"And Ut Pictura Poesis is her name": John Ashbery, the plastic arts, and the avant-garde

ALTHOUGH JOHN ASHBERY carefully enumerated French avant-garde influences on Frank O'Hara in his introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, he has consistently denied the primacy of any such influence in his own work. Yet certain facts about his career undercut this denial-including a ten-year expatriation in Paris where he worked as an art critic for the Herald Tribune until 1965-as do the terms of the denial itself, which exclude the likes of Pierre Reverdy, Raymond Roussel, and Giorgio de Chirico, participants in the Avant-Garde to whom he is clearly indebted. What, then, is the avant-garde tradition-in Ashbery's words, the "other tradition"-Ashbery would sidestep even as he acknowledges certain of its by-ways? Surprisingly, Ashbery himself provides a map of its influence through his writings on avant-garde painters, particularly the French. In this way his own art criticism becomes a kind of a proto-poetics, while the theoretical relation between painting and poetry-like an impertinent "talking picture" (ut pictura poesis)repeatedly inserts itself into Ashbery's poetical ruminations on novelty.

Ashbery's evasiveness about his own avant-garde genealogy seems to have been a reaction to W.H. Auden's and Harold Bloom's disparaging associations of his "excesses" with Surrealism.' Bv the 1960s Surrealism was old hat, even in America. Yet in his writings on the subject Ashbery seems determined to retain its unofficial nature as a source of novelty bv resuscitating marginal figures and precursors of the movement-less out of critical premeditation than simple appreciation. At the same time, he upholds the general framework of an anti-literary, anti-artistic attitude inherited from Surrealism by concurring with the poet/painter Henri Michaux (whom he interviewed in 1961) that it provided "la grande permission" and thus should be valued "less for what [its members] wrote than for the permission they gave everybody to write whatever comes into their heads" (RS398).

Ashbery, then, seems interested in an "acculturated" Surrealism that crosses the original limits of its Bretonian program and assimilates itself to new realities: "What has in fact happened is that Surrealism has become a part of our daily lives: its effects can be seen everywhere, in the work of artists and writers who have no connection with the movement, in movies, interior decoration, and popular speech. A degradation? Perhaps. But it is difficult to impose limitations on the unconscious, which has a habit of turning up in unlikely places" ("In the Surrealist Tradition," RS4).

Writing at different times in the 1960s, Ashbery discriminates between Surrealism's procedures and practitioners in a way that subtly illuminates his own poetic debts. Indeed, his critical evaluations help to differentiate his own procedures from those most closely identified with the "official" Surrealism of the 1920s: Liberte total in Paris in the 1920s turned out to he something less than total, and if it was not total, then it was something very much like the everyday liberty that pre-- Surrealist generations had to cope with. In literature it meant automatic writing, but what is so free about that? Real freedom would be to use this method where it could he of service and to correct it with the conscious mind where indicated. And in fact the finest writing of the Surrealists is the product of the conscious and the unconscious working hand in hand, as they have been wont to do in all ages. But if automatic writing is the prescribed ideal for literature, what about art? Dali's meticulous handling of infinitesimal brushes excludes any kind of automatism as far as the execution of his paintings goes, and perhaps even their conception was influenced by a desire to show off his dazzling technique to its best advantage. Breton called Miro the most surreal of the Surrealists, yet the deliberate wit and technical mastery of his work scarcely seem like tools to plumb the unconscious. ("The Heritage of Dada and Sur realism,' RS 6)

According to Ashbery, the automatist inadequacies of surrealist painting were rectified only with the advent of the New American Painting, since "automatism was not a viable possibility in art until much later, in the hands of artists like Jackson Pollock" ("Yves Tanguy," RS 26). Yet in seeing Abstract Expressionism as the first complete realization of plastic automatism, Ashbery is actually demoting its importance for him as a poet. One cannot help wondering if this critical maneuver is not in part a way of distinguishing his own avant-garde poetics from the kind of empirical automatism one finds in O'Hara's poetry, particularly in its early, more derivative manifestations such as "Easter" and "Second Avenue," the latter of which Ashbery once described as "a difficult pleasure" (Feldman 69). Ashbery elaborates his critical view of automatism-albeit in this case primarily as a form of writing-in an essay on Pierre Reverdy: "Reverdy's poetry avoids the extremes of Surrealist poetry, and is the richer for it." In the same essay he implies that automatism remained an unachieved ideal for the Surrealists, who adhered to rules that necessarily conflicted with it: