Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture, and Perception in Art and Writing since 1950
by Allen Fisher foreword by Pierre Joris contributions by Shamoon Zamir and Paige Mitchell
University of Alabama Press, 2016 eISBN: 978-0-8173-9063-1 | Paper: 978-0-8173-5872-3 Library of Congress Classification PN53.F57 2016 Dewey Decimal Classification 809.93357
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture, and Perception in Art and Writing since 1950 is an expansive and incisive examination of the patterns of connectedness in contemporary art and poetry. Allen Fisher—a highly accomplished poet, painter, critic, and art historian as well as a key figure in the British poetry revival of the 1960s and 1970s—has a close and discerning connection to his subjects.
In Imperfect Fit, Fisher focuses on the role of fracturing, ruptures, and breakages in many traditional ties between art and poetry, as well as the resulting use of collage and assemblage by practitioners of those arts. Fisher addresses, among other subjects, destruction as a signifier in twentieth-century art; the poetic employment of bureaucratic vocabularies and “business speak”; and the roles of public performance and memory loss in the fashioning of human knowledge and art.
Commonplace notions of coherence, logic, and truth are reimagined and deconstructed in this study, and Fisher concludes by suggesting that contemporary culture offers a particularly robust opportunity—and even necessity—to engage in the production of art as a pragmatic act. Scholars of art, poetry, and aesthetics will be engaged and challenged by this insightful work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Allen Fisher is a poet, painter, publisher, art historian, and performer associated with the British Poetry Revival. He is an emeritus professor of poetry and art at Manchester Metropolitan University and the author of several publications, including Sputtor, Gravity as a consequence of shape, and the seminal work Place.
REVIEWS
"These extraordinary essays by poet and painter Allen Fisher are foundational texts for contemporary UK poetics. For more than thirty years, Fisher has developed highly original, practical aesthetics based on a deep understanding of physics and psychology as well as art history, poetics, and philosophy. His poetry and his art works have consistently explored the ethics and aesthetics of the interrelatedness of science, art, and everyday life. In this essential book, Fisher persuasively gives the arts new scale and relevance in a scientific era.”
—Peter Middleton, author of The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture and Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry
— -
"Few books about poetics are as hopeful and wide ranging as this one. Imperfect Fit should put an end once and for all to modernism's nostalgia for order as it describes varieties of a more pertinent practice in poetry and art."
—Keith Tuma, editor of Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
— -
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
The New Complexity: A Foreword by Pierre Joris
Preface: A Conversation with Allen Fisher Conducted by Paige Mitchell and Shamoon Zamir
Introduction
1. Confidence in Lack: Logic, Coherence, and Damage
2. Testing and Experimenting: A Personal View of Aesthetic Practice and Reception
3. Necessary Business: Aesthetics and Patterns of Connectedness: Reading Works by cris cheek, Eric Mottram, and J. H. Prynne
4. Integration and Disintegration in the Work of R. B. Kitaj
5. Poetry and Performance: Facture and Reader Participation in Performance: Aspects of Charles Olson’s Poetic Practice
6. Breaks Margin: Postmodernism as Package and Resistance against It in the Work of Harry Thubron and Ulli Freer
7. The Crowd: Momentum, Energy, and the Work of Cy Twombly
8. Monuments to the Future: Social Resonance through the Work of Joseph Beuys
9. Engaged Damage in the Work of William S. Burroughs
10. Traps or Tools and Damage: Inventive Perception and Transformation
Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture, and Perception in Art and Writing since 1950
by Allen Fisher foreword by Pierre Joris contributions by Shamoon Zamir and Paige Mitchell
University of Alabama Press, 2016 eISBN: 978-0-8173-9063-1 Paper: 978-0-8173-5872-3
Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture, and Perception in Art and Writing since 1950 is an expansive and incisive examination of the patterns of connectedness in contemporary art and poetry. Allen Fisher—a highly accomplished poet, painter, critic, and art historian as well as a key figure in the British poetry revival of the 1960s and 1970s—has a close and discerning connection to his subjects.
In Imperfect Fit, Fisher focuses on the role of fracturing, ruptures, and breakages in many traditional ties between art and poetry, as well as the resulting use of collage and assemblage by practitioners of those arts. Fisher addresses, among other subjects, destruction as a signifier in twentieth-century art; the poetic employment of bureaucratic vocabularies and “business speak”; and the roles of public performance and memory loss in the fashioning of human knowledge and art.
Commonplace notions of coherence, logic, and truth are reimagined and deconstructed in this study, and Fisher concludes by suggesting that contemporary culture offers a particularly robust opportunity—and even necessity—to engage in the production of art as a pragmatic act. Scholars of art, poetry, and aesthetics will be engaged and challenged by this insightful work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Allen Fisher is a poet, painter, publisher, art historian, and performer associated with the British Poetry Revival. He is an emeritus professor of poetry and art at Manchester Metropolitan University and the author of several publications, including Sputtor, Gravity as a consequence of shape, and the seminal work Place.
REVIEWS
"These extraordinary essays by poet and painter Allen Fisher are foundational texts for contemporary UK poetics. For more than thirty years, Fisher has developed highly original, practical aesthetics based on a deep understanding of physics and psychology as well as art history, poetics, and philosophy. His poetry and his art works have consistently explored the ethics and aesthetics of the interrelatedness of science, art, and everyday life. In this essential book, Fisher persuasively gives the arts new scale and relevance in a scientific era.”
—Peter Middleton, author of The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture and Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry
— -
"Few books about poetics are as hopeful and wide ranging as this one. Imperfect Fit should put an end once and for all to modernism's nostalgia for order as it describes varieties of a more pertinent practice in poetry and art."
—Keith Tuma, editor of Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
— -
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
The New Complexity: A Foreword by Pierre Joris
Preface: A Conversation with Allen Fisher Conducted by Paige Mitchell and Shamoon Zamir
Introduction
1. Confidence in Lack: Logic, Coherence, and Damage
2. Testing and Experimenting: A Personal View of Aesthetic Practice and Reception
3. Necessary Business: Aesthetics and Patterns of Connectedness: Reading Works by cris cheek, Eric Mottram, and J. H. Prynne
4. Integration and Disintegration in the Work of R. B. Kitaj
5. Poetry and Performance: Facture and Reader Participation in Performance: Aspects of Charles Olson’s Poetic Practice
6. Breaks Margin: Postmodernism as Package and Resistance against It in the Work of Harry Thubron and Ulli Freer
7. The Crowd: Momentum, Energy, and the Work of Cy Twombly
8. Monuments to the Future: Social Resonance through the Work of Joseph Beuys
9. Engaged Damage in the Work of William S. Burroughs
10. Traps or Tools and Damage: Inventive Perception and Transformation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC