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Poetry Plastique. - book review
Art in America, Feb, 2002 by Raphael Rubinstein
Poetry Plastique, edited by Jay Saunders and Charles Bernstein, New York, Marianne Boesky Gallery and Granary Books, 2001; 96 pages, $20.
The most recent golden age of American poet-painter collaborations was nearly half a century ago, in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was the period when, to cite just a few examples, Frank O'Hara was making "poem-paintings" with Norman Bluhm, lithographs with Larry Rivers and collages with Joe Brainard; Joan Mitchell was contributing illustrations to a volume of her friend John Ashbery's poems; the indefatigable Brainard was making collaborative comics with seemingly every poet he encountered, including James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch and Ted Berrigan; and even Andy Warhol, later to worship at the altar of Eurotrash, was pursuing dialogue with serious poets such as Berrigan. The era has been recently chronicled in exhibitions such as "In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art" [see A.i.A., Feb. '00] and last year's retrospective devoted to Joe Brainard at P.S. 1. Warhol's unexpectedly extensive involvement with poetry is examined in Reva Wolfs 1997 study, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s.
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This creative density appeared to diminish in the decades that followed. The poetry scene changed as poets entered academia in increasingly large numbers and were dispersed from the Lower East Side to college campuses around the country. At the same time, styles of art arose--Minimalism, Conceptual art, Earth art--that seemingly offered less scope for poetic collaboration than those which had preceded them. By the 1980s, not only had the presence of poets been dispensed with in some sectors of the art world, but even a sense of community with other artists was under threat. Speaking during a 1993 panel on artist-writer collaborations, Neo-Expressionist painter Eric Fischl described how, compared to the 1950s, "the 1980s were darker and more alienated, we lost that romantic feeling. One worked alone. Then because of the explosion of media you didn't hang out the same way you used to, you read about each other." And when successful artists like himself did hang out, it was at expensive restaurants. "Poets are poor," the pragmatic (or perhaps just hard-hearted) Fischl pointed out and thus had a difficult time keeping up socially with the prominent artists of the day. What distinguished the 1950s from the 1980s, apparently, was the difference between the price of a beer at the Cedar Bar and the cost of a dinner at Barocco.
This is not to suggest that poet-painter collaborations abruptly came to an end in the mid-1960s. The 1970s saw impressive (though at the time practically clandestine) collaborations between Philip Guston and poets such as Clark Coolidge, William Corbett and Bill Berkson [see A.i.A., Sept. '95]. In the 1980s, the independent French publisher Collectif Generation brought together a wide range of poets and artists, many of them Americans, to create experimental volumes in limited editions. There have also been isolated cases of painters such as Francesco Clemente, Trevor Winkfield and Jane Hammond who have a passion for working with poets. Lately, however, there have been signs of a wider rapprochement between the realms of poetry and visual art.
In contrast to the 1950s, when painters and poets often turned out collaborative paintings, prints and drawings, these days the book seems to be the favored form for such interactions. An excellent example of a recently published book made by a painter and a poet is Drawn & Quartered, a volume that reproduces 54 drawings by Archie Rand, each of which is accompanied by a quatrain by poet Robert Creeley. A New York painter known for creating image-rich canvases, often at mural scale or in lengthy series, Rand here exercises his virtuosic drawing abilities. Each vignette, usually showing one or two figures, is a little anthology of effects, combining contour drawing, crosshatching, chiaroscuro, graphic boldness and delicate detailing. The atmosphere is rarely contemporary, with many of the scenes evoking a 19th-century Europe of salons, shtetlach, military campaigns and eccentric scholars. There are also occasional sorties into the biblical Middle East. Rand fields a wonderful cast of characters and architectural backdrops, all drawn with an unmatched wit, vigor and sense of art history.
Creeley, who wrote the accompanying verses in a single session as Rand passed him the previously completed drawings, varies his approach. Sometimes he puts words into the mouths (or minds) of Rand's figures, as when a naked female model says to the man making a sculpture of her, "Am I only material / for you to feel? / Is that all you see / when you look at me?" For other drawings, the poet provides condensed commentary. Underneath a drawing of an anxious-looking woman and child, he writes, "Are they together? / Grandmother and granddaughter? / Is there some fact of pain / in their waiting?" Rather than straining to compose perfectly finished verses, Creeley responded to the impulsive spirit of Rand's drawings. Occasionally the speed shows, as when Creeley has a farmer lamenting the death of his horse when the deceased animal in the drawing is clearly bovine, but more often he comes up with pithy, plausible captions, sometimes of wonderful elegance. My favorite, accompanying a dramatic drawing of a man kneeling before a stack of paper sheets, is this memorable expression of how, in life, futility and exuberance can go hand in hand: "All these pages / to turn, / all these bridges / to burn."
