brit editions

rod and kevin discuss a brit edition of the collected poems of george oppen relative to the various u.s. editions. this was one enjoyable discovery of browsing a mainstream bookstore in england this summer, as i pointed out a while back without going into much detail.

in some cases, the carcanet two-volume collected poems of william carlos williams are essentially identical to the u.s. new directions editions but with more interesting covers...

in other cases though, you get an edition unlike anything in the u.s., for example these two distinct selected frank o'hara books. published not quite two years apart, the thinner earlier volume apparently contains o'hara's semi-serious poetics statement "personism: a manifesto," while the more recent volume offers a slightly more generous selection (180 some pages as opposed to 90 some). this latter appears to be the same as the selected that don allen edited for knopf back in the 1970s (and which carcanet had printed earlier too). question is, aside from the cooler looking covers, what are they thinking with these marginally different editions?

fall museum preview

culled from ken johnson's piece in the nytimes (subscription only, email me if you want the whole thing) from a few weeks ago. very eastcoast-centric, but i include exhibits closer to some of you and also within my possible striking distance (travelling exhibits noted when the info was available,... hello san diego!)

John Armleder, About Nothing: Works on Paper 1962-2007
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
through December 17, 2006
John Armleder (b. 1948, Geneva, Switzerland, lives Geneva) is a performance artist, sculptor, and painter, whose multi-faceted activities are connected by drawing. Affiliated with Fluxus in the late 1960s and 70s, the value of ephemerality and notion that art is the conduction of creative energy are imperative to his work. During the 1980s, his "furniture sculpture" was highly visible within the context of "New Geometry" or "Neo Geo." This is the first major exhibition of John Armleder's work in the United States.

Enigma Variations: Philip Guston and Giorgio de Chirico
Santa Monica Museum of Art, California
through November 25, 2006
...will explore the influence of de Chirico’s distinctive vision on Guston, while illustrating Guston’s ability to transform inspiration through the inimitable lens of his creative consciousness.

Massive Change: The Future of Global Design
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Through December 31, 2006
Conceived by the internationally renowned designer Bruce Mau, the exhibition invites viewers to consider the dynamic future of design culture and the real choices we must make. Massive Change is dramatic, engaging and critical, immersing visitors in a series of powerful encounters with the latest innovations in the fields of urban design, transportation, information design, revolutionary material and more.

Picasso and American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC
Through January 28, 2007
Picasso's influence on American artists is the theme of a show juxtaposing Picasso's works with those of Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and others. Travels to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Feb. 23 to May 28); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (June 17 to Sept. 9, 2007).

Steve Reich at the Whitney: A Performance Event
Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC
Sunday October 15, 2006 2 - 6 pm
The Whitney pays special tribute to Reich with four hours of Reich’s music performed by some of today’s most exciting young contemporary music ensembles, including Alarm Will Sound, Prism Saxophone Quartet, So Percussion, and the Manhattan School of Music’s TACTUS, as well as Ransom Wilson and other accomplished Reich performers.

Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966
Morgan Library and Museum, NYC
Through January 6, 2007
The first big museum exhibition to study Mr. Dylan's early career will present historical artifacts -- handwritten lyrics, letters, instruments and photographs -- as well as films of performances by and interviews with him and others.

Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York
Guggenheim Museum, NYC
October 10, 2006 – January 21, 2007
The first major United States exhibition since 1977 to be devoted to this Italian avant-gardist known for slashing and puncturing his painted canvases and metal panels.

Courbet and the Modern Landscape
The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
October 15, 2006 - January 07, 2007
Courbet's landscape paintings of the 1860s defined the essential artistic issues that would concern the next generation of avant-garde painters (who would be called the impressionists), changing the course of painting for the next 100 years. Despite its enormous significance, Courbet's landscape painting received surprisingly little consideration in exhibition form. This show will focus on 37 landscape paintings, which demonstrate how Courbet was a radical innovator both in the motifs he chose to paint and in the dramatic brushwork of his paintings.

Barcelona & Modernity: Picasso, Gaudi, Miro, Dali
Cleveland Museum of Art
October 15, 2006 - January 7, 2007
The first comprehensive exhibition (over 300 works) to focus on the Catalan Renaissance, a period of extraordinary artistic fertility centered in Barcelona from the late 1880's until Franco took power in 1939.

Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan
New York Public Library
October 20, 2006 - February 4, 2007
The Japanese literary tradition, dating from as early as the 8th century, is among the richest and most enduring of any country in the world, and ehon, or "picture books," although little known in the West are one of the glories of world art. Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan will demonstrate the variety of visual languages used by artists over many historical periods from 764 to 2005. It will include approximately 200 books with printed illustrations, as well as related manuscripts, drawings, woodblock prints, and photographs.

John Latham: Time Base and the Universe
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, NYC
October 29, 2006 - January 8, 2007
An exhibition of approximately thirty works by the late British artist John Latham (1921-2006). Conceived with the artist prior to his death in January 2006, the show surveys the major stages of his career, spanning over fifty years. With his uncompromising endeavor to explore some of the most complex cosmological ideas through art, and due to his criticism of the art market, he was both acclaimed and vilified in his lifetime. Visceral and enigmatic, his work encompassed sculpture, performance, installation, film, conceptual, and book art.

Music is a Better Noise
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
October 29, 2006 - January 8, 2007
Music is a Better Noise brings together musicians who make art and artists who make music, or for whom music is an integral part of their creative process. The exhibition, featured in two parts in P.S.1’s first floor Drawing and Painting Galleries, also includes a video program in the Vault.

Brice Marden retrospective
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
October 29, 2006 - January 15, 2007
From his monochromatic abstractions of the 70's to his recent compositions of meandering colored lines, Mr. Marden has produced the most consistently sensuous and elegant American painting of the last four decades. This retrospective will present 50 paintings and 50 drawings from all phases of his career. Travels to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Feb. 17 to May 13).

Albers And Moholy-Nagy: From The Bauhaus To The New World
Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC
Through January 21, 2007
Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy were two of the greatest pioneers of modernism in the twentieth century. This exhibition focuses on their individual accomplishments as well as the parallels in their work and examines their groundbreaking development of abstract art beginning in the early 1920s.


Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
November 4, 2006 through January 24, 2007
The first consideration of Louis’s work in the United States since 1986 and offers a critical re-examination of this influential painter’s legacy. Featuring approximately 30 canvases produced from 1951 through 1962, Morris Louis Now examines the work that defined Louis’ career and that contributed to a critical turning point in American art. Louis worked in an innovative manner by “staining” the canvas with thinned acrylic pigments, using intense, rich washes of color to create unified compositions. Travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (Feb. 17 to May 6).

Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination
Smithsonian American Art Museum
November 17, 2006 - February 19, 2007
The first full-scale survey of this great American Surrealist in 25 years includes boxes, collages, films and graphic designs among its 200 works.

Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
November 19, 2006 – March 4, 2007
Will present forty to fifty Magritte paintings along with an equal number of paintings and sculptures by international artists working over the past forty years and will include the work of Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins, Joseph Kosuth, Sherrie Levine, Richard Artschwager, Jeff Koons, Martin Kippenberger, Jim Shaw, Raymond Pettibon, Robert Gober and Marcel Broodthaers.

looking even further ahead: bruce nauman in berkeley, jasper johns at the NGA...

negative ads

adam nagourney offers the following in the nytimes the other day:

Republicans and Democrats began showing at least 30 new campaign advertisements in contested House and Senate districts across the country on Tuesday. Of those, three were positive.

[...]

The result of the dueling accusations has been what both sides described on Tuesday as the most toxic midterm campaign environment in memory. It is a jarring blend of shadowy images, breathless announcers, jagged music and a dizzying array of statistics, counterstatistics and vote citations — all intended to present the members of Congress and their challengers in the worst possible light. Democratic and Republican strategists said they expected over 90 percent of the advertisements to be broadcast by Nov. 7 to be negative.

welcome to yankee-style democracy, where the tools of the trade are lies and slander, the engine is money, and the net outcome is precisely an anti-democratic one. don't be fooled: negative advertising is not a unique-to-this-moment response to the important issues of the day. it is a carefully premeditated tactic with one goal and one goal only: make potential voters so disgusted with the whole political process that they choose not to exercise their right to vote and stay home, thereby ensuring the perpetuation of the status quo.

small-press poetry stats

nice to see john latta back in blog world with isola di rifiuti (which he's apparently been running since may, thus showing how current i am). repeated trips through his earlier hotel point will be well rewarded, trust me.

recently latta offered his take (the second section in a three-part post) on ron silliman's take on the attention span project of steve evans. each year since 2003 evans has invited readers to contribute lists of up to 11 recent poetry titles (or general books or recordings or films or performances or events) that have been most significant to them, with or without brief statements of why. evans posts the lists, and also compiles some statistics on which titles and publishers get cited most frequently. (i contributed a list, with comments, for the first time this year.)

the results are always interesting, especially the individual lists. but as i mentioned to david buuck and ca conrad in a private email yesterday, such things have about as much sociological significance as a survey on dailykos that says "click here if you hate bush." as most of us are aware, results from self-selection sampling can rarely be extrapolated to a general population with any confidence or accuracy. first, you can't identify or assess the full population that actually could have contributed a list. second, since self-selectors may have specific motivations for responding, you cannot correct for biases introduced into the sample on account of those motivations or take into account the biases of those who choose not to respond. and so on. (in fact, i am a perfect case in point: i contributed a list because increasingly i'm finding the books of poetry most important to me are being written by women and i wanted that fact to be registered.)

in any case, latta is spot on when he refers to silliman's "bean-counting" and calls this "a dumbshow algebra of proof." let me be clear: i do not disparage bean-counting. in fact i find it to be a very useful activity when the context calls for it, and silliman can be among the very best there is in this regard. but 46 responses from an estimated field of 10,000 isn't just one of "some methodological limitations" as ron calls them, it's tantamount to no methodology at all -- if not entirely "meaningless," according to latta, "as a data-set for statistical analysis," then at the very least pretty near insignificant. the resulting analyses in this case makes for a terribly poor showing of poets trying to be sociologists while misapprehending basic principles of statistical analysis.

i also find the competitiveness such attempts at numbercrunching fosters -- a competitiveness i might add that lies at the heart of global free market capitalism and that i would like to think small-press poetry opposes on more than a nominal level -- utterly disheartening. lisa robertson appears on these lists so frequently because she is a fantastic poet, pure and simple. must we then pit this fact against rodrigo toscano's only having appeared once a year? he's also a fantastic poet, such lists completely notwithstanding. sure, they give us some insight into reading habits from which perhaps some general inferences can tenatively be made. beyond that -- and to the extent that they foster the competitiveness, branding and who's-hot-who's-not faddism of larger marketplace banalities -- pseudo-sociological analyses derived from the attention span stats ultimately do small-press poetry a disservice.

fahrenheit 9/11 and the path to 9/11

the rightwingers are congratulating themselves in their latest round of "spot the liberal hypocrites." they say that liberals insisted on the inherent truths of michael moore's fahrenheit 9/11 and yet denounce the forthcoming ABC mini-series the path to 9/11 as fabrication. i refer you to mario loyola, karl, rightwingsparkle, marc schulman, curt, newyank, mark, vern beachy -- and i'm sure there will be others.


i'm no big fan of moore myself, but let's make one thing clear: the crucial and obvious difference between ABC's mini-series and moore's film -- one that i daresay negates the analogy altogether -- is of course the medium and not the message: the production and consumption of a hollywood movie remains entirely within the realm of personal and private enterprise, while a TV mini-series makes use of public airwaves that are licensed by the FCC on behalf of the american public. the more appropriate analogy thus might very well be less with fahrenheit 9/11 than with the swift-boat propaganda film stolen honor: wounds that never heal.

of course ABC's parent company disney has already made its political leanings evident when it blocked its subsidiary miramax from distributing fahrenheit 9/11 -- well within its rights of private enterprise of course, so this is all really no surprise.

dewey redman 1931-2006

when i started getting serious about free jazz in my last two years of college, i had a radio show on the crappy campus station and eventually played exclusively my new discoveries in the genre. fortunately what the station lacked in audience it made up for in decent vinyl, and i quickly learned that anything on arista/freedom was likely to be worth a listen: braxton, art ensemble's paris sesions, cecil taylor's nefertiti, julius hemphill's dogon a.d., and of course, look for the black star by dewey redman -- these were the slabs that i nurtured a taste originally nursed on ornette coleman and john coltrane.

