John Ashbery, one of the most brilliant living poets, and also a sometime art critic and author of Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987, is having his solo gallery debut in NYC this week at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Midtown. The exhibit consists of wry collages, old and new, that deftly combine postcards and other ephemera.
Ashbery is one of my favorite poets, but also one of the few poets for whose work I have the patience. The NYT article about this exhibit, The Poetry of Scissors and Glue connects Ashbery’s poetry and collage-making in the context of his early love of film, and describes his process as “making language-collages based on principles learned from paper collages, which were in his hands, based on techniques learned from films.”
Department of Everyday Visualingual 