A Dictionary of the American Avant-Gardes

Richard Kostelanetz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351267021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte americana

For this American edition of his legendary arts dictionary of information and opinion, the distinguished critic and arts historian Richard Kostelanetz has selected from the fuller third edition his entries on North Americans, including Canadians, Mexicans, and resident immigrants.

Typically, he provides intelligence unavailable anywhere else, no less in print than online, about a wealth of subjects and individuals. Focused upon what is truly innovative and excellent, Kostelanetz also ranges widely with insight and surprise, including appreciations of artistic athletes such as Muhammad Ali and 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 Ambrose Bierce and Nicolas Slonimsky (both with individual entries), Kostelanetz offers a "reference book" to be treasured not only in bits and chunks, but continuously as one of the ten books someone would take if they planned to be stranded on a desert isle.

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Abstract Expressionism

(c. 1948)

If only because it emphasizes esthetic qualities, this term has come to be the most acceptable epithet for the innovative painting that became prominent in NEW YORK CITY in the late 1940s (and was thus sometimes called the NEW YORK SCHOOL). Drawing not only from Surrealism but from JAZZ-based ideas of improvisatory gestural expression, certain artists laid paint on the canvas in ways that reflected physical attack, whether in the extended dripped lines of JACKSON POLLOCK or in the broad strokes of FRANZ KLINE. “Action painting,” another epithet once popular for this style of painting, was coined by the critic HAROLD ROSENBERG, who theorized that these abstractions represented the artist’s mental state at the moment(s) of composition. One esthetic common to such painting was “all-over” composition, which is to say that the activity could be just as strong near the edges of the canvas as in the center, purportedly in contrast to the more hierarchical focusing typical of traditional art.

Willem de Kooning’s work is customarily placed within this term, even though his best paintings acknowledge figuration and focusing; so are BARNETT NEWMAN and AD REINHARDT, perhaps because they were roughly the same age as the others (and resided mostly in NEW YORK CITY), even though their art proceeded from decidedly nonexpressionist premises. A European epithet for comparable painting was art informal.

Acconci, Vito

(24 January 1940–27 April 2017)

He began as a poet and translator; and though Acconci subsequently had a distinguished career as a visual artist, mounting exhibitions and producing videotapes as well as presenting live performance and installations, his poetry remains his most innovative work. One 350-line poem was distributed one line per page over 350 separate sheets of paper, which were then bound into 350 copies of Acconci’s otherwise uniform magazine, 0 to 9. His definitive work is Book Four (1968), which he self-published in photocopies. As literature on the cusp of conceptual art, it contains a series of self-reflexive texts, beginning with a page that reads at its upper left: “(It stopped back.),” and then at its lower right: “(This page is not part/of the four books/and is at the top),” with the page entirely blank in between. Book Four concludes with a Gertrude Steinian text in which separate sentences, in sum suggesting a narrative, are each preceded by the numeral “1.”

Of Acconci’s performance pieces, I remember best one in which he invited you into a kind of confessional booth and told you an authentic secret; another in which he sat at the bottom of a stairwell, blindfolded, with a metal pipe in his hand, defending the space in front of him with a genuine violence; a third, Seedbed (1972), in which he purportedly masturbated under a 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 a Catholic art concerned with abnegation and spiritual athleticism.

Besides performance pieces and writings, Acconci 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 silliness, are striking, though different in quality from his previous work in other forms. A rich career as various as Acconci’s merits a long biography.

Ali, Muhammad

(17 January 1942–3 June 2016; b. Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.)

Defensive boxing wasn’t his invention, but he took its choreography to a higher level. He was among the few star boxers flexible enough to bend backwards to escape a punch and among the few heavyweights to “dance,” which is a boxing honorific for being light on his feet. Among Ali’s defensive strategies, after setting up in a familiar offense stance, was stepping backward with his left foot, thus moving out of his opponent’s normal punching range. When the other guy necessarily moved forward to reset himself, Ali punched without risking return punishment. As a defensive fighter 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 punched themselves into exhaustion, becoming easy prey for Ali’s knock out. Watching him perform was a theatrical pleasure rarely duplicated in his sport. (Those coming close include Jorge Páez [1965], whose mother reportedly owned a circus in border Mexicali; and “Prince” Naseem Hamed [1974], whose fortes were striking costumes and grand entrances.) Early in his storied career, Ali displayed voluble wit. By its end, however, he was mute in public, probably as the result of taking too many strong punches.

Allen, Woody

(1 December 1935; b. Allan Stewart Konigsberg)

His single most inventive film was his first as a director, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), which must be seen to be believed. Taking Japanese action footage, made only a few years before, Allen made a fresh English soundtrack entirely about something else – Jews searching for the world’s best egg salad recipe. This unpretentious formula becomes the platform for rich gags, some of them exploiting Asian stereotypes (in a move probably less acceptable now); others, incongruous juxtaposition.

Though Allen was only 30 when it appeared, Tiger Lily came in the wake of a rich precocious career in comedy that began when he was 17 – scriptwriting for network television shows, providing captions to New Yorker cartoons, taking the stage as a stand-up comedian where he successfully developed the persona of a neurotic, nervous, intellectual, Jewish nebbish. (This 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 comedy.

Two qualities special about Tiger Lily are that it doesn’t depend upon his persona and it realizes mediumistic invention to a degree that Allen never tried again. Tiger Lily is screamingly, continuous funny, at the level of the best MARX BROTHERS, who were Allen’s initial heroes. Only where the producers insert songs by the Lovin’ Spoonful, a fair folk-rock group popular at the time, does this film fall down. Perhaps that last unfortunate experience prompted Allen to retain final creative control of his later films.

Perhaps because he felt more responsible for earning enough money to make yet more films, his later films were less courageously innovative. He got serious; and though Allen didn’t get far in college, he made movies for those who did. No doubt over-(or under-) educated, I fell asleep in too many later Allen films; though, if prompted, I recall some inspired comedy in his Bananas (1971), which was long ago. Nobody else once worthy of an entry here has made the desire to make yet more (and more) films the principal focus of his career.

Of his writings, the most original are “ballets” that he has published here and there over the years.

In his personal life, Allen successfully challenged the politically correct proscription against inter-generational marriage with his sometime partner’s adopted daughter. Surviving negative publicity, they have remained tight for over two decades. Time tells its own truth.

American Abstract Artists

(1936)

Founded in NEW YORK CITY at a time when representational “American Scene” painting was dominant, AAA held weekly meetings, staged gallery exhibitions, and published print portfolios that initially received a hostile reception, especially from those wanting to dismiss it as “European” and thus un-American. In 1940, AAA, representing a disparaged minority, printed a broadside titled “How Modern Is the Museum of Modern Art,” which became the occasion for a visible protest outside the newly venerable institution. Another pamphlet entitled “The Art Critics” savaged the newspaper reviewers prominent at the time. Over the next two decades AAA forged preconditions for the acceptance of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, at least in New York. Though subsequently less combative, AAA survived into the 21st century, often with populous annual exhibitions. When I applied with my visual art nearly always with numerals and words, some gatekeepers at AAA replied that, as presentations of external entities, those were not truly abstract. Esthetically tough and tight AAA still is.

American Religious Art

One uniquely American contribution to the world’s spiritual life has been new religions, many of which originated in the early mid-19th century in a western New York state area commonly called “The Burned-Over District.” Some of these new faiths invented forms of devout respect and religious art unknown anywhere else in the world. I can recall my teacher, the great historian William G. McLoughlin (1922–92), demonstrating around 1960 the extreme physical movements of religious conversion common at the time among various sects 130 years before. Advocates of Spiritualism toured America sponsoring séances, truly heightened performance, promising communication with the dead. With perhaps two hundred women, often still teenagers, working as full-time trance speakers, Spiritualism came and went, perhaps because its avatars were avowedly celebate women at a time when few religious leaders were female. The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, commonly known as the Shakers, also developed innovative styles of domestic furniture that are treasured to this day.

