| “Picture Poetry” examines the intersections of influence and aesthetic ideology between the mid-20th century literary and visual arts avant-gardes—particularly as this is played out in the work of John Ashbery, William Burroughs, and Frank O'Hara. Deeply affected by the belated American reception of dada in the 1950s and the subsequent emergence of Pop art, the literary avant-garde innovated a form of writing which, in its intensification of the visual properties—and the physical body—of the text, resists conventional reading practices, fetishizing language to a degree that seems practically like an abdication of “literature.” Criteria of quality were replaced by idiosyncratic strategies of chance, and traditional hierarchies of interest and meaning were radically leveled. But if the affect of psychological depth is thus subordinated to accidental surface effects the resulting fetishization of writing (in which words conceal their meanings) exposes (in its indecipherability and also as a form of solitary pleasure) the self's essential privacy, emphasizing the opposition of public and private within writing. As precursory texts exemplary of the transition to the postmodern consciousness of the subject's constitution within language, Ashbery's, Burroughs's, and O'Hara's work becomes ultimately the pretext here for a consideration of the crisis—one both of values and means—at the heart of all contemporary cultural conventions. |
