Everyone knows that the death this month of John Ashbery deprived us of a great poet. Fewer realize that we also lost an outstanding art critic. It’s understandable. Ashbery often made light of his violon d’Ingres, perhaps in order to ward off the cliché—true enough, as most clichés are—that the New York school into which he was (uncomfortably) pigeonholed consisted of poets involved with the art world. Or maybe he just recognized poetry as the higher calling. David Bergman, the editor of Ashbery’s 1989 volume of selected art writing, Reported Sightings, of course followed suit:

In 1960, when John Ashbery accepted a friend’s offer to replace her as art critic for the Paris Herald Tribune, he was merely seeking employment in a city where Americans found it both difficult and necessary to earn money in order to live. Little did he know that the job would lead “as one thing follows another” into a career in which for the next twenty-five years almost without interruption he worked as a “sort of art critic” for such different journals as ArtNews, Newsweek, and New York. (p.xi)

But Ashbery was well aware that such accidental happenings, one thing following another, as they always do, is as much as we have of what used to be called destiny. His art criticism was important in itself and for his poetry, however much he might have minimized it—“as though to protect what it advertises,” to quote his most famous poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

The commonality between the two parts of Ashbery’s work is evident, first of all, in an inimitable tone, which one discerns as clearly in his critical prose as anywhere else in his oeuvre. This tone is the essence of his poetry, but also of his idea of art. Admittedly, it occurs more fitfully in the criticism than in the poetry, of which it is practically the whole substance. As a jobbing reviewer working to deadline, he could turn out considerable quantities of merely intelligent observations about whatever the subject of his assignment was, allowing (or forcing?) the poet to show his hand in just a stray sentence or two. But there are other pieces that clearly meant more to him, ones in which he was working out the aesthetic principles that would both carry through his poetry and inform his appreciation of painting, drawing, and sculpture.

It’s easy to see that Ashbery’s idea of art was indebted to Surrealism, and Bergman rightly began his selection (thematic rather than chronological) with a section on “Surrealism and Dada.” But Ashbery’s sense of Surrealism was his own, and not André Breton’s; maybe I’d better refer to it as small-s surrealism, not a proper name but a potential broadly distributed throughout the aesthetic field. For Ashbery, surrealism is basically the realization that art is at its best when it is “the product of the conscious and the unconscious working hand in hand.” (p.6) His writing accordingly cultivates a tone of unruffled common sense—and often the substance, rather than just the tone—as a way of staying open to the “irrational, oneiric basis” of it. (p.7)

It is this interpenetration of the banal and the enigmatic that accounts for Ashbery’s singular tone. An example: Of Joseph Cornell he writes, “But the galleries which showed him had a disconcerting way of closing or moving elsewhere, so that one could never be sure when there would be another Cornell show.” (p.14) The statement is ordinary and factual enough; and yet Ashbery sets off unexpected overtones. The simple fact that galleries are typically rather transient businesses somehow becomes an unexpected portal to the more significant mysteries of the ungraspable form that the representation of reality takes on when interpreted by way of an artist like Cornell (or a writer like Ashbery), so that “these eminently palpable bits of wood, cloth, glass and metal must vanish the next moment.” That vanishing points to the great metaphysical question: Does anything exist? Ashbery is sensitive to the way great art often seems to point to nonexistence as the hidden truth of existence.

But that idea, like all those that assert the most potent fascination over certain minds, loses its power when spelled out, as I’ve just so ham-fistedly done. Its force is in its intimation. Ashbery quotes de Chirico quoting Schopenhauer: “To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few moments so completely that the most commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence.” (p.126) Such isolation has nothing necessarily to do with social estrangement or any sort of definitive withdrawal from contact with others—though Ashbery does manifest sympathy with the lost and lonely ones of art (John F. Peto, Patrick Henry Bruce…)—but simply, as Schopenhauer says, a vital moment of distance from everyday life but within it.

This understanding of the essentially commonplace nature of the artistic effects that de Chirico called “metaphysical” allows Ashbery a rare vision of the essential unity of modern art—a unity that cuts across even the most heavily defended stylistic boundaries, including those between art and adjacent cultural fields: “Surrealism has become part of our daily lives,” he explains, and “its effects can be seen everywhere, in the work of artists and writers who have no connection with the movement, in movies, interior decoration and popular speech.” (p.4) No wonder that he finds it to be “the connecting link among any number of current styles thought to be mutually exclusive, such as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and ‘color-field’ painting. The art world is so divided into factions that the irrational, oneiric basis shared by these arts is, though obvious, scarcely perceived…. It’s still what’s happening.” (pp.7-8)

Still today, blinkered art historians would enjoin us not to perceive this overlooked essence, depriving us of the “original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal” perceptions that seem to have come so easily to Ashbery. Sure, everyone acknowledges the roots of Abstract Expressionism in capital S-Surrealist ideas of automatic writing, and it only takes a little nudge to begin seeing the dreamlike qualities of the chromatic fluidity in the work of a color field painter such as Jules Olitski, but his assertion of a Surrealist basis for Minimalism is likely to raise some eyebrows. Surprisingly, Ashbery insists on an art history that is not cyclical or dialectical but linear—much more so than, say, Clement Greenberg’s. “The pendulum has not swung” from an ostensibly irrationalist Romanticism to a more objective and hard-headed art of the real, he insisted, and in fact “the history of art proceeds in orderly fashion, in a straight line.” (p.10) It’s a line that in Ashbery’s eyes passed through something as mundane (and as tangential to any mundane consensus about the mainstream of art history) as a still life by Jane Freilicher, yet Ashbery’s words also resonate with Donald Judd’s praise of Frank Stella’s paintings, in which “The order is not rationalistic and underlying but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another.” One thing following another is Ashbery’s sense of Surrealism and of history.

