Visionary Architects: Barbara Guest, Frederick Kiesler, and the Surrealist Poetics of the Galaxy
Abstract
:1. Introduction
Although Kiesler’s nominal field was architecture, his work included theater and set design, gallery and exhibition design, department store window display, furniture design, sculpture, painting, drawing, writing, and little magazine publication, all fueled by his interdisciplinary, collaborative approach to architecture.[T]he make-up of the mourners is indicative of the close-knit network that the deceased had created during his lifetime. It consisted of different circles of artists, different generations, and fields and reflects Kiesler’s interdisciplinary mindset: in addition to his wife Lillian and his assistant […] the speakers included dancers, composers, writers, and a museum director, a designer, and a visual artist. In view of Kiesler’s rediscovery by the architectural scene of the 1970s, it comes as some surprise that there were no architects among the speakers, and only few among the mourners.
The relation between Guest’s “Homage” and Kiesler’s “Galaxies” offers us an important guide to this movement of “turning away from the center or norm”, illuminating a looser kind of affiliation and history of En Dehors Garde experiment that was undertaken in what Guest called the “Shadow of Surrealism” (Guest 2003, p. 16).5‘En dehors’ means “toward the outside”, implying that artists are turning away from the center or norm, moving in a circular motion, with an eye toward the center. Upon return, the center is transformed, adjusted, and reformed by the arc of the revolution. Rather than assuming a militant position at the forefront of culture, women, people of color, and queer or disabled artists often came from the outside and circulated on the margins. They rarely enjoyed the power, privilege, or authority derived from membership in the institutions of art, or even in the countercultural, avant-garde circles that challenged those institutions. Instead, they worked and moved strategically to transform gendered, racialized literary traditions and visual cultures that excluded or objectified them.
2. Surrealism in New York and Kiesler’s Galaxies
Levy’s portrayal of the Glass as a feminized “cosmogony” that is open to and altered by its environment anticipated Kiesler’s “Galaxies” and Guest’s “Homage”. Calling the Large Glass a “masterpiece” that “will fit any description such as: abstract, constructivistic, real, super-and-surrealist”, Kiesler wrote that “It is architecture, sculpture, and painting in ONE. To create such an X-ray painting of space, material and psychic, one needs as a lens a. oneself, well focused and dusted off, b. the subconscious as camera obscura, c. a super-consciousness as sensitizer, and d. the clash of this trinity to illuminate the scene” (Kiesler 1937, p. 54). The drama implicit in this “clash” reveals how Kiesler’s work in theater and set design influenced his approach to the “scene” of exhibition.[Duchamp’s] great painting on glass, which he calls a “glissière en verre”, was obviously an experiment in the dynamics of space. The composition was devised so that it might retain a constructive relation with whatever heterogeneous objects passed in back of the transparency. When I first saw the large glass at the Brooklyn Museum I was fascinated, not merely by the work itself, but by the numerous transformations which were lent the composition by its accidental background, by the spectators who passed through the museum behind the glass I was regarding. The “Mariée mise a nu” seemed to absorb them all partially into her own cosmogony, while at the same time she lent some of her own form indefatigably to them. There can be no doubt that this big toy was a sincere experiment with space and a successful one.
Rather than approach an art museum as a cemetery or mausoleum for works of the past, Kiesler believed that through Surrealist design he could make the gallery a “living creature” integrated into everyday life and facing the future.In this ‘Salle de Superstition’ (initiated by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton), there were no longer paintings in squares or ovals, there were no longer boxes of cubes or spheres. Every aspect of this plastic reality was transformed methodically into a realizable form, thanks to a specific ideology and the material conditions of a given space-time. The frames of paintings, the pedestals of statues, the styles of architecture all fell, as dust falls from the feet of the traveler who has reached the end of his journey. The house, freed from aesthetic tradition, became a living creature.
He wanted to get the picture out of the frame so that there would be in a sense an endless frame. The whole world would become the frame of the picture. He made all kinds of experiments […] He would have an exhibit and he had the pictures on the ceilings and he made them so that you experienced them looking up. He had the pictures at various angles. Galaxies was a series of painting which were related. I remember seeing that exhibit, the whole gallery was filled with not isolated experiences as in most galleries even today […] but every painting in the galaxy was part of the whole, the endless whole, and everything he did could be added to this theme.
Similarly, he commented in his “Correalist Manifesto”: “We want construction based on a system of continuous tension in free space” (Bogner and Noever 2001, p. 99). Thus Kiesler considered the spaces between the parts of each “Galaxy”, and the fluid and potentially “endless” relation between the diverse works in his “Galaxies” series, as integral to their meaning and function.15I find my paintings consisting of many paintings, smaller and larger units, separated from each other through intervals of varying dimensions, yet belonging together as one cluster, one nova, one galaxy. My sculptures I also see as consisting of divergent chunks of matter, held together yet apart, appearing like galactic structures, each part leading a life of coexistence, of correality with the others. Yet this correlation, whether close or far apart, does not necessarily depend on physical links. As in wireless electricity, there is correlation without connection. These ‘endless’ paintings and sculptures lead a life of inner cohesion. Between these corporeal units there lie the various empty fields of tension that hold the parts together like planets in a void.
Kiesler’s understanding of his “Galaxy” as an “integration with space” reflects the influence of Duchamp’s Large Glass, which Kiesler had described in 1937 as just such an integration:These galaxies differ from ‘paintings’ in that they are not one painting but a group of several: and their distances are prefixed in relation to each other. While painting is an addition to space, a galaxy is an integration with space. Therefore the intervals between the units of a galaxy are as important as the units themselves, particularly since these intervals flow in and connect with the surrounding area.(italics mine; quoted in Bogner 2001, p. 23)
Glass is the only material in the building industry which expresses surface-and-space at the same time. Neither brick nor stone, nor steel, nor wood can convey both simultaneously. It satisfies what we need as contemporary designers and builders: an inclosure [sic] that is space in itself, an inclosure that divides and at the same time links.
In his “Galaxies”, Kiesler adapted Duchamp’s understanding of space in the Large Glass to a three-dimensional “environment”, that allows the space to “flow in and connect with the surrounding area”, using space to divide and link. This understanding of space would also inspire Barbara Guest’s approach to the arrangement of “empty” space and printed text on the page. As Jill Stoner argues, “Architectural space need not only be bound to enclosure—finite, measurable, and palpable. It may also transcend material boundaries, flow maddeningly like mercury, soft-hard and fluid. Such space is found within texts both written and built. We find it in literature and in architecture; it flows teasingly among words and within walls, between interiors” (Stoner 2012, p. 21). Just as Duchamp used glass (a material that can “transcend material boundaries, flow maddeningly like mercury, soft-hard and fluid”) to draw attention to space as structure and surface, Guest used the blank spaces between and around words, lines, and stanzas to divide but also connect the parts of a poem, and to structure the visible design’s relation to less visible forces.Normally one looks through a translucent plate glass from one area into another, but in painting an opaque picture (like this) one also accentuates the space division optically. The painting then seems suspended in midair negating the actual transparency of the glass. It floats. It is in a state of eternal readiness for action, motion and radiation. While dividing the plate glass into areas of transparency and non-transparency, a spatial balance is created between stability and mobility. By way of such apparent contradiction the designer has based his conception on nature’s law of simultaneous gravitation and flight.
