at pal activities as “poems of every conceivable kind: sound BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE before Josef moved poems, typographical poems, simultaneous poems, to Yale University. In addition to designing fabric pat- poster-poems, square, rectangular, chess-board poems. terns for manufacture by others, she wove bedspreads, And even straightforward poems. Plays. Novels.” Albert- curtains, and wall hangings, also publishing a book On Birot should be remembered, if for nothing else, for this Weaving (1965). Though Anni A.’s art was influen- classic aphorism: “If anything can be said in prose, then tial and thus easily imitated, her best works still look poetry should be saved for saying nothing.” That’s such a uniquely hers, especially for their striking color relation- gloriously liberating principle that I wonder why nobody ships. In 1949, she became the first designer honored known to me had thought of it before and, too bad, few with an exhibition at MoMA that then toured. have observed it since. His tondo, circular abstract painting, of Nude Woman in the Bath (1916) is special.

ALBERS, JOSEF ALBRIGHT, IVAN (19 March 1888–25 March 1976) (20 February 1897–18 November 1983) First a student and then an instructor at the B AUHAUS , Albers emigrated to America soon after that legendary A highly original American painter, he made portraits German school was closed by the Nazi authorities, teach- so extravagantly meticulous, with thin lines emerging ing first in North Carolina at B LACK M OUNTAIN from other thin lines, that they attain a high original- C OLLEGE until 1949, and then at Yale University until ity. So detailed is his work that he completed remark- his retirement. Intentionally restricting his imagery to ably few paintings in sixty years of nearly full-time art 8 • ALEATORY MUSIC activity. With a wealth of nuance, he frequently por- escape a punch and among the few heavyweights to trayed the theme of human vulnerability and decay. “dance,” which is a boxing honorific for being light on The critical question is which came first – the tech- his feet. Among Ali’s defensive strategies, after setting nique or the vision? One curiosity of his life is that Ivan up in a familiar offense stance, was stepping backward Albright had an identical twin brother, Malvin (also with his left foot, thus moving out of his opponent’s 1897–1983), who sculpted, with less success. How that normal punching range. When the other guy necessar- happened – how two artists supposedly with similar ily moved forward to reset himself, Ali punched with- genes produced such different qualitative results – is a out risking return punishment. As a defensive fighter mystery warranting penetrating analysis. whose skin rarely cut, he could also “take punches,” as it’s said, until, as in his classic “Rumble in the Jungle” with mighty George Foreman (1949), his opponents ALEATORY MUSIC punched themselves into exhaustion, becoming easy prey for Ali’s knock out. Watching him perform was (1950s) a theatrical pleasure rarely duplicated in his sport. The word aleatory is derived from the Latin “alea,” (Those coming close include Jorge Páez [1965], whose that is, a die. (Julius Caesar exclaimed after crossing the mother reportedly owned a circus in border Mexicali; Rubicon, “Alea jacta est.”) Aleatory music in the literal and “Prince” Naseem Hamed [1974], whose fortes sense is not a new invention. “Dice music” was a popu- were striking costumes and grand entrances.) Early in lar parlor game in the 18th century. A celebrated exam- his storied career, Ali displayed voluble wit. By its end, ple is Musikaisches Warfespiel, attributed to Mozart. however, he was mute in public, probably as the result In the second half of the 20th century, composers of of taking too many strong punches. the avant-garde introduced true aleatory methods. A pioneer work was Music of Changes by JOHN CAGE , derived from chance operations found in the ancient ALLEN, WOODY Chinese book of oracles, the I Ching , in which random numbers are obtained by throwing sticks. By drawing (1 December 1935; b. Allan Stewart Konigsberg) an arbitrary table of correspondences between numbers and musical parameters (pitch, note-value, rests) His single most inventive film was his first as a direc- it is possible to derive a number of desirable melo- tor, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), which must be seen rhythmic curves. Human or animal phenomena may to be believed. Taking Japanese action footage, made also serve as primary data. Configurations of fly specks only a few years before, Allen made a fresh English on paper, pigeon droppings on a park bench, the para- soundtrack entirely about something else – Jews bolic curve of an expectoration directed towards a spit- searching for the world’s best egg salad recipe. This toon, dissection of birds as practiced in ancient Rome, unpretentious formula becomes the platform for rich etc. are all excellent materials for aleatory music. At a gags, some of them exploiting Asian stereotypes (in a HAPPENING in an American midwestern university, move probably less acceptable now); others, incongru- the anal discharge of a pig, which was administered a ous juxtaposition. clyster, was used as an aleatory datum. MAURICIO Though Allen was only 30 when it appeared, Tiger KAGEL has made use of partially exposed photo- Lily came in the wake of a rich precocious career in graphic film for aleatory composition. The composer- comedy that began when he was 17 – scriptwriting for engineer IANNIS XENAKIS organizes aleatory music network television shows, providing captions to New in stochastic terms, which possess the teleological qual- Yorker cartoons, taking the stage as a stand-up come- ity absent in pure aleatory pursuits. dian where he successfully developed the persona of a neurotic, nervous, intellectual, Jewish nebbish. (This —Nicolas Slonimsky varied in crucial respects from his actual self-confident personality.) By any measure, no American had a better education in comedy to prepare him for yet greater ALI, MUHAMMAD comedy. Two qualities special about Tiger Lily are that it doesn’t (17 January 1942–3 June 2016; b. Cassius Marcellus depend upon his persona and it realizes mediumistic Clay, Jr.) invention to a degree that Allen never tried again. Defensive boxing wasn’t his invention, but he took Tiger Lily is screamingly, continuous funny, at the level its choreography to a higher level. He was among the of the best MARX BROTHERS, who were Allen’s few star boxers flexible enough to bend backwards to initial heroes. Only where the producers insert songs AMERICAN ABSTRACT ARTISTS • 9 by the Lovin’ Spoonful, a fair folk-rock group popular AMBIENT MUSIC at the time, does this film fall down. Perhaps that last unfortunate experience prompted Allen to retain final (c. 1920) creative control of his later films. Perhaps because he felt more responsible for earn- Ambient or background music was first suggested as ing enough money to make yet more films, his later a possible art form by ERIK SATIE . He described his films were less courageously innovative. He got seri- concept of “furniture music” ( musique d’ameublement ) ous; and though Allen didn’t get far in college, he made as “new music [to be] played during intermission at movies for those who did. No doubt over-(or under-) theatrical events or at a concert, designed to create a educated, I fell asleep in too many later Allen films; certain ambience.” In the 1930s, the Muzak Company though, if prompted, I recall some inspired comedy in was founded to transmit, by radio, soothing background his Bananas (1971), which was long ago. Nobody else music that would be appropriate for offices and facto- once worthy of an entry here has made the desire to ries. These selections were psychologically tested either make yet more (and more) films the principal focus of to encourage more productivity or to ease stressful situ- his career. ations (e.g., the ever-present Muzak heard while sitting Of his writings, the most original are “ballets” that in the dentist’s chair). A common nickname for this type he has published here and there over the years. of overly pleasant background music is Elevator Music. In his personal life, Allen successfully challenged In the postwar years, American composer JOHN the POLITICALLY CORRECT proscription against C AGE reintroduced Satie’s notion of music to be intergenerational marriage with his sometime part- played as a background accompaniment to other ner’s adopted daughter. Surviving negative publicity, activities. This idea has been most actively espoused by they have remained tight for over two decades. Time composer/producer B RIAN E NO who took the term tells its own truth. “ambient music” from Cage. Eno’s background music is supposed to be both “interesting as well as ignor- able,” in the words of critic Stuart Isacoff (1949). The most famous example of Eno’s ambient work is Music ALTERNATIVE SPACES for Airports , which, ironically, has been used as Muzak in several major airports. (1970s) Another development in background music briefly This has been the preferred American epithet for gal- flourished in the late ’50s and early ’60s, mostly in the leries that exhibit art and sponsor performances with- hands of eccentric sound composer Esquivel. His cre- out the expectation of a profit. Many were founded in ations, now known as “space-age bachelor pad music,” the wake of largesse made available by the National combined electronic sounds with futuristic background Endowment for the Arts and its imitators in many music. This music was designed to be played in the states, initially to serve artists who found commercial homes of forward-looking young men, anticipating the channels closed. In 1977, the NEA funded fifty-nine of advances of the space-age. As pure kitsch, this music over one hundred that had applied. Perhaps the larg- was briefly revived in the late 1990s. est and most famous, PS 1 in Astoria, New York, took —Richard Carlin over a vacated public school (thus the “PS”) that was among the largest in NEW YORK CITY. While its former auditoriums and gymnasiums were used for exhi- AMERICAN ABSTRACT ARTISTS bitions and performances, the sometime classrooms (1936) housed smaller shows or became studios mostly for artists from abroad. (I had in 1979 an exhibition of Founded in NEW YORK CITY at a time when repre- my BOOK-ART in a ground floor corner space that sentational “American Scene” painting was dominant, must have been a principal’s office, because it housed AAA held weekly meetings, staged gallery exhibitions, a machine for making bells ring throughout the build- and published print portfolios that initially received a ing.) In one of its top-floor classrooms, PS 1 perma- hostile reception, especially from those wanting to dis- nently houses J AMES T URRELL’s Meeting (1986), miss it as “European” and thus un-American. In 1940, a masterpiece whose roof can be opened to exhibit AAA, representing a disparaged minority, printed the changing late afternoon sky. Thousands of artists a broadside titled “How Modern Is the Museum of from around the world, avant-garde and otherwise, Modern Art,” which became the occasion for a vis- have benefited from the existence of such alternative ible protest outside the newly venerable institution. spaces. Another pamphlet entitled “The Art Critics” savaged 10 • AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND LETTERS the newspaper reviewers prominent at the time. Over credit advisors and the blind and just a step away from the next two decades AAA forged preconditions diaper providers. One of the more unwittingly embar- for the acceptance of ABSTRACT EXPRESSION- rassing books owned by me is Portraits from the Ameri- ISM, at least in New York. Though subsequently less can Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1987), combative, AAA survived into the 21st century, often as a reader looking only at the pictures would judge a with populous annual exhibitions. When I applied with 19th-century European art gallery. No less than seeing my visual art nearly always with numerals and words, firsthand is believing. some gatekeepers at AAA replied that, as presenta- What AAAL represents culturally is a European tions of external entities, those were not truly abstract. model for collecting RETROGRADE (and thus funda- Esthetically tough and tight AAA still is. mentally un-American) kinds of talents. What it displays provincially is a weakness for middling writers appearing frequently in slick commercial magazines such as AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS The New Yorker , thus reflecting a general and continu- AND LETTERS/NATIONAL INSTITUTE ing decline of standards within the self-appointed guard- OF ARTS AND LETTERS ians. (Only a few decades ago, it was generally assumed that no writer could do optimal work contributing to (1904; 1898–1993) such a periodical, with all its constraints on subject, These are self-replicating clubs, chartered by acts of length, and style.) The distinguished Harvard profes- Congress no less, of living artists, composers, and writ- sor Harry Levin (1912–1994), himself a member of the ers that, notwithstanding their monikers, include among NIAL, called it, in a memorable phrase, “one of those their members remarkably few of the Americans fea- professional societies which exist primarily for mutual tured in this book. (The former AAAL was until 1993 admiration.” Because this is the United States, rather an inner circle of fifty drawn from the latter NIAL.) than Europe, the retrograde Academy’s influence on the The AAAL’s literature department can be character- development and even the direction of native culture is, ized as less advanced than its music division, while that thankfully, negligible. That last fact perhaps accounts for devoted to visual arts is, by common consent, the most why no book-length history of it exists. backward of all. When I first observed its membership, around 1965, I thought that every major writer born before 1910 (and thus 55 at the time) belonged; in 1999, AMERICAN RELIGIOUS ART over three decades later, that qualitative generalization One uniquely American contribution to the world’s covers only authors born before 1911 (Norman Corwin spiritual life has been new religions, many of which being the oldest flagrant omission at that time). Con- originated in the early mid-19th century in a western sider this other comparative measure: It would now be New York state area commonly called “The Burned- very easy to make a list of visual artists not belonging, Over District.” Some of these new faiths invented forms who are collectively better than current members – a of devout respect and religious art unknown anywhere shadow academy, to use a British epithet; fairly easy else in the world. I can recall my teacher, the great his- to make a stronger list of writers (but harder, if not torian William G. McLoughlin (1922–92), demonstrat- impossible, to make a competitive list of composers). ing around 1960 the extreme physical movements of In 1961, the painter AD REINHARDT , who had religious conversion common at the time among vari- a sure instinct for puncturing professional pretense, ous sects 130 years before. Advocates of Spiritualism noted that in the Manhattan telephone directory that toured America sponsoring séances, truly heightened year were seven “National Institutes,” consecutively: PERFORMANCE, promising communication with National Institute for Architectural Education the dead. With perhaps two hundred women, often National Institute for Disaster Mobilization still teenagers, working as full-time trance speakers, National Institute for Straight Thinking Spiritualism came and went, perhaps because its ava- National Institute for the Blind tars were avowedly celebate women at a time when National Institute of Arts and Letters few religious leaders were female. The United Society National Institute of Credit of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, commonly National Institute of Diaper Services known as the Shakers, also developed innovative styles of domestic furniture that are treasured to this day. Anybody want to make anything of that? While several of these faiths survived into the 21st cen- Yes, the NIAL, wholly on its own volition, situated tury, among those prospering more were Christian Sci- the putative top drawer of American arts between ence and, especially, the Mormon Church. Whereas a ANGER, KENNETH • 11 favorite theme of the former’s art is heaven on earth Warner Brothers in the wake of her pop hit. By the (e.g., portrayed often in JOSEPH CORNELL, himself mid-90s, however, Anderson had disappeared from the faithful), the latter dramatizes its claims for unique pop scene as well as from more progressive venues. revelations in theatrical forms such as performances Her work has failed too often to meet the claims made by the huge Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the annual for it, whether as visual art, music, writing, or perfor- Hill Cumorah PAGEANT. mance, for it has from its beginnings been invariably Certain radical religions persecuted in Europe, such more slick than avant-garde and more acceptable than as the Rosicrucians, found in America freedom not challenging. only to practice but to invent new arts. Centered in the early 18th century in Ephrata, PA, they developed unique design and a singing style, since lost, that was ANDRE, CARL compared to listening to choirs of angels. To the degree that African-American churches have represented a (16 September 1935) new religion, their NEGRO SPIRITUALS epitomize Andre, more than anyone else, persuasively estab- new uniquely American sacred art. lished the idea of a situational sculpture in which materials, sometimes purchased or found (rather than ANARCHIST ART fabricated), are imported into a particular space (usually where “art” is the currency of admission). Because these sculptures exist only in that situation, only for the (1960s) duration of their display there, the parts can be sepa- Anarchists have made art, often portraying other anar- rated and retrieved at the exhibition’s end, if not later chists. A classic example is John Henry Mackay’s The organized into a totally different work – what Andre Anarchists (1872), which was written in German by calls “clastic” art. As these works may be taken apart an author born in Scotland who was then residing in (or gathered up) and recomposed, they look intention- London. Anarchists also appear in Henry James’s The ally unfinished and impermanent (thus denying the Princess Casamasim a (1886). classic piety that “sculptural art” must necessarily be However, as anarchism presumes an open, nonhi- a finished product); they also look as though someone erarchical society, so a truly anarchist art should have else could easily duplicate them with commonly avail- an open, nonhierarchical form or portray open, non- able materials. hierarchical activities. In my experience, the epitome Therefore, Andre’s sculpture Lever (1966) assumes was JOHN CAGE’s HPSCHD (1969), which gets its an untraditional horizontal form, consisting of 137 own entry here. Other examples include CLAYTON pieces of separate but visibly identical (and thus inter- PETERSON’s Tomkins Square Riot (1988), THE LIV- changeable) firebricks laid side to side in a single line ING THEATRE’s Paradise Now (1968), and Lee Bax- 30 feet across the floor. An adept aphorist (“Art is what andall’s Potsy (1963). Indicatively, an academic book we do; culture is what is done to us”), Andre has also on Film and the Anarchist Imagination (1999) scarcely written comparably innovative, nonsyntactical literary understands this concept. texts. Although they are exhibited from time to time (and even reprinted in the catalogs accompanying exhibitions), he has resisted collecting them into books. ANDERSON, LAURIE

