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Ashbery hors cadre

 | 
Hélène Aji
, 
Agnès Derail

The Mysteries of the known object

Contemporary Art Strategies in John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”

David Reckford

Texte intégral

Introduction: Catalogue and Spirit

  • 1 J. Ashbery, Houseboat Days, New York, The Viking Press, 1977, p. 31-34.
  • 2 For a useful insight into the influence that poetic gesture had cf. Anne Waldman, “Anne Waldman spe (...)

1Something typical of the art of John Ashbery, and an important part of his work’s Jamesian charm and mind-racking difficulty for those just discovering it, is the multiplication of source motifs from surprisingly far afield placed into curious, sometimes gaudy juxtapositions. It is safe to say that such collaging contributes to the challenge and pleasure of untangling his text. For instance, in 1975, in New York, when he read his poem “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”,1 which references “La Princesse de Clèves” and the “Carte du Tendre” alongside “Speedy Gonzales”, “the Fudd’s Garage”, “pecky acajou harpoons”, “New Brutalism standards”, and a “plumbago-blue log cabin on a Gadsden Purchase commemorative cover”, as well as quotngs from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, he created something like a conflagration in the heads of some listeners, a liberating chaos and breaking down of barriers in echo to the opening of youth culture in 1960s America, while no doubt befuddling others cracking open his book at random.2 Such a creation emerged from his position as an artist profoundly of the present constantly interpolating the past.

2Oriented towards traces of contemporary artistic strategies in Ashbery’s poetics, also potentially a source of confusion for some readers of his poetry, this paper is not going to linger on the catalogue of motifs in his poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1974), though they are marked by a fascinating diversity (the dozing whale, the reptile eggs, the cabbage rose, Berg’s comment on a phrase in Mahler’s Ninth symphony, etc.), but rather look into the author’s methods, turns of style, including accumulations and juxtapositions, inspired by twentieth-century artistic approaches, mostly from particular artists’ practice of Surrealism, Abstract-Expressionism, Conceptual Art and Pop Art.

  • 3 In fact, it could be said that the three books, Three Poems, which is a book of prose poems, Self-P (...)

3Ashbery clearly does draw on such material, mirroring a variety of artistic techniques in the poem, while bringing to mind a number of artists, and does so primarily in a process of breaking down the image that obsesses him, a mirror portrait by a Mannerist master. Indeed, there is a sense that he is not trying to build the museum piece up the way John Keats means to make us thoughtfully experience an idealized Grecian urn that was the composite of several pieces, including the Sosibios Vase, in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819). The wild digressions in Ashbery’s text perhaps help him to get beyond Romantic idealism, as well as to side-step that early-modern masterpiece by Parmigianino which he sees so strongly in his mind’s eye. He wants to get on to something else with this, in the end, strongly reflexive poem, one which could be highlighted as one of the major turning points for his poetics.3

4However, before explaining how twentieth-century art strategies provide the movement around the inert mystery of a painting seen in a museum many years earlier accompanied by a former lover, poet Pierre Martory, the pertinence of John Ashbery’s and this paper’s art-strategic angle requires some justification: it is worth asking why the poet would embark on such a un-Keatsian deconstruction or dismissal of the painting in the first place, and why he includes consciously or not the avant-gardism of the modern museums and galleries in the move to accomplish that task.

  • 4 The topos of crying in front of an artwork is illustrated, in Ashbery’s entourage by Peter Sjchelda (...)

5In a Proustian manner, what strikes every reader quickly about Ashbery’s poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is the ambition to make a kind of intellectual music by expanding and collapsing time like a squeeze-box, primarily the some four-hundred-and-fifty years between Parmigianino’s creation of the painting and his of the poem, though, thickening the plot so to speak, there are multiple other time-gaps involved. The poet specifies within the poem that self-portrait by Parmigianino first struck him in 1959, in situ in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Pinpointing the moment of contact with the work implies that the painting seemingly leapt off its support, sticking with him, uncomfortably, perhaps making him cry,4 certainly inhabiting his dreams, nagging the poet to be made into a poem for some fifteen years, without a clue as to how.

6The subject could not be approached in any ordinary way. The poem regards the painting alternatively in its capacity to fascinate the viewer (for instance: “accepting everything with the same/ wraith of a smile” “SPCM”, l, v. 133-134, p. 71, or conveying “the enchantment of self with self”, l, v. 145, p. 72) and, on the contrary, as something which generates discomfort (for instance: “the pity of it smarts/makes hot tears spurt”, l, v. 44, p. 69, frustratingly, “your eyes which are empty/ know nothing” l, v. 44-45, p. 69, or the damning for the modern status of artists, “what has now become a slum”, l, v. 186, p. 73). The poem’s integrity could not depend on the structure of the original work but rather on its obliteration into feelings and ideas of some autonomy, and amplitude.

7Some qualification of the word “nag” to describe the lodging of the painting in the poet’s consciousness is necessary: without a doubt, for Ashbery, the niggling nature of such feelings also makes the poem an interesting project, and indeed the painting can be represented as a propitious irritant meant as a jumping off point and then left to recede. From the poem, the reader gathers that the Vienna painting even featured in Ashbery’s dreams over the years (that is primarily the meaning of “it remains / The white precipitate of its dream” (l, v. 322-323, p. 77), which also suggests a reminder that the concept of such a distorted portrait was “dreamed up” by Parmigianino, an innovation in its time). It is only on a dream level, and in art, that the two people, the painter and the poet, can fully merge, though temporarily. The word “dream”, appears frequently in the text, ten times, like the other word “hand”, so pregnant in discussing contemporary art, with its connotations of physical making versus more conceptual work.

  • 5 As in “With the face goes a mirror, as with the mind a world” from “With the Face”, or “Throats cla (...)
  • 6 Cf. Alain Jaubert, “Miroir, mon beau miroir…”, in Lumière de l’image, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, where (...)

8Unsurprisingly perhaps, there is a lot of the word “mirror” and its derivatives disseminated throughout the poem. It was a favorite word of Modernist poet Laura Riding, whose elegant and no-nonsense work on poetic language through her poetry Ashbery confesses to admiring to the point of wishing to embody.5 Indeed, Ashbery takes up time and again the Laura Riding technique of making two successive lines distorting mirrors of each other, or creating a mirror effect across a caesura. Compare Laura Riding’s, “with the mind goes a world/with the heart goes a weather”, to Ashbery’s, “It presents its stereotype again/but it is an unfamiliar stereotype” ( “SPCM”, l, v. 207-208, p. 73), or “its time has come/some time ago” (l, v. 294-295, p. 76). Mirrors, as well, are a favorite image in the work of Picasso, around the time of his series called “la Suite Vollard” of the early 1930s particularly, often a distorting mirror which serves as a shorthand for the artist’s gaze, the act of interrogating what we think we know but cannot seem to put across.6

Frequenting Both Poets and Painters

  • 7 Such as the visit to Jean Hélion’s studio (rare for such a shy artst) accounted for in J. Ashbery, (...)

9There was destined to be no easy way to deal with the painting, thus a kind of recourse to a sophistication in the tools deployed, and a natural cleaving to the processes, priorities, and interrogations native to the art world that grew up around the poet from the 1930s to the 1960s and with which he was in contact through social and professional situations. Those include the frequenting of artists at their Cedar Tavern hangout in New York and at exhibitions openings, at the Tibor de Nagy gallery, where the term “Poets of the New York School” was coined by gallery owner, Bernard Meyers, and other galleries and museums, Ashbery’s activity as a contributor of articles and essays on art to newspapers and reviews, such as Art News and New York Magazine, not to mention the intimacy of studio visits.7

10Aside from a work of erasing the image, the use of contemporary art to put to the test Parmigianino’s sixteenth-century capacity to fascinate, and discover hidden dimensions, illustrates the virtue of measuring and questioning the distance between Parmigianino’s world and the poet’s. The two weltanshauungs are alternatively proximate and divergent, mysteriously brought together and torn apart, providing the dominant movement of the poem, like the movement between joy and despair in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, according to Anton Berg, as is cursorily referenced in the poem.

  • 8 He mentions that proclivity in the International PEN interview given soon after the publication of (...)

11Twin notions of sameness and otherness are valuably explored by the poem, one of the poet’s most celebrated pieces, and arguably, as was said, a turning point. More than other points in his development, this would be the moment where he decides to be a modern Mannerist of poetry, self-consciously preoccupied by the way it all comes out, as Pablo Picasso says, by the movement of his thought.8

12In an eye-catching passage, the poem reflects on the complicated (variable) geographical and emotional gap between Rome, “where Francesco/ was working during the Sack” ( “SPCM”, l, v. 251-252, p. 75), and New York, where Ashbery lived (during the last phases of the Vietnam War) when he composed the poem. Through an attitude of in turn wistful and enthused urbanity and with certain studious preoccupations with avant-garde art, the rather unpredictable Ashbery, known for his wide-ranging cultural absorptions and experiments, is taking what might be called “the high road” of New York School Poetry to deal with Parmigianino and his elusive Self-Portrait.

  • 9 Barbara Guest, “Barbara Guest on LINEBREAK with Charles Bernstein”, 1995, recorded in New York, web (...)
  • 10 Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems, ed. Donald Allen, London, Penguin Books, 1994, p. 112.

13As New York poet Barbara Guest reminds us (in an interview with Charles Bernstein), what the so-called “Poets of the New York School” learned from the painters of their day, Abstract Expressionists in particular, was that one finds the subject of the poem in the process of writing it.9 Thus, Frank O’Hara’s short poem, “Why I’m Not A Painter”, among other things, chronicles how the result of his poetic efforts, a suite of poems called “Oranges” —as in the fruit—, diverged from an initial project of a single poem about the color orange and inevitably the word “orange”, just as, simultaneously in that poem, “Why I’m Not A Painter”,10 the painter Mike Goldberg creates a series of paintings called “Sardines” in an Abstract Expressionist mode which emerged from a single work where the word “Sardines” was painted in, and then, surprisingly, painted over. We hear the painter and poet literally touching glasses in the poem, with their works serving as artistic touchstones for each other, in terms of the spirit or the approach to the work.

  • 11 Kenneth Koch, “The Circus”, in Selected Poems, New York, Library of America, 2007, p. 42.

14Another case in point from the first generation of the New York School would be Kenneth Koch’s poem, “The Circus” (1971), which starts vaudeville comically by describing writing poetry in a ridiculously threadbare apartment in Paris in the 1950s and movingly discovers in its midst that it is about the serious and melancholy subject of forgetfulness with the passage of time. Indeed, the poet remarks half-way through his text, in an apotheosis of forgetting and artistic release, that: “this poem wants to get off on its own/ Someplace like a painting not held to a depiction of composing ‘The Circus’.”11 John Ashbery alludes to the same process, in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, wryly using a comparison with the game which the English call “Chinese Whispers”:

A whispered phrase passed around a room
Ends up as something completely different.
It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike
What the artst intended. Ofen he finds
He has omited the thing he started out to say
In the first place.
“SPCM”, l, v. 445-450, p. 80

  • 12 That text evokes movingly the dream of bringing the old text to life: “I felt the strrings of new b (...)

15Indeed, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” becomes a piece about phenomenologically wavering otherness, being and not being the other, and takes on that conundrum, serendipitously encased in the title, in the process of its writing. The painting serves as the springboard towards ideas of hybridity in particular, which brings us back to the ambiguity of the title (whose self-portrait is it? John Ashbery’s or Francesco Parmigianino’s? Is it the painting or the poem?). Furthermore, prolonging the ambiguity, the rhythmically accelerating then decelerating first line, “As Parmigianino did it, the right hand” (l, v. 1, p. 68), is not about the subject of the portrait, but on its execution—appropriately since part of what is appreciated about Mannerist painting in the contemporary art world is how it foregrounded questions of Manner: such works are showcases of their how, i. e. the treatment, generally marked by originality. The word “as”, the lexical signpost for manner, is the first word in the poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, and the first word of the title of the first poem in the book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The self-deprecatng title of the first piece in the book is “As One Put Drunk into a Packet-Boat” (which also takes an early-modern work as a pretext to exercise a contemporary eye, playing with notions of distance, in fact a poem by Andrew Marvell of the same title).12

  • 13 J. Ashbery, Houseboat Days, p. 45.

16It should be noted that Ashbery has a taste for establishing unexpected relationships between the title and the first line of his poems, such as in the poem, important for a study of his views on painting in poetry, “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name”, which starts by deflating the pretension of its own title, indeed which quotes a dictum of the Latin poet, Horace, with a self-reproaching first line: “You can’t say it that way anymore”.13 That poem, or that line at least, in a deadpan tone, asserts a Rimbaldian “il faut être absolument moderne”, which, we are arguing, was just becoming conscious for the poet three years earlier in the writing of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, where it became important to assert the author’s modernity, and his cultural moment. Out of a principle of contrast or dialogue, being forthrightly of his own time and culture was the only way for Ashbery to approach the problem. Not that he no longer calls forth ghosts after Parmigianino’s, but he is quicker and easier at dispatching them.

  • 14 Cf. Joachim Du Bellay, Défense et illustration de la langue française, “[donner à notre langue] cet (...)

17The critic would do well to downplay the role of ekphrasis in examining the poem (or any of Ashbery’s poetry). Indeed, the angle of ekphrasis, in the sense of poetry’s task being to make us see something beyond the veil of language, no longer seems at issue, or it may be simply that Ashbery recognizes that the evolution of poetry and the visual arts toward the production of more open, all-purpose vehicles somewhat changes the terms of that hoary, Roman formula, “Ut pictura poesis” whereby poetry will be judged by its capacity to make visual its evocations.14

  • 15 Laura Riding, “The World and I”, in Selected Poems in Five Sets, New York, Persea Books, 1993, p. 5 (...)
  • 16 Cf. Fernande Olivier, Souvenirs Intimes (écrits pour Picasso), Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1988.

18However, there remains, including for Ashbery, some validity to that principle, on the level of the poetic line for instance. Both poetry and painting, in their native unwieldiness ( “What hostile implements of sense!”, in a line by Laura Riding), are concerned with the subtle, the elusive, and the invisible.15 In a reciprocal way, as a by-product of his approach, the use of contemporary artistic strategies by Ashbery in the poem reminds the reader of what contemporary art owes to poetry: Picasso painted his seminal “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” at a moment of obsession for Arthur Rimbaud’s “Bateau Ivre” and in close friendship with what would become two major poets, Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob; their brand of cubism, particularly, revels in poetic ambiguities.16

19Rather than merely imitate the visual, Ashbery brings the reader into the solar plexus of poetry, its sensitive core. It is interesting that among the poets most explicitly given voice to in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, we find Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Tellingly, the poem is preceded several pages earlier in the book by a poem with the bathetic title, “Ode to Bill”, evoking the painter Charles Demuth’s 1928 homage to William Carlos Williams, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, which features the name “Bill”. In other words, Ashbery’s poem, while evoking conversations between painters and poets, ties some strings to the tradition of newness in poetry, and subtly asserts a modernist, avant-gardist, and American ancestry to his poetics (what he is undertaking has other ancestries of course, including Charles Baudelaire, also an art critic, whose poem, “Le Voyage”, arguably haunts the text’s skepticism). Emily Dickinson, who must be behind the confounding line, enticing us into realms of abstraction, “That is the tune but there are no words” ( “SPCM”, l, v. 47, p. 69), as well as the short line “Was like. A peculiar slant” (l, v. 105, p. 71) and the adducing of the “housewife doing chores” (l, v. 140, p. 72), was an extremely visual poet, and in her “fascicles” somewhat of a visual artist in today’s sense. William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound were friends of painters and known for employing visual art-inspired techniques (imagism, cinematics, photographic “objectivity”, etc.), as well as speaking directly about art in museums in their poems.

20Ashbery seems skeptical of ekphrasis as Horace advises its use in theory, nor does he consider it necessarily to be his forte, nor again a necessity for poetry. Nevertheless, there is actually a bit of near ekphrasis in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” in that sense of vividly evoking a visual image in words, just as some contemporary artists, like Jane Freilicher, have recourse to naturalistic styles within their compositions; indeed, he begins his poem with a physical description of the painting: “A few leaded panes, old beams, / fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together/ In a movement supporting the face, ...” (l, v. 4-6, p. 68). That passage is not quite enough to make one see the portrait, if one has not seen it before, but we do follow his eye around the canvas, where he is enumerating what is there to see, and the relationships that the composition creates. To similar evocative effect is how he insists, mostly in the first section, on the way the head and the hand are not depicted in ordinary proportion to each other, thus illuminating the perspectival structure of the work (through exaggeration, or a kind of “vorticism” in Ezra Pound’s term).

  • 17 J. Ashbery, Other Traditions, p. 35.

21Ashbery makes use of a style of directly engaging observation in poetry derived from the works he admires in the British poet, John Clare, about the closest one can come to an ekphrastic poet in the full sense. Indeed Ashbery comments in Other Traditions, that his style goes back and forth between two extremes: “My own [poetry] has… always swung between the poles of Clare’s lumpy poetry of mud and muck and Beddoes’s perfumed and poisonous artifice,”17 as if to make us suspend our disbelief and then make us think about that suspension.

An American Surrealism

  • 18 J. Ashbery, Reported Sightings, p. 17.
  • 19 Cf. The course given by Gilles Deleuze recorded at l’université Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint-Denis betwe (...)

