Elissa Gabbert’s “The Word Pretty” (Black Ocean, 2018) a delightful collection of lyrical essays on “writing, reading, and living,” includes this reference to and quote from Wayne Koestenbaum’s “My 1980s and Other Essays” (FSG, 2013), in her essay “The Art of the Paragraph” on pages 66-67, in writing about transitions between paragraphs. Enjoy this double Ashbery sighting…
Read MorePERSONAS in the Area at Art 14
Inspired by John Ashbery's poem "Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror,” the Pleisys theatre group presents "Personas" at the 14th Day Art Space from January 12, 2019.
A multimedia performance of body theater. The theme is the poetic introduction of the viewer into the "world of the self" defined by the concepts, "I notice, I discover, I connect, I carry within my memory.”
Read MoreThe poet and critic John Ashbery described his friend, the painter Fairfield Porter, in a 1983 Newsweek review, as “one of those innovators whose originality can come perilously close to seeming old-fashioned.” It’s an apt gloss for Porter’s 1952 portrait “John Ashbery (Argyle Socks),” as well as for most of the two dozen other demure treasures making up “Works From the Collection of John Ashbery” at Kasmin. (Ashbery died in 2017, leaving instructions that his extensive art collection, only a small portion of it represented in this show, be sold to support experimental artists working now.)
Read MoreKasmin Gallery’s current jewel of an exhibition is “Works from the Collection of John Ashbery”—yes, that John Ashbery, the poet whose accolades included a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a MacArthur “genius” grant. Ashbery died last year at 90, and his vast private art collection is now being sold by Kasmin, in association with the Eric Brown Art Group.
Read MoreStudent: How do you get inspired?
Ashbery: I used to wait around for inspiration when I was your ages, but realized I wouldn’t get very much written if I had to wait. So, as the years have gone by, I’ve trained myself to get along without inspiration and it seems to work just as well.
Student: Did you enjoy an active imagination as a child?
Ashbery: Yes, I used to invent cities and people as imaginary citizens. I would do this on the beach where I grew up, on Lake Ontario, where I’d build sandcastles or houses. I used to make large maps on big sheets of cardboard and put on all the names of the cities and towns. I remember one country where the capital city was Murielsville because of a little girl I had a crush on in grade school. The population was something like 8,957,000. She had the most population of any of the cities.
Student: When did you realize you wanted to pursue the life of a poet?
Read MoreKasmin is pleased to announce an exhibition of selected works from the collection of the celebrated New York poet and art critic, John Ashbery (1927 – 2017). Bringing together paintings, drawings, and collages by artists such as Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher, Helen Frankenthaler, Fairfield Porter, Joe Brainard, and Larry Rivers, the presentation reflects the deep-rooted artistic and personal associations amongst a group of artists and poets who, between them, defined New York’s downtown scene for almost two decades from the 1950s onwards.
Read MoreRead More…Now she inhabits the upper air, where moods are painful to sustain. The language will be arriving later, she misreads. Language = luggage, baggage, the sadness of rain. Ashbery has died, comma, Ashbery has died.
The prolific collage work that John Ashbery produced over the last decade of his life is remarkable because it allows new insights into the creative process of one of America's most reticent poets. But what many saw as a poet's late foray into the visual arts was, in reality, a return to an early vocation that somehow morphed into complex hybrids. Composition, whether with images or words, was Ashbery's métier and collage had been his technique of choice since the beginning of his career as a poet. The mixing of visual arts and literature was also a distinctive trait in the works of authors that have been of central interest to Ashbery, namely French writer Raymond Roussel, and American outsider artist Henry Darger. Ashbery, like Roussel and Darger, conveyed narrative through the juxtaposition of seemingly random imagery that left to the reader the task of filling the gaps and making connections.
Read MoreHudson, NY (3 September 2018)—On the one year anniversary of the passing of John Ashbery (1927 - 2017), one of the world’s greatest poets, The Flow Chart Foundation—a nonprofit organization dedicated to his legacy—launches anew, announcing the hiring of Jeffrey Lependorf, longtime Executive Director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, the national arts service organization for independent literary publishing, to become its Executive Director beginning this November.
Read MoreThe Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present, John Ashbery, Oh, What Fun! an exhibition of the poet and artist's collages made between 2015 and 2017, prior to the artist’s death in September 2017. This will be Ashbery’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery and his first at the gallery’s Rivington Street location.
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