Figure Ground Reversal

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Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art By Stephen Fredman Stanford University Press, 2010. 240 pages The irony of the word is while, by definition, it emphasizes something very specific--some context or another--it is often, in practice, utterly vague. This is the initial challenge of Stephen Fredman's new book, Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art (2010): to define for the reader of this otherwise descriptive and engaging book what actually means. Given most readers already know the contexts they are interested in having book about post-World War II American poetry elucidate (biographical, historical, formal, textual, etc.), it is to Fredman's credit he doesn't gesture toward all the literary critical possibilities. Instead, he immediately situates the reader inside the vibrant practices of handful of artists working in America between 1945-1970, artists who created and used the term for themselves. Contextual refers to a way of making and a new relationship between art and life (xi) emerged together during this period, and Fredman spends the better part of his introduction and Chapter One explaining this formation. The how of contextual practice is the easiest to grasp, for practice involved drawing together discarded or unremarked fragments (whether visual or verbal) from daily life. In this way it was related, at least structurally, to collage. But these poets and artists turned to the material of their everyday lives, the body became site of interest as repository of unrecognized cultural potential. This emphasis on (and assemblage of) the everyday, the bodily, the overlooked, and the fragmentary resulted in an artistic practice that reveled in sexual display and drug experimentation, espoused an anarchist politics and communal sociality, and encouraged mystical and shamanistic excursions. Fredman defines and situates this practice historically, both the beginning of series of countercultural movements and reaction to the defensive rigidity and self-enclosure of postwar American society (30). Although he makes big claims for the period, he often only invokes them at the beginning and ends of chapters, leaving him free to build the book's narrative and argument from descriptions and analyses of the installations, anthologies, collaborations, and publications together constituted practice. By focusing on the technique drove the movement, instead of on the movement itself, Fredman generates very different kind of book about American poetry, one invested more in particular works and sites of artistic engagement than in the shift in American aesthetics can nonetheless be felt in its pages. While Fredman declares this book to be about four central figures- -the poets Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley; the artist Wallace Berman; and the filmmaker, artist, and folk music anthologist Harry Smith--he populates it with many of the artists with whom these figures worked and lived. In this way, Practice reflects the truly collaborative ethos of the movement Fredman describes, in which texts were created by many artists and across various media. He presents these artists alternatives to those normally studied from this period, declaring the more conventional choices of figures for this particular study would have been Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, Joseph Cornell, and John Cage. When one of his figures has received recent critical attention (such Duncan and Creeley), Fredman makes point of highlighting the things about these artists (Creeley's theories of context and Duncan's role in the erotic arts) continue to be overlooked. In these ways, Practice tells an untold story reconfigures the period for those interested in it. …