[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: September 29, 2008]
I hoped to review this show a couple of weeks ago, but the "appurtenances of daily life", as Ashbery would have it, got in the way. There's still time, though - it closes October 4th - to enjoy the gallery debut of America's most honored living poet.
Perhaps the major living poet in the English language - or least he's the obvious candidate for that grandiose title, which is perhaps achievement enough - Ashbery emerges aged 81, as a skilled, entertaining, engaging collagist (apparently he had practised the art at college, but those works are lost).
Collage has been an ever-present technique in Ashbery's poetry, where snatches of movie dialog, overheard conversation, titles or lines from other authors, are regularly pasted over the meandering, indirect narrative of his lyric. Often - here comes Popeye or Daffy Duck or Will Rogers - these external intrusions provide light relief from the customary self-effacing melancholy which is the poet's dominant tone.
Indeed, many of these works - some very recent - are often laugh-out-loud funny. The superheroes imposed on the postcard of the Smithsonian, for example; or the knickerbockered Fauntleroy figure bearing roses, apparently pursued by a fish ("Poisson d'Avril").
The most dramatically effective (and still slightly silly) composition is "Six O'Clock", in which a train rushes over an El line, drowning out the crowded, illuminated evening street below. Parallel with the street, for no apparent reason, flows a river bearing a praying figure in a boat, straight out of myth. The big full moon smiles lugubriously at the inexplicable scene.
If the show is enjoyable, stark originality is harder to claim. The choice of images irresistibly suggests Joseph Cornell. It didn't need the dedication of "Chutes and Ladders I" for the influence of Ashbery's brilliant artist-writer friend Joe Brainard to be evident. (I never miss an opportunity to point out that Brainard's I Remember is one of the most original and rewarding prose works of modern American literature.)
What I didn't know, until I read the catalog, was that some of the materials in the works were actually supplied by Brainard; at least, they were cut up many years ago, and placed in an envelope Ashbery only recently opened. Brainard, who died of AIDS at 52, thus whispers to us through his friend's recent works; and few poets are as open as Ashbery to the remembered voices of beloved others.
It's a show of connections, indeed. The Tibor de Nagy gallery, whcih hosts it, has a long connection with the Ashbery circle: de Nagy's partner, Bernard Myers, edited the seminal anthology of the so-called New York school's poetry, featuring poems by Ashbery, O'Hara, Koch, Schuyler, Guest and others alongside illustrations by such artists as Brainard, and Jane Freilicher who still exhibits at the gallery.
Another connection is with the British (New York-based) painter Trevor Winkfield, whose show of recent paintings adjacent to Ashbery's collages has attracted less press attention. Winkfield is a friend and illustrator of Ashbery - he designed the cover for Ashbery's book-length poem Flow Chart - and a devotee of contemporary poetry (a regular presence at Poet's House in SoHo).
Winkfield's vividly colored acrylics manipulate familiar objects in unfamiliar ways within a two-dimensional pictorial space which the artist never tires of unfolding, questioning and re-articulating. One acknowledged influence on his approach is Gerald Murphy, that overlooked American giant discussed at length in an earlier Pink Pig. Murphy was an associate of both Picasso and Léger, and it is the latter's departure from analytical cubism toward an exploration of the smooth, polished volumes of everyday objects which influenced Murphy.
Winkfield too is Léger-like in the serenity of the shapes he arranges and his comfort with spheres and rounded, curved surfaces (consider the central panel of "At the Gates" for example). Léger's interest in the recognizable figurs and objects is displaced, however, by a private symbolism of keys, pipes, flowers and fish (does "The Swimmer" allude slyly to Beckman?). I was also reminded of the slightly older British artist, Patrick Caulfield, whose analysis of pictorial space never excluded ornamental pictorial elements.
Works from this uplifting double show can be located with patience at the gallery's web site. The clickable link for Winkfield is functioning - the Ashbery link doesn't seem to work.