22One thing can be many things in poetry, and, in Ashberian style, obsessively so. In that early “ekphrastic” passage of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” and some others, he is indeed evoking the painting, but also making a kind of poetic catalogue as artists as diverse as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Cornell are known to do. There are links between those three artsts: indeed, in an article on Joseph Cornell reprinted in Reported Sightings Art Chronicles 1957-1987, Ashbery asserts, “Certainly Rauschenberg, one of the most significant influences on today’s generation, looked long and deeply at Cornell’s work”.18 That same artcle mentions Joseph Cornell’s use of the “cabbage rose” motif, which derives from a work by Surrealist Max Ernst, and that rose, as already mentioned, features in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”. The use of accumulation art seems the feature of Surrealism most amenable to American modernism. It owes something to Cubist assemblages too. Later in the poem Ashbery describes his own working space in a parallel way to Parmigianino’s: “desk, papers, books, /Photographs of friends, the window and the trees/ Merging in one neutral band […]” ( “SPCM”, l, v. 125-127, p. 71), a passage which evokes photos of the clutered studio of the English surrealistc painter, Francis Bacon. The “neutral band” may recall the color known as “Jasper Johns gray”, a magma from which significations are set to emerge.19

  • 20 One may be reminded that one of Erwin Panofsky’s initial claims to fame came from his brilliant int (...)

23Another Surrealistic technique is to play with the category in which the object fits, which is what happens to some of Raymond Roussel’s works completely transformed by digressions from lyric poetry to stories to documentaries. In the case of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, which certainly makes good use of its lineated presentation, the text transcends the category, “Poetry”, and can be read as a kind of art-history lecture. In that way it resembles a performance staged in the 1965 by the conceptual artist, Robert Morris, where he dresses up like the venerated art historian, Erwin Panofsky, and lip-synchs to the latter’s speech.20 Indeed, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” tracks the Erwin Panofsky method somewhat: moving from the purposely naïve, Clare-like inventory of what’s there to see (Erwin Panofsky’s term for that first stage in the demonstration is “primary subject matter”) then the poem goes on to situate the representation in its context (technical, historical, cultural, …), to finally arrive at its irreducible singularity (those two phases being, broadly, “iconography” and “iconology” for Erwin Panofsky).

  • 21 J. Ashbery, “Recording for Radio Helicon, hosted by John Tranter”, ABC, June 19, 1988. Web:https:// (...)

24The text of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” can actually function as an art-history lecture, if one adopts that focus. There is even mention of a carousel, which is both an evocation of the child’s imagination, —as it plays with time and nostalgia, the poem dips into childhood—but can also evoke the apparatus used in twentieth-century art-history classes, the slide carousel. He also affirms critically the use of, “Black-and-white illustrations in a book where colorplates/are rare” (l, v. 402-403, p. 79). “None of us ever graduates from college” says Ashbery in his “signature” poem, “Soonest Mended” (Selected Poems, l, v. 59, p. 87).21 Confirming the suspicion that we started to read a poem and are finding ourselves, perhaps disappointingly, in a lecture course, the text quotes the Renaissance inventor of art-history, Giorgio Vasari, and the contemporary American art historian, Sydney Freeberg.

25The insertion of those quotes into the poem partakes of another Surrealistic, or more precisely, Dadaist technique: the ready-made, as in Marcel Duchamp’s Bottle Rack or Snow Shovel. Like the Duchampian objects, these “drily academic” quotes, artfully contextualized, take on the uncanny capacity to become poetic. Within the first quotation of Vasari’s, twisted into seven verses of the poem, we read, at the beginning of a line, “with great art to copy” ( “SPCM”, l, v. 14 and l, v. 143, p. 68 and p. 72), a phrase which is repeated later and which seems to raise the very Duchampian-Warholian paradox of creating something new by executing a machine-like copy, in defiance of Walter Benjamin’s concerns about the loss of aura in mass production of cultural artefacts. That criticism of or play with Walter Benjamin’s theme is directly reflected in the line, “An investing /Aura that would corrode the architecture” ( “SPCM”, l, v. 429-430, p. 79). The mention of the “barber” and the “turner” in the same quote would seem to chafe against notions of high and low art, much questioned in the 1970s, and still a prickly issue today (could there even be a cryptic reference to J.M.W. Turner, precursor of Abstract Expressionism, who was the son of a barber?) In one quoting of Sydney Freeberg, a line is made to end on the Italian word “bizarria” (l, v. 188, p. 73), which evokes the Surrealists’ habits of searching for oddities in flea markets (Susan Sontag in her Happenings: an Art of Radical Juxtapositions, credits the Surrealists with diverting that procedure towards art), that aesthetic of the curious, “found” form is that of the poem.

  • 22 J. Ashbery, Houseboat Days, p. 47.
  • 23 The volume contains a poem about the film noir called “Fortes Flick”.

26About the last line of his poem “What is poetry” ( “It might give us—what? — some flowers soon?”,22 which seems a perfect conclusion to that piece), Ashbery admitted that he overheard it in a bookstore in New York and copied it down, inserting it later into the poem. There may well be a line in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” overheard in the street or on the television, the most probable being, “there is room for one bullet in the chamber” (l, v. 528, p. 82), splicing Parmigianino foolish audacity in disturbing the codes of art, almost seamlessly, into some Film Noir thriller.23 Another candidate would be, “and those assholes/ who would confuse everything” (l, v. 426-427), where one perceives the use of the tough language of the New York streets that one does not quite picture Ashbery himself, or his rather professorial poetic persona in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, uttering spontaneously. The first Vasari quote ends with the synonym for mirror, “glass”, perhaps a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s “Grand Glass”, an important work of early, conceptual art, which in turn was inspired by Raymond Roussel the proto-Surrealist writer, that Ashbery was seriously engaged with studying while living in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s.

