Delimit / De-limit: Barbara Guest at Kandinsky’s Window

Hal Coase

doi:10.18778/2083-2931.13.07

Authors

Hal Coase Sapienza University of Rome https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3855-2399

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.13.07

Crossmark check for up

Keywords:

Barbara Guest, avant-garde, weak modernism, poetics, New York School

Abstract

This essay reads Barbara Guest’s poem “The View from Kandinsky’s Window” from her 1989 collection Fair Realism alongside Wassily Kandinsky’s own theories of form and abstraction. It argues that Guest’s poetic reinvention of historic avant-garde aesthetics on the page can be taken as an exemplary case for new feminist theorizing of the avant-garde as a set of decentered, provisional, and heterogenous practices. Guest’s engagement with Kandinsky is initially situated in the context of Clement Greenberg’s criticisms of the painter throughout the 1940s. According to Greenberg’s formalism, Kandinsky is shown to have “failed” due to his provincialism, eclecticism, and disharmonizing of scale. Guest’s poem can be seen as valuing and accentuating each of these qualities and in so doing it presents a subtle defence of Kandinsky’s aesthetics and becomes an example of the kind of intermedia contamination which Greenberg’s theorizing on “pure” modernist painting had attempted to delimit. Guest’s counter interest in “de-limiting” the work of art—removing boundaries imposed by period, style, and media—is contextualized within debates on the “limit” within avant-garde aesthetics.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Hal Coase, Sapienza University of Rome

Hal Coase is Doctoral Candidate at the Sapienza University of Rome. He has studied at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester and University of Oxford. His poetry and criticism have been published by PN Review and Carcanet Press. His research interests include twentieth-century poetics, silence in literature, weak theory, and cross-media experiments.

References

Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism. Cambridge UP, 1989.
Google Scholar

Apollinaire, Guillaume. “Les Peintres Cubistes.” A Picasso Anthology, edited by Marilyn McCully, Princeton UP, 1982, p. 74.
Google Scholar

Bürger, Peter, et al. “Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde.’” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 4, 2010, pp. 695–715. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2010.0034
Google Scholar

Bürger, Peter. Theorie der Avantgarde. Suhrkamp, 1974.
Google Scholar

Burwick, Frederick. Mimesis and its Romantic Reflections. Pennsylvania State UP, 2001.
Google Scholar

Chee Dimock, Wai. “Weak Theory: Henry James, Colm Tóibín, and W. B. Yeats.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 39, no. 4, 2013, pp. 732–53. https://doi.org/10.1086/671354
Google Scholar

Churchill, Suzanne W., Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum. “En Dehors Garde.” Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde, edited by Suzanne W. Churchill, Linda Kinnahan and Susan Rosenbaum, U of Georgia, 29 July 2016, http://mina-loy.com/chapters/avant-garde-theory-2/the-en-dehors-garde/ accessed 21 Sept. 2022.
Google Scholar

Dal Lago, Alessandro. “On the Ethics of Weakness: Simone Weil and Nihilism.” Weak Thought, edited by Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti, translated by Peter Carravetta, State U of New York, 2012, pp. 111–37.
Google Scholar

“delimit, v.” OED Online, Mar. 2023, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/49402/ accessed 11 July 2023.
Google Scholar

Dolven, Jeff. Senses of Style: Poetry before Interpretation. Chicago UP, 2018. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226517254.001.0001
Google Scholar

Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century. MIT Press, 1996.
Google Scholar

Gibson, Ann. “Avant-Garde.” Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff, Chicago UP, 2003, pp. 202–16.
Google Scholar

Greenberg, Clement. “‘American-Type’ Painting.” The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956, edited by John O’Brian, Chicago UP, 1986, pp. 217–35.
Google Scholar

Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” Art in Modern Culture, edited by Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris, Phaidon, 2001, pp. 308–14.
Google Scholar

Greenberg, Clement. “Obituary and Review of an Exhibition of Kandinsky.” The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, edited by John O’Brian, Chicago UP, 2008, pp. 3–6.
Google Scholar

Greenberg, Clement. “Review of Exhibitions of John Miró, Fernand Léger, and Wassily Kandinsky.” The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, edited by John O’Brian, Chicago UP, 1986, pp. 62–65.
Google Scholar

Greenberg, Clement. “Towards A Newer Laocoon.” The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, edited by John O’Brian, Chicago UP, 1986, pp. 23–38.
Google Scholar

Guest, Barbara. Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing. Kelsey St., 2009.
Google Scholar

Guest, Barbara. Interview by Catherine Wagner. Colorado Review, vol. 24, no. 1, 1994, pp. 173–77.
Google Scholar

Guest, Barbara. The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Edited by Hadley Guest, Wesleyan UP, 2013.
Google Scholar

Kandinsky, Wassily. Point and Line to Plane. Edited and translated by Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay, Guggenheim Foundation, 1947.
Google Scholar

Kaufman, Robert. “A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest’s Recent Poetry.” American Poetry Review, vol. 29, no. 4, 2000, pp. 11–16.
Google Scholar

Lehman, David. The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets. Doubleday, 1998.
Google Scholar

MoMA, “Press release: 16 November 1936.” MoMA, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2823 accessed 14 Aug. 2022.
Google Scholar

Perloff , Marjorie. Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters. Chicago UP, 1997.
Google Scholar

Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Gerald Fitzgerald, Harvard UP, 1968.
Google Scholar

Pollock, Griselda. “Moments and Temporalities of the Avant-Garde ‘in, of, and from the feminine.’” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 795–820. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2010.0030
Google Scholar

Pound, Ezra. “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, XI.” Selected Prose, Faber, 1978, pp. 41–42.
Google Scholar

Ray, Man. “To Tristan Tzara.” 1921. Letter 40 of Man Ray Writings on Art, edited by Jennifer Mundy, Getty Research Institute, 2016, p. 65.
Google Scholar

Rexroth, Kenneth. “The Cubist Poetry of Pierre Reverdy.” World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth, New Directions, 1987, pp. 252–59.
Google Scholar

Rosenbaum, Susan. “The ‘do it yourself’ Avant-Garde: American Women Poets and Experiment.” A History of Twentieth-Century Women’s Poetry, edited by Linda A. Kinnhan, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 323–38. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316488560.021
Google Scholar

Rothman, Roger. “Figures Without a Ground: Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and the Dissonance of German Modernism.” Modernity: Critiques of Visual Culture, vol. 2, 2002, https://castle.eiu.edu/modernity/rothman.html accessed 3 Sept. 2022.
Google Scholar

Schuyler, James. Selected Art Writings. Black Sparrow, 1998.
Google Scholar

Strom, Kirsten. “‘Avant-Garde of What?’: Surrealism Reconceived as Political Culture.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 62, no. 1, 2004, pp. 37–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-594X.2004.00133.x
Google Scholar

Taylor, Brandon. “Kandinsky and Contemporary Painting.” Tate Papers, vol. 6, 2006, pp. 1–7. Tate, autumn 2006, https://www.tate.org.uk/documents/430/tate_papers_6_brandon_taylor_kandinsky_and_contemporary_painting.pdf accessed 28 Aug. 2022.
Google Scholar