3. Guest’s “Homage” and the Visual Poetics of the Galaxy
Guest’s metaphor of a “hemisphere” of the arts, and her architectural description of a three-dimensional poetry extending vertically and horizontally, suggests her affinity with Kiesler’s concept of the “galaxy” and his Surrealist approach to architecture more generally.I grew up under the shadow of Surrealism. In that creative atmosphere of magical rites there was no recognized separation between the arts. Those of us who shared this atmosphere brightened by Apollinaire, Éluard, Valéry, and the old master Mallarmé, considered ourselves part of a hemisphere where all the arts evolved around one another, a central plaza with roads which led from the palette to quill to clef. One could never again look at poetry as a locked kingdom. Poetry extended vertically, as well as horizontally, never did it lie motionless within a linear structure. Assisting in this poetic mobility would be an associative art within whose eye the poet might gaze for reassurance and for a glowing impersonal empathy.
The worldis going upstairsand some peopleof whom Frederick Kieslerdidn’t approve
are sitting in the basement.
Galaxies galaxiesyou are our last jewelsthe ones the Czar gave usand we preservedin our ateliers
Preferring to drivetaxicabsand knowingwe had a secret(able to live gracefullyin tenements)
We simply waiteda fresh morningthat was bound one dayto openover the roofs
In the opening stanzas Guest uses the architectural metaphor of a dwelling with an upstairs and basement to establish a contrast between “the world” which is actively “going upstairs”, and the people unapproved by Kiesler who are static, “sitting in the basement”. She emphasizes this distinction graphically as well: positing an analogy between a stanza and a room with a staircase, Guest’s first stanza uses its lines and line breaks to suggest an analogy between the movement of the poem down the page and the movement of climbing up stairs, an ascension that alludes to Kiesler’s skyward gaze in his “Galaxies”. “The world” is a planetary term, connoting Kiesler’s “Galaxy”, but also evokes the French “le monde”, which refers to high society and/or those in the know, a like-minded group headed in the same direction. The space between the first and second stanza creates a dramatic enjambment, with the fate of those who Kiesler rejected hanging in the balance. The solitary line of the second stanza, which completes the grammatical phrase, graphically underscores what happens to this group: left alone in the basement, they are cut off from the previous stanza and the structure it evokes, so they are unable to ascend, and implicitly, stuck in the past.And we see dawnas a palace.
Thus the “we” who eke out a living, “Preferring to drive/taxicabs”, and willing to accommodate the city’s rigors, “(able to live gracefully/in tenements)”, connotes the hardships encountered by the avant-garde, but may refer specifically to the poets who were part of Guest’s circle, a reading supported by Guest’s emphasis on grace, which alludes to Frank O’Hara’s lines from “In Memory of My Feelings”, “Grace/to be born and live as variously as possible” (O’Hara 1995, p. 256), and to O’Hara’s and Guest’s friend, the painter Grace Hartigan, who like Guest struggled to navigate the postwar avant-garde as a woman. Guest’s depiction of a younger avant-garde who cherish Kiesler’s artworks in their studios resonates with Kiesler’s emphasis on the value of the visionary imagination in contrast to the market for art in his “Correalist Manifesto”: “Drive out ‘high painting’ from art galleries. Shows have become exhibitionist acts, the painter, an exhausted producer./Drive out contemporary art from museums. Art belongs to the street, the home, the people. Curators live large. Artists hock their hunger and pride./Drive out art traffickers from the salons of the nouveau riche; they condemn art to pillory./Drive out art advertisement from the cities, where too many artists debase the idea of a pure, solitary spirit and prostitute art to a predatory industry” (Bogner and Noever 2001, p. 92).Painters naturally gravitated toward expensive cars, lofts and chateaux, while poets take buses, settle in dim rooms […] and until the event of the word processor satisfied themselves with modestly turned print. Money rolls into the pockets of painters with a frequency that stuns the poet. Just as the extravagance of a painter is admired so is his ability to leap the boundaries of experiment or assume the labors of a chauvinist past. Some of us did desire to sit under the same umbrella as Picasso, even share his villa at Mougins. The physical extravagance of paint, of enormous canvases can cause a nurturing envy in the poet that prods his greatest possession, the imagination, into an expansion of its borders.
(able to live gracefullyin tenements)
We simply waiteda fresh morningthat was bound one dayto openover the roofs
Looking up to the sky above the built city, the poets “see dawn/as a palace”, the line break and white space between these lines signifying the poets’ ability to transform—through poetic metaphor and spatial imagination—their humble environment into royal architecture, connoting the Czar and his jewels, Kiesler and his “Galaxies”, and what poet Charles Baudelaire called in “The Painter of Modern Life” the “aristocratic superiority of [the] spirit” (Baudelaire 1972). Guest’s use of white space between these lines and stanzas graphically indicates the importance of the space “over the roofs”—the sky and its galaxies—which provide a literal “opening” and metaphorical inspiration to those hemmed in by the vertical city.And we see dawnas a palace.
Having in sleepexperiencedoriginal dreamswhich now becomean environment
Guest posits a shared Surrealist inspiration between the younger “we” that sees dawn as a palace, and Kiesler in his creation of galaxy environments. Thus the lines “Having in sleep/experienced/original dreams/which now become/an environment” can refer to Kiesler (inspired by dreams, Kiesler created Surrealist environments, including his “Galaxies” and his innovative Gallery designs), but can also refer to the poet, the poet’s circle, and the reader. Guest’s use of the present tense in “now become” positions the unfolding poem (and readers as they read), as part of the >Galaxy“, suggesting that the “original dreams” and the resulting “environment” are also theirs. Just as the “we” at this moment may variously include Kiesler, Guest’s circle, and the reader, Guest does not specify the “it” that the “we” climb into: “it” may evoke Kiesler in a “night suit” like a Surrealist astronaut, climbing into the landscape of dreams or into the physical “environment” that resulted from these dreams; Guest and her group literally climbing into a large “Galaxy”, possibly Kiesler’s twelve-foot high “Galaxy for Nelson Rockefeller” exhibited at MoMA in 1952 (Figure 2); and the readers, who imaginatively “climb” into the galaxy structure that the poem builds as it moves down the page. In this way the poem, like a “Galaxy”, remains “open” to its environment and audience.So we climb into itin the night suittrusting to placeone foot on“the cornerstone of the edifice”
These lines dramatize both physical movement and an affective change, as the “we” who enter the “Galaxy” structure are no longer “traditional” or “isolated”. These quotes explicitly allude to Kiesler’s essays, including a line from his “Correalist Manifesto” about the Salle de Superstition: “The house, freed from aesthetic tradition, became a living creature” (italics mine; Bogner and Noever 2001, p. 99), and a line from his “Note on Correalism” which accompanied the 1952 exhibition of his “Galaxies” at MoMA: “The debacle of art as a necessity today is caused by its separation from daily living, its isolation” (italics mine; Kiesler 1952, p. 8). “Edges” refer both to the edges of the “Galaxy” and to the edges of the poetic line, and they are equally “accurate” whether built of “stone” or words. Similarly, Guest’s structure “borders” on “a scheme” that remains invisible but structurally central to the poem: Kiesler’s “Galaxies”, and more generally the dreams and unconscious forces that the poem manifests, its “invisible architecture”. Guest’s Note to “Homage” emphasizes that Kiesler’s “Galaxies” originated in “architectural drawings”: the first material realization of his vision appeared on paper, like Guest’s poem (Guest 2003, p. 19) (Figure 4 and Figure 5).No longer “traditional”or “isolated”Whose edgesborder ona schemeaccurate as stone
In these lines Guest puns on the idea of “having rough edges”, a judgment that critics may well have applied to Kiesler’s sculpture and to the poetry of Guest’s circle, but which also signifies their shared willingness to challenge social and artistic conventions. Stating that the edges “surround us”, Guest suggests that Kiesler’s “Galaxy” structure and Gallery designs provided a kind of provisional but protective and sustaining shelter that allowed a younger artistic avant-garde to coalesce: as Guest noted, “Kiesler designed the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery in New York where Pollock and a ‘galaxy’ of new painters first showed” (2003, p. 19).22 The final lines of the stanza convey the idea of “edges no longer rough that surround us” visually and iconically, through the parentheses that surround the phrase “(on the walks/to commence our future/in another scale)”: while the tenement structure parenthetically enclosed and constrained the young poets, Kiesler’s structures provide support while encouraging new movement or “walks” into the future. These lines connote a younger avant-garde embarking on new paths, but also register O’Hara’s use of the walk as an organizing motif in his “I do this, I do that” poems; rather than position O’Hara as part of the past, Guest subtly positions O’Hara’s death as a continuation of his appetite for life, as taking a “step away” into another dimension (O’Hara 1995, pp. 257–58). Part of yet distinct from Kiesler’s “Galaxy”, the “we” join and extend the Galaxy “in another scale”; Guest’s two-dimensional poetic text displays and extends Kiesler’s three-dimensional “Galaxy” structures into future time and space. 23Whose edgesno longer roughsurround us(on the walksto commence our futurein another scale)
4. The Bartered Bride and the En Dehors Garde: New Formations of the Avant Garde
Galaxy I see you hangingfrom the ceiling
You are our bartered bridewith your grandcomatoseskeleton
Guest’s description of a “Galaxy” “hanging/from the ceiling” recalls Daisy Aldan’s description of “Galaxy” exhibitions with components on the ceiling; however, with its “grand/comatose/skeleton” and “coat of arms”, Guest likely alludes to the “Galaxy for Nelson Rockefeller” exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952. As Zillner writes, “Kiesler was associated with no museum as closely as with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York” (Bogner and Zillner 2019, p. 35), which exhibited his Correalistic furniture from the Guggenheim gallery, as well as his sculptures, architectural drawings, and his models and plans for the never realized “Endless House” which he had hoped to build in the museum’s gardens.24 Kiesler’s “Galaxy for Nelson Rockefeller” (1948–1952) was exhibited at MoMA as part of an exhibition titled 15 Americans (9 April–27 July 1952) (Bogner and Zillner 2019, p. 36). The “Galaxy” is a twelve-foot-high edifice or “skeleton” of a “room” that lacks floors, walls, and ceiling, which Kiesler had originally designed in 1948 for the set of the Darius Milhaud opera “Le Pauvre Matelot/The Poor Sailor” (libretto by Jean Cocteau) at Juilliard, an opera with nautical themes (Kiesler and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation n.d.). MoMA displayed it in a room along with a nineteen-part “Galaxy” painting (1951) arranged on one wall, with the top four painted panels echoing the horizontal “fish spine” of the sculpture (Figure 6 and Figure 7).Because you are edificeand bestowed on you isa “coat of arms”
Barr likens the “Galaxy” to a four-poster bed, a pergola, a drifting raft, and concludes by calling it “the supreme anti-technological gazebo” (Barr 1952, p. 142). In his descriptive note he adds that Kiesler “looks on Galaxy as a practical sculpture, to live with and within—to put in a garden, in a wooded grove or on a beach”, echoing Kiesler’s comment that the “Galaxy” “is a practical sculpture. It is both to be lived with and within” (Kiesler 1952, p. 8). Barr’s poetic metaphors emphasize the skeletal (dolphin’s spine, comb-finned gar) and fossil-like nature (ichthyosaur) of the structural components of the structure, which Barr associated with the detritus and movements of the sea (raft, sea horse, dolphin, lobster, driftwood, gar). Lacking walls yet creating large airy spaces suggestive of a dwelling open to space and the elements, the large “Galaxy for Nelson Rockefeller” embodied Kiesler’s ideal of structures that achieve “integration” with “the flow of [the] daily environment”, an ideal that Barr’s poetic language echoes and which his Harper’s Magazine “installation” furthers.Galaxy is architecture for sky-gazers; its plan is a cross with arms raised in amazement; its major axis slopes abruptly toward a vanishing point like Borromini’s false perspective in the Palazzo Spada; its four caryatids are a dolphin’s spine, a hippocampus, a lobster claw and an ichthyosaur caressed by a boomerang; its lintels are driftwood and a comb-finned gar.
The Bride raised the cloud settled on heraspen head and stepping away from her bachelorsshe seized like wands the poems I handed her:
‘A life glitters under leavespiled for anonymity…’
In this vision of the Bride, she steps away from her bachelors and out of the Large Glass for a new perspective enabled by Guest’s wand-like poems, resulting in a vision of a castle in shadow, an allusion to Guest’s essay “The Shadow of Surrealism” and perhaps to the metaphor of dawn becoming a castle in “Homage”. Similarly, in “Homage” Guest depicts Kiesler’s “Galaxy” as a Bride who has left behind the Large Glass and her bachelors for more visionary realms, and who offers spiny protection (a coat of arms) and a structure on which Guest can build her poems: “you are edifice”.She would lead us through glass to view theenigmatic hill where a castle slung a shadow.
