As Vincent Katz’s illuminating forward makes clear, poetry has always been an important element of Jim Dine’s art. Dine himself has related his poetry to the performance dimension of his output, and has commented on them as integral aspects of his artworks. Katz tracks the history of Dine’s complicated ventures into poetry, the earliest stemming from the time of his involvement with the visual arts. Indeed, in Katz’s words, Dine’s “oeuvre as a visual artist can justifiably be described as poetry.” Poetry here, according to Katz, is “taking one thing and making it into something else,” a refining of the modern poet’s “defamiliarization” that aligns the Pop rebus or collage of the painter with a poet’s decontextualization or deformation of language. What we get in Poems to Work On, Cuneiform’s beautifully produced book, then, is essentially a gestural act of refocusing, not so much the integrating of diverse pictorial and written elements that Dine is famous for but on a separating out of the linguistic element that enables us to sense and appreciate its qualities as poems qua poems on the page.

Dine’s poetry, like all of his art, draws on multiple twentieth century traditions. He plays with everything, surrealism, Lettrism, Pop Art, New York School (he’s especially beholden to its poets such as O’Hara, Koch and Ashbery) to name a very obvious few. What these movements and practitioners all have in common, as with Dine and his poems, is that they see history, especially the history of art and tradition as a cornucopia rather than as isolate and/or oppositional lesson plans for civilization and culture. The tone of the poems is generosity, and Dine’s relationship to the past is one of lighthearted opportunism, magpie tolerance for otherness, and a comic shoring of fragments as he flails along. Take these few excerpts from “Travel Dust”:

Two eggs follow me to

the Food Derby

I set my sight on toast

and loads of tea and pumpkin seeds,

mixed with four or five grapes

(in my mouth)

so I have energy

to breathe.

. . . .

Going real slow

by foot down river

fumes belching

out of Moscow.

Heavy guards around

your smokestacks.

. . .

All the greasy

machines get down on their knees

to spray hearts clear plastic.

Dine’s world is a topiary: here, seemingly beyond contradiction and critique, the crazy clutter of American city life and its “Food Derby” is set side-by-side with Moscow’s belching river and the machine and plastic littered mindscape of contemporary life. There’s an air of something off-target in Dine’s riffs and concretions as they run from insouciance to pathos, finally to settle into semi-comic professions of indifference, as in his Wolfman (Wall) where “the big action takes place next door. ALWAYS DID,” that often leads that insouciance into a sense of wonderment, as in “Oceans:”

INNOCENCE

THAT’S WHAT i LIKE!

LOOKing down THIS

VALLEY

LOOK—

UP IN THE SKY,

THERE’S

BLUE ON YOUR LIPS/

As with his Mobius-strip geography that is capable of touching a half-dozen points at once, Dine’s typographic moves ironize the passage above, the lower case letters undercutting its unabashed Gee Whiz boyishness in the same moment as its seeming artlessness grabs it back. In this sense, Dine’s work is both pose and poise; this naïf knows just what he is doing.

Which can be not only sophisticated entertainment, a sort of ramble through hi-jinks and mood swings, but also an anchorage for depth of thought. Katz calls Dine’s “The Untersberg Gift” a “limnal poem.” The poem, as Katz notes, constitutes a return to poetry after many years of not writing. At once manifesto and demonstration, the poem sits by itself, mid-book, showing Dine, after some twenty years of poetic silence, reaching down into himself for what impels his art, where having “spoken/to ‘the emperor’ many times,” he’s found in Untersberg the transformative moment of “the body/waiting to be opened to reveal itself (hopefully).” Is this “’emperor’” a self-imposed censorious governor inhibiting Dine’s free-wheeling emotions or are we watching some reconfiguration of an emperor’s “new clothes” moment of revelation that releases Dine from his self-conscious awareness:

‘Are you courageous?’ asked the Emperor.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I am dazzled by beauty.’

