Lytle Shaw

I sin essä teori med små bokstäver och den platsspecifika vändningen argumenterar den nordamerikanske litteraturvetaren och författaren Lytle Shaw för en teori som låter sig förändras och belysas av litteratur och konst, och inte endast omvänt. ”teori med små bokstäver” är teori inte som en oomtvistad förklaringsmaskin, utan som en del av ett samtal, en dialogisk teori som kan lära sig av, förvandla sig själv i relation till, föremålen för sina undersökningar. ”teori med små bokstäver” är teori som talar till, inte över, konsten, och så att konsten kan höras ”tala artikulerat till och som teori – ibland bjuda motstånd, erbjuda modifieringar och till och med ge upphov till tankemodeller helt utanför de existerande teoretiska begreppens korpus”. ”teori med mindre bokstäver” inbegriper hos Shaw också en ”platsspecifik” dimension, men som berör platsen inte bara på en empirisk, utan också på en diskursiv eller disciplinär skala. Här blir litteratur och konst på ett artikulerat vis mer än ett uttryck för eller en kommentar till en fysisk plats; den blir också ”en reflektion över de ramar för beskrivning eller tolkning som används för att framställa sådana platser”.

New Grounds for Dutch Landscape uses an experimental, site-specific method to demonstrate how 17th century painters Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Meindert Hobbema did not so much represent the newly made landscape of Holland as re-enact, through their painterly factures, its reclamation and ongoing threats to its stability: from flooding and drainage to abrasion and erosion. These low-level dramas of recalcitrant matter allowed the Dutch to develop an ongoing temporality at odds with history painting’s decisive instant and a vocabulary of substance that wrested meaning away from humanist landscape painting’s expressive figures. Lytle Shaw’s books include Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, The Moiré Effect, Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics, and Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research. His museum catalog publications include essays on Robert Smithson, Gerard Byrne, Zoe Leonard and the Royal Art Lodge. Shaw is professor of English at New York University and a contributing editor for Cabinet magazine.

Narrowcast explores how mid-century American poets associated with the New Left mobilized tape recording as a new form of sonic field research even as they themselves were being subjected to tape-based surveillance. Media theorists tend to understand audio recording as a technique for separating bodies from sounds, but this book listens closely to tape's embedded information, offering a counterintuitive site-specific account of 1960s poetic recordings. Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Amiri Baraka all used recording to contest models of time being put forward by dominant media and the state, exploring non-monumental time and subverting media schedules of work, consumption, leisure, and national crises. Surprisingly, their methods at once dovetailed with those of the state collecting evidence against them and ran up against the same technological limits. Arguing that CIA and FBI "researchers" shared unexpected terrain not only with poets but with famous theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, Lytle Shaw reframes the status of tape recordings in postwar poetics and challenges notions of how tape might be understood as a mode of evidence.

Narrowcast explores how mid-century American poets associated with the New Left mobilized tape recording as a new form of sonic field research even as they themselves were being subjected to tape-based surveillance. Media theorists tend to understand audio recording as a technique for separating bodies from sounds, but this book listens closely to tape's embedded information, offering a counterintuitive site-specific account of 1960s poetic recordings. Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Amiri Baraka all used recording to contest models of time being put forward by dominant media and the state, exploring non-monumental time and subverting media schedules of work, consumption, leisure, and national crises. Surprisingly, their methods at once dovetailed with those of the state collecting evidence against them and ran up against the same technological limits. Arguing that CIA and FBI "researchers" shared unexpected terrain not only with poets but with famous theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, Lytle Shaw reframes the status of tape recordings in postwar poetics and challenges notions of how tape might be understood as a mode of evidence.

I Fältarbeten argumenterar Lytle Shaw för att en inriktning mot plats och ­senare mot site inte bara tillät poeter som William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Amiri Baraka, Joanne Kyger, Clark Coolidge och Bernadette Mayer att dyka ned i en värld av fördjupad specificitet; en fält­arbetets poetik gjorde det också möjligt för dem att tänka sina relationer till angränsande discipliner – framförallt historiografi och etnografi – på nya sätt, och att kritiskt reflektera över och omkoda dessa fält. Genom att koppla platsens poesi till ­site-specifik konst omkontextualiserar Shaw i synnerhet Robert Smithsons arbete i relation både till dess konsthistoriska reception och till poesins historia, där Smithson idag för många yngre poeter framstår som en allt ­viktigare föregångare. Lytle Shaw är författare och kritiker. Han är också verksam vid New York University.

In this stimulating and innovative synthesis of New York’s artistic and literary worlds, Lytle Shaw uses the social and philosophical problems involved in “reading” a coterie to propose a new language for understanding the poet, art critic, and Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O’Hara (1926-1966).O’Hara’s poems are famously filled with proper names—from those of his immediate friends and colleagues in the New York writing and art worlds (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Grace Hartigan, Willem de Kooning, and many musicians, dancers, and filmmakers) to a broad range of popular cultural and literary heroes (Apollinaire to Jackie O). But rather than understand O’Hara’s most commonly referenced names as a fixed and insular audience, Shaw argues that he uses the ambiguities of reference associated with the names to invent a fluid and shifting kinship structure—one that opened up radical possibilities for a gay writer operating outside the structure of the family.As Shaw demonstrates, this commitment to an experimental model of association also guides O’Hara’s art writing. Like his poetry, O’Hara’s art writing too has been condemned as insular, coterie writing. In fact, though, he was alone among 1950s critics in his willingness to consider abstract expressionism not only within the dominant languages of existentialism and formalism but also within the cold war political and popular cultural frameworks that anticipate many of the concerns of contemporary art historians. Situating O’Hara within a range of debates about art’s possible relations to its audience, Shaw demonstrates that his interest in coterie is less a symptomatic offshoot of his biography than a radical literary and artistic invention.

Fieldworks offers a historical account of the social, rhetorical, and material attempts to ground art and poetry in the physicality of a site. Arguing that place-oriented inquiries allowed poets and artists to develop new, experimental models of historiography and ethnography, Lytle Shaw draws out the shifting terms of this practice from World War II to the present through a series of illuminating case studies. Beginning with the alternate national genealogies unearthed by William Carlos Williams in Paterson and Charles Olson in Gloucester, Shaw demonstrates how subsequent poets sought to ground such inquiries in concrete social formations - to in effect live the poetics of place: Gary Snyder in his back-to-the-land familial compound, Kitkitdizze; Amiri Baraka in a black nationalist community in Newark; Robert Creeley and the poets of Bolinas, California, in the capacious 'now' of their poet-run town. Turning to the work of Robert Smithson - who called one of his essays an 'appendix to Paterson,' and who in turn has exerted a major influence on poets since the 1970s - Shaw then traces the emergence of site-specific art in relation both to the poetics of place and to the larger linguistic turn in the humanities, considering poets including Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, and Lisa Robertson. By putting the poetics of place into dialog with site-specificity in art, Shaw demonstrates how poets and artists became experimental explicators not just of concrete locations and their histories, but of the discourses used to interpret sites more broadly. It is this dual sense of fieldwork that organizes Shaw's groundbreaking history of site-specific poetry.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the work of Irish multi-media artist Gerard Byrne (born 1969). Byrne is renowned for his video installations that reenact legendary conversations from history, such as a discussion of sexuality and eroticism held by the Surrealists in the 1920s.