Because you are edificeAnd bestowed on you isa “coat of arms”
Which youregally loandividing itinto weightless halves
Guest’s use of passive voice omits the figure who has bestowed on the “Galaxy” a coat of arms, and thus the bestower may be Duchamp, Kiesler, or Guest. Placing “coat of arms” in quotation marks suggests on the one hand that Guest is assigning symbolic meaning to an abstract structure, associating it with the visual design on a shield, the chainmail coat used in battle, or perhaps with the arrows of Artemis, the Greek goddess of the moon. And much as quotes function earlier in the poem, this quote also signals that the coat of arms has been imported or borrowed from an external source, echoing the importance of “readymade” elements in the Large Glass and in Kiesler’s framings of the Glass. In his poetic response to the “Galaxy”, Alfred H. Barr Jr. described the Galaxy’s “plan” as a “cross with arms raised in amazement” (Barr 1952, p. 142). Echoing Barr, Guest’s “coat of arms” may also refer to the structural “arms” on the “Galaxy”, that reach out to enclose, protect, or offer assistance, a feminist twist on the armor of the masculine “avant-garde” as the advance guard of an army. Describing the Bride as an “edifice”, which refers to a large or imposing building, Guest positions the Bride as a figure of importance, affirmed by her “coat of arms” and the adverb “regally”, which alludes back to the Czar and his jewels. This Bride is queenlike, with power: rather than a figure who is bartered by others, she loans the coat of arms. She divides this coat into “weightless halves”, connoting the use of space as a kind of structure that connects and divides, as in the two “halves” of the Large Glass, and in the spaces of Kiesler’s “Galaxies” and Guest’s “Homage”.Making your entrancesfrom the moon30
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
1 | Surrealism marks an important turn in the long history of word/image relations, understood by most scholars of ekphrasis (defined by James Heffernan as a “verbal representation of a visual representation”) as an antagonistic struggle, historically gendered in terms of a silent, feminized image or artwork narrated or made to speak by a male writer (Heffernan 1993, pp. 3, 7). Even as recent scholarship on feminist and queer ekphrasis has complicated this understanding of word-image relations (Bergmann-Loizeaux 2009; Halpern et al. 2009; Glavey 2015), it has often come up short in addressing the works of the avant-garde. For instance, “readymades” and found objects do not constitute forms of “visual representation” in Heffernan’s sense. Surrealist poets and artists tended to collaborate and to work across verbal/visual boundaries, just as they challenged other oppositions assumed to be antagonistic (e.g., dream and reality). Informed by Surrealism, Guest’s poems participate in and transform the tradition of ekphrasis, opening up the kinds of media that poems engage, and using the relationship between word and image to advance feminist commentary on technologies of vision, the gaze, desire, and imagination. Instead of antagonistic dominance over a feminized art object, in Guest’s poetry we find, as Sara Lundquist argues, a preference for speaking with and through the artwork (Lundquist 1997); instead of a simple critique or reversal of the male gaze we find instead, as Du Plessis argues, that Guest “multiplies the gaze so that she, as a female poet, can claim some power over the many dimensions of sight and seeing” (Du Plessis 2006, p. 177). In applying Kiesler’s understanding of Correalism to the relation between poetry and visual art, Guest’s “Homage” charts yet another model, one of spatial connection and extension, which results in an intermedial, sequentially collaborative work. |
2 | Zillner has recently emphasized the importance of the concept of the network and of network analysis to understanding Kiesler’s diverse work, career, and influence (Bogner and Zillner 2019, pp. 16–17). |
3 | (Lundquist 2001b; Du Plessis 2006; Nelson 2007; Kinnahan 2001, 2004; Keller 2001; Diggory 2001; Caples 2008) have demonstrated how Guest was often marginalized in the reception of the New York School: their scholarship has worked to reverse this trend while simultaneously challenging and expanding our understanding of the school and of the avant-garde more generally. I build on their insights in this essay. |
4 | For a review of the substantial scholarship on women and the historical avant-garde, see (Churchill et al. 2020a; see also Frost 2003; Nelson 2007; Nielsen 2015; Richards 2020; Shockley 2011; Yu 2009). |
5 | As Garrett Caples argues, Surrealism was an abiding influence throughout Guest’s career: “At her last two or three readings, she’d begun to identify herself as a surrealist, prompted in part by the two poems she’d written about de Chirico that open her final book, The Red Gaze. The Red Gaze was in fact originally subtitled Surrealism and Other Poems, although she nixed this in the end, not wishing, she said, to be overshadowed by surrealism. It was a characteristically ‘Barbara’ statement, one riffing off the title of her essay ‘The Shadow of Surrealism,’ which had recently been collected in Forces of Imagination” (Caples 2008, p. 153). Caples, like Du Plessis (2006), emphasizes Guest’s feminist adaptation of Surrealism; he points out “Being a woman in a male-dominated world, she felt oppressed by the social order; her art wasn’t taken seriously, and this was a deep source of pain to her. She felt continually slighted, from Ron Padgett and David Shapiro’s omission of her in the Anthology of New York Poets, to David Lehman’s cursory treatment of her in The Last Avant-Garde. This oppression perhaps provided the psychological conditions conducive to surrealism. Whether or not she should be considered a surrealist is probably less important than the fact that much of her poetry is. Her imagination was” (Caples 2008, pp. 154–55). |
6 | On Daisy Aldan’s Folder magazine, see Michael Hennessey (2011). Guest’s archive in the Beinecke Library attests to the importance of Folder magazine; Guest clipped and saved a photo from the January 1960 issue of Mademoiselle titled “The Folder Poets” (Guest n.d.). The photo depicts, from left to right, Daisy Aldan, William Weiss, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, Emilie Glen, Frank O’Hara, Ruth Yorck, Kenward Elmslie, Denise Levertov, Charles Boultenhouse, Arthur Gregor, Joy Gould, Le Roi Jones, Lucia Dlugoszewski, Jean Garrigue, Edward Field, and Storm de Hirsch, all published in Folder (1953–6). Aldan founded Tiber Press with Richard Miller and Floriano Vecchi in New York in the early 1950s: Tiber published prints by visual artists, a series of collaborative books by poets and artists, Folder magazine, which contained both poetry and visual art, and the anthology A New Folder (Aldan 1959). The name “Folder” originated in the experimental design of the magazine: rather than a bound volume, it consisted of looseleaf pages held in a folder, with each poem and work of visual art printed on a separate page. Aldan hoped that readers would incorporate the art and poems into their everyday living space, an idea stemming from Caresse Crosby’s magazine Portfolio, published during World War II on unbound pages. Like Portfolio, Folder looked back to Surrealism in its effort to facilitate dialogue and collaborations between poetry and visual arts, in its international focus, and in its experimental understanding of the magazine as a portable collection and social space that puts art and artists in dynamic relation to one another. Aldan’s archive in the Beinecke includes letters from Frederick Kiesler as well as Aldan’s typed appreciation of Kiesler, “Frederick Kiesler: Vessel of Fire”, and a typescript “Kiesler Archives”, a 1970 transcription of Aldan’s recorded memories of Kiesler and their friendship. Aldan recalled that she met Kiesler through the poet Ruth Yorck in 1954; Aldan was working on a doctorate at NYU on “The Influence of French Surrealism on American literature”, and Kiesler was always “immensely encouraging” of Aldan’s work and the work of other young artists and writers (Aldan 1970, pp. 1, 5). They became lifelong friends and collaborators, and Aldan included a drawing of Kiesler’s “Endless House” in A New Folder (1959) (Aldan 1970, pp. 5, 12). |
7 | Kiesler’s room for the Brooklyn Exhibition was not completed in time for the exhibition (Bohan 1982, pp. 61–62). See (Rosenbaum 2017), for a discussion of Dreier’s installation of Duchamp’s Large Glass and Tu M’ in her Connecticut home. |
8 | Kiesler developed his understanding of “Correalism” in response to Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, publishing an essay on “Design—Correlation” in the May 1937 Architectural Record (81.5, pp. 53–60) that featured his reflections on The Large Glass, accompanied by photographs taken by Berenice Abbott, arranged into spatial designs on the page by Kiesler. He also published a related reflection, “Design-Correlation”. VVV 2–3 (March 1945), pp. 76–80. Kiesler formalized these ideas in his “Manifesto on Correalism” (Kiesler 2001), initially published in French in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui in 1949, and printed in English translation in (Bogner and Noever 2001, pp. 92–99). The “Second Manifesto of Correalism” was published in Art International 9.2 (March 1965): 16–19. |