Nature gives me the courage to persist,

in my quest for the fabulous treasure inside.

Barbarossa asks me to sing for him.

And Dine does sing again for us, with an often graceful observant humor that strikes me as endlessly quotable. This new mode seems too casual to call a method, but it’s built on juxtaposition and sudden unexpectedness, as in “Nite Letter:”

My, my they’ve taken to watering the red orange juice. Next

they will probably want me to drink umbrella handle wine.

A boyfriend and his girlfriend (two really swell looking kids)

are about to do something stupid in front of a telegram

and some stenciled palm trees.

At once urbane and “raw,” as an anthropologist might have it, Dine’s poems are full of verbal pleasures and comic tonalities, like that “umbrella handle wine” above with all of its top of the palate lollings or the “stenciled palm” that propels the imagination into some gallery of the new where an exhibiton of Dine’s work is being held. In these gestures, Dine replicates the complex feelings that his paintings give to viewers, who marvel at the precision of his draftsmanship as they are carried along through blurring and cascading traditions of art. The eye and ear rarely rest as they move down through the lines of a Dine poem, even as they often amount to self-knowing teasers. The poems are charmers, even as they raise questions of where a word is traveling or how expectations are transformed by syntax and diction. Despite the disjunctions, there’s a seamless controlling ear presiding over Dine’s poems that gives them weight and authenticity. And every now and then, all the lyric power comes over unapologetically, that is, without the interference of art-world and poetry-world zippy-zaps and defensiveness. What happens then is as magical as anything being written today:

Resting comfortably

….my eyes watch the downfall

of your eyes.

the downfall of the Leonardo highway

uncomfortably sitting

with mouth open and face white

phoning the world

to find

new anxieties in free verse

imagine—

one man in the cosmos

the saint of vanishing dreams

blue limbs, gold draperies

the child of the Baptist

rushing the ending

Poems To Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine. Foreword by Vincent Katz. (Victoria, Tx: Cuneiform Press, 2015. ISBN: 978-0986004032, 300 pp. $50

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February 2015: Vincent Katz, Martha Schwendener and Christopher Stackhouse

Joining Moderator David Cohen February 13, 2015, at the National Academy Museum, the panelists reviewed exhibitions of Mamma Andersson at David Zwirner, Merlin James at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Titus Kaphar at Jack Shainman Gallery, and Heidi Howard at Nancy Margolis Gallery.

We regret to inform listeners that due to equipment failure the last segment of the event was not recorded; Heidi Howard’s review ends part way through and the audience response to the second half of the program (Kaphar and Howard) was lost. Special thanks to recording engineer Isaac Derfel for defying the odds and saving the bulk of this month’s recording.

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Granary Books
New York
2008

POETRY FOR ART – Editorial Advisor: Bill Berkson – presents newly published poetry (or poetry posted to the web for the first time) that relates to visual art. It can be poetry that responds, like criticism, to work on view at the time of posting. Or, as is the case here, it can represent a collaboration of between artist and poet. Alcuni Telefonini is a livre d’artiste published in an edition of 70 by Granary Books, New York, with words by Vincent Katz and images by Francesco Clemente. The poems were written in Italy, Germany, and France in 2002, while the author was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. The watercolors were made during the summer of 2006 in Italy. artcritical has extracted three poems from Alcuni Telefonini:, “Back,” “Breath,” and “Bricks,” arranged over four double-page spreads out of 28 pages. The book was printed in 2007 at Silicon Gallery Fine Art Prints, Philadelphia.

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, art critic, editor, and curator. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Cabal of Zealots (1988, Hanuman Books), Understanding Objects (2000, Hard Press), and Rapid Departures (2005, Ateliê Editorial), and two volumes of translation from Sextus Propertius, Charm (Sun and Moon Press, 1995) and  The Complete Elegies (Princeton, 2004).  In addition to his work with Clemente, Katz has made other book collaborations with artists, including Rudy Burckhardt, Wayne Gonzales, and Alex Katz.  Vincent Katz writes frequently on contemporary art and has published essays on the work of Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, Kiki Smith, Philip Taaffe, and Cy Twombly. He is the editor of the poetry and arts journal VANITAS and of Libellum books.