This sense of continuity is why Ashbery can discern a “metaphysical similarity” (p.17) between Joseph Cornell and Sol LeWitt. He could have quoted LeWitt’s statement that the conceptual artist is a mystic, not a rationalist, leaping to conclusions that logic can’t reach, but he didn’t need to, drawing instead on the experience of the art itself: “Cornell’s art assumes a romantic universe in which inexplicable events can and must occur. Minimal art, notwithstanding the cartesian disclaimers of some of the artists, draws its being from this charged, romantic atmosphere, which permits an anonymous slab or cube to force us to believe in it as something inevitable.” (pp.17-18)

It might be argued that—like Milton’s Satan who carried hell with him, saying, “myself am hell”—the charged atmosphere necessary to see Minimalism in this way is something that Ashbery brought with him, and that the inevitability of the Minimalist object was entirely historical and discursive. But I don’t think so. How could anything so flatly empirical have so quickly given rise, for instance, to Robert Smithson’s earthworks, “wherein the romantic artist’s traditional folie des grandeurs is carried to dizzying new heights.” (p.352) The folie is more affecting for the fact that it may indeed be nothing but folly. In praise of Carl Andre’s sculpture Ashbery cited “its implicit admission that all this may be a put-on, may not be worth your while. The poignancy of this situation heightens our response to a Newman, a Rothko, or an Andre.” (p.230)

Of course, Ashbery’s poetry was often suspected of being a put-on, or not worthwhile. It’s somehow telling that “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” first published in 1974, is a kind of experiment within his oeuvre, an attempt to write the sort of essaylike poem he would never otherwise write, and have it yet be entirely his own and not an imitation of someone else’s style. It succeeded in convincing some of the skeptics that Ashbery wasn’t a put-on. It’s interesting to realize that the poem had its origins in an assignment a decade earlier for the New York Herald Tribune (International Edition), a review of a show of Parmigianino’s and Correggio’s drawings at the Cabinet des Dessins of the Louvre. But an ear for words and phrases, rather than subjects, tells us that the poem’s roots are spread further out into his art criticism. Consider Parmigianino’s hand, “thrust at the viewer” in the poem’s second line, and then re-read the 1967 essay in which he rightly cites Robert Rauschenberg as among those whose art profitably derived from that of Joseph Cornell (and thereby, he says, passed the influence on to Judd, LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Ronald Bladen)—the lesson being “the same in each case: the object and its nimbus of sensations, wrapped in one package, thrust at the viewer, here, now, inescapable.” (p.17) That thrust—Ashbery’s, Parmigianino’s, Rauschenberg’s—remains inescapable. It’s still what’s happening.

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The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Cuneiform, 2015) delves into collaboration between visual artists and writers, and the production and publishing of artists’ books. The complex relationships between writer, artist and audience are inseparable here, in compelling essays that bear charmingly anecdotal voices. The collection was occasioned by a 2011 symposium at the University of Caen in France entitled Collaboration and the Artist’s Book: a Transatlantic Perspective. The book was edited by Anca Cristofovici and Barbara Montefalcone.

Although many of the writers and artists speaking are American, the essays venture to other parts of the world to show a more diverse sampling of works from this and the last century. It seemed it was then that painters quit scribbling signatures on their paintings, and today, artists and writers suddenly have more interfaces than ever to co-create. The inherited illusion of medium-specificity is being forgotten; artists are working alongside one another, sharing materials, duties, and authorship. This collaborative attribute of contemporary artists and writers distinguishes them from many of their precursors. As the poet Bill Berkson has put it, “such sociability is what puts the work in the world.” It’s maybe in identifying with others through the work (often from totally different, sometimes opposing positions) that we find our current zeitgeist.

Most, if not all, of the contributors to the book are regular collaborators, whose collections are often peppered with idiosyncratic, rare, livres d’artistes. Many of the more hard-to-find artist’s books were and are still made in small print runs for small, even niche, audiences. Working to “reaffirm a sort of Renaissance of the ‘book object,’” and point out what is now often central to us as readers — collaboration in its many guises — we hear from Gervais Jassaud, Vincent Katz, Bill Berkson, Susan Bee, Raphael Rubinstein, and editor Kyle Schlesinger, to name a handful.