9 | Kiesler wrote “It is the principle of unity, primordial unity, the unity between man’s creative consciousness and his daily environment which governs the presentation of paintings, sculptures, furnishings and enclosures in these four galleries” (“Note on Designing the Gallery”, Davidson and Rylands 2004, p. 174). |
10 | |
11 | Similarly, Berenice Abbott’s photographs of Kiesler’s Art of this Century gallery are an important record of the interactive features of the gallery and offer a further mediation and framing of it. See (Davidson and Rylands 2004). |
12 | For a further, related framing in a different medium—an interactive digital exhibition and analysis of View’s Duchamp issue, including Kiesler’s Triptych—see Erin McClenathan’s StoryMap, “Loy in View” (McClenathan 2020): https://mina-loy.com/art-exhibits/loy-in-view/ (accessed on 26 August 2022) McClenathan (2020) and Michael Taylor (2019) discuss the importance of Jamaican-born Percy Rainford’s photographic contributions to the Triptych. |
13 | In 1947 Kiesler also made a “Galaxy” portrait of Duchamp https://www.moma.org/collection/works/33989 (accessed on 26 August 2022) and in 1948 one of e.e. cummings https://www.moma.org/collection/works/33977 (accessed on 26 August 2022). Kiesler’s archive includes typescripts of poems that reflect on architecture, including a poem dated 11 July 1958 and one dated to the 1960s, published in (Bogner and Noever 2001, pp. 34, 38–39). Daisy Aldan recalled Kiesler writing poems and sharing them with her (Aldan 1970, pp. 12–13), and in her interview about Kiesler she looks through his poetry manuscript titled Thirsty Paper, and reads aloud a number of the poems (Aldan 1970, pp. 14–21). |
14 | Similarly, in his 1947 “Correalist Manifesto”, Kiesler argued that under the influence of “Correalism”, “Painters, sculptures, and designers, driven away by functionalism, will return from exile to be saved by architecture; suddenly, every house will become a museum” (Bogner and Noever 2001, p. 99). |
15 | The potential “endlessness” of Kiesler’s constellation of “Galaxy” artworks is akin to the endlessness of the “expanding universe”. Dieter Bogner argues that the “Galaxies” “develop parallel with the Endless House beginning in 1947” (Bogner and Noever 2001, p. 23). Lisa Phillips argues that Correalism and endlessness are the central aesthetic principles that informed the “Galaxies” (Bogner and Noever 2001, p. 29). Phillips writes, “The celestial galaxy worked as a metaphor for both composition and the idea of ‘endlessness’. Galaxies, like compositions, comprise various elements as they come into being. ‘Only then is their expanse defined, and they can actually, by further necessity, be further expanded by adding new units. Their inner cohesion is the principle matter, and since this impetus might grow and make new demands, these galaxies […] are by principle endless’. For Kiesler, the galaxy expressed the miracle of how things are held together as well as the implications of an infinitely expanding universe on both microscopic and macroscopic levels” (Bogner and Noever 2001, p. 29). She notes that the “realities of the atomic age, nuclear physics, and space exploration gave his Galaxies special urgency” (Bogner and Noever 2001, p. 29). |
16 | Influential works of avant-garde visual poetics included Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés, Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, Marinetti’s futurist poems guided by his concept of ‘Words-in-Freedom’, Pound’s and Fenellosa’s ideograms, Mina Loy’s Love Songs, and poetry inspired by Cubism (Blaise Cendrars, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, W.C. Williams, e.e. cummings), Dada (Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann), Surrealism (poem-objects of Breton), and Lettrism (Isodore Isou). While extremely various, the visual poems associated with the avant-garde use the innovative spatial layout of words and letters as a means of breaking with conventions of linearity, reference, syntax, punctuation, spelling, and poetic voice; and explore the plastic possibilities of print through play with typography, font, and graphic design. |
17 | Aldan recalled that “Kiesler often spoke about Mallarmé, in fact I was told that he had in the 1920’s and 30’s, he had done a study of Mallarmé and of the word, the visual poem, the placement of the poem on the page, which was a tremendously new concept. […] I never would have completed the Coup de Dés, worked on it so profoundly, if not for Kiesler. I remember that now, he helped me, the layout I took directly from Mallarmé, but he discussed it with me and he helped me with several nuances of the language, of the poem” (Aldan 1970, p. 12). Arguably Aldan’s translation was as important as Olson’s “projective verse” (1950) in positioning the page as an “open field” for experiment, an experiment that Guest would pursue in The Open Skies (1962), The Blue Stairs (1968), and in “Homage” (1968). Guest’s experiments with visual form were not static, developing and changing over the course of her career, such that her late and early experiments in visual poetics differ stylistically in substantive ways, even as space endured as an important component of her poetic designs. |
18 | On the importance of space as an architectural structure in Guest’s poetry see in particular (Donovan 2009). Donovan argues that Guest’s use of space is primarily but not always visual, and likens Guest’s poems to Gothic structures: “Like the Gothic architects, Guest created a carefully constructed form with very little materials. The effect is a notion of a complete body that verges on transcendence and relies on trace outline, space, light and an echo of the familiar” (n. pag.). Lamm argues that in Guest’s book Fair Realism, “images of domestic architecture serve as figures for artistic forms that make dwelling in the imagination imaginative, livable, and just” (Lamm 2013, p. 116). Finberg makes a persuasive case for reading Frank O’Hara’s poems in the context of modernist architectural space and discourse, specifically through their playful subversion of corporate America’s adoption of international style in iconic structures such as the Seagram building: “They are not poems that chronicle the city, but rather should be read as akin to contemporaneous event scores and happenings” (Finberg 2016, p. 115). On poems as architectural structures see also Marsha Bryant’s and Charlie Hailey’s essay for this special issue, particularly the discussion of Wallace Stevens’ “architectural poem” (Bryant and Hailey 2022, p. 5), and Jo Gill’s essay on Hart Crane’s “architectural art” (Gill 2022). |
19 | In Memory of My Feelings was published by MoMA after O’Hara’s death in 1967 and reprinted in 2005. Selected and edited by Bill Berkson (1967), this portfolio volume includes 30 of O’Hara’s poems, illustrated with 46 original drawings by thirty of the artists he knew, reproduced by offset lithography on individual sheets. The illustrated poems on unbound sheets of paper were placed in a canvas portfolio. The portfolio, a miniature exhibition, was published to accompany an actual exhibition of the illustrated poems at the MoMA which ran from 5 December 1967 to 28 January 1968. In his Preface, Rene d’Harnoncourt stated, “it was decided that the best way the Museum might honor Frank O’Hara, after his sudden death, would be the publication of a book of his poems decorated by the plastic artists with whom he was associated. This is that book, a homage to the sheer poetry—in all guises and roles—of the man” (1967, n.pag.). The Museum also held a “Frederick J. Kiesler Memorial” exhibition from 31 December 1965–20 March 1966. |
20 | Like Kiesler, Guest was involved in the New York theater scene, writing and staging several plays in the 1960s; this shared interest in theater helped both artists to approach the reception of the artwork in dynamic terms. Correalism suggests a different model of inter-arts engagement than that of conventional ekphrasis, moving closer to collaboration and intermediality. Women poets’ and artists’ collaborative works have received less attention than ekphrastic poetry, but Lundquist in her study of Barbara Guest’s collaborations with Grace Hartigan and Mary Abbott suggests that collaboration provided crucial mutual recognition and support (Lundquist 2001a). Kimberly Lamm argues that Guest’s collaborations with female artists demonstrate an “aesthetic of restraint” that “work toward creating feminist artistic practices among women that exceed struggles with and against male dominance” (Lamm 2013, p 115). On collaboration in the New York School see (Silverberg 2013); on collaboration in Surrealist circles, see (Hubert 1994). Collaborative works involving women not only commented on and refigured notions of original authorship, but also explored and challenged social relationships defined by gender, sex, race, class, and power (Hubert 1994, pp. 4, 10, 27). In visual-verbal collaborations, patriarchy and its associated hierarchies, including the conventional antagonism between a masculinized word and feminized image, were challenged and opened up: collaboration often served as a means of exploring new configurations of gender and desire, beyond the limits imposed by Breton and the Surrealist movement. |
