6th Annual Distinguished Critics Lecture
Presenting Raphael Rubinstein




Raphael Rubinstein's lecture was entitled “A Reading Of,” and explored the tradition of poems composed in response to artworks. The tradition is venerable and continuing today, and many poets are writing poems inspired by contemporary visual art. This work, too often overlooked by the mainstream artworld, constitutes a vital discourse that offers something distinct from conventional art criticism. With an emphasis on innovative poetic form, and a glance back at the poet-painter associations of the Abstract Expressionist generation, the evening was devoted to the complex interplay of poetic language and contemporary art.

Excerpt from the lecture:

Anything can happen when you are standing in front of a work of art. Sometimes what happens has to stay private, and always a massive amount of what happens happens in a zone from which words can return with only a very partial account. and yet, they do straggle through, and we need them to do so, we need to convey to each other our experiences of the visual, even if we only succeed fractionally. Most of the words that we read about visual art are published under the banners of “art criticism” and “art history” and “artists writings.” There’s much that’s valuable in all these areas, and I can’t imagine the experience of art without the existence, sometimes welcome, sometimes distracting or infuriating, of these modes of discourse. But this evening is devoted to another kind of verbal response to works of art: poetry. This is “a reading of” poems about contemporary art, “reading” in two senses: I will recite poems and also offer some interpretation and contextualization.

“Poetry” is a charged, and frequently misused, word, but I’m not going to spend any of our time trying to define it, any more than I would attempt to define art. Art is what artists make, even when it doesn’t look like “art.” Poetry is what poets write, even when it doesn’t look or sound like “poetry.”

The poem I started with is by Jim Brodey, a poet who died in 1993 at the age of 51. The poem is titled “Joan Mitchell,” in tribute to the great gestural painter who was a friend of many poets and who died the year before Brodey (his poem was written well before Mitchell’s death). During the last years of his life Brodey wrote hundreds of what he called “name poems,” mostly about musicians, fellow writers or artists. He doesn’t identify any specific Mitchell painting in the poem nor tell us anything about the circumstances of Mitchell’s life or what relation, if any, he might have had with her. In this way it’s very different from the poems of Frank O’Hara where Mitchell often makes appearances, alongside O’Hara’s other artist friends. There’s no apparent autobiography in Brodey’s poem: what matters to him is not Joan Mitchell the person, but her paintings and how they influence and intersect with his own perceptions. Brodey was a poète maudit of enormous gift, someone who lived on the edge, suffering drug addiction, homelessness, dying of AIDS. In the “name poems” he frequently turns to other tortured creators, like blues musicians Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith, and reading his poems one is always aware of the encroaching shadows, but his poems are celebrations of creativity, beauty, rhapsodic responses to everything he held to be valuable. He is making impossible demands on the poems and their subjects, as if the blue of Mitchell’s painting and the blue in the poem were capable of saving his life. One can’t miss the religious undercurrent in this poem, his hope that Mitchell’s blue will waft him into a “good future.”

JOAN MITCHELL
by Jim Brodey

Blue is an eternal color
It means infinite bliss
When it turns to black

I turn my back and go away
To blue the eternal color
When it turns to red I pray

We can move slower blue eternal color
The highway moves on vapor I am lost
In white ether the world is soft is

High is white is blue eternal color
When the colors change for the better
I am flashing golden ivory specks

Diamond dust splashed with blue specks
Golden flashes through the wheat skyblue
Make that purple gathers inside of

As the eternal eyes of Jesus calmly knew blue
The eternal color of the heart beating
Alone for love’s radiance when blue

Mounts the sky’s zenith and our hearts
Are the handball courts of the future
An ocean filled with sky and flesh

We pray at a painter’s hand for blue
That eternal color ready with knowledge
Turning the night from its wreckage

Into sidewalks of clouds that lead
To the Sky Church nestled in tofu
These eternal parking tickets have

All blown away through blue eternal color
Radiance given to heart-mind throbbing blue
Sentences soaked with rain and good futures

Appears by permission of Hard Press Editions, originally published in Heart of the Breath: Poems 1979-1992

Poems read at the Menil Collection on October 6, 2009

Jim Brodey, “Joan Mitchell”
Kenneth Koch, “To Some Abstract Paintings”
Frank O’Hara, “Variations on the ‘Tree of Heaven’”
Marjorie Welish, “About the Length of an Arc” (Cy Twombly)
Clayton Eshleman, “Leon Golub working on a painting”
Clark Coolidge, from Baffling Means (Philip Guston)
Paul Hoover, “Sixteen Jackies” (Andy Warhol)
Robert Creeley, “For Georg” (Georg Baselitz)
Kevin Young, “Toxic” (Jean-Michel Basquiat)
Kevin Young, “New Art, New Money” (Jean-Michel Basquiat)
Charles Bernstein, “Reading Red” (Richard Tuttle)
Norma Cole, “Estar for Hélio Oiticica”
Mónica de la Torre, “Convergence”
Mary Jo Bang (Bruce Pearson)
Mary Jo Bang, (Cindy Sherman)

Listen to Rubinstein being interviewed on KUHF.

Raphael Rubinstein is a New York-based poet and art critic whose books include Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990–2002 (Hard Press Editions) and The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces (Make Now). In 2006 he put together the anthology Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice (Hard Press Editions) and is the editor of Mission Critical, an art criticism series published by Hard Press Editions. His book of micro-narratives In Search of the Miraculous: 50 Episodes from the Annals of Contemporary Art has been translated into French and Swedish. From 1997 to 2007 he was a senior editor at Art in America; he continues to be a contributing editor to the magazine. Since 2007 he has been a professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston and is also on the faculty of the Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2002, the French government presented him with the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

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