(5 June 1947) ANGER, KENNETH Anderson has been sporadically popular since the (3 February 1927; b. Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer) early 1980s, following the surprise hit of her eight- minute audio montage “O Superman.” Working in A child of the Los Angeles film world, Anger began New York since 1973, Anderson had been exposed to precociously with a trilogy of SURREALIST and the musical experiments of BRIAN ENO and PHILIP disjointed films that were juvenile in both content G LASS in evolving her stage shows that included spo- and, seemingly, inspiration, yet nonetheless regarded ken word (often electronically distorted), tape loops, as an antithesis to slick Hollywood films: Fireworks synthesized sounds, mime, film, and light shows. Her (1947), Eaux d’Artifice (1953), and Inauguration of best-known work in this mode was the seven-hour pro- the Pleasure Dome (1954, recut 1966). Perhaps the duction The United States (1984), the audio portion of best of them is the first, which portrays a young man’s which was released as a five-volume set by rock label homoerotic dreams. (It reportedly earned Anger a 12 • ANIMATED FILM letter from Jean Cocteau, inviting him to come to the WARNER toons, which didn’t earn much criti- Europe, where he lived for most of the 1950s. Return- cal writing until the 1970s. Only in 1985 did the ing to New York in 1962, he lived initially near Coney MUSEUM OF MODERN ART mount a retrospec- Island, where he reportedly learned about socially tive of Warner work. The only animated film ever to marginal America.) command much critical respect at its premiere was Only with Scorpio Rising (1964) did Anger emerge Walt Disney’s feature-length FANTASIA (1941), as a mature innovative filmmaker. The subject is motor- which is indeed a masterpiece. cyclists, and this film emphasizes their insane love of Curiously, the development of animated film cre- their machines, their attempts to imitate film heroes ated a precondition for video, which at its truest is not such as James Dean, and their rowdy, implicitly homo- a representational medium, like most film, but some- erotic parties. In the third section of the film, against thing else, containing as it does the potential to gener- the motorcyclists are juxtaposed some blue-tinted ate its own imagery and to process electronically (and scenes from a black-and-white version of the Christ thus easily) prerecorded pictures. story. This last contrast is reinforced by the shrewd use Though I’ve read many histories of animated film, I on the soundtrack of rock-n-roll music that has the dis- don’t consider any of them to be critically smart. None- tinct virtue of being at once both resonant and ironic. theless, I recommend the thick Giannalberto Bendazzi’s As Anger’s cutting from one kind of scene to another Cartoons (1995) for its international information. The becomes quicker, Scorpio Rising becomes hysterically anthology Frames (1978), assembled by George Grif- funny. The film somewhat resembles Pop painting in its fin, himself a distinguished animator, presents a page use of very familiar quotations, as well as its author’s or two of credible sample images from American ambivalent attitude toward popular materials – in the animators. I reprint all their names, not because they artful mixing of high culture with low. Also an author, are familiar but because, decades later, they aren’t, Anger published the classic exposes of individual tur- though many probably should be: Jane Aaron, Martin pitude (as distinct from corporate sin) in Hollywood, Abrahams, Karen Aqua, Mary Beams, Lisze Bechtold, Hollywood Babylon (1965) and Hollywood Babylon Adam Beckett, Gary Beydler, David Blum, Lowell II (1984). Bodger, Barbara Bottner, Robert Breer, Ken Brown, Carter Burwell, John Canemaker, Vincent Collins, Lisa Crafts, Sally Cruikshank, Larry Cuba, Jody Culkin, ANIMATED FILM Howard Danelowitz, Carmen D’Avino, Loring Doyle, Irra Duga, Eric Durst, Tony Eastman, David Ehrlich, (c. 1900) Jules Engel, Victor Faccinto, Roberta Friedman, Paul Glabicki, Andrea Romez, James Gore, Linda Heller, It is my considered idiosyncratic opinion that anima- Louis Hock, Al Jarnow, Flip Johnson, Linda Klosky, tion in film has always constituted an avant-garde. Ken Kobland, Candy Kugel, Maria Lassing, Kathleen Since film extended from photography, where any- Laughlin, Carolina Leaf, Francis Lee, Jerry Lieberman, thing resembling animation has always been scarce, Anthony McCall, Frank & Carolina Mouris, Eli Noyes, animation has from its beginnings necessarily reflected Pat O’Neill, Sara Petty, Dennis Pies, Suzan Pitt, Rich- discoveries about properties that made film different ard Protovin, Kathy Rose, Peter Rose, Susan Rubin, from photography. Whereas representational films Robert Russett, Steve Segal, Maureen Selwood, Janet were shot scene by scene, most animation was pro- Shapero, Jim Shook, Jody Silver, Lillian & J. P. Somer- duced frame by frame. Movement on screen comes saulter, Robert Swarthe, Mary Dzilagyi, Anita Thacher, not from moving the camera or the actors but from S TAN V AN D ER B EEK , Peter Wallach, and JAMES changes made on a drawing board by hand. WHITNEY. Consider this invisibility to be an indica- Throughout the history of film production, ani- tion of how avant-garde nearly all film animation must mation has always been a sorry sister. It is said that be, even in America. the producer in charge of cartoons at W ARNER B ROTHERS , where some of the best animation was achieved, arrived at screenings with the epithet “Roll ANT FARM the trash.” And the censors at the time didn’t exam- ine animated shorts as closely as feature films, allow- (1968–78) ing, say, the eroticism of the Fleischers’ Betty Boop to go into movie houses, where such sensuous moves A West Coast artists’ collective, similar to USCO by human beings in feature-length films would have but with more participants, they produced at least been forbidden. Few critics at the time acknowledged one classic, a row of old Cadillac cars with their front ANTHOLOGIES (OF THE AVANT-GARDE) • 13 grills buried into the earth, that has been so widely ANTHOLOGIES (OF THE reproduced it has become their SIGNATURE image AVANT-GARDE) obscuring for some a wealth of provocative activities, including publications, some of which are reproduced (1896–) in the catalog of a 2004 retrospective at the University of California Museum of Art in Berkeley. The great printed collections of emerging avant-garde The Cadillac Ranch, as it was officially called, epito- materials draw from disparate sources to establish per- mized the Art Farm’s radical goals of sexualizing archi- suasively the existence of a body of works previous not tecture. Their esthetics descended from Pop Art that seen together. As literally a choice gathering of flowers, seemed more persuasive in the 1960s than later. Oddly, anthologies initially introduce, if not publicize; eventu- the principal mover, Chip Lord (1944), became a pro- ally, they canonize. The exemplar for proto-EXPRES- fessor of film/digital media at the University of Califor- SIONISM was Der Blaue Reiter Almanach (1912, The nia in Santa Cruz. Blue Rider) and DADA was RICHARD HUELSEN- BECK’s Dada Almanach (1920; English, 1966 & 1994). Historically, SURREALIST literature benefitted from ANTHEIL, GEORGE Andre Breton’s Anthologie de l’humour noir (1940, The Anthology of Black Humor). For earlier French vanguard writing, the classic was Remy de Gourmont’s (8 July 1900–12 February 1959) two-volume Le Livre des Masques (1896, 1898) that Residing in Europe in the middle 1920s, Antheil was brilliantly reworked and later translated as The became the epitome of the outrageous avant-garde Book of Masks (1994). American composer, producing raucous piano pieces Among the other classic anthologies of emerg- with such aggressive titles as Sonata Sauvage, Mecha- ing avant-gardes was Poètes à l’Écart (1946, Offside nisms , and Airplane Sonata . Returning to America for Poetry), edited by CAROLA GIEDION-WECKLER; a one-person Carnegie Hall concert in 1927, he com- ROBERT MOTHERWELL’s The Dada Painters and posed a Ballet mécanique (having already produced Poets (1951; second ed., 1989); EUGEN GOMRING- a score for a Ferdinand Léger film of the same title) ER’s konkrete poesie (1960, 1996); FRANZ MON’s with airplane propellers, several pianos, and many Movens (1960); LA MONTE YOUNG and JACKSON drums. (In a 1989 complete recreation of this historic MAC LOW’s An Anthology of Chance Operations concert, I thought it by far the strongest work on the (1963, 1971), which features early FLUXUS along program.) His Transatlantic (1928–29) was the first with JOHN CAGE’s early influence; Happenings, American opera to receive its premiere in Europe, Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Realisme Eine Dokumenta- in Frankfurt in 1930. However, not until 1998 was it tion Herausgegeben (1965), edited by Jürgen Becker produced in his native country, with five performances (1932) and Wolf Vostell (1932–98), who also brilliantly by the Minnesota Opera, where the critic K. Robert designed its pages; Mary Ellen Solt’s Concrete Poetry: Schwarz (1957–99) saw it, producing an appreciation A World View (1968), which became most valuable for of its “delirious intricacy . . . in text, staging, and music” its international scope; JEAN-FRANÇOIS BORY’s for Opera News . Once Again (1968) for visual narrative; Peter Weibel Lionized by some literati, Antheil helped E ZRA and Valie Export’s Wien: Bildkompendium Wiener POUND to complete his opera Le Testament de Vil- Aktionismus und (1970) for VIENNA ACTIONISM; lon (1926), and in return became the subject of Ezra Eugene Wildman’s Experiments in Prose (1969), whose Pound’s booklet Antheil and the Treatise on Har- only competition for representing radically innovative mony (1927). Back in America in the early 1930s, fiction is an anthology of mine; ALAN SONDHEIM’s Antheil produced less distinctive music before mov- Individuals (1977), which features a brilliant introduc- ing to Hollywood, where he wrote undistinguished tion often typical of such avant-garde selections; Ger- film scores and a stylistically journalistic syndicated hard Rühm’s Die Wiener Gruppe (1985) for certain newspaper column titled “Boy Meets Girl” offering Austrian poets; GEOF HUTH’s modest pwoermds advice to the romantically distraught. He collabo- (2004) for linguistic inventions. There are other conse- rated with the film actress Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000) quential anthologies of new avant-garde work, includ- in inventing (and even legally patenting) a guidance ing a few edited by me. (Having composed anthologies, system for radio-directed torpedoes. Though no lon- I like to read those that are thoughtfully edited , rather ger an avant-garde composer by his forties, he pub- than compiled where, for two negative red flags, selec- lished a memoir with the audacious title Bad Boy of tions appear in alphabetical order by author or chrono- Music (1945). logical order by birthdate.) 14 • ANTONAKOS, STEPHEN