21 | Webster writes that e.e. cummings, a prominent practitioner of visual poetics, establishes “analogies between the visual, spatial [and syntactic] structure of the [poem] and the kinds of physical, emotional movement evoked” (Webster 1995, p. 121). |
22 | Gerd Zillner also emphasizes the “Galaxy” as a figure for a social-artistic network, noting that “At the end of the 1940s Kiesler began drawing portraits and making the multi-part Galaxy Portraits of his friends” (Bogner and Zillner 2019, p. 39). |
23 | In her orientation towards the future, Guest’s “Homage” revises T.S. Eliot’s modernist model of poetic tradition, even as Guest like Eliot posits the importance of connections that living artists make with the dead; rather than remapping past and present in Eliot’s feedback loop, Guest’s “Homage” connects past and future. Like dead stars (also a favorite metaphor of Eliot), Kiesler’s “Galaxies” continue to illuminate the present and reach out to the future in spatial, social, and artistic terms. |
24 | Kiesler worked for decades on his plan for a Surrealist-inspired “Endless House” that integrated art and everyday life. That the “Endless House” was never built but generated exhibitions, drawings, models, and a book, testifies to its importance less as an established structure than as a formally variable “imaginary museum” capable of generating dream and imagination. On the history and various incarnations of the “Endless House”, see (Bogner and Noever 2001). |
25 | Philip Johnson, the Curator of Architecture at MoMA, also commissioned Kiesler to create a similar “Galaxy” sculpture for the garden of his Glass House in Connecticut (Bogner and Zillner 2019, p. 40). On MoMA’s “white cube” mode of exhibition, see O’Doherty (2000) and Staniszewski (2001). |
26 | The influential history of modernism recorded at the Museum of Modern Art, as Griselda Pollock has commented, “systematically failed to register the intensely visible artistic participation of women in making modernism modern” (Pollock 2010, p. 34). Pollock notes that of the 2052 exhibitions held at MoMA since 1929, 95, or 5%, have focused on women (Pollock 2010, p. 42). |
27 | Penelope Rosemont argues that the early Surrealist movement was male-dominated and many male Surrealists were not feminists, yet they were nevertheless “the irreconcilable enemies of feminism’s enemies, and thus in many ways could be considered feminism’s allies. They concentrated their attacks on the apparatus of patriarchal oppression: God, church, state, family, capital, fatherland, and the military” (Rosemont 1998, p. xliv). Breton idealized women as muse, erotic or romantic ideal, and as a child-like medium to irrational unconscious states, but also “championed the sorceress, vamp, succubus, temptress, seer, sphinx, wanton, outlaw, and dozens of other models of unconventional women” (Rosemont 1998, p. xlvii). Amelia Jones observes “the tendency within surrealism to rationalize in its own fashion—by orienting its explorations toward the ultimate recontainment of femininity, flux, homosexuality, and other kinds of dangerous flows that intrigued the surrealists but which they could not bear to allow to remain unbounded” (Jones 2004, p. 252). The history of Surrealism’s reception by women and other marginalized groups in the U.S. can be seen as a history of resistance to such containment; see (Rosement and Kelley 2009; Rosenbaum 2012). On women and Surrealism, see (Allmer 2009, 2016; Chadwick 1985; Caws et al. 1991; Conley 1996; Fort and Arcq 2012; Lusty 2007; Hubert 1994; Watz 2020). |
28 | David Hopkins has demonstrated Duchamp’s influence on a generation of queer male artists interested in challenging masculinist modernism after World War II (Hopkins 2007), while Amelia Jones approaches Duchamp not as an authorizing paternal origin but as a figure whose generativeness for postmodernism lies in the readymades’ deconstruction of sexual difference (Jones 1995). |
29 | Kimberly Lamm explores Guest’s poem “Heroic Stages” as a response to Hartigan’s paintings, and argues that “Guest saw both Hartigan and her work as crucial allies in a creative world that lauded the masculinist heroics of abstract expressionism through the criteria of the ‘modern-abstract-contemporary’” (Lamm 2013, pp. 115, 122–24). |
30 | Guest’s revised and condensed “Homage” concludes: “Galaxy! Galaxies!/entering from the moon” (Guest 2003, p. 19). Moving from the singular “Galaxy” to the plural “Galaxies” suggests the ways in which individual “Galaxy” artworks circulate as part of larger “Galaxy” environments, and proliferate through extensions and responses such as Guest’s poem. The later version of “Homage” published in 2003 radically condenses stanzas 3–9, and omits stanzas 10–12 that address the “Galaxy” as a “bartered bride” (Guest 2003, p. 19). Guest subtracted material and this later version is thus more abstract than the 1968 publication. Rather than consider the later poem a final version of the earlier poem, I recommend regarding the two as related but distinct works, parts of a galaxy. |
31 | Loy’s poem can also be read as a response to Duchamp’s Large Glass and Man Ray’s photo of a section of the glass (Rosenbaum 2020). |
32 | Du Plessis connects otherworldly space in Guest’s poetry with her “fair realist” adaptation of the Surrealist marvellous (Du Plessis 2006). |
33 | Although ekphrasis is a concept conventionally applied to literature, scholars have approached it in the context of the museum (Heffernan 1993; Bergmann-Loizeaux 2009; Fischer 2006; Paul 2002; Yacobi 2012) and have usefully extended it to film and music (Clüver 1998; Bruhn 2000; Sager Eidt 2008). More generally, scholars of intermediality (crossing borders between media) are using this concept to reconsider and extend understandings of ekphrasis (Eilitta 2012; Rajewski 2005; Yacobi 2012). The context and concept of the collection, gallery, or museum as a kind of architectural, spatial frame that cuts across media, invites us to broaden our approach to ekphrasis by considering ekphrasis as one medium presenting a work in another medium, a self-conscious art of framing that uses and reflects upon generic mixture. Broadening the forms and media of collection that we consider under the rubric of the museum allows us to engage collections that are visionary, imaginative, textual, filmic, digital, virtual, etc. My understanding of “imaginary museums” coincides with Wall-Romana’s understanding of the “cinematic imaginary” as an expansion and transformation of the poetic imagination through new media, primarily the cinema (Wall-Romana 2013, pp. 16–18, 29–30). |
34 | On the relevance of network analysis to a more expansive history of the avant-garde, see Churchill, Kinnahan, and Rosenbaum, “The Biography Project: Loy and her Social Network” (Churchill et al. 2020b); Chinn et al., “Networking the New American Poetry” (Chinn et al. n.d.); and Sturm, “Alice Notley’s Magazines” (Sturm n.d.). |
References
- Aldan, Daisy. 1959. A New Folder. New York: Tiber Press. [Google Scholar]
- Aldan, Daisy. 1970. Kiesler Archives (Typescript, Tape #4, April 27, 1970). Daisy Aldan Papers. New Haven: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. [Google Scholar]
- Allmer, Patricia, ed. 2009. Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism. New York: Prestel. [Google Scholar]
- Allmer, Patricia, ed. 2016. Intersections: Women Artists/Surrealism/Modernism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Barr, Alfred H., Jr. 1952. Kiesler’s Galaxy. Harper’s Magazine, April. 142–43. [Google Scholar]
- Baudelaire, Charles. 1972. The Painter of Modern Life. In Charles Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature. Translated by P. E. Charvet. London: Penguin Books, pp. 390–435. [Google Scholar]
- Bergmann-Loizeaux, Elizabeth. 2009. Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Berkson, Bill, ed. 1967. In Memory of My Feelings. 2005 Reprint. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. [Google Scholar]
- Bogner, Dieter. 2001. Inside the Endless House. In Frederick J. Kiesler: Endless Space. Edited by Dieter Bogner and Peter Noever. Vienna: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 11–26. [Google Scholar]
- Bogner, Dieter, and Peter Noever, eds. 2001. Frederick J. Kiesler: Endless Space. Vienna: Hatje Cantz Verlag. [Google Scholar]
