Zoe Leonard’s You see I am here after all brings together thousands of postcard images of the “great cataract,” Niagra Falls, from the early 1900s through the 1950s. This grand accumulation of viewpoints brings up issues as diverse as human interventions with nature and the function of landscape in inventing American historical narratives, as well as the technological evolution of image reproduction and dissemination.

Zoe Leonard: You see I am here after all

Arts & Photography

Leonard, Zoe

Shaw, Lytle

Individual Artists

Dia Art Foundation

Narrowcast (Post*45)

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: Poetry and Audio Research (Post*45)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Stanford University Press

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.

Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

University Alabama Press

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.

Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Contemporary North American Poetry Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

University Of Iowa Press

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.

Providing a synthesis of New York's artistic and literary worlds, this book uses social and philosophical problems involved in reading a coterie to propose a language for understanding the poet, art critic, and Museum of Modern Art curator, Frank O'Hara.

Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Contemp North American Poetry)

Poetry. The water shored up the pilings and barnacles/ that shored up the pier, that shored up/ the memory machine. In Lytle Shaw's CABLE FACTORY 20, Robert Smithson's description of the landscape surrounding his Spiral Jetty in Utah's Great Salt Lake guides 20 site-specific poems. In the spirit of Smithson's site/ non-site dynamic, which proposes a continuous circuit between objects selected for framing as art and the contexts out of which they have been pulled, Shaw uses the the San Francisco Bay Area as his laboratory, exploring the extent to which a poetics of place, a linguistic site-specificity, is possible in the social/architectural landscape of the century America. Lytle Shaw edits SHARK with artist Emilie Clark. Their collaborations ROUGH VOICE and FLEXAGON, as well as SHARK, are available from SPD.

Cable Factory 20

Poetry

Atelos

Poetry. ". . . Lytle Shaw has carried out often disruptive, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes melancholy explorations into the processes through which the world gets made into an object of knowledge. But what is the lobe of the book's title? A lobe is a roundish projection, a part of something to which it is attached by the very fissure that also creates it. A lobby could serve as an architectural example, its fissures the walls, doors, stairs, and elevators which connect it to the rest of the building. But not all lobes are material. Knowledge-creates lobes of a sort (hence the interest in Diderot). More precisely, it is about the fissures that form the known, the fissures that form knowers and that leave them (us) dangling in the wind"-Lyn Hejinian. A SIDE OF CLOSURE also available at SPD.

The Lobe

Roof Books

A mock epic and a work of contemporary art. This title tries to unravel the byzantine history of the Chadwick dynasty. It includes numerous photographs of the Blachly-Shaw assault on the art world, along with a judicious selection of the Chadwick papers now known to be extant.

The Chadwick Family Papers: A Brief Public Glimpse

Blachly, Jimbo

Periscope Pub

Dublin artist Gerard Byrne employs video and photography to question how images are constructed, transmitted and mediated. Influenced by literature and theater, Byrne's work references everything from popular magazines to Samuel Beckett. This volume presents recent photographs and videos, along with works from the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Gerard Byrne: The Present Tense Through the Ages

Godfrey, Mark

Coombes, Claire

Walther König/Lisson Gallery

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Books by Shaw, Lytle