it's actually criminal that redman's debut leader date, look for the black star, is out of print and not commerically available in any format. from the rollicking joy of the title track, side one moves into the slight samba feel and hesitant, inquisitive break of "for eldon." side two begins with the brief, pensive atempo "spur of the moment" before launching into the album's other centerpiece, "seven and one," another joyous and possible kirk-esque piece whose theme alternates between hilarious stop-starts and uptempo freebop. the side closes with another thoguhtful ballad, "of love." like i said, it's an utter disgrace that this music cannot find a place in a marketplace which is thereby doing the world a tremendous disservice.

at least his impulse work made it to CD, with the ear of the behearer reissue being filled out with four tracks from the subsequent coincide. while perhaps best known as a sideman for ornette coleman and later keith jarrett -- his discography as a leader is sporadic and in shambles -- and known also for a spawning a famous tenor playing son named joshua, dewey redman was an utterly unique and accomplished player in his own right. i'll never forget sitting with rod smith at my place one evening listening to my newly=pirchased copy of coleman's new york is now, and the lovely, plaintive opening composition "the garden of souls." it clocks in at just under 14 minutes long, the first 8 or so minutes of which are taken up with an extended coleman alto solo, whcih a little after 5 minutes double-times up the tempo and cooks along at that pace for another 4 minutes before simmering back down. at 9:54 this low foghorn rolls in outta nowhere! rod and i both stopped in mid-conversation and stared at the stereo in silence: what the hell was that? redman frequently vocalized while playing, he sang or hummed or shouted amidst, beneath or overtop the saxophone soundings to create wonderful dissonant and emotive effects. and let's not forget to his explorations on the musette -- one of few contemporaries (aside from giuseppi logan and bill cole i suppose?) to take up the invitation of asian reed instruments in any serious way.

a truly underappreciated modern master who will be missed, dewey redman has received a suitable tribute from al nielsen....

       THE EAR OF THE BEHEARER (after Dewey Redman)

       Dewey eyed
       Playback to
       Where the I goes
       Ghost wholes
       Half-choked holds
       Rest a while

       Funcityhues
       Lo sadidy dues
       Blue Redman

       Coincident black star
       Signs oud
       Dithering zither
       Deed seeds

       Somnifacient meditation
       Almost Eldon

       Differing in unison
       Boody image in
       Dis
       Guise

       Vertiginous
       Variance

klee and jacquot

rounding out my holiday weekend of film and about-to-close art shows, i trekked over to the phillips collection yesterday for the first time in probably 2-1/2 years, and certainly since their new wing opened up, apparently just this past april. before even heading up to the "paul klee in america" exhibit i browsed around and was quickly reminded what i fine permanent collection they have. by people i know -- an early pollock, a great motherwell, (chi ama, crede) that i can't find a photo of, gustons (early and late), a nice albers and noland, two interesting early rothkos and a little "rothko room" with four (i think) of his more mature works. plus, lots of nice pieces by people i don't know at all -- john walker's october low tide, maine and ostraca II, howard hodgkin's torso, and joan mitchell's august, rue daguerre.

klee is someone i've had an affinity with going back to grade school, maybe 5th grade. i think they had some students from the local college come in and teach us some art at some point, because i remember being to look through art books and find something you liked and imitate it. the result is one of very few surviving childhood artworks of mine, never having thought i had much talent. but i titled it "head of an archaeologist by paul klee" and i've never found any painting of klee's by that name but i'd surely like to figure out some day what professional's head i was imitating that day.

anyway this was a terrific exhibit (it's up through this sunday), with something like 80 of his works on display, mostly from the 1920s i'd say though some into the 1930s. i have to say a number of things that struck me about klee: first, luminosity. der angler is a great example of this. he frequently manages to get this incredible luminosity behind the central figures in the paintings; although it's a very different quality, rothko immeidately comes to mind as someone for whom luminosity is an important quality.

second, palette: what an incredible range of colors he draws upon, so unlike the next couple of generations i think (rothko, still, reinhardt) as much as i like them.


(Photographs by Mark Harden)



third, scale: utterly modest, they don't try to bowl you over with their awesomeness. fourth, media: an incredible variety (oil, water, mixed with various other substances and applied to all kinds of surfaces) and yet with a remarkable consistency. and fifth, lines: clear and for the most part precise. notice in all this i fail to call attention to the whole "childlike" quality that is so often taken to characterize his work. it's too easy a characterization i think, misses something somehow. it's an other part of consciousness he's tapping into, bringing together many of the impulses of his surrealist peers without being reducible to any of them.

------------------

benoît jacquot's musician-assassin was a strange film. the protagonist, gilles, is a violinist who is so convinced of his own excellence that he refuses to compromise his genius by earning money playing in an orchestra or teaching. it could be an interesting commentary on artistic integrity and the marketplace, but the dramaturgy unfolds in such deadpan that it's hard to do anything but take gilles to be a joke or parody of integrity ad absurdam.

i'll be curious to see where the rest of the NGA's jacquot mini-retrospective turns out.

menken and kiefer

refusing to let ernesto spoil the last day of my summer, i went down to the national gallery to see martina kudlácek's 2005 documentary notes on marie menken. (an aside: the free films in the basement of the national gallery's east wing are one of the true treasures of life in this nation's capital. i don't take advantage of it as often as i should but this month they're featuring films by benoît jacquot so i'll be checking that out.)

knowing next to nothing about menken except that she was an experimental filmmaker, and not even having heard of her when i published a poem of drew gardner's named after her a few years ago, turns out that she didn't just teach andy warhol how to make films. one of the very first things i see and hear upon walking into the movie 30 minutes late -- never trust the city paper's screening times! -- is stan brakhage claiming that the single most important filmmaking predecessor for his own concerns is marie menken! of course, kudlácek then cuts immediately to an excerpt of menken's eye music in red major (1961) and the connection is more than obvious.

readers in DC have one more chance to see this at the NGA (sunday at 2pm), and it's worth it not only for pure info and background. there are moments when it's quite nicely shot too: one scene in particular where kudlácek's footage of a carnival ride litlerally morphs into pure brushstrokes. there are some moments too where the narrative wanders and makes the film feel like it was really only a 70-minute film that was stretched to make it 97 minutes (particularly when we follow gerard malanga into queens to visit his father's crypt). other moments tho were quite a joy: malanga discovering footage of menken and warhol shooting footage of each other on a rooftop and him and warhol making silkscreens in warhol's studio in late 1963 for example; kenneth anger talking about how marie and her husband used to get drunk and spar with each other all weekend; brakhage describing menken's discovery of the hypnogagic vision; peter kubelka describing the poetics of the bolex camera; and jonas mekas singing and translating the lithuanian children's song that menken sang to him once.

i then decided i'd better see the "anselm kiefer: heaven and earth" show at the hirshhorn before it closes next weekend. (typically, it was here all summer and i might have missed it altogether.) i think overall i'm not really crazy about kiefer's work, tho there are aspects to it i do like. on a level of painterly technique i do like the texture of the big oils on the big burlap canvases, but his palette is so limited, so unremittingly dark. (the watercolors he did in the 1970s, like winter landscape, offer quite a refreshing contrast: brighter color, cleaner lines.)

thematically he's also so... obvious. darkness, big darkness, massive inhumanity, a bit of humor (dark of course). really leaves so little to the imagination. even when kiefer gets sculptural and puts affixes objects into the flat dimensions of the canvas -- like the hierarchy of angels that has an airplane propeller in it, the title an obvious nod to rilke's duino elegies -- it's all so obvious in ways that rauschenberg for example never is.

however i do like him more as a book artist, especially when he combines that with his cosmological speculations. there are the early (1969) books called the heavens which look to have simple watercolors and pasteups in them. then there's cauterization of the rural district of buchen (1975), books made up of old canvases of his that he had burned.


followed two decades later (this is hardly a complete survey, i'm just pulling stuff i mades notes on and that the hirshhorn website has pictures of) by book with wings (1992-1994), which speaks for itself


more recently we get the secret life of plants (2001), a giant upright book that asserts the kinship between individual plant cells and the starry heavens...


followed by for robert fludd (2003) which resembles a giant book of start charts with mages made of lead, meteorites, this time featuring giant lead books on a bookshelf that has been pummeled by meteorites

which means i guess i like kiefer the book artist far more than keifer the painter.

tonight: comets on fire at the black cat!