- Bogner, Peter, and Gerd Zillner, eds. 2019. Frederick Kiesler: Face to Face with the Avant-Garde: Essays on Network and Impact. Basel: Birkhäuser. [Google Scholar]
- Bohan, Ruth L. 1982. The Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition: Katherine Dreier and Modernism in America. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. [Google Scholar]
- Bohn, Willard. 2001. Modern Visual Poetry. Newark: University of Delaware Press. [Google Scholar]
- Bonk, Ecke. 1989. Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise. Translated by David Brett. New York: Rizzoli. [Google Scholar]
- Breton, André. 1969. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver, and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. [Google Scholar]
- Bruhn, Siglind. 2000. Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting. Hillsdale: Pendragon Press. [Google Scholar]
- Bryant, Marsha, and Charlie Hailey. 2022. Thirteen Tactics for Teaching Poetry as Architecture. Humanities 11: 19. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Caples, Garrett. 2008. Barbara Guest in the Shadow of Surrealism. Chicago Review 53–54: 153–57. [Google Scholar]
- Caws, Mary Ann, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg, eds. 1991. Surrealism and Women. Cambridge: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]
- Chadwick, Whitney. 1985. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. Boston: Little, Brown. [Google Scholar]
- Chinn, Lisa Marie, Brian Croxall, and Rebecca Sutton Koeser. n.d. Networking the New American Poetry. Emory Center for Digital Scholarship & The Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. Available online: https://danowski.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/nnap/about/ (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Churchill, Suzanne, Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum. 2020a. Theories of the Avant-Garde and En Dehors Garde. In Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne Churchill, Linda Kinnahan and Susan Rosenbaum. Athens: University of Georgia. Available online: https://mina-loy.com/chapters/avant-garde-theory-2/ (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Churchill, Suzanne, Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum. 2020b. The Biography Project: Loy and her Social Network. In Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne Churchill, Linda Kinnahan and Susan W. Rosenbaum. Athens: University of Georgia. Available online: https://mina-loy.com/news-events/digital-mina-loy-in-the-classroom-mapping-loys-social-artistic-networks-in-florence-new-york-paris/ (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Churchill, Suzanne, Linda Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum. 2020c. En Dehors Garde. In Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne Churchill, Linda Kinnahan and Susan W. Rosenbaum. Athens: University of Georgia. Available online: https://mina-loy.com/chapters/avant-garde-theory-2/the-en-dehors-garde/ (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Clüver, Claus. 1998. Quotation, Enargeia, and the Function of Ekphrasis. In Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis. Edited by Valerie Robillart and Els Jongeneel. Amsterdam: VU University Press, pp. 35–52. [Google Scholar]
- Conley, Katharine. 1996. Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. [Google Scholar]
- Davidson, Susan, and Philip Rylands, eds. 2004. Peggy Guggenheim & Frederick Kiesler: The Story of Art of This Century. New York: Guggenheim Museum. [Google Scholar]
- Diggory, Terence. 2001. Barbara Guest and the Mother of Beauty. Women’s Studies 30: 75–94. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Donovan, Lisa. 2009. Barbara Guest: Text as Ruin, Architected Negation, and the Gothic Structure. Jacket 36. Available online: http://jacketmagazine.com/36/guest-donovan.shtml (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Du Plessis, Rachel Blau. 2006. Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. [Google Scholar]
- Duchamp, Marcel. 1969. Notes and Projects for The Large Glass. Edited by Arturo Schwarz. New York: Harry N. Abrams. [Google Scholar]
- Edelman, Aliza. 2013. Grace Hartigan’s Grand Street Brides: The Modern Bride as Mannequin. Women’s Art Journal 34: 3–10. [Google Scholar]
- Eilitta, Leena. 2012. Introduction: From Interdisciplinarity to Intermediality. In Intermedial Arts: Disrupting, Remembering and Transforming Media. Edited by Leena Eilitta, Liliane Louvel and Sabine Kim. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. [Google Scholar]
- Filipovic, Elena. 2009. A Museum That is Not. E-Flux Journal 4. Available online: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/a-museum-that-is-not/ (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Finberg, Keegan Cook. 2016. Frank O’Hara Rebuilds the Seagram Building: A Radical Poetry of Event. Textual Practice 30: 113–14. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Fischer, Barbara K. 2006. Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]
- Ford, Charles Henri, ed. 1945. Marcel Duchamp Number. New York: View. [Google Scholar]
- Fort, Ilene Susan, and Tere Arcq, eds. 2012. In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Munich: DelMonico/Prestel. [Google Scholar]
- Frost, Elisabeth A. 2003. The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. [Google Scholar]
- Frost, Elisabeth A. 2016. Visual Poetics. In A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Edited by Linda A. Kinnahan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 339–58. [Google Scholar]
- Gill, Jo. 2022. Hart Crane: The Architectural Art. Modernism/Modernity PrintPlus 7: 1. Available online: https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/gill-hart-crane-architectural-art (accessed on 26 August 2022). [CrossRef]
- Glavey, Brian. 2015. The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Gross, Jennifer, ed. 2006. The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Guest, Barbara. 2001. “Homage.” Angel Hair 5 (Spring 1968). In The Angel Hair Anthology. Edited by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh. New York: Granary Books, pp. 101–3. [Google Scholar]
- Guest, Barbara. 2002. Invisible Architecture. In Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing. Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press. Available online: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69475/invisible-architecture (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Guest, Barbara. 2003. Durer in the Window: Reflexions on Art. Edited by Africa Wayne. New York: Roof Books. [Google Scholar]
- Guest, Barbara. 2008. The Collected Poems. Edited by Hadley Haden Guest. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Guest, Barbara. n.d. Barbara Guest Papers. New Haven: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
- Guggenheim, Peggy. 1979. Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict. New York: Universe Books. [Google Scholar]
- Guilbaut, Serge. 1983. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
- Halpern, Nick, Jane Hedley, and Willard Spiegelman, eds. 2009. In the Frame: Women’s Ekphrastic Poetry from Marianne Moore to Susan Wheeler. Newark: University of Delaware Press. [Google Scholar]
- Heffernan, James. 1993. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
- Hennessey, Michael. 2011. On Daisy Aldan, ‘A New Folder’. Jacket 2. Available online: https://jacket2.org/article/daisy-aldan-new-folder (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Hirsch, Sharon L. 2003. Grace Hartigan: Painting Art History. Seattle: University of Washington Press. [Google Scholar]
- Hopkins, David. 1998. Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [Google Scholar]
- Hopkins, David. 2007. Dada’s Boys: Masculinity After Duchamp. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Hubert, Renée Riese. 1994. Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership. Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press. [Google Scholar]
- Jones, Amelia. 1995. Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Jones, Amelia. 2004. Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada. Cambridge: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]
- Judovitz, Dalia. 1998. Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]
- Judovitz, Dalia. 2010. Drawing on Art: Duchamp & Company. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]
- Kachur, Lewis. 2001. Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations. Cambridge: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]
- Keller, Lynn. 2001. Becoming ‘a Compleat Travel Agency’: Barbara Guest’s Negotiations with the Fifties Feminine Mystique. In The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets. Edited by Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, pp. 215–27. [Google Scholar]
- Kiesler, Frederick. 1937. Design-Correlation. The Architectural Record 81: 53–60. [Google Scholar]
- Kiesler, Frederick. 1945. Design-Correlation. VVV 2–3: 76–80. [Google Scholar]
