‘Freedom that has turned into a painting’

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter discusses John Ashbery’s poetry as it poses the question of autonomy. It argues that Ashbery’s poetry is concerned with distinguishing the autonomy of art and the individual conceived like a work of art from a social claim for the value of individual autonomy. He thus constantly portrays autonomy as a kind of receding or fictional image, a work of art, which returns our attention to the particularities of individuals, rather than their universal nature. Beginning with a reading of his work in The Double Dream of Spring, the chapter argues that this formulation can be read historically as