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Rating: 
Summary: Ashbery Unplugged
Review: The range of styles surveilled in this anthology, chanted aloud, taps on the eardrum like some snooty, kibitzing skip-rope rhyme: from Flemish primitivism to Blakean theosophy to Japanese photography to Bulgarian art to Barbizon landscapes to Italian baroque to Francis Bacon's death-empty Existenz.... (And skip, and weave, and jump, and sashay.) Ashbery's weekly obligation to grind out art-gallery reportage takes the edge off his game (there is little zing and panache in these articles, surely not the Ashbery of 'Convex Mirror' or 'Wet Casements' or 'Tapestry'), but we can sense the poet assembling secret stanzas beneath the prim, deadpan facade, the lyrical footnoting of each gallery-critique with a submerged kabbalah of vision-forming events. Many of the articles seem like secret rehearsals for the sinuous liquid-measures that would shoal in on the melt-waters of Ashbery's passing-strange future verse odysseys. Being forced to *respond* to such a barrage of multicultural artworks, consistently and intelligently, may have been the excitant to desert-thirst Ashbery needed, an entry-burn to some exotic, chimerical, Parisian boot-camp of the Critical Eye set to hone his assimilative powers.Here, his tone is light and disaffected, rinsed clean of resentment, of snooty ire (of polemic, in short). He smiles without mirth. He muses quietly on the splotched canvases and hieroglyphic streaks of pigment smeared straight from the tube. The painting glasses his eye, drizzling a cool rain on the transformative poetic pyre, surrendering the *gravitas* of the nipping stanza for the quiet, unassuming air of journalism and reportage. Admirers of *Flow Chart* or *Houseboat Days* or *Can You Hear, Bird?* must tune to a different wavelength, endure Ashbery's incognito for 400 pages of canny, priggish prose. To his credit, however, Ashbery manages to clarify our confusion without diminishing it, allowing the painting or sculpture or collage to work its idiopathic design into the crawling hues of our ocular node, to extend its mesh of associations into us, to interleave its voice with the recessed intaglio of our deep painterly source-code, because the pattern gleams there, too. Granted, all great love wants to *create* the beloved, and I may be over-subjectifying my experience of these essays. (Ashbery is, after all, no Arthur C. Danto, much less a Ruskin or a Pater.) Poems like 'Tapestry' taught me how and whom to love, and left me burdened with a programme for self-enhancement that would keep me howling to an inward moon for as long as I can read and write (silly pretentious tart that I am). If no such creature is ever sighted, we are resolved to create one in its stead. Likewise, whenever Ashbery's journalism disappoints us by not *attacking* these gallery-exhibitions with the same gold-standard inbreaking rush of poetic zeal we've come to expect, there is always the temptation to project our own cocksure aesthetic fantasies onto the stark-white glossy canvas of the not-quite-there. 'The conception is interesting: to see, as though reflected / In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through / Their own eyes....' --'Wet Casements' Few people really care whether the canvases of George Mathieux really surge with polychromatic rhythms equal to the fin-de-siecle squiggling of France's post-Dada cabal, whether William Blake's illuminated epics prognosticate the kino-eye intensity of modern cinema, whether H.R. Giger's machine-world mechanosphere can help us de-romanticize the industrial megalomania that has dessicated the Earth, and our refusal to know is already part of the disaster. Ashbery's book stands a minor classic to help us bulwark the spelunking eye against an 'anything goes' contemporary art-culture that would lead us to believe that, well, anything goes.... Nobody seems to remember the utopian art-academies that John Ruskin or Walter Pater (or, heck, even Camille Paglia) bequeathed to us in blueprint, a god-revealing curriculum that combined Renaissance audacity with the semiotic motion-sculptures of modern cinema with the elite conceptual sonatas of post-Nietzschean tragic theater to tear modern culture a new one. Rather we have university arts programs that nurture aggressive extroverts in fashion-victim garb who wouldn't know the harsh, ascetic legacy of 20th-century modernism if it jumped up the wazoo. A strong intertextual reading of *Reported Sightings* combined with Ashbery's collected verse will permit us something of the strong Wildean vision of *The Critic As Artist*, where the vanished statues and apocalyptic chapel-ceilings of Renaissance boldness will be put to work alongside the chemo-industrial landscapes of cyberpunk-capitalism and the world philosophical cinema that lights up our pain fibers at the vanishing point of the man-made horizon, that renews the exploratorium of the Ruskinian and Paterian world-artist in the machine-environments forced on us by exponential cybernetic influx and 24-7 media spamming.....[pause for breath]. Or something to that effect. Lemme work on it. Meanwhile buy the book.
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