Francesco Clemente, who was born in Naples, Italy, in 1952, moved to New York City in 1981, though he continues to spend time in Italy and India.  He has often engaged in collaborations, both in India with local craftsmen, and in New York with artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, among others. He has published many works in conjunction with poets, including John Wieners, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Rene Ricard.  Clemente’s works on paper were the focus of a full retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1990, which traveled within the United States and to the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1991).  The artist’s comprehensive oeuvre was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, Clemente, mounted by the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999-2000), which traveled to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (2000). Most recently, a survey of the artist’s work was organized by the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (2002-2003).

In the Poetry For Art series, artcritical present three poem from the book arranged on four double page spreads:

(click the thumbnails for full size reproductions of page spreads)

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Arthur Danto, Vincent Katz, and Linda Yablonsky joined David Cohen to discuss Kara Walker at the Whitney and Sikkema Jenkins, Karen Yasinsky at Mireille Mosler, Isaac Julien at Metro Pictures, Kate Shepherd at Galerie Lelong, and Antony Gormley at Sean Kelly.

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Rudy Burckhardt: Selected Photographs
through September 11, 2004
724 Fifth Avenue at 57th Street, 212 262 5050

Rudy Burckhardt’s Sense of Place

What makes Rudy Burckhardt unique among many great photographers of New York is his magic sense of the ratio between city dwellers and built enivornment. Arriving in New York in 1935, at age 21, the Swiss photographer felt at first “overwhelmed by its grandeur and ceaseless energy” and took some years to adjust to the “tremendous difference in scale between the soaring buildings and people moving against them in the street” before feeling ready to photograph the phenomenon.

Whether composing a timeless classic like his portrait of the Flatiron Building, (1947/48) or snapping the heels of fashion-conscious midtown passersby, he was always sure to achieve a compact of people and place. For the Flatiron shots he ascended an office building further uptown, which he compared to climbing the Alps, only by elevator. Rather than isolating the great skyscraper and making it otherworldly, as Stieglitz famously did, he swathes it amidst the vehicles and pedestrians of the flanking avenues. With its giant shadow it becomes the pulsating heart of the metropolis.

This facility for humanizing the environment while socializing its inhabitants travelled abroad, to Venice, where the Campanille and Doge’s Palace are seen from the perspective of a cat on San Giorgio’s, or Naples or the Carribean, and indoors, in photographs of artists in their studios, for instance. Instead of presenting a forced figure-ground relationship of foregrounded artist set against works or accutrements, there is a true, insider’s grasp of the rapport of maker and object. A character-defining set of Jackson Pollock at work in 1950 very literally vindicates the abstract expressionist’s famed pronouncements about being “IN my painting.” Burckhardt took aerial shots of Pollock at work; the most exhilerating offers a contrasting black and white split composition in which the artist mixes paint on one side the image while a work in progress, black swirls on a white ground, floats out of time and space on the other.

Surprisingly, the handsome, deftly selected monograph just out from Abrams with its main text by novelist, poet and critic Phillip Lopate, is the first on this quietly influential photographer, who was also a painter and experimental filmaker. It joins the very substantial catalogue of his work (still the major work on the artist) that accompanied Burckhardt’s retrospective in Valencia, Spain in 1999 by poet, scholar and critic Vincent Katz, who has also contributed an appreciation to the present volume. The publication is accompanied by an exhibition of early works at Tibor de Nagy which includes a selection of vintage prints.