It should be said that poet-painter collaborations are nothing new; the Banquet Years for some of the featured American collaborators took shape a half-century ago in New York (surprise, surprise). This period constitutes the classical moment of artistic collaboration in the 20th century — with Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and others providing a lasting effect on the poetry and art that has been written since these appearances. That all this is nothing new makes following generations’ collaborations, a great sampling of which is covered here, all the more thrilling. Collaborations by Bill Berkson and Joe Brainard, Berkson and Philip Guston, Ron Padgett and George Schneeman, sparked new and wilder joint works by artists who innovated with new technologies, and concomitant new opportunities. As Schlesinger notes, “Exquisite typography, printing, editing, binding, materials, etc. even when highly understated or reserved, are an equally important form of collaboration.”

Many of the essays do a good job of describing the nuances of collaboration outside of conventional norms, with a wide range of interactions between arts, and of considering how “visibility and new reading experiences contribute to the construction of figures of thought.” The book’s handsomely designed cover bears a photograph of one of the stranger works by Alex Katz: Edwin and Rudy, cutout (1968), a painting on cutout panel, of the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby and Rudy Burckhardt. The job of working “to produce non-identical books in a world of increasingly mass-produced, look-alike consumable products,” Gervais Jassaud nails in his essay entitled “New Aspects in the Making of Artists’ Books.”

Kyle Schlesinger, Cuneiform Press’s publisher and a contributor to this volume, emerges from a rich lineage of creative practitioners who’ve opted for a more collaborative mode in their work, with figures from Black Mountain College (John Cage, Robert Creeley, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, etc.) as a jumping off point. Schlesinger’s dictum, “Separate but equal. Together but not the same,” is worth repeating here or tacking up someplace at home. And his curious observation that “there are nearly as many horses in the United States today as there were one hundred years ago,” takes us by way of contextual analogy from the era of horseless carriages to one of new media. Despite certain traditional sensibilities, being a letterpress designer and a typewriter composer, Schlesinger wisely points out the necessity of adaptation to changing media forms. Collaboration is a “primal, and necessary survival instinct,” he says, “and as far as book arts is concerned, ‘here to stay.’” Schlesinger has published several collaborative books: one, composed mostly via text messages between he and James Yeary, called The Do How (Great Fainting Spells, 2014), and one between himself and Deborah Poe (GFS, 2015). He also co-edits Mimeo Mimeo, a journal that focuses on artists’ books, typography and the mimeograph format.

Katz discusses artists’ books and the tradition, which Black Mountain College had a large part in, “taking control of the means of production” so that one would be “able to put one’s own work into the world very quickly, and in the way that one wanted to.” This perspective sheds light on artistic view that seems more utilitarian, in that product was not only beautiful, but was often also useful, too. Katz’s collaborations with Burckhardt in the book Boulevard Transportation (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1997) are shown here in a couple of black and white photographic spreads, one a quotidian cityscape, and the other depicting reeds in a glinting lake. The collaborators intended to describe or interpret scenes with their chosen mediums: for Burckhardt, the photograph, and for Katz, poems (which would also interpret Burckhardt’s photographs). “I often wonder if these poems could live apart from this book, because they are really so linked to the photographs,” Katz muses, and it’s clear by the samplings given here that the two were, as the best collaborations will evince, totally in tune.

Rubinstein’s essay reminds us that collaborations are often the best at their strangest. He gives the crazy anecdote of Jacques Derrida’s unlikely collaborator the Italian painter Valerio Adami, where the latter imitated former’s handwriting to offer friendship and spark cooperation. Can you imagine someone coming to you with a piece of art wherein they’ve imitated your handwriting? Nonetheless, the inspired “collaboration” turned out a success.

Looking at my favorite example of collaboration from this book, in Adami’s imitations and Derrida’s essay “+R into the bargain,” from the 1975 edition of Derrière le Miroir, Rubinstein comments “It’s hard to think of any other artist-writer encounter where the two participants have become so completely intertwined.” He goes on to mention collaborations and artist’s books of his own, which may be unfamiliar to some readers: with Enrico Baj, Shirley Jaffe, Fabian Marcaccio, and Jane Hammond. Rubinstein worked in a spirit that was “simultaneously collaborative and anonymous, which allowed us to surprise each other throughout the process.” His comment pins down what’s best about collaboration, and goes likewise for a reader.

Dick Higgins is quoted in an essay by Montefalcone, saying, “The hardest thing about the artist’s book is to find the right way to talk about it.” This is kind of a funny insight, because The Art of Collaboration goes to endless lengths to discuss the subject’s intricacies, but it manages to avoid sounding too scholarly or droning, to which we can credit the editors’ mutual eye for stellar contributors.

However easy it is to note the limitations of handling subjects like this, its authors present scenarios and constructions that were often hitherto unpublished, in an engaging, generous manner. The contributors are at their best when offering specific collaborative and artistic illustrations, and of course the examples are contagious. Like the memories of Marcel Proust or the inventions of Raymond Roussel, the coherent examples in The Art of Collaboration seem to produce like and better examples, to make for a read that’s pretty exciting.

Cristofovici, Anca and Barbara Montefalcone (eds.) The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books (Victoria, TX: Cuneiform Press, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0-9860040-5-6. 198 pages, $40

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