27Symptoms too of Ashbery’s natural affinity for Surrealism, there are a number of hybrid images in the spirit of René Magritte (or Giorgio de Chirico), especially the room which is, simultaneously, an hourglass: “So the room contains this flow like an hourglass” ( “SPCM”, l, v. 176, p. 73). There is no exact painting of that image, but if René Magritte had had the idea he would have painted it, giving it an enigmatic, slightly unrelated title like “Footprints of Tomorrows”. There is an explicit reference to T.E. Hoffmann, which seems also to reference René Magritte:

[…] You feel like one of those
Hoffmann characters who have been deprived
Of a reflection, except that the whole of me
Is seen to be supplanted by the strict
Otherness of the painter in his
Other room. […]
“SPCM”, l, v. 235-240, p. 74

28It is interesting to note the slide from “you” to “me” in that passage, part of the migrating self in keeping with Surrealist tastes. The idea of the cloth over the birdcage ( “SPCM”, l, v. 325, p. 77) signaling the undiscovered self, night, and dreams may also be a gloss on a René Magritte’s The Therapist, 1937. Ashbery was following psychotherapy at the time, something (need it be added?) impossible for Parmigianino.

A Collection of Albatrosses

29In keeping with the tone of dry commentary, Ashbery’s use of methods from his contemporaries, the Abstract Expressionists, is to their love of throwing around ideas regarding their art, partcularly ideas about immediacy and authenticity, as in the paradoxical statement, “no/false disarray as proof of authenticity” ( “SPCM”, l, v. 53-54, p. 69), rhetorically underlining what crisis affecting modern artsts Parmigianino’s work is not prey to, although he did live in a time of crisis. Critic Harold Rosenberg addresses that very existential problem of working towards an impossible authenticity, which was facing the artists he was defending in publications like the Partsan Review:

  • 24 Harold Rosenberg, “Mobile, Theatrical, Actve”, The Anxious Object, New York, Horizon Press, 1964, r (...)

[…] When an act loses its purpose, it degenerates into play-actng and is performed not to produce a result but to win applause. As with all art movements, some of the practtioners of Abstract Expressionism saw it almost from its birth as an opportunity to charm. It is often hard to tell desperation put on for show from desperation actually felt. The fake and the real become grown together and feed each other [… ]24

30In the poem, Ashbery seems to allow some pathos in, but to think of it simultaneously as form, as in the phrase already mentioned, “the pity of it smarts/ Makes hot tears spurt”, which, although genuinely touching, actually adds up to an adroitly crafted, original statement of the emotion: partcularly the way the word “spurt” seems to compress the consonants from the preceding words “pity”, “smarts”, and “hot tears”, while signifying a release from compression. There is thus a double movement in that word, which also evokes the forthright energy of Robert Motherwell’s splatters (as in his 1962 series, By the Sea) and hints at a tinge of sweetness to the pain. The verse makes good use of the double meaning of pain and knowledge embedded in the word “smart” used as a verb. Ashbery’s ear, being so open to the colloquial, makes such formal wordplay out of divergent registers easily accessible.

31In “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, aside from Robert Motherwell’s meaningful splatters, the text evokes a number of what Charles Harrison after Clive Bell calls “Significant Forms”, which are really “liberating forms”, disentangling the viewer from prosaic reality, and which could be related to styles of New York School painting, appearing to the reader connected to that painterly culture. Among those that seem to be alluded to, there must be: “Before one’s shadow ever grew/ Out of the field into thoughts of tomorrow” ( “SPCM”, l, v. 149-150, p. 72) which seems to take the visual vocabulary from color-field artists, particularly Marc Rothko; “a wave breaking on a rock, giving up/ its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape” (l, v. 199-200, p. 73), which could call to mind Robert Motherwell, Marc Toby, Jules Olitski, or Sam Francis, with a nod to a kind of orientalism or Zen Buddhist approach; “casting twig shadows on blithe/ sidewalks” (l, v. 381-382, p. 78), which could evoke Jackson Pollock’s technique of painting on a canvas on the ground, the word “blithe” being an interesting Ashberian, or Hart-Crane-like substitution for the word “candid”, underlining the mobility or animation of the support; “The explosion is so precise, so fine” (l, v. 416, p. 79) which brings to mind Adolph Gottlieb’s “blast” paintings and Roy Lichtenstein’s caricatures of them; “Clouds in the puddle stir into sawtoothed fragments.” (l, v. 100-101, p. 70) which seems to reference the rough edges of Clifford Still’s color-field works, as well as Hart Crane’s poem, The Bridge ( “rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene” l. 22); and finally, “memories deposited in irregular /clumps of crystals” (l, v. 155-116, p. 72), which seems descriptive of Yves Tanguy’s abstract-surrealist works. The large hand and tiny face in the poem’s exaggerated description of the convex-mirror portrait are extremely reminiscent of precursor work to New York painting by Joan Mirò and Pablo Picasso.

32Aside from those references to visual motifs and signature styles, all quite distant from the aesthetic of Parmigianino, but usefully there in the poem to carry its Romantic baggage, two properly stylistic correlatives to 1950s American painting stand out. First, Ashbery’s relation to the line breaks in this lineated poem are like the consciousness that abstract painters necessarily accord the edges of the canvas. One instance that cleaves close to painter Frank Stella’s adage, which bothered many painters, “what you see is what you see”, appears early in the poem, striking a strangely religious note: “It is what is/ Sequestered.” ( “SPCM”, l, v. 8-9, p. 68). There, the line-break stimulates ontologically oriented reflections, suggesting that Parmigianino’s face does and does not appear in its reality, or can only appear through a deeply informed imaginative act. It is suggestive of the argument or conflict between the hand and the face, which is strong in the first part of the poem, whereas the references to removal of the hand play into the orientations of Pop Art and Conceptual Art.

33Secondly, there is all the work the poem does to establish a sense of immediacy. Just as a work by Willem de Kooning in a museum today looks freshly painted, Ashbery shows himself at work as we read this poem today. His presence is sketched out, even conjured by it.

34Part of an aesthetic of the immediate, the ongoing, and the unfinished, the poem just before “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” in the book, “Oleum Misericordiae” (i. e. “the water of life”), contains two remarks in parentheses about what the poet should remember to include in the poem when he has the time:

[…] In furnished rooms (describe wallpaper)
Transient hotels (mention sink and cockroaches) […]
“SPCM”, l, v. 28-29, p. 67

35In “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, along the lines of Frank O’Hara’s poetics, references to immediacy are frequent: “today is uncharted” (l, v. 151, p. 72), “one/is always cresting into one’s present” (l, v. 385-386, p. 78), “makes one want to /push forward ignoring the apparent/Naïveté of the attempt” (l, v. 356-368, p. 78), “The shadow of the city injects its own/Urgency” (l, v. 251, p. 75), “the day as it moved gracelessly on” (l, v. 139, p. 71), “the present we are always escaping from/and falling back into” (l, v. 391, p. 78), “as tme speeds up so that it is soon/much later” (l, v. 134-135, p. 71), which was another deft use of an enjambment, and, perhaps a reference to that upstart style, Pop Art, but also a wake-up call, “The balloon pops” (l, v. 100, p. 70).

Advertsing Gimmicks

36A frequently occurring word, “gesture”, complements the obsession with the hand in the text; that it is also a “frozen gesture” intersects with Pop Art’s critique or teasing of the previous generation of artsts. On one hand, Abstract Expressionism demonstrated the virtues of being alive in the moment, to inscribe the moment of composition most actively, which allows the observer to transcend their own present and try to be there, — there with Parmigianino as his sketching hand “weave [s] delicate meshes” (l, v. 74, p. 70) like a proto-Jackson Pollock. On the other hand, Ashbery often pulls back and introduces a distance which is refreshing to thought, and reminds us that we “cannot inhabit that room”. That sort of Freudian distance brings with it the potential of free-play as well as the humor of deflation and getting real. There are biting moments of skepticism in the text, making it exude instructive demystification, as the poet examines, as he puts it, “the backing of the looking glass” (l, v. 263, p. 75).

37Along those lines, there seem to be a couple of echoes in the text of well-known provocations pronounced by Andy Warhol, for instance, as Ashbery addresses the painter directly:

[…] On the surface.) But your eyes proclaim
That everything is surface. The surface is what’s there
And nothing can exist except what’s there. […]
“SPCM”, l, v. 79-81, p. 70

  • 25 Andy Warhol, « Warhol in His Own Words: Statements (1963-1987), in Stiles, Kristine, and Peter Selz (...)
  • 26 Cf. Michel Bourel, “Andy Warhol à Paris dans les années 60,” in Artstudio (Spécial Andy Warhol) no  (...)

38In reading that line, one automatically hears Andy Warhol famously telling Gretchen Berg of the Los Angeles Free Press in 1967: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am” or “I see everything that way, the surface of things, a kind of mental Braille.”25 It is of course coy to the point of disingenuousness to make such statements, since they make us stray from the knowledge that the surface is what we interpret, i. e. penetrate, and the life of artworks is how they engage our interpretations. There are no fewer ambiguites awaitng resolution through digging into contexts in Warhol’s works than anyone else’s. In fact, his systematic occlusion of the invitation to question and dig actually stimulates that activity among skeptical observers; the more neutral the oracle, the more vivid the controversy. In the US, at first, and still today, some people have averred that Andy Warhol is uncritcally devoted to the American scene, indeed seemingly thinking, “finally an artst who is not a lefty”, whereas Andy Warhol’s first exhibition in Paris was denounced by the press on the French right for its radical positions, and celebrated on the left.26 Toutng one’s own superficiality can be the best way to get people to question the system that valorizes such a stance. Both Jeff Koons and Damian Hirst, conscious of the Warholian gambit, have used such positions to gain institutional acceptance.

  • 27 Mona Lisa travelled to the US in 1963.
  • 28 “SPCM”, lignes 31, 100, 207, 15, 14, 130, 80, 170, 217, 390, 387, 415, 510, 514, 4, 506; pages 69, (...)

39Andy Warhol’s oeuvre contains works, from the 1970s, which seem to exploit the Da Vinci craze of the day (like an acidulously colored “Last Supper” or proliferating “Mona Lisas”27), and there thus could be said to be an Andy Warhol-John Ashbery dialogue carried out through their art. In any case, the skeptical vocabulary of Pop Art is present in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”: “materialized”, “pop”, “stereotype”, “copy”, “mirror”, “uniform”, “surface”, “bubble-chamber”, “dabbled”, “’art’” in quotes, “’poetry’” in quotes, “doggerel”, “lips moist”, “an exhausted world”, “advertising”, and “second-hand knowledge”.28

40Ashbery is furthermore attuned to what was known as the “camp” sensibility, a strong feature of Pop Art. What Harold Rosenberg, quoted above, presents as a dire formal struggle engaging artists to their core, Pop can take as a prime object of play, a wink to insiders. Thus the poem speaks of “aping naturalness”,” SPCM”, l, v. 1516, p. 82, (critics of Abstract Expressionism actually taught an ape to paint as a hoax in 1964, the chimpanzee, “Pierre Brassau”). The phrase in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” which asserts the idea of camp is “twisting the end result/ Into a caricature of itself” (l, v. 442- 443, p. 80), and further on, in the anti-philosophical statement, “the better for the roles we have to play” (l, v. 524, p. 82). The reference to the character of Imogen in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline evokes disguises and mistaken identities which squares well with camp tastes, as does the reference to T.E. Hoffmann, a camp favorite. Most of all, the idea of the “unfamiliar stereotype” (l, v. 209, p. 73) seems to capture the fun factitiousness of the camp sensibility in action.

  • 29 William Butler Yeats, Discussing “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” recorded in October, 1932, web: http: (...)