In a way it is not so surprising that Burckhardt had to wait for posthumous recognition (he took his own life in 1999) as he had a fateful combination of modesty, understatement, and friendship with high achievers. “So often was Burkchardt described in print as ‘under-rated’ and ‘unsung’ that he became virtually renowned for not being famous” writes Mr. Lopate, who naturally is determined to correct the record.

But Mr. Lopate acknowledges that Burckhardt’s reputation reflects his modus operandi as a street photographer: “to hide in plain sight.” Burckhardt played court photographer to the New York School painters and poets, counting among close friends Willem de Kooning, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. His onetime lover, the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby, introduced him to New York and remained part of his life through his marriages to the painter and critic Edith Schloss and to the painter Yvonne Jacquette (his widow).

Burckhardt was the most benign of paparazzi. He enjoyed a rich harvest in Naples where everyone really wanted to be photographed, piling up for the honor. Although he rarely asked passersby for permission to photograph them, his pictures never seem intrusive, even when they are gently voyeuristic. Among his most endearing and memorable images are those that capture a detail of a woman’s dress amidst shadows, stockinged feet and high heels, like “Midtown, New York,” (1939/40). Burckhardt was Baudelarian not just in the sense of being a flaneur, sauntering around the city open to such unprecious chance encounters as the 1978 shot of a miraculously pretty, self-absorbed girl with flowing locks leading a flock of women crossing the street at Penn Station, but also, more mystically, in the sense of capturing “correspondances” as the disks on a dress to the glass panes sunk in a sidewalk as in the photograph, “Cirles, New York,” (1934). There is often a low-key surrealism to such snapshot perceptions.

Although near-abstract compositions of the intersections of a building and pavement made sense of his professed admiration of Mondrian, Burchhardt was temperamentally incapable of purism. Even at his most abstract, the signifiers of building and person are vital. His later revisiting to his triumphant locale, the Flatiron, has a penile reflection of the skyscraper pulsate in a puddle with a man’s legs caught above, also in reflection. He was equally unsuited to social commentary. Mr. Katz contrasts his take on the American South with the hefty moralizing of Robert Frank: he wasn’t interested in illustrating injustice but in discovering truths. Cutting across genres and tendencies, he was more about perception than observation. Instead of seeing what he could find, he was more about finding what he could see.

Burckhardt really needed the social for his art to work. Where a factory building’s even triplets of windows fills the whole composition, or a nude is the exclusive focus of an essay in shadow play, he is masterful enough, but dutiful. The same nude on the fire escape is less skilful but more vital in its nonchalent juxtaposition of flesh and city fabric. The miniscule passerby on the distant street below turns the model into a timeless goddess. A depopulated 1951 composition of the Ascensione, Rome, is handsome enough, but the take of tourists in the loggia in Florence from the same trip has a wonderfully casual sense of bodies communicating in space. His nature studies in Maine, which preoccupied him in his last years, are an exception to this rule; in his often anthropomorphic trees he found a subject where the environment formed its own society.

Burckhardt is literally a light presence among New York photographers: Disdaining the lugubrious and self-important chiarascuro and tonal richness of his contemporaries, he very deliberatly printed light. This only partly explains the gentle understatement and calm that pervades even his most daring experiments. The quirkly humor of his movies extends his lightness of being. And yet there is painful ambiguity in his melancholy self-portrait of 1984 in Searsmont, Maine, his country place. He sits in lotus position, but behind him are strewn empty liquor bottles, suggesting that meditation took its chances with less unorthodox means of transcendence.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 15, 2004.

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Imagine an art school that functioned like no other. Located far from the bustling art scene of New York, it was nestled remote North Carolina, miles away from anything. Here, the student decided what classes to take and how long his course of study would last. A school that could not afford to pay its professors a cash salary, but was so popular that teachers came anyway, ready to use their cars for lodging in lieu of being part of the spirit of community the school fostered. A school that had no endowment, operated on a shoestring budget from year to year, and conferred no degrees, but that saw its graduates go on to attend the prestigious graduate programs at Columbia and Harvard.

There was once such a place, and Black Mountain College was its name, and it was the hotbed of experimentation in the visual, musical and literary arts from 1933 to 1956. A whole generation of artists, writers, dancers and musicians cut their creative teeth here, and their legacies live on to this day. Black Mountain: Experiment in Art, edited by Vincent Katz, examines the history and influence the college had on the artists and teachers who emerged from its uncommon ground, and in doing so, it leaves no doubt as to its importance in the greater scope of American art history.

Black Mountain: Experiment in Art is the exhibition catalogue to “Black Mountain College: Una Aventura Americana” presented at the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, which Katz also curated. Katz’s opening essay, which shares the title of the book, presents a condensed but in no way incomplete survey of the people events that secured the college’s place in history. The history of the school, what could easily be boringly encyclopedic, is light and interesting, allowing the reader to move breezily from one profile to another. The text has a yearbook feel, as if these were our classmates, rediscovered again for the first time in years. The stories lend themselves to a quixotic notion of the artist, but they are not melodramatic for these collaborations were not born out of romanticism, but out of practicality and experimentation.

Founded by John Andrew Rice, Black Mountain was a school where experimentation was indeed the focus; one where the students would constantly question, and the teacher would foster the discussion, not provide The Answer. Calling Black Mountain College an “experiment in art” is therefore appropriate in this context. Rice gathered a group of like-minded colleagues each irritated by the rigid structures at other universities, and started a college run entirely by the faculty, where the students were free to create independent patterns of study. As Katz notes, “these organizational principles were adhered to for the duration of the college’s existence. They proved its great blessing, its difference, and its difficulty.”

The school officially opened in September of 1933, fifteen miles from Asheville, North Carolina in an under-utilized YMCA building. It would later move to property purchased at nearby Lake Eden- 667 acres with sixteen buildings and an artificial lake. From the beginning, because it was so small, one was required to be part of an integral unit at the college, so close that it took on the character of a large family. Rice, convinced that the arts should play a central role in college education, reasoned that an artist should head up the college. Physics instructor Ted Dreier (nephew of collector Katherine) suggested contacting Philip Johnson, then director of the department of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, for a recommendation. He suggested Josef Albers, and thus began Black Mountain’s venture into experimentation in art and in art education.

In its twenty-three years, Black Mountain College produced some of the most important collaborations and ideas in the twentieth century. Teachers included Lyonel Feininger, Ilya Bolotowski, Walter Gropius, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Jacob Lawrence, Beaumont Newhall, Ben Shahn, Robert Motherwell, Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind; that’s just the short list. Big names in literature were also drawn to the campus -Thornton Wilder, Henry Miller, Irwin Panofsky and Anais Nin. It was that sense of community, the freedom to experiment, that drew of them to this sometimes exhilarating, sometimes lonely place. It was the only place many of them did not hesitate to try.

A school as small as Black Mountain provided the perferct breeding ground for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Katz explains that John Cage’s 4’33” -possibly the composer’s most famous (or infamous) work wherein the composer sits at the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds but plays nothing-was derived from Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings. Cage saw Rauschenberg’s paintings (multiple planks of white, painted in subtle textural variations) as a gutsy experiment, and as such, ventured to create a musical piece based on similar ideas. Katz notes that Cage had been afraid that the piece would be taken as a joke. In any other environment it might have. By stepping into this realm, Cage was then able to take his ideas one step further. It was at this point that he created Theater Piece No. 1-widely accepted as the first “happening.”

That specific works are splendidly reproduced is another strong point of this text. Using descriptive analysis to show exactly where pivotal developments lie, Katz provides the reader a link between idea and practice. He explains that de Kooning’s gestural style and “typically de Kooningesque palette of ‘weak’ or ‘offbeat’ colors” were discovered in 1948 while teaching at Black Mountain. Asheville was painted in that year, and indeed it reveals what we know to be “de Kooningesque”, “active color rhythms in compressed space, though still relying on the linear definition of partially bounded areas.” By including a section on recent work from a handful of Black Mountain artists, Katz offers insight into how their work has evolved over time.