By contrast, a weak anthology purportedly present- emerged, as perhaps a theme was Antrobus’s testing ing a certain strain of new work can kill it, especially the famed reserve of British theatrical (not radio or if the book is the first on its theme. May I doubt if literary) audiences who either failed or confirmed him. another An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011) (Or?) Though Sperm Test was also published in a dis- will ever appear. Earlier, Germano Celant’s Art Povera tinguished series of British playbooks, Antrobus didn’t (1969) was the last on its subject (until a 2011 cata- offer London another play, instead collaborating with log for a museum exhibition). No one (re)does what SPIKE MILLIGAN, among other miscellaneous proj- nobody wants to do. ects. Why not more plays, I don’t know.

ANTONAKOS, STEPHEN APOLLINAIRE, GUILLAUME (1 November 1926–17 August 2013) (26 August 1880–9 November 1918; b. Wilhelm Apol- Born in Greece, he came to the United States as a child linaris de Kostrowitzky) and later studied visual art. Around 1960, he discovered Born of a Polish mother who brought her fatherless NEON, which became his principal medium for art sons to Monaco, where they received a French educa- since. Whereas DAN FLAVIN used the other medium tion, Kostrowitzky, known even into his adult years as of fluorescent light for its peculiar kind of glow, what “Kostro,” took a French pseudonym for a mercurial Antonakos loved in neon was its colors. First he added literary career that included art criticism, plays, fic- neon tubes to his assemblages; then he let the lamps tion, pornography, and poetry. An early avant-garde stand by themselves. Later he had them fill an entire text was the poème simultané, “Zone” (in Alcools , room, realizing an ENVIRONMENT wholly with 1913), in which events in several places are portrayed light. In 1973, he made the radical move of placing ten in adjacent lines, as though the writer were a bird rap- large neon works outdoors around the architecture of idly moving from place to place. To foster perceptions the Ft. Worth Museum, making the entire building into that are not linear but spatial, Kostro simply eschewed a prop for his giant light sculpture. punctuation. His second innovation, presaging liter- Though neon had always been popular in commer- ary M INIMALISM was the one-line poem, “Chantre” cial signage, Antonakos appropriated it for modern art (or “Singer”), which William Meredith (1919–2007) by using it abstractly, typically for curved lines appar- translates as “And the single string of the trumpets ently suspended in space. Most of his later works he set marine.” Kostro’s third major innovation was visual in public spaces, where they customarily appear with- poems that he called “calligrammes,” in which words out his name attached: on the south side of West 42nd are handwritten or typeset to make expressive shapes, Street between 9th and 10th Avenues in Manhattan; in which he dubbed “visual lyricism.” For “Il pleut” (or “It the Exchange Place PATH station in Jersey City; in the rains”), the letters stream down the page, in appropri- Pershing Square station in Los Angeles; and the Provi- ately uneven lines; “The Little Car” has several shapes dence Convention Center in Rhode Island. Typically, reflective of automotive travel; “Mandolin Carnation they are visible from greater distances than most pub- and Bamboo” incorporates three roughly representa- lic art. In the 1980s, Antonakos began producing sacred tional forms on the same page. Some of these hand- reliefs that benefit from placing neon lamps behind a written poems have lines extending at various angles, rectangular, mostly monotonal painting. words with letters in various sizes, musical staves, or diagonal typesetting, all to the end of enhancing lan- ANTROBUS, JOHN guage. Not only do such poems display a freedom in the use of materials, but Kostro apparently made it a point of principle not to repeat any image. Another, (2 July 1933) perhaps lesser, innovation he called “conversation During my year in London, in the mid-1960s, I thought poems” (“Les Fenêtres” and “Lundi Rue Christine”), the two most original playwrights were N. F. SIMP- because they were assembled from morsels overheard SON, already familiar and still remembered, and (and in their spatial leaping resemble “Zone”). Antrobus. The latter’s You’ll Come To Love Your Kostro’s best-remembered play, Les Mamelles de Sperm Test (1964) invited audience participation with Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias, 1918, but written many the playwright himself as his own protagonist declar- years before), is a satire on sex and genius that Martin ing near the end: “If you want a third act, you’ll have Esslin (1918–2002) identifies as a distinguished precur- to improvise it yourself.” The night I was there no one sor to the THEATER OF THE A BSURD . Kostro’s ARAKAWA • 15 strongest book of art criticism, Les Peintres Cubistes, finally Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Prometheus Méditations Esthétiques (1913, The Cubist Painters, in Basel in 1924–25. Ahead of his times, Appia scarcely Esthetic Meditations), identified a new development imagined a century ago subsequent developments not as it was maturing. A single essay, “L’Esprit nouveau et only in illumination but theatrical projection. les poètes” (“The New Spirit and the Poets,” 1918), is no less valid today than it was when written, because of its emphasis upon surprise as an avant-garde esthetic APPROPRIATION value. As an arts critic, Kostro coined “Surnatural” that was (1970s) later shortened to surréal, which stuck, and he cham- The filching of bits from earlier art, often without attri- pioned PABLO PICASSO above all other painters. It bution, has become so popular a modernist procedure should not be forgotten that, in the cultural milieus of in literature, music, and visual art that it’s often unno- Paris at the beginning of the century, Kostro performed ticed. In music, it’s called SAMPLING. What was new, invaluable service in bringing together advanced artists especially in the 1970s, was reproducing whole works, and writers and helping them understand one another. nearly intact, especially of photographs and then paint- As Roger Shattuck (1923–2005) elegantly put it, “He ings, as well as sometimes literary texts, with the claim wrote on all subjects, in all forms, and for all purposes. that the reproduction belonged to the younger artist. For him there was no separation of art and action; Simple to do, easy to write about, such works gener- they were identical.” Since I was first called Kosti in ated considerable chatter less among practicing art- a summer camp that had too many boys named Rich- ists than in art magazines and their principal audience ard, I respect his love of accident and coincidence as I of art students. In my judgment, the most profound assimilate him, regarding this Dictionary as a book that appropriator was also among the earliest and a most Kostro would have written had he lived long enough, meticulous painter (or repainter), rather than a (re) say to my age, and resettled in NEW YORK CITY. photographer – ELAINE STURTEVANT. Everyone after was after. APPIA, ADOLPHE ARAKAWA (1 September 1862–29 February 1928) A Swiss theater designer who in 1891 had published a (6 July 1936–18 May 2010; b. Shusaku A.) pamphlet about Staging the Wagnerian Ring , Appia a It is easier to describe Arakawa’s paintings than to say few years later wrote Die Musik und die Inzenierung , what they mean. His paintings tend to be large, usually in which he advocated a theater of atmosphere suc- containing sketchily rendered images, eschewing col- ceeding a theater based on appearances, which is to say ors other than black, gray, and white. Often they have 19th-century realism. “We need not try to represent a letters produced with large stencils, as well as hand- forest,” he wrote. “What we must give the spectator is writing with roman letters. The simple names for these man in the atmosphere of a forest.” In James Roose- paintings are customarily free of symbolic suggestion. Evans’s summary: The parts are sufficiently distant from one another, as well as from the painting’s title, to suggest mysteries It was Appia who first demonstrated the neces- that are not easily penetrated, and indeed they aren’t. sity of visualizing the mood and the atmosphere ARTHUR DANTO, a sometime Columbia University of a play; the importance of suggestion com- philosophy professor, reportedly identified Arakawa pleted in the imagination of the spectator; the as “the most philosophical of living artists.” Arakawa effectiveness of an actor stabbed by a spotlight also collaborated with his wife, MADELINE GINS , in a great dim space; the significance of a “space- in producing a visual-verbal book, The Mechanism of stage”; and the more abstract forms of scenic Meaning, that went through three radically different art. He foresaw not only the possibility of spot- editions (1971, 1979, 1988) and is sometimes identified lighting but also of projected scenery. as the epitome of CONCEPTUAL ART . This is no less penetrable than Arakawa’s visual art, finally posing Dismissed at first, Appia persisted, staging scenes the question, rarely raised, of how much unintelligibil- from Carmen and Manfred privately in Paris in 1903 ity is acceptable in contemporary art. It is not for noth- and then complete texts: Orpheus and Euridice in 1903, ing that few articles about Arakawa’s work are long Tristan und Isolde at La Scala in Milan in 1923, and and that even shorter appreciations come to drastically 16 • ARCHIGRAM different conclusions. The voluminous catalog of a 1997 was a group of sculptors, including Archipenko, Jacques retrospective that reveals that he ceased painting at the Lipchitz, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Henri Lau- end of the 1980s to concentrate on architecture (mostly rens, who consistently worked out the formal problems conceptual). of applying Cubism to their art. Archipenko’s Seated Mother (1911) probably predates the efforts of the rest. It was a modest and tentative attempt compared ARCHIGRAM to later works: a female figure, who seems totemic in her passive and stiffly upright posture, sits with her legs (1961–74) folded, her figure cut across and divided up by curv- “Archigram” was the name of the architectural news- ing planes that slip around and under each other. The letter documenting the designs and theories of Warren basic purpose of Cubism, the simultaneous presenta- Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, tion of multiple perspectives, was not and could not Ron Herron, and Michael Webb. These British archi- be physically achieved in sculpture. But the efforts of tectural visionaries of the 1960s are remembered for Archipenko and the rest did contribute to the expan- reshaping architecture with outlandish designs influ- sion of sculptural form. Though Archipenko extended enced by consumer culture and entertainment. Syn- his influence through the schools he ran in France, thesizing science fiction, futuristic comic books, and Germany, and eventually, the United States, the sculp- amusement park esthetic, Archigram challenged archi- tures he created throughout the rest of his long career tecture’s rigidity with bravado, effectively epitomizing were largely unimpressive. C ONCEPTUAL A RCHITECTURE . Although the —Mark Daniel Cohen group’s fantastically innovative forms were never realized, the designs and titles for Archigram constructs such as “A Walking City,” “Plug-In City,” and “Instant ARDITTI QUARTET City” are in themselves examples of the group’s inven- tiveness and social concerns. “A Walking City” is a (1974) take on NEW YORK CITY’s future, wherein the city In nearly every instrumental genre there are individu- consists of several colossal, insect-like structures with als who make a specialty of performing avant-garde retractable legs that dwarf the background of New works as no one else can. What DAVID TUDOR was York City’s skyline, gently mocking what some con- to the traditional piano, Paul Zukofsky (1943–2017) sider the ultimate architectural achievement of the was to the solo violin; SUN RA, to electric keyboards; 20th century: the skyscraper. Stuart Dempster (1936), to trombones; FRANCES- With sufficient illustrations that may one day rival MARIE UITTI, to her cellos; Bertram Turetzky, to the prescience of LEONARDO’s proposed inventions, the double bass; Skip La Plante (1951), to homemade Archigram was able to illuminate and even liberate instruments, and Margaret Leng Tan (1945), to the architecture’s potential with Utopian optimism, how- toy piano, Irvine Arditti’s string quartet has become ever naïve. And despite the demands of an architecture to its literature. His group’s typical feat is to perform with material limits, Archigram avoided compromise, the complete string quartets of E LLIOTT C ARTER , promoted liberation, and protested all limitations with M AURICIO K AGEL , or G YÖRGY L IGETI in a a bold advertising cum marketing campaign that is still single evening or on a single set of disks. They did so applicable to the ongoing hyper-urbanization of mod- well with J OHN C AGE’s early quartets that he wrote ern cities and American cities in particular. some new ones especially for them. In their taste for —Michael Peters high modernist music, the London-based Ardittis, as they are commonly called, contrast with the San Fran- cisco-based Kronos Quartet (1973), who have made a ARCHIPENKO, ALEXANDER specialty of adapting pop songs to their instruments and of playing flashier, more accessible musics. (30 May, 1887–25 February, 1964)

Archipenko can be credited with being the first artist ARENSBERG, WALTER & LOUISE who worked principally in sculpture to absorb successfully the lessons of Analytic C UBISM from painting (4 April 1878–29 January 1954; 1879–1953) and introduce them into his three-dimensional work. Although P ABLO P ICASSO’s own Head of a Woman Husband and wife, married forever, they conducted (1909–10) is an earlier execution of sculptural Cubism, it for several years around World War I the most ARMANDO • 17 distinguished artists’ salon ever in NEW YORK CITY, the bridge incorporates words from American writ- where many other hostesses and hosts have tried ear- ers as various as HERMAN MELVILLE and JOHN nestly to charm a current avant-garde elite. In their two- A SHBERY and then colors reflective of American level apartment on West 67th Street, the Arensbergs intellectual history. (“The yellow is from Monticello,” offered hospitality to the most distinguished New York Armajani once told an interviewer. “Jefferson called Dadaists, some born here, most recent immigrants. The it the colour of wheat, of the harvest.”) These marvel- Arensbergs incidentally became MARCEL DUCH- ous structures rank as architecture to some, but not AMP’s most generous patron, amassing the largest to others. His darker skin and origins elsewhere not- early collection of his scarce work. Their salon ended withstanding, Armajani became a major Minneapo- in 1921 when the Arensbergs relocated to California. lis artist implicitly defining it among America’s more Especially for avant-garde artists in New York City, enlightened cities, accounting as well for why superior nowhere has been as hospitable since. No dope, Walter selections from his work are featured in the Walker Art published critical volumes about William Shakespeare, Center’s thick book (1990) about its own collection. in addition to books of poetry. A rich appreciation of the Arensbergs concludes Robert Crunden’s American Salons (1993). ARMAN

(17 November 1928–22 October 2005; b. Armand ARIAS-MISSON, ALAIN Fernandez)

(11 December 1936) As one of the self-proclaimed “New Realists” in Paris at the beginning of the 1960s, Arman used authentic A truly “mid-Atlantic” literary artist, a Harvard-educated objects, generally in abundance – overwhelming abun- classicist who works sometimes as a dexterous simul- dance. Simple though the idea of making a sculpture of taneous interpreter, Arias-Misson has published litera- only one kind of thing was, he produced, with audacity ture and produced performances in both America and and witty style, accumulations of, for example, dollar Europe. His first novel, Confessions of a Murderer, Rap- bills, bullets, musical instruments, old cameras, watch ist, Fascist, Bomber, Thief (1974), engages contemporary parts, and kitchen utensils. For a 1960 exhibition he history in an imaginative way, as a series of fictionalized filled the Iris Clert Gallery from floor to ceiling with glosses on reproduced newspaper clippings, becoming, garbage. The invitation was not the customary card but in sum, a coherent portrait of the gratuitous violence in a sardine can filled with trash. our time. What is stylistically special about the novel is Sometimes Arman’s accumulations were welded the exploitation of both the language and photographs together; other times they lay free in a glass case. If of journalism. Arias-Misson has also produced, more in metacollage brings together elements with something Europe than here, “public poems,” which are language- in common, these would be meta-ASSEMBLAGES. based provocative performances, the words customarily “He is always bending the object to his entirely per- appearing as signs rather than speech. sonal and purely arbitrary will,” writes the American- Italian critic Henry Martin (1942), “as though to tell us that will is what we are most truly made of.” Though ARMAJANI, SIAH the process of making his assemblages reflects mad and messy inspiration, Arman’s results are usually neat (10 July 1939) and picturesque. An Iranian who immigrated to America in the 1960s, Armajani moved from creating calligraphic paintings and then eccentric sculpture to building elegant and ARMANDO highly original pedestrian bridges. Beginning with models that were included in museum sculptural exhi- (18 September 1929; b. Herman Dirk van Dedeweerd) bitions, he was eventually invited to execute commis- Of the many stipendiats from around the world sions. Perhaps the most successful, typically begun with whom I met in the 1980s as a guest of the DAAD BER- an exhibited model, the 375-foot Irene Hixon Whitney LINER KUNSTLERPROGRAMM, he particularly Bridge (1988), arches over several lanes of highway, impressed me, initially for sharing a classic joke, no connecting the sculpture garden of the Walker Art doubt translated from the Dutch: “Germans are won- Center to central Minneapolis. A slim structure with derful. They take everything seriously except humor.” a curved arc that becomes inverted in the middle, He also told me that on the wall next to his telephone 18 • ARMITAGE, MERLE he wrote, out of concern for otherwise offending, the ARMORY SHOW names of people who had a sense of humor. Curious about him, I later learned that as a teen- (17 February–15 March 1913) ager during World War II Armando lived near a Dutch “transition camp” for Nazi prisoners destined for con- Officially called “The International Exhibition of Mod- centration camps. Starting late, he had an adventurous ern Art” and installed at the 69th Regiment Armory career as an artist and writer, belonging to Group Nul, in New York, this was the single most influential exhi- which was perceived to be the most radical (at least bition of avant-garde painting ever in America. With in Holland) in the early 1960s, also aligning himself over 1,600 objects, it was really two exhibitions within with French Situationists, who expelled him. He later a single space. The American section, which contained published fairy tales for both children and adults, co- roughly three-quarters of the items, was an unbiased produced a Dutch television program, and made both comprehensive survey of current American activity. paintings and sculptures often monumental in size and In the European section, however, were canvases by grim in their abstracted imagery. Two recurring themes Impressionists, Georges Seurat, the Symbolists Odilon are faltering memory and passing time. Redon and Puvis de Chavannes, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Fortunate Armando was that his hometown in Hol- Van Gogh (eighteen items), Pierre Gauguin, HENRI land, Amersfoort, hosted a museum devoted to his MATISSE (forty items), while PABLO PICASSO work, only to become unfortunate when a fire struck and Georges Braque, for two, were slighted. The edge it and his paintings. Especially if an adventurous artist of new European art was represented by FRAN- does work as disparate and noncommercial as Arman- CIS P ICABIA and M ARCEL D UCHAMP whose do’s, valorize any city that honors its own. NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE, NO. 2 (1913) inspired outraged reviews in the press (a newspaper critic dubbed it “Explosion in a Shingle Factory”). Of the 174 works sold, the preponderance of 123 were ARMITAGE, MERLE made by European artists. The general un-sophistication of the American public notwithstanding, nearly a half (12 February 1893–15 March 1975) million people saw the Armory Show in New York, ten By most measures the most distinctive book designer thousand visitors arriving on the final day, and at its of his generation, Armitage used, in a summary by his later venues in Chicago and Boston – many of them admirer DICK HIGGINS: remembering it for decades afterwards.

color and printed end leaves in most books, few rules or ‘spinich’ (characteristic of Bauhaus and ARMSTRONG, LOUIS Art Deco design), large page folios, minimalist title spreads with very large type size, unusual (4 August 1901–6 July 1971) mixtures of typefaces, and, in his later books, A precocious horn player from an indigent family, recurring visual motifs, such as a Navaho rug in a he was gigging in black bands around his native New book on Stravinsky. Orleans as a teenager. By 1922 he went to Chicago to play in Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, a prominent group, Armitage also authored and edited many volumes about making his first recordings with them in 1923. Quick modern art and modern dance, in addition to working to exploit the possibilities of records for disseminating as a promoter, publicist, and presenter of concerts, for his music, initially to black audiences, eventually to a which he customarily designed memorable brochures. larger multicultural public, he made countless record- Typically he worked with smaller American publish- ings with innumerable assortments of other musicians. ers and often self-published. Among his numerous books By 1925, still in Chicago, he organized his own groups – were anthologies of criticism about IGOR STRAVIN- initially the Hot Five, later the Hot Seven, etc. SKY , M ARTHA G RAHAM , A RNOLD S CHOEN- Armstrong’s first musical innovations were rhyth- BERG, and GEORGE GERSHWIN. Though many of mic. As the cultural critic Albert L. Murray (1916– these volumes were reissued in their times, few are in 2013) put it, Armstrong became: print now. He worked briefly as an art director of slick magazines and in titling design for Hollywood studios. the intimate beneficiary of ragtime and stride, Armitage reportedly declared, “I write in order to have the shift from the popularity of the 3/4 waltz something to design.” Accent on Life (1965) is Armitage’s beat of the operetta to the 4/4 of the fox trot, the autobiography that is stylish both verbally and visually. one-step, the two-step, the drag, the stomp, the ARP, JEAN/HANS • 19

Afro-U.S. emphasis on percussion and on synco- other parts, out of the great tradition. An idiosyncratic pation, the break, stop time, and so on. artist who mocked artistic ambition, Arneson managed through his self-deprecating humor to stand alone. On a different sense of time, initially learned in —Mark Daniel Cohen black New Orleans, Armstrong founded an African- American modern music, incidentally becoming more influential than B IX B EIDERBECKE , an Iowa-born ARP, JEAN/HANS German–American cornetist, who epitomized a more Caucasian style of horn-based jazz. (Whereas Beider- (16 September 1887–7 June 1966; aka Hans A.) becke died from disease exacerbated by excessive alcohol, and certain later jazz stars succumbed early to Born a German citizen in Strasbourg, Arp moved eas- heroin, Armstrong’s principal daily recreation/distrac- ily between France and Germany (and thus between tion was reportedly marijuana.) On the strength of his two first names), between the French and German art, coupled with his persistence, Armstrong success- languages, and between visual art and poetry. In the fully imported African-American street culture into all first respect, he made abstract reliefs dependent upon of America’s living rooms. Given the strength of racial cutouts and highly distinctive sculptures utilizing cur- prejudice, not to mention the practice of segregation, vilinear shapes. He worked with automatic composi- during the first half of the 20th century, this was no tion, chance, and collaborations. He appropriated the easy feat – forging a cultural path that other African- epithet “concrete art,” even though his biomorphic American musicians have since successfully pursued. forms were quite different from the geometries of Once Armstrong’s reputation as a trumpeter was T HEO V AN D OESBURG , who originated the term, securely established, he became a successful vocalist, and MAX BILL , who popularized it. Arp spoke of in a gravelly innovative style uniquely his, as his facil- wanting “to attain the transcendent, the eternal which ity to syncopation influenced later singers. One suc- lies above and beyond the human.” Papiers déchirés he cessor, Tony Bennett (1926), often credits Armstrong composed by tearing up paper whose pieces fell ran- with inventing uniquely American solo vocalizing. domly onto the floor in an analog to the “automatic Armstrong even released best-selling disks in which writing” of S URREALISM . He wrote: his famous trumpet took a back seat to his voice. One credible hypothesis holds that he always wanted to be I continued the development of glued works by a singer, indeed always sang, and regarded his trum- structuring them spontaneously, automatically. peting as extending his singing voice. Well-managed I called this working “according to the law of and generous with his time, Armstrong played in the chance.” The “law of chance,” which incorporates largest and most prestigious venues around the world all laws and is as inscrutable to us as is the abyss and appeared regularly in films and on radio and then from which all life comes, can only be experienced television, working steadily until his death. by surrendering completely to the unconscious.

So profoundly did Arp believe in the implications of his ARNESON, ROBERT method, he added, “I claimed that, whoever follows this law, will create pure life.” One quality common to his visual art and his poetry is simplicity of shape and color. (4 September 1930–2 November 1992) Integrating contraries, his art seems to belong to Arneson is the only innovative artist other than Surrealism as well as to D ADA , to C ONSTRUC- P ETER V OULKOS to make ceramics his chosen TIVISM as well as to Expressionism. With two first medium. Unlike Voulkos, who took his inspiration names, speaking two languages, he became the mas- from the ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST ferment ter of the pun. To the British art critic David Sylvester that surrounded him and sought to enter the rarefied 1926–2001), Arp mastered “the visual pun made by a realm of high artistic aspiration, Arneson was more shape that means two or three different and incongru- down to earth, so to speak, in his work with clay. He ous things at once and hints, moreover, at referring to aimed satirical barbs at pomposity and self-importance, further things that can’t quite be identified.” Bingo. particularly his own. Arneson’s many ceramic self-por- Arp also published criticism that included Die Kun- traits combine references to art history, such as Chinese stismen (Isms of Art, 1925), written in collaboration with bowls and Roman columns, with comic renditions of his E L L ISSITZKY , in which the two participants persua- face, genitalia, hands, and feet. He portrays himself as a sively identified all the avant-garde movements dating very ordinary human being trying to poke his head, and back to 1914. Oddly, this percipient text is not reprinted 20 • ARS ELECTRONICA in the standard English-language anthology of Arp’s with a similarly short life span) were coined with the writings. Not unlike other Dadaists, he evaded conscrip- intelligence of advertising and promotion rather than tion into World War I with a certain theatrical style. As art criticism and art history. (What is surprising is that the American writer Matthew Josephson (1899–1978) most of the “critics” adopting such opportunistic epi- tells it, the German consul in Zurich gave Arp: thets survived their decline and disappearance, perhaps illustrating how the business of criticism differs a form to fill in, listing about thirty questions from the life of art.) starting with his birth. He wrote down the day, month, and year – 1889 [ sic] – on the first line, repeated this for all the rest of the questions, ART RESEARCH CENTER (A.R.C.) then drew a line at the bottom of the page, and added it all up to the grand total of something (1964) like 56,610! Founded in Kansas City by T. Michael Stephens (1941) as a Midwestern outpost of international CON- Did his reputation gain or lose from his having a sur- STRUCTIVISM, this heroically modest “nonprofit” name that sounded like the English word for Art and has presented exhibitions and sponsored presentations thus prompted such deprecating epithets as Arp’s Art? ever since, occasionally venturing elsewhere, always true to its esthetic. In their home city, lacking a solid ARS ELECTRONICA headquarters, A.R.C. ingeniously utilized public spaces and temporarily vacant storefronts and offices, often with artists from elsewhere in the world. Respecting (1979) the tradition of the BAUHAUS and DE STIJL, its logo What began as an annual festival of arts exploring new consists, illustratively, of a yellow triangle, a red square, technologies became the foundation for a museum that and a blue circle, but in (highly American?) fluorescent probably ranks among the largest and most advanced colors. Among the other Constructivist art collectives of its kind. Always located in Linz, Austria, the biannual were Anonima in Cleveland, OH, during 1960 to 1971, gathering became annual in 1986 and then a limited and GRAV, an acronym for Groupe de Recherche company in 1995. The Arts Electronica Center opened d’Art Visuel, in Paris from 1960 to 1968, both of whom in 1996 in a big building on the Danube River, the incidentally portrayed themselves as scientific optical operation subsequently growing alongside increasing researchers. Comparable alternative groups struggle interest in these new arts. Since remodeled in 2009, this elsewhere around the USA; few survive as long as “Museum of the Future” has interactive exhibits, VIR- A.R.C. TUAL REALITY simulators, 3-D videos, robots, and much else unimaginable only a few decades ago. Beside it is a FutureLab with both staff and guest research- ART WORLD ers. Nonetheless, AEC’s sponsors have issued several books, how 16th century, with a German publisher (1960?) experienced with printing visual art with rich colors. Much understanding of significance in recent art depends upon this concept that circumscribes people seriously involved in artistic MODERNISM, ART POVERA, L’ART CONTEMPORAIN, whether as creators, critics, or sponsors. Thus, what ART INFORMEL, ART BRUT, ART might appear to be a meaningless gesture in the out- AUTRE, SUPERREALISM, NEW side world, such as sitting silently at a piano, becomes significant within an art world, more specifically in ESTHETIC, ART OF THE REAL, its contribution to the history of modernist music. To TRANSAVANTGARDE, NEO-GEO, those familiar with the earlier music of the composer UNEXPRESSIONISM, ETC. JOHN CAGE, the performance in 1951 of absence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds (then These terms are grouped together because they were the maximum time available on a 12-inch 78 rpm used at one time or another to merchandise a new recording disk) was initially recognized as extend- group of artists. Although some of the individual artists ing his earlier well-established interest in incorpo- promoted under these banners might have survived, rating into his music those sounds produced without the terms did not, mostly because they (and others musical instruments. This absence of intentional ARTISTS’ COLONIES • 21 music-making gains further resonance from, first, ARTFORUM the frame of a concert including other music, within a venue where modernist music was previously pre- (1962) sented, and then the presence of a pianist (DAVID TUDOR) already renowned for playing advanced By common consent, the heaviest of the regularly pub- music. Thus, by such resonant FRAMING, a move lished art magazines, this has developed an implicit meaningless to laypeople gains meaning within an function that is not immediately obvious. By printing acknowledged art world. extended, mostly appreciative articles about exhibi- By the same enhancing process did, say, ANDY tions that have closed or work that isn’t commonly WARHOL’s paintings of common objects gain sig- available, Artforum is less about reviewing (and thus nificance. Similarly, only to followers of architects can implicitly selling) new work, say, than about shaping a proposal for a building unbuilt have meaning. Such art chatter less among professional artists than in the effort extends the art-world’s traditional magic of art schools. Thus can Artforum establish reputations establishing value, sometimes great value, upon objects of professors as well as artists. One theme of the self- that common people judge trivial. anthology from its pages, Looking Critically (1984), is Contemporary music’s Art World slightly overlaps that the second word refers less to evaluation, as nega- with that in the visual arts, which scarcely in turn inter- tive notices are rare, than efforts at clarifying mysteries, acts with that in literature where, say, semblances of customarily with ideas drawn from philosophy. Much chopped-up prose have long been accepted as “free like other things learned in universities, Artforum can verse.” be initially intimidating unless it is mastered. Not unlike other sophisticated modernist monikers this one got vulgarized to identify people who visit gal- leries and museums. ARTISTS’ BOOKS This term arose in the 1970s to encapsulate anything bookish made by individuals established in the visual ARTAUD, ANTONIN arts world or, sometimes, who had just gone to art school. Like most art terms based on biography, rather (4 September 1896–4 March 1948) than the intrinsic properties of the art, it was a marketing device, designed to sell works to an audience Artaud is the author of a hypothetical book so extraor- respectful of “artists”; because of the biographical dinary, Le Théâtre et son double (1938; The Theatre and base, the term forbade qualitative distinctions, “better” Its Double, 1958), that it bestowed authority on every- artists not necessarily producing superior books. thing else he ever did: books of plays, his poems, his Artistically considered, alternative book forms should movie appearances, his notebooks, even his persistent be called BOOK-ART the produce, book-art books madness. (A more familiar example of this syndrome (to further distinguish them from “art books,” which are would be the authority that the theory of relativity illustrated books, customarily in a large format, about bestowed upon Albert Einstein, albeit in different visual art). Some of us have favored this esthetic defi- ballparks.) nition over the autobiographical, without success so far. Influenced particularly by Balinese dancers he saw in Paris in the early 1930s, Artaud imagined a Western theater that would neglect realism and nar- ARTISTS’ COLONIES rative for kinetic images, rituals, and even magic. Such theater could surround the audience, even enticing it (1898) to participate. Thus, under the banner of “theatre of cruelty,” he forecast not only Peter Brook’s (1925) Throughout the 20th century, artists have gathered more radical productions and the LIVING THE- together, usually in some rustic setting, to create a resi- ATER, but also HAPPENINGS and subsequent dential community in which they could live and work PERFORMANCE art. Though Artaud aspired to apart from bourgeois pressures. Other benefits included create consequential avant-garde art and sometimes close support of each other’s efforts and the sharing of did inspired performances of his own texts, it is as a critical intelligence. Among the earliest were Ogunquit theorist and an artistic “personality” that he is mostly in Maine and Worpswede in North Germany. Whereas remembered. Curiously, he is among the few major the first centered upon an art school opened in 1898 by artists to have the epithet “art” embedded within his the painter Charles Woodbury (1864–1940), the latter surname. counted among its more eminent members the painter 22 • ARTISTS’ SOHO

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907). Around the turn that he began as a fairly experimental writer. His long of the 20th century a certain building within DOWN- poem “Europe” (1960) is a classic of acoherent dif- TOWN Manhattan, 51 West Tenth Street, became a mini fuseness, which is to say that it connects words from a artists’ colony with a gallery and the studios of several variety of sources, barely connecting them. When this prominent artists. Around World War I MAN RAY par- poem appeared in Ashbery’s second book, The Tennis ticipated in a short-lived colony in Ridgefield, NJ, across Court Oath (1962), the critic John Simon (1925), a sure the Hudson River from Manhattan. A later example in barometer of conservative prejudices, wrote, “It never America was THE LAND, which for decades housed deviates into – nothing so square as sense! – sensibil- several major avant-garde figures. None of these bucolic ity, sensuality, or sentences.” None of Ashbery’s many retreats ever had more than a few dozen people. later poems equal “Europe” for esthetic deviance in In the late 1960s, by contrast, the former Bell Labs my opinion (acknowledging that others might disagree in Manhattan’s far west Greenwich Village was reno- with me). Ashbery also coedited two moderately avant- vated to become Westbeth whose many spaces with garde English-language literary journals published in uncommonly tall ceilings were offered to certified art- France, Locus Solus (1960–62), named after a book by ists at rents far below the market levels. More promi- R AYMOND R OUSSEL , the eccentric earlier French nently, ARTISTS’ SOHO, by further contrast, was an writer on whom Ashbery wrote his M.A. thesis, and Art industrial slum that became an art town , sort of a de and Literature (1964–68). No one else has successfully facto campus, further downtown within NYC, with sev- explored, in the bulk of his writing, such a great numeral hundred working artists, if not more, many of them ber of forms indigenous to Poetry. avant-garde, some not. The concentration of so many After he received three prominent literary prizes painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, et al. within a for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), Ashbery’s square mile created a large esthetic hot house. professional life changed precipitately. He received university positions and praise from academic critics, becoming the principal example in two arguments: ARTISTS’ SOHO First, nothing, but nothing, will elevate the reputation of a sometime experimental writer as successfully as See SOHO. a “major prize.” Second, once an independent writer becomes a professor, the quality of his or her work ARTMANN, H. C. declines. Ashbery became, enviably perhaps, the only American poet whose books appear nearly biannually (12 June 1921–4 December 2000; b. Hans Carl A.) from commercial houses, establishing a bibliography nearly as long as that of, say, Hugh Fox (1932–2011) or I wanted to write an appreciative entry on this legend- Lyn Lifshin (1938), two American poets much loved ary linguistically sophisticated and adventurous Vien- only by smaller publishers. nese poet who in (West) BERLIN around 1983 spoke Perhaps because Ashbery’s effects are so subtle and to me in English he first learned during World War II he is uniquely skilled, those acknowledging his influ- in a POW camp in Wales (!). Artmann was the princi- ence rarely write as well. pal older figure in the Wiener Gruppe (Vienna School) He also published art criticism that, in contrast to of writers who were decidedly more avant-garde than the sophistication of his poetry, seems amateur. those residing in the smaller Austrian city of Graz. So innocently I purchased over the Internet a book titled The Best of H. C. Artmann (1975), edited by Klaus Reichert, a Frankfurt professor of English, who also ASHER, MICHAEL once spoke to me in my native tongue. However, all this framing notwithstanding, this paperback book’s con- (15 July 1943–15 October 2012) tents were entirely in German without any translations Asher’s field of concern has been the exposure of the or any glosses in English. Joke’s on me and, alas, them. institutional environments and social power structures that determine the nature of what is accepted as art. ASHBERY, JOHN His method is to rearrange the elements in existing exhibition spaces to emphasize the conventions under which they are displayed. His two Chicago projects in (28 July 1927–3 September 2017) 1979 are the most effective examples of his method. Because Ashbery had by the 1990s become the epit- At the Art Institute of Chicago, he moved a statue of ome of the “Major American Poet,” it is easy to forget George Washington by Jean-Antoine Houdon from ASSEMBLAGE • 23 the top of a staircase to the room below, suggesting the came in a box, customarily undated. For instance, issue transformation of a 1917 sculpture into a contempo- # 8, guest edited by DAN GRAHAM and designed rary installation by the merest gesture. At the Museum by GEORGE MACIUNAS, had a characteristic of Contemporary Art, Asher removed aluminum pan- cover by JO BAER, a one-page score by PHILIP els from the exterior of the building and installed them GLASS, texts by ROBERT MORRIS, YVONNE inside, implying their alteration into artworks. RAINER, LA MONTE YOUNG, JACKSON MAC More critiques of art than works of art, his efforts LOW, EDWARD RUSCHA, creating an avant-garde have an advantage over B RUCE N AUMAN’s critical museum in progress. inversions of the circumstances by which art is viewed. This Aspen’s apex, issue “5+6,” likewise undated, was Nauman’s assaults on the viewer amount to nothing both edited and designed by BRIAN O’DOHERTY more than assaults on the viewer. Asher’s projects sug- and dedicated to STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ. Inside gest a coherent idea: that we struggle to see and inter- this box are cardboards with which the reader could pret a work of art wherever the exhibiting institution build a sculpture by TONY SMITH; a booklet with tells us it is to be found; and without such institutional poems by MICHEL BUTOR and Dan Graham; aegis, we might not see art at all. another booklet with texts by SOL LEWITT, T. Smith, MORTON FELDMAN, and O’Doherty; and five plas- —Mark Daniel Cohen (1991) tic 7-inch “flexidiscs,” as the thin plastic records were Billing himself as a “sculptor,” Asher was most then called. One disk contains a SAMUEL BECKETT ephemeral. The London art reviewer Richard Cork text read by the actor Jack MacGowran, and WILLIAM (1946) wrote in 1973 about entering a London gallery BURROUGHS and Alain Robbe-Grillet texts read by basement that seemed empty. their authors. A second disk had the percussionist Max Neuhaus’s realizations of scores by JOHN CAGE and I had to ask the gallery owners to show me where Feldman. A third contained manifestoes by MERCE the art was! The answer, it transpired, lay in the CUNNINGHAM and NAUM GABO read by their point at which the wall of the room touched the authors. A fourth had creative texts by MARCEL floor. All the way around, a thin but palpable inci- DUCHAMP and RICHARD HUELSENBECK read sion had been made in the base of the walls so that by their authors. The fifth record was an interview with they appeared slightly detached from the floor. Merce Cunningham. Were that not enough, the box also included a reel of 8 mm films by HANS RICHTER , In 2010, the Whitney Museum gave Asher a prize for L. MOHOLY-NAGY, STAN VANDERBEEK, and proposing to open its premises around the clock, pur- ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, along with a hand-held portedly making it permanently accessible to the out- viewer. If anyone published anything polyartisticly com- side world. (Rewarded with a week, Asher got only parable elsewhere or since, I don’t know about it. three days.) In between Asher was at CAL ARTS an Needless to say perhaps, none of the publishers of inﬂuential professor whose legendary “Post-Studio periodical reprints for libraries have ever duplicated Crit” class is memorialized in Sarah Thornton’s Seven Aspen . Days in the Art World (2009). The most comparable literary magazine was Tom Bridwell’s Soma-Haoma whose fourth issue (1974) came in film can 7 inches high and 5 inches in diameter; its ASPEN seventh issue (1976), in a wood box.

(1965–71) ASSEMBLAGE Incidentally the name of a renowned Colorado ski resort, as well as some other institutions elsewhere, (1950s–’70s) this five-letter word had more presence in the 1960s as the name of a uniquely distinguished polyart peri- This term was purportedly coined in the early 1950s by odical. Its publisher was Phyllis Johnson, a former edi- the French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–85) initially for tor at Advertising Age and Women’s Wear Daily , who lithographs made from paper COLLAGES and then, claimed her Aspen to be “the first three-dimensional more influentially, for small sculptures made from magazine.” papier-mache, scraps of wood, sponge, and other debris. The customary epithet “periodical” would be insuf- The word was popularized by a 1961 exhibition at New ficient, as it appeared irregularly. While late issues York’s Museum of Modern Art, whose catalog spoke were collections with loose-leaf sheets, an earlier one of works that “are predominantly assembled rather 24 • ASSEMBLING than painted, drawn, modeled, or carved.” On display in terms of groups, not individuals.) In my judgment, were by-then classic collages along with sculptures by the Atlas apex is the witty and intricate Oulipo Com- L OUISE N EVELSON , RICHARD STANKIEWICZ, pendium (1998), assembled by Brotchie and HARRY J OSEPH C ORNELL , and E DWARD K IENHOLZ , MATHEWS. This masterpiece of its kind, at once whose contribution was really a tableau (which differs introductory and definitive, went into a larger aug- from sculpture in having a theatrical frontside, forbid- mented edition (2005), much like this Dictionary , inci- ding close access). Eventually the epithet “assemblage” dentally. At translating into English certain strains of functioned best as a definition for three-dimensional advanced European writing, Rosmarie and Keith Wal- collage. drop’s Burning Deck Press (1961) works similarly, if more modestly, mostly with poetry.

ASSEMBLING ATONALITY (1968) (1908) This has become the generic name for a book/periodical in which contributors submit copies of whatever This term became current in the 1910s among Viennese they want to include and their paper(s) is collated and musicians who felt they were avoiding the traditional bound into finished books. Meant to service alternative bases that defined both major and minor scales. The work, such collaborative media made the contributors technique of atonal writing depended upon the uncon- responsible for design and typesetting, eliminating strained use of all notes, as though they had equal “editorial” objections and interference. The name is weight, regardless of previous “harmonious” relation- taken from Assembling (1970–83), which was founded ships, thereby creating music that seems to float above by Henry James Korn (1945), later an arts administra- any foundation. ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, for tor, and R ICHARD K OSTELANETZ , who also pre- instance, refused to use a key signature in his work from pared a retrospective catalog, Assembling Assembling the 1910s, preferring, in NICOLAS SLONIMSKY’s (1978), for an exhibition in an alternative space, an art- phrases, to let “the melody flow freely unconstrained school gallery. Scarcely the first, though consistently by the rigid laws of modulation, cadence, sequence, the thickest, serving the largest constituency of writer/ and other time-honored devices of tonal writing.” artist self-printers, Assembling had a long life, second (Slonimsky adds that Schoenberg himself, predisposed only to Art/Life , published monthly from 1981 to 2006 to Viennese precision in language, preferred the term by Joe Cardella (1945–2018). Assemblings continue to “atonicality,” because his music lacked not tones but appear around the world. Appreciative of true freedom tonics and dominants, which had been the traditional of publication, Géza Perneczky (1936) has become the touchstones of Western harmony.) principal historian of this radical movement with his Once the principle of atonality was understood, the book Assembling Magazines 1969–2000 (2007) that question arose whether there hadn’t been precursors. was published in Germany doubled-columned with his PAUL GRIFFITHS, among the more sophisticated native Hungarian adjacent to an English translation. music critics ever writing in English, says that It could be said that the sum of self-prepared artists’ home pages on the I NTERNET represents an unmedi- atonal means of order MAY be distinguished ated Assembling. as far back as Mozart: one locus classicus is the Commendatore’s grim statement in the penul- timate scene of Don Giovanni (1787), where in ATLAS PRESS seven bars he touches eleven of the twelve notes. Still more striking is the opening of Liszt’s Faust (1982) Symphony (1853–57), where the unharmonized theme strikes the twelve different notes within Founded in England by Alastair Brotchie (1952) and the first thirteen. Malcolm Green (1952), it has, in the tradition of the THEMERSONs’ Gaberbocchus Press (1948–79), Griffith continues, “One may say there is here translated into English certain extreme European the threat of atonality, but the threat does not begin avant-garde literature connected to such combines as to be carried out until dissonant harmonies are sus- DADA, SURREALISM, OULIPO, ‘PATAPHYSICS, tained over a longer period, as they are in several of VIENNA ACTIONISM, and much else that would Liszt’s late piano pieces (1880–86).” My own opinion otherwise be unavailable. (How European to think is that those predecessors’ practices were too slight to AUDEN, W. H. • 25 represent a radical position (that would, say, warrant and sculptural, later geometric paintings, monochrome an entry in a book like this). canvases, and extreme atonality in music. In a dialectical interpretation of modern musi- More artistically questionable perhaps has been the cal tonality, atonality becomes the antithesis that is introduction of materials commonly judged uncouth, resolved with the discovery of S ERIAL M USIC as such as cow dung or pickled carcasses, all respecting a new, alternative structure for the strict ordering of (or exploiting) Duchamp’s urinal from decades before; pitches. In fact, after 1923, neither Arnold Schoenberg but once the dirty works of Damien Hurst (1965) and nor ANTON WEBERN returned to nonserial ato- Chris Ofili (1968), among others, were purchased by nality, having previously completed their dialectical established art collectors and then appreciated favor- synthesis. (I coined the epithet ACOHERENCE as a ably in public print – once the audacity emblazioned literary analog, initially to characterize the early poetry in their exhibition was accepted – their status as Art of JOHN ASHBERY, who is musically sophisticated, was assured. but now as a definition for all writing that eschews traditional grammatical and semantic structures.) Though AUDEN, W. H. much recent music could be defined as atonal, the term is no longer used, or useful. (21 February 1907–29 September 1973) The more that an adventurous writer writes, the ATTIE, DOTTY more likely it is that some of his publishing might be really good. Similarly, the more an adventurous well- (20 March 1938) supported modern writer publishes, the more possible it is that some will be avant-garde. What was true for Taking the comic-book form of sequential panels, Attie EDMUND WILSON was also applicable to W. H. has made an unusually allusive art that echoes classi- Auden whose more avant-garde work appears not in cal painting, particularly Jean Auguste Dominique his fluent portentous verse, which influenced at least Ingres (1780–1867), and Victorian literature, particu- two generations of lesser English-language poets, but larly Anthony Trollope (1815–82), in addition to comic in some of his ancillary writing forgotten by even his books. Her square, bordered panels tend to have either more fervent admirers and, alas, misrepresented even picture or text, in either case with propelling a narra- by his most loyal publisher. tive; and beneath the innocuous surface are hints of Letters from Iceland (1937), written in collabora- menace and nightmare. The pictures are usually drawn tion with his fellow British poet Louis MacNeice, is from details in masterpiece paintings (thus making her not a continuous travelogue but a marvelous, multi- work comparable to music compositions that draw faceted pastiche of two kinds of verse (one to each phrases from the classics). “Often as not,” writes the author), reportage, spirited personal letters (appar- curator Howard Fox, “her stories involve the nobility ently addressed to real people), and some verbatim of another century, usually in polite company at formal documents about their exploration of a North Atlan- social occasions. This innocent facade seems to mask tic island, itself a unique work of art on the fringe of an underlying corruption. ” Western Europe. After comments on Icelandic poli- tics, society, and literature (though oddly omitting the inviting outdoor steam pools, perhaps because these AUDACITY young men didn’t swim) comes their most stunning conceit of a joint “Last Will and Testament,” whose Perhaps this quality was always appreciated in art, well-turned lines incidentally shows that these aspiring but only in the 20th century has audacity become writers knew familiarly many of their most prominent such a positive attribute. The measure is simply an contemporaries. audience’s mouth-dropping awe before something One additional element here, unusual in any poet’s that is so beyond their notions of acceptability, if not book, is the poet’s own photographs, in this case understanding. The historical exemplar was, of course, Auden’s, reflecting his recent prior experience writing MARCEL DUCHAMP’s Fountain (1917), which unusually poetic soundtracks for British documentary was a store-bought urinal that an established artist films. Not only are Auden’s pictures distinguished in offered to a juried art exhibition (which rejected it). sum, but they make an invaluable contribution to the Whereas this epitomizes content-audacity, as I’ll call whole that incidentally precedes the American clas- it, formal audacity is something else, perhaps epito- sic of photographs + texts – James Agee and Walker mized by CUBISM in its many forms both painterly Evans’ LET US PRAISE FAMOUS MEN (1939). 26 • AUDIO ART

It is unfortunate that Auden’s photographs weren’t the soundtrack is composed before the image and/or included in the 1967 Faber reprint of Letters from the video artist also works in audio art or music compo- Iceland that was reissued again in 1985. In the lat- sition. The master here is R EYNOLD W EIDENAAR , ter edition, indeed, nothing is said about the Auden who indeed took degrees in music composition before photographs other than to credit him with the image turning to video, whose best videotapes incorporate his of a horse’s back half on the book’s cover. Whereas own music compositions. a reprint of Letters with only words is commonly This procedure of sound preceding image is scarcely available, the superior complete original was scarce new. Some classic cartoons were produced this way – until posthumously reprinted in the initial volume of it’s hard to imagine how WALT DISNEY’s F ANTA- Auden’s Prose and Travel Books in Verse (1996). To SIA could have been made otherwise. Likewise the no surprise perhaps, Letters isn’t mentioned in some excerpts that comprise Opera Imaginaire, an anthol- Auden bibliographies, beginning with the one on Wiki- ogy of imaginative French television programs, mostly pedia in 2011. Another favorite innovative Auden text based on familiar recorded arias, which were subse- for me is his brilliant chart of literary romanticism (c. quently released on commercial videotape. ORSON 1942), which I rescued from his executor, the Columbia WELLES, who made classic radio programs before he English professor Edward Mendelsohn (1946) for my produced films, reportedly recorded the soundtrack of anthology Essaying Essays (1975, 2012). his films before he shot any footage, finding in sound a Oddly, Auden dropped his more avant-garde surer guide to visual-verbal narrative art. esthetic interests (as well as earlier tastes for pop music and new architecture) soon after immigrating to America in the late 1930s, whereas other Europe- AUDUBON, JOHN JAMES ans often discovered in the USA kinds of alternative culture unavailable back home. How come? My sense (26 April 1785–27 January 1851; b. Jean Rabin) is that Auden became in America a favorite of a class So familiar have his images of birds become that it’s of people, lumpen academics, whose British peers had hard for us now to imagine how original they and their already rejected him as too avant-garde. Insecure in artist were in their own time. Whereas the principal his personal life by turns Christian and gay, Auden per- American painters did portraits of people, he did birds haps accepted too much direction from his enthusiasts. as though they were people. No one before him painted animals in such close detail and then not just a few but AUDIO ART hundreds, his theme becoming American uniqueness. Rather than merely exhibiting his drawings, Audubon courageously self-produced books (1827–39) that he (1980s) made available initially to subscribers, who became his This term arose to define esthetic experience based on patrons. While these drawings have often been repro- sound, as distinct from music on one side and language duced with varying degrees of quality, his original print- on the other. It can exist in live performance, whether ings have sold for millions of dollars. Among the many on radio or on stage, as well as on audiotape. Typical books about Audubon, the most profound was pub- pieces of audio art are about the sound of something – lished in 1936 by Constance Rourke (1885–1941), who say, the sound of seduction, the sound of the language of is better known for her masterful American Humor prayer, the sound of particular cities, or sounds of nature. (1931), whose theme is also American uniqueness. (P.S. Among the major practitioners are J OHN C AGE I publish this here because the theme is attractive to (particularly in his early Williams Mix [1953]), SOR- me and the summary superficially credible, though I’ve REL HAYS (especially in her Southern Voices , [1981]), been reliably informed that it’s repeatedly erroneous, J ACKSON M AC L OW , Makoto Shinohara (1931, espe- beginning with the omission of ALEXANDER WIL- cially in City Visit [1971]), Frits Wieland (especially in SON. May I hope that no other entry here is so askew.) Orient Express ), and N OAH C RESHEVSKY .

AUERBACH, ERICH AUDIO-VIDEO TAPES (9 November 1892–13 October 1957) (c. 1980) As a literary scholar awesomely adept at seeing large This is my coinage for video art in which the image in small bits, he wrote, while a German Jew exiled in accompanies highly articulate sound, usually because Turkey during World War II, an extraordinary book, AUTOBIOGRAPHIES • 27

Mimesis (1946; English, 1953), most of whose chapters used computers not only to make music but to create begin with long quotations from literary works from interactive situations for live ensembles. Homer and the Old Testament through St. Augustine, Boccacio, and Honore de Balzac, among others, to AUTOBIOGRAPHIES Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), courageously, as she had died only a few years earlier. In a series of extended (forever) analyses, Auerbach locates different “representation[s] of reality,” which is to say each writer’s unique view of Odd it is that there are so few by genuinely avant-garde the world. Given his genius for especially close reading, figures mostly because, may I suppose, the best were one theme is that intentionally innocent sentences can rarely celebrated enough for commercial publishers unintentionally bear considerable literary and histori- to contract them. Even then, publishers typically pre- cal weight. After World War II, his masterpieces trans- fer from celebrities conventionally limited narratives lated into English, Auerbach came to America before with an abundance of gossip over intelligence about dying too young. Easy to adapt and praise, his achieve- their art(s). An example would be Kenneth Rexroth’s ment in such sensitive close reading can’t be topped; An Autobiographical Novel (1966), which initially the closest analogue is LEO STEINBERG on visual art. appeared from Doubleday. Curious it is as well that so few avant-garde artists’ autobiographies are formally unusual. To the degree AURA that HENRY MILLER’s greater books are factual rather than fictional, they constitute a monumental An invisible halo bestowed upon the greatest works autobiography. BUCKMINSTER FULLER’s printed of art that places them above serious criticism, even “Chronofile” is, by contrast, a succinct chronological if they are commonly disparaged and/or the possibil- self-presentation reportedly drawn from a “Dymaxion ity of an aura initially denied. Precisely because such Chronofile” that, by contrast again, contains copies of works were often dismissed upon first appearance, the everything copyable, so to speak, that Fuller assembled aura gains virtual presence from having been earned daily in his long professional life (1920–83). The gath- through the appreciation of audiences, rather than ering of the latter/larger at the Stanford University bestowed from a single higher authority like, say, a Brit- Library is reportedly 270 feet long and thus would best ish knighthood or a Presidential Medal. For readers of be reproduced not in print but as digitized files, which this dictionary, certain entries here have acquired such would represent a significant departure in autobio- veneration; others, no doubt not. graphical publishing. One of the more unusual avant-garde book autobiographies is James Laughlin’s Literchoor Is My AUSTIN, LARRY Beat (2014), which was composed not by the author but posthumously by his successors, gathering materials both verbal and visual from various sources to (12 September 1930) document an unusual life in an unusual form. Since its A professor who founded the extravagantly produced publisher was NEW DIRECTIONS, which Laughlin periodical Source: Music of the Avant-Garde (1967– (1914–97) had founded, consider that this book has 74), which printed variously alternative scores and the further distinction of being, so to speak, posthu- interviews, as well as including 10-inch records of pre- mously self-published. From a New Directions author viously suppressed music, Austin has worked adven- comes the precursor for this – WILLIAM CARLOS turously with E LECTRONIC M USIC , live electronic WILLIAMS’s I Wanted to Write a Poem (1958), which performance, and theatrical conceptions. I remember was likewise composed by another person and, curi- best The Magicians (1968), which was performed on ously, initially published by another firm before being Halloween on a stage bathed in black light, with two reprinted by New Directions. screens that apparently swiveled with the breeze. The At roughly the same time that Gertrude Stein was performers included several children performing ele- writing her ironically straight Alice B. Toklas (1933), mentary tasks, singing songs that resounded through she was drafting “Lifting Belly,” her most ambitious an amplification system that treated soft, high notes lesbian text that can be read as implicitly autobio- gently. Austin spoke of this piece as a “time object. I graphical. (While the former was a best-seller, the lat- wanted to take music out of the context of a dramatic ter appeared, to no surprise, posthumously.) So is flow of consequential events and to lose, as much as WILLIAM FAULKNER’s “1699–1945 The Comp- possible, the sense of time.” More recently, Austin has sons” (1946) implicitly autobiographical. 28 • AUTOGRAPH

Starting at the age of 40, I’ve produced five auto- DIETER ROTH’s Diaries (1987; posthumously 2012, biographies, one for each decade since, that are not which the artist/author translated into English himself), continuous narratives but collections of shorter self- in addition to H.C. ARTMANN’s Das Suchen nach dem revelatory texts. LYN HEJINIAN, by contrast, has gestrigen (1964) and Tag oder Schnee auf einem heißen developed her My Life (1980, 1987, 2003, 2013) as an Brotwecken (1978), Günter Brus’s irrwisch (2000), incremental text. One special literary move was MAR- Otto Muhl’s Weg aus dem Sumpf (1977), none of which TIN GARDNER’s review under the pseudonym of have yet appeared in English translation. I wish I knew George Groth of his own The Ways of a Philosophi- enough Spanish to read RAMÓN GÓMEZ DE LA cal Scrivener (1983), which should be remembered SERNA’s seductively titled Automoribundia (1948) among the few avant-garde moves ever made in the and enough French to read untranslated autobiogra- otherwise RETROGRADE The New York Review of phies by GEORGES PEREC. Books . Much of LUCAS SAMARAS’s work, especially with words, is audaciously autobiographical. ROB- AUTOGRAPH ERT RAUSCHENBERG’s three-panel Autobiog- raphy (1968) is a masterpiece of visual and verbal What increases value in art, whether in a book or on a summary in mid-career (at 43, as he lived to be 82). painting, almost magically, are scratches reflecting lit- MERCE CUNNINGHAM’s great BOOK-ART, erally a golden touch ascribed to certain hands. Dare Changes (1969, with Frances Starr), is as much an not underestimate the crucial value of this minor detail. autobiography as descriptions of the choreogra- On my walls are four silkscreened prints made by AD pher’s unique purposes. This wrongly forgotten book REINHARDT just before his death and thus unsigned, was published by DICK HIGGINS’s SOMETHING though they would be worth much more had he lived ELSE PRESS. His own Jefferson’s Birthday/Postface long enough to add merely his initials. Proof poof. (1964) and Foew&ombwhnw (1969) weave together several precociously autobiographical strands in exemplary BOOK-ART. Marcel Jean’s The Autobiog- AVERY, TEX raphy of Surrealism (1980) is actually a highly selective chronological anthology of the participants’ writings, (26 February 1908–27 August 1980; b. Frederick B. A.) all audaciously titled. Marcel Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise (1935–41; After directing some “Oswald the Rabbit” cartoons Box in a Suitcase) is a boxed self-retrospective that is for Walter Lantz (1899–1994) at Universal in the mid- implicitly autobiographical. SOL LEWITT’s Autobi- 1930s, he became a principal creator of Bugs Bunny ography (1980) is wholly pictorial. While the sum of (1940, in A Wild Hare), a truly iconic figure who sub- CHUCK CLOSE’s numerous self-portraits constitute sequently appeared in over 150 films as an anarchis- a visual autobiography, BRIAN O’DOHERTY’s Name tic protagonist who survives all adversity (as, needless Change (1972) documents an important development to say, a descendant of preternaturally wise rabbits in in his own life both visually and verbally over ten pan- American folklore and literature). What distinguished els 5 feet wide. For a strictly visual autobiography in a the best Avery cartoons from WALT DISNEY’s, say, single image few can top EL LISSITZKY’s The Con- are such qualities as quicker pace, a sharper edge, con- structor (1924), a PHOTOMONTAGE that acknowl- tinuous detailed movement, greater violence (though edges his earlier work. A case can be made for ON no injury is permanent), unsupervised activities (typi- KAWARA’s documentation for decades of his daily cally without, say, both cops and parents), improbable activities as nothing but autobiography scrupulously situations (rather than realism), and a nightmare from devoid of “opinion, mimetic duplication, self-analysis, which a protagonist cannot escape. sensual responses, feelings, attitude, ego, sentiments, One of my very favorites, Billy Boy (1953), portrays memories, joys, terrors, dreams, and fantasies.” By con- an insatiably voracious goat that eats up everything trast, both NICOLAS SLONIMSKY’s and ARAM around him until he is rocketed to the moon, which he SAROYAN’s memoirs are more conventional. devours as well. As a linear narrative wholly eschewing So under-noticed have formally inventive autobiog- digression, epiphany, or climax, this comes to a grue- raphies been that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some conclusion. Among Avery’s other creations were others exist. Chilly Willy the Penguin, Lucky Ducky, and Droopy P.S. My colleague Malcolm Green (1952), a very the sorrowful-looking Dog. Among the masterpieces helpful British artist residing in BERLIN, recommends starring the last is Droopy’s Double Trouble (1951), in AYLER, ALBERT • 29 which Droopy has an identical twin, Drippy, who ter- into the countenance of this wind rorizes a canine lummox named Spike who can’t distin- the bright light of unpeopledness guish between the two. Avery’s Bugs Bunny cartoons 1967 (Translated from are widely available on videotape. He also nurtured Russian by Alex Cigale) the talents of CHUCK JONES, I. M. Freleng (1906–95; Igor Satanovsky aka Friz F.), and other WARNER BROTHERS animators prior to his quitting them in 1940. AYLER, ALBERT

AYGI, GENNADY (13 July 1936–25 November 1970)

(21 August 1934–21 February 2006) Considered by many to be one of the most original poets writing in Russian in his lifetime, he had also published in his first Chuvash language, which is indigenous to the Chuvash Republic in Russia. (Chuvashi are a Turkic ethnic group, native to an area stretching from the Volga Region to Siberia, and their language is the most divergent variant of Turkish.) Aygi mostly wrote in Russian after 1960, encouraged by Boris Pasternak (1890–1960). Paying special attention to the visual structure, he was much influenced by KASIMIR MALEVICH’s views on both poetry and painting. By combining motifs of Chuvashi folklore with ideas of Russian, French, and German avant- gardes, Aygi wrote poetry which was at once distinctly pastoral and neo-modernist, and sounded strange to the Russian ear. He claimed that his poetry is neither Figure 1 Albert Ayler, saxophone; Donald Ayler, trumpet. rhymed nor free verse, but rather rhythm-oriented. As Photo by Frank Kofsky. Courtesy Special Collections, University his longtime translator Peter France notes in the essay Library, University of California Santa Cruz. Frank Kofsky Audio “Translating a Chuvash poet,” Aygi’s poems often and Photo collection. sound like incantations, “perhaps like the chanted prayers which Aygi inherits from his grandfather, the More than any other, Ayler realized the highly abra- last pagan priest of his village.” sive, EXPRESSIONISTIC music that became the avant-garde edge for the younger jazz cognoscenti in Returning to Baudelaire the 1960s. He performed on the tenor saxophone, often in collaboration with his brother Donald (1942–2007), a smouldering a trumpeter. Among the records that epitomize his (from the paper style is Bells (ESP, 1965), which captures a live con- into the world) – cert at New York’s Town Hall on 1 May 1965. He dis- the master covered in the saxophone acoustic qualities unheard as though before and unavailable to anyone else. (One story has somewhere the older saxophonist John Coltrane, upon first meet- of apparentness: ing Ayler, simply asking him, what kind of reeds are you using?) I have played this single-sided record for a face people who think themselves enthusiasts for every- like God’s – in the ashes – grasped: thing “way out,” only to watch them wince. Ayler’s of the not-“I” of the mind body was found in New York’s East River; the cause of crackling – with a ﬂ ame! . . . – his death has never been explained.