41The image of the ping-pong ball “on its jet of water” (l, v. 90, p. 70), a reference to an anecdote of W.B. Yeats’s, where an “advertisement” seen along The Strand, in London for a “refreshing drink” made him yearn for an isolated, self-reliant, Arcadian life on the “Lake Isle on Innisfree”, seems to reconcile the pop-art and abstract-expressionist tensions in Ashbery’s poem into a continuous cycle.29

Conclusion: The Mathematical Turn

42Close in spirit to Dada and Pop, Conceptual Art, is well represented in the text, partcularly the way thoughts and concepts are frequently alluded to. The use of lexicography “speculation” (from the latin speculum, “mirror”), ( “SPCM”, l, v. 48-49, p. 69) reminds one of the ur-conceptual work, “One and Three Chairs” (1965) by Joseph Kosuth. The poet, by evoking such strategies, is affirming the way concepts, invisible as they may be, are in fact things, which he affirms clearly during the first of his “Nortion Lectures” in 1989:

  • 30 J. Ashbery, Other Traditions, p. 2.

[…] For me, poetry has its beginning and ending outside thought. Thought is certainly involved in the process; indeed, there are times when my work seems to me to be merely the recording of my thought processes without regard to what they are thinking about. If this is true, I would also like to acknowledge my intention of somehow turning these processes into poetic objects, a position perhaps kin to Dr. Williams’s “No ideas but in things,” with the caveat that, for me, ideas are also things. [… ]30

43In a way, all of what we have been calling “contemporary art strategies” are really concepts, outgrowths of ideas initiated by Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp at the beginning of the 20th century, and in post-WWII New York effervescently argued, put into motion, and given palpable incarnations, light or heavy, in artworks including Ashbery’s text. Perhaps the ultimate Conceptual artist without borders is Ashbery’s friend, the musician John Cage, famous for saying forthrightly, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it”, a kind of purified, Zen-influenced thought, underlining the need to give formal status even to one’s sense of the void, what Emily Dickinson may be alluding to with the repeated word, “circumference”; as far as thoughts can travel, there is always a farther, more encompassing level. The first section of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” ends with the statement, echoing John Cage: “in pure/affirmation that doesn’t affirm anything” (l, v. 98-99, p. 70).

  • 31 Ibid., p. 85.
  • 32 Ibid.

44What stands in for the power of the concept most vividly, or surprisingly, in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is the recourse to the mathematical vocabulary: the 180-degree angle, the man-sized quotient, the mathematical determinates of perspectival play, the gibbous moon, the eye of the fly, the logarithm, etc. Artists like Sol Le Witt, Bernar Venet, and Cy Twombly, all have been interested in wrong-footing critical pre-conceptions of the artist’s territory through mathematical approaches to creative projects (as do the Oulipo writers in France, who actually collaborate with mathematicians). There are precedents, that Ashbery is aware of, in Renaissance Italian painting, in the notion (again) of “circumference” that Emily Dickinson puts to varied use in her poems, and, in a passage Ashbery quotes in Other Traditions, poet John Wheelright’s lines: “Any Friend to Any Friend/ (A–B)2 = (B–A)2”.31 Ashbery’s comment relates the amusingly cryptic passage to the necessity of otherness for friendship to thrive: “the equation with its squares seems to suggest a deprivation of friendship that is squared by the magnified importance one friend takes on in the habit of another’s mind”.32

45Thus, through multiple disciplines adopted by artists and adapted from artists (alternatively taken up and dropped) “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” brings us back and forth, to and away from, Parmigianino’s room through the sense of what it is at any time in history to be an artist, and dissipates that illusion to concentrate the mind to the challenges of the present.

  • 33 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Henry James, Essays on Literature, The Library of America, Ne (...)

46So one question we can ask as a conclusion, to revisit the arguments of this paper in another mode is to wonder how conscious the use of contemporary art strategies was at the stage of writing “Self-Portrait”. What were the underlying motivations that may have led to such an approach, which seems an important dimension of the work, though there are other things going on, some of which we inevitably touched on (autobiographical play and true introspection, hat tipping to musicians and poets that interest the author, experiments of ekphrasis as opposed to deploying of art strategies, etc.)? The number of concepts from in and around the artists’ studios that were underlined, and seem quite consciously employed, point to a plan. However, Ashbery’s aesthetic is not to have too much of a plan, as his painter contemporaries (his “brothers of the brush” in Henry James’s phrase)33 were demonstrating, and his close friends, like Frank O’Hara, were noticing and articulating. The desire and impossibility to bring the fascinating Late High-Renaissance painting up to the present led naturally to associations with the most visible aesthetics of the contemporary era. We can speculate that it “just happened” in the writing, was semi-conscious at certain stages and was insistently pursued at others.

47The matter of time, alternatively highlighted and lost, is central to bringing on multiple interrogations: so there also are implicit questions, which emerge organically from the general conceit of looking at the painting with modern eyes, such as concerning how well modern artists would stand up to the criteria of the sixteenth century.

48Interesting too is the reminder of how, as the poem notes in a tragic chord, even after being impressed by the mirror portrait, the court never gave a commission to Parmigianino. Did he belong in his period? Was he ahead of his time? What are the relationships then between art and patronage at the time and in our democratic age?

49Possibly, it is best to think that the art strategies evident in the poem just fell into place, thanks to implicit problems, as it was being written. This is such a fraught work, apparently not one of the author’s favorites of his own production, the reflections and emotions of the poet are so deeply entangled in the quotations and experiences from without that the tension can barely resolve itself. Indeed, “Each part of the whole falls off” ( “SPCM”, l, v. 549, p. 83). That failure does not allow the piece to detach itself from the fascination of readers, who can find in it the other, and the unexpected contours of their selves. It is truly tempting to misread the “convex mirror” as a “complex mirror”, as complexity is the principle quality on offer. It is all that can encompass the whole.

Notes

1 J. Ashbery, Houseboat Days, New York, The Viking Press, 1977, p. 31-34.

2 For a useful insight into the influence that poetic gesture had cf. Anne Waldman, “Anne Waldman speaks at the 2012 Poets Forum on the subjects of Poetic Beginnings: Beats, the New York School, & Language Poetry”, in an event organized by the Academy of American Poets, web: poets. org. She quotes Ashbery’s poems “America”, “Europe”, and “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”, evoking work, “[…] riveting for their erasure-montage, juxtapositions, complexity, similarity to the illogic of a dream, ellipsis, destabilizing the first person confessional […]”. The screwball comedy, “What’s Up, Doc?”, by Peter Bogdanovich, starring Barbara Streisand was released in 1972. Cf. Borrowed from John Milton, Paradise Lost, book II, l. 463-4: “While I/Abroad through all the coasts of dark destruction seek/Deliverance for us all. l. […]” (Ibid., p. 33).

3 In fact, it could be said that the three books, Three Poems, which is a book of prose poems, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and The Vermont Notebook, a book of list poems, constitute together a kind of transition from the bitng, almost manic, work in The Double Dream of Spring, towards the slightly more mellow, reflectve work in Houseboat Days and after. What symbolizes this most may be a phrase in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”: “Doggerel writen by mature poets” (l, 414), where the “mature poet” is Ashbery himself, and the “doggerel” he refers to may be the passages of doggerel, part of the snideness of his 1969 poem “Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox” (Selected Poems, p. 95-96).

4 The topos of crying in front of an artwork is illustrated, in Ashbery’s entourage by Peter Sjcheldahl’s confession to Steve Martn that encountering a certain Piero Della Francesca work in situ, he cried.

5 As in “With the face goes a mirror, as with the mind a world” from “With the Face”, or “Throats claw the mirror of blind triumph,” from “O Vocables of Love” in Laura Riding, Selected Poems in Five Sets, New York, Persea, 1993, p. 70 and p. 50.

6 Cf. Alain Jaubert, “Miroir, mon beau miroir…”, in Lumière de l’image, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, where he discusses “Young Woman Before a Mirror” by Pablo Picasso (MOMA), where he underlines the frequent use of the word “mirror” by Paul Éluard in L’Amour, la poésie, such as the Picasso-like lines, “All that repeats is baffling/ You are born in a mirror/in front of my former image” (my translation).

7 Such as the visit to Jean Hélion’s studio (rare for such a shy artst) accounted for in J. Ashbery, Reported Sightings Art Chronicles 1957-1987, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

8 He mentions that proclivity in the International PEN interview given soon after the publication of SPCM.

9 Barbara Guest, “Barbara Guest on LINEBREAK with Charles Bernstein”, 1995, recorded in New York, web: writng. upenn. edu/pennsound/x/Guest. php

10 Frank O’Hara, Selected Poems, ed. Donald Allen, London, Penguin Books, 1994, p. 112.

11 Kenneth Koch, “The Circus”, in Selected Poems, New York, Library of America, 2007, p. 42.

12 That text evokes movingly the dream of bringing the old text to life: “I felt the strrings of new breath in the pages” (l, 7), while also mimicking the drunkenness that Andrew Marvell imputes to a rival.

13 J. Ashbery, Houseboat Days, p. 45.

14 Cf. Joachim Du Bellay, Défense et illustration de la langue française, “[donner à notre langue] cete perfecton et, comme font les peintres à leurs tableaux, cete dernière main, que nous désirons”.

15 Laura Riding, “The World and I”, in Selected Poems in Five Sets, New York, Persea Books, 1993, p. 56.

16 Cf. Fernande Olivier, Souvenirs Intimes (écrits pour Picasso), Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1988.

17 J. Ashbery, Other Traditions, p. 35.

18 J. Ashbery, Reported Sightings, p. 17.

19 Cf. The course given by Gilles Deleuze recorded at l’université Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint-Denis between 1979 and 1987: particularly “Sur la Peinture – séance 1, cours du 31 mars 1981”; his discussion of the two sorts of gray starts at the 55th minute; web: youtube. com/results? search_ query=www.webdeleuze.com.

20 One may be reminded that one of Erwin Panofsky’s initial claims to fame came from his brilliant interpretation of the Portrait of Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Couple, a picture featuring a convex mirror.

21 J. Ashbery, “Recording for Radio Helicon, hosted by John Tranter”, ABC, June 19, 1988. Web:https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Ashbery/6-19-88/Ashbery-John_19_Intro-SoonestMended_Radio-Helicon_ABC_6-19-88.mp 3

22 J. Ashbery, Houseboat Days, p. 47.

23 The volume contains a poem about the film noir called “Fortes Flick”.

24 Harold Rosenberg, “Mobile, Theatrical, Actve”, The Anxious Object, New York, Horizon Press, 1964, reproduced in Jed Perl, Art In America 1945-1970, Writngs from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism, New York, The Library of America, 2014, p. 254.

25 Andy Warhol, « Warhol in His Own Words: Statements (1963-1987), in Stiles, Kristine, and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: a Sourcebook of Artsts Writng, Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1996, p. 390.

26 Cf. Michel Bourel, “Andy Warhol à Paris dans les années 60,” in Artstudio (Spécial Andy Warhol) no 8, printemps 1988, p. 93-105. NB: Ashbery wrote a positive review of the exhibition and the effervescence it caused.

27 Mona Lisa travelled to the US in 1963.

28 “SPCM”, lignes 31, 100, 207, 15, 14, 130, 80, 170, 217, 390, 387, 415, 510, 514, 4, 506; pages 69, 70, 73, 68, 68, 71, 70, 72, 74, 78, 78, 79, 82, 82, 68, 82.

29 William Butler Yeats, Discussing “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” recorded in October, 1932, web: http://writng.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Yeats.php

30 J. Ashbery, Other Traditions, p. 2.

31 Ibid., p. 85.

32 Ibid.

33 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Henry James, Essays on Literature, The Library of America, New York, 1984, p. 50.

Auteur

Enseigne à l’École du Louvre (anglais et histoire de l’art), à l’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, à Sciences Po Paris et à l’ESCPEurope. Il a fait ses études à l’University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) jusqu’au master, puis a obtenu en juin 2019 un doctorat de l’université Paris Nanterre, avec une thèse intitulée « Les cercles concentriques : esthétique et poétique des New York Poets ». Dans ce cadre, il a réalisé un film à partir de son long entretien avec la poètesse Alice Notley, en collaboration avec le réalisateur Laurent Zilberman. Il est également peintre et poète.

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