- Kiesler, Frederick. 1952. Note on Correalism. In 15 Americans. Edited by Dorothy Miller. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, p. 8. [Google Scholar]
- Kiesler, Frederick. 1965. Second Manifesto of Correalism. Art International 9: 16–19. [Google Scholar]
- Kiesler, Frederick. 2001. Manifesto on Correalism. In Frederick J. Kiesler: Endless Space. Edited by Dieter Bogner and Peter Noever. Vienna: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 92–99. [Google Scholar]
- Kiesler, Frederick, and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation. n.d. Biography Frederick Kiesler. Available online: https://www.kiesler.org/en/biography-frederick-kiesler/ (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Kinnahan, Linda. 2001. Reading Barbara Guest: The View from the Nineties. In The Scene of Our Selves: New Work on the New York School Poets. Edited by Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, pp. 229–44. [Google Scholar]
- Kinnahan, Linda. 2004. Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. [Google Scholar]
- Lamm, Kimberly. 2013. Fair Realism: The Aesthetics of Restraint in Barbara Guest’s Collaborations. In New York School Collaborations: The Color of Vowels. Edited by Mark Silverberg. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 113–40. [Google Scholar]
- Levy, Julien. 1945. Duchampiana. View 5: 34. [Google Scholar]
- Loy, Mina. 1996. The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Edited by Roger L. Conover. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. [Google Scholar]
- Lundquist, Sara. 1997. Reverence and Resistance: Barbara Guest, Ekphrasis, and the Female Gaze. Contemporary Literature 38: 260–86. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Lundquist, Sara. 2001a. Another Poet Among Painters: Barbara Guest with Grace Hartigan and Mary Abbott. In The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets. Edited by Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, pp. 245–64. [Google Scholar]
- Lundquist, Sara. 2001b. The Fifth Point of a Star: Barbara Guest and The New York ‘School’ of Poets. Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30: 11–41. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Lusty, Natalya. 2007. Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Aldershot: Ashgate. [Google Scholar]
- Malraux, André. 1949. Museum Without Walls. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Pantheon Books. [Google Scholar]
- McClenathan, Erin. 2020. Loy in View. In Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne Churchill, Linda Kinnahan and Susan W. Rosenbaum. Athens: University of Georgia. Available online: https://mina-loy.com/art-exhibits/loy-in-view/ (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Nelson, Maggie. 2007. Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions. Iowa City: Iowa University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. 2015. Experiments in Black: African-American Avant-Garde Poetics. In Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Edited by Joe Bray, Allison Gibbons and Brian McHale. New York: Routledge, pp. 168–81. [Google Scholar]
- Norman, Will. 2016. Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. [Google Scholar]
- O’Doherty, Brian. 2000. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]
- O’Hara, Frank. 1995. Collected Poems. Edited by Donald Allen. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]
- Paul, Catherine. 2002. Poetry in the Museums of Modernism. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press. [Google Scholar]
- Phillips, Lisa. 2001. Frederick J. Kiesler: Ambient Artist. In Frederick J. Kiesler: Endless Space. Edited by Dieter Bogner and Peter Noever. Vienna and Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 27–30. [Google Scholar]
- Pollock, Griselda. 2010. The Missing Future: MoMA and Modern Women. In Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art. Edited by Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz. New York: Museum of Modern Art, pp. 29–55. [Google Scholar]
- Rajewski, Irina. 2005. Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality. Intermédialités Histoire et Théorie Des Arts Des Lettres et Des Techniques 6: 43. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Richards, Jill. 2020. The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes. New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Rosement, Franklin, and Robin D. G. Kelley. 2009. Black, Brown, and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora. Austin: University of Texas Press. [Google Scholar]
- Rosemont, Penelope. 1998. Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. Austin: University of Texas Press. [Google Scholar]
- Rosenbaum, Susan. 2012. Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Influence on the American Poetry Scene, 1920–1960. In The Oxford Handbook to Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. Edited by Cary Nelson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 268–300. [Google Scholar]
- Rosenbaum, Susan. 2015. The ‘do it yourself avant-garde’: Twentieth-Century American Women Poets and Experiment. In Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Edited by Linda Kinnahan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Rosenbaum, Susan. 2017. Brides Stripped Bare: Transformations of Surrealist Spectatorship in U.S. Women’s Collections. Special issue of Dada/Surrealism 21. Available online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/dadasur/vol21/iss1/ (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Rosenbaum, Susan. 2020. Eros Obsolete, Lunar Baedeker, and Duchamp’s Large Glass. In Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne Churchill, Linda Kinnahan and Susan W. Rosenbaum. Athens: University of Georgia. Available online: https://mina-loy.com/criticism-of-freud-alternate-models-of-eros-female-sexuality/#eros (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Sager Eidt, Laura M. 2008. Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis in Literature and Film. New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi. [Google Scholar]
- Sawin, Martica. 1995. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. Cambridge: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]
- Shockley, Evie. 2011. Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African-American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. [Google Scholar]
- Silverberg, Mark, ed. 2013. New York School Collaborations: The Color of Vowels. New York: Palgrave. [Google Scholar]
- Staniszewski, Mary Anne. 2001. The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]
- Stoner, Jill. 2012. Towards a Minor Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]
- Sturm, Nick. n.d. Alice Notley’s Magazines: A Digital Publishing Project. Available online: https://www.nicksturm.com/digital-publishing-project (accessed on 26 August 2022).
- Sullivan, Louis. 1896. The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered. Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, March. 403–9. [Google Scholar]
- Taylor, Michael R. 2019. Percy Rainford: Duchamp’s ‘Invisible’ Photographer. Vienna: Verlag fur Moderne Kunst. [Google Scholar]
- Tomkins, Calvin. 1996. Duchamp: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt. [Google Scholar]
- Wall-Romana, Christophe. 2013. Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry. New York: Fordham UP. [Google Scholar]
- Watz, Anna, ed. 2020. Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration. Manchester: Manchester University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Webster, Michael. 1995. Reading Visual Poetry After Futurism: Marinetti, Apollinaire, Schwitters, Cummings. New York: Peter Lang. [Google Scholar]
- Yacobi, Tamar. 2012. Ekphrastic Double Exposure and the Museum Book of Poetry. Poetics Today 34: 1–52. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Yu, Timothy. 2009. Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian-American Poetry Since 1965. Stanford: Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar]
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. |
© 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Share and Cite
Rosenbaum, S. Visionary Architects: Barbara Guest, Frederick Kiesler, and the Surrealist Poetics of the Galaxy. Humanities 2022, 11, 113. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11050113
Rosenbaum S. Visionary Architects: Barbara Guest, Frederick Kiesler, and the Surrealist Poetics of the Galaxy. Humanities. 2022; 11(5):113. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11050113
Chicago/Turabian StyleRosenbaum, Susan. 2022. "Visionary Architects: Barbara Guest, Frederick Kiesler, and the Surrealist Poetics of the Galaxy" Humanities 11, no. 5: 113. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11050113
APA StyleRosenbaum, S. (2022). Visionary Architects: Barbara Guest, Frederick Kiesler, and the Surrealist Poetics of the Galaxy. Humanities, 11(5), 113. https://doi.org/10.3390/h11050113