One area where the book falls short is in its explanation of exactly why the school failed to endure. Without a board of directors or an endowment, the school’s financial stability was always in question. Albers did much to keep things going despite this. He arranged for guest lectures, for slides for presentations, and ensured the variety of artistic viewpoints evidenced by the range of artists who taught at the college. He urged friends and alumni to donate art books to the library.

Albers left the school in 1948, and it was at this point that the poet Charles Olson took over. With a writer now in charge, the focus shifted naturally from the visual arts to the written word and became the same kind incubator for literature that it had been for the visual arts only five years earlier.

Olson studied at Wesleyan and Harvard, worked for the Office of War Information during World War II and worked on FDR’s reelection campaign of 1944. He made a name for himself in 1947 with Call Me Ishmael, his study of Melville, but his years at Black Mountain from 1948 to its closing in 1956 were the most critical to his career as a writer. Most memorable was the 1950 publication of his essay “Projective Verse”-composition by field, where the page was a canvas on which words could be dropped in a variety of positions, not just one after another. Another key aspect of Projective Verse was the demand that it be made in the moment, one word or thought was meant to spur the next-it is not a meditation but an abstraction, like a Pollock on paper. Olson also made his mark by urging authors to publish their own works. Under his direction, the movement known as the Black Mountain School of writers was formed, which included Robert Creeley, Fielding Dawson, Robert Duncan and Joel Oppenheimer, among others.

Olson was an imposing figure, both physically and intellectually. Robert Creeley’s essay “Olson and Black Mountain College” sheds light on the complexities of person. As Creeley puts it, “It was hard not to come under his spell and he was finally bored by those who did.” Olson’s methods were challenging. His way of teaching was curious. He taught late at night, with classes lasting sometimes into the next morning. The structure that Albers had instituted was clearly erased.

When Olson took over in 1948, attendance at the college was at its peak. But what exactly led to its decline? Was it Olson’s domineering personality? Dorothea Rockburne, only seventeen when she came to the school in 1951, said, “it was strange and wonderful place, but it was very sexist. Olson was extremely sexist, and I’d never experienced that before.”

Was it slipshod management? By Creeley’s account, and within the essay by Kevin Power, “In Around and About The Black Mountain Review: Robert Creeley and Company,” it would appear that Olson spent too much time on his own writing endeavors instead of public relations and fund raising. In 1952, a prospectus for the school reported a 1:2 faculty to student ratio, and by 1954, there were only seven students enrolled. There was no science class, and Olson urged Robert Creeley, who had no knowledge of the sciences, to teach it. Creeley told Olson, “Biology was the one class I never took.” Olson’s reply, “Terrific, you can learn something.”

Was the small campus suffocating? Ilya Bolotowski found it too isolated, “a lively place, but very much inbred. And that finally became stifling, like living in a small room with mirrors; nothing else exists, except endless reflections.” Or were the teachers themselves to blame? Six of de Kooning’s ten students left the same year he did. When asked by Albers if he knew anything about that, de Kooning replied, “Sure. I told them if they want to be artists, they should quit school and come to New York and get a studio and start painting.”

In 1955, the college lost the land surrounding the school and the remaining buildings were practically in ruin. Robert Duncan described the main building as “a derelict piece of modernism-nothing looks more rundown than an art moderne building ten years later.” A very desperate end for something that once had so much glorious promise. Even so, this text leaves one with a feeling of inspiration and with a hope that art, inspired by experimentation, is useful and can still change our perception of the world.

Black Mountain: Experiment In Art
Edited by Vincent Katz with essays by Martin Brody, Kevin Power and Robert Creeley.
MIT Press, 2003

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