While several of these faiths survived into the 21st century, among those prospering more were Christian Science and, especially, the Mormon Church. Whereas a favorite theme of the former’s art is heaven on earth (e.g., portrayed often in JOSEPH CORNELL, himself faithful), the latter dramatizes its claims for unique revelations in theatrical forms such as performances by the huge Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the annual Hill Cumorah PAGEANT.

Certain radical religions persecuted in Europe, such as the Rosicrucians, found in America freedom not 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 compared to listening to choirs of angels. To the degree that African-American churches have represented a new religion, their NEGRO SPIRITUALS epitomize new uniquely American sacred art.

Andre, Carl

(16 September 1935)

Andre, more than anyone else, persuasively established the idea of a situational sculpture in which materials, sometimes purchased or found (rather than 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 duration of their display there, the parts can be separated and retrieved at the exhibition’s end, if not later organized into a totally different work – what Andre calls “clastic” art. As these works may be taken apart (or gathered up) and recomposed, they look intentionally unfinished and impermanent (thus denying the classic piety that “sculptural art” must necessarily be a finished product); they also look as though someone else could easily duplicate them with commonly available materials.

Therefore, Andre’s sculpture Lever (1966) assumes an untraditional horizontal form, consisting of 137 pieces of separate but visibly identical (and thus interchangeable) firebricks laid side to side in a single line 30 feet across the floor. An adept aphorist (“Art is what we do; culture is what is done to us”), Andre has also written comparably innovative, nonsyntactical literary texts. Although they are exhibited from time to time (and even reprinted in the catalogs accompanying exhibitions), he has resisted collecting them into books.

Anger, Kenneth

(3 February 1927; b. Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer)

A child of the Los Angeles film world, Anger began precociously with a trilogy of surrealist and disjointed films that were juvenile in both content and, seemingly, inspiration, yet nonetheless regarded as an antithesis to slick Hollywood films: Fireworks (1947), Eaux d’Artifice (1953), and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954, recut 1966). Perhaps the best of them is the first, which portrays a young man’s homoerotic dreams. (It reportedly earned Anger a letter from Jean Cocteau, inviting him to come to Europe, where he lived for most of the 1950s. Returning to New York in 1962, he lived initially near Coney Island, where he reportedly learned about socially marginal America.)

Only with Scorpio Rising (1964) did Anger emerge as a mature innovative filmmaker. The subject is motor-cyclists, and this film emphasizes their insane love of their machines, their attempts to imitate film heroes such as James Dean, and their rowdy, implicitly homo-erotic parties. In the third section of the film, against the motorcyclists are juxtaposed some blue-tinted scenes from a black-and-white version of the Christ story. This last contrast is reinforced by the shrewd use on the soundtrack of rock-n-roll music that has the distinct virtue of being at once both resonant and ironic. As Anger’s cutting from one kind of scene to another becomes quicker, Scorpio Rising becomes hysterically funny. The film somewhat resembles Pop painting in its use of very familiar quotations, as well as its author’s ambivalent attitude toward popular materials – in the artful mixing of high culture with low. Also an author, Anger published the classic exposes of individual turpitude (as distinct from corporate sin) in Hollywood, Hollywood Babylon (1965) and Hollywood Babylon II (1984).

Antonakos, Stephen

(1 November 1926–17 August 2013)

Born in Greece, he came to the United States as a child and later studied visual art. Around 1960, he discovered neon, which became his principal medium for art since. Whereas DAN FLAVIN used the other medium of fluorescent light for its peculiar kind of glow, what Antonakos loved in neon was its colors. First he added neon tubes to his assemblages; then he let the lamps stand by themselves. Later he had them fill an entire room, realizing an environment wholly with light. In 1973, he made the radical move of placing ten large neon works outdoors around the architecture of the Ft. Worth Museum, making the entire building into a prop for his giant light sculpture.

Though neon had always been popular in commercial signage, Antonakos appropriated it for modern art by using it abstractly, typically for curved lines apparently suspended in space. Most of his later works he set in public spaces, where they customarily appear without his name attached: on the south side of West 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues in Manhattan; in the Exchange Place PATH station in Jersey City; in the Pershing Square station in Los Angeles; and the Providence Convention Center in Rhode Island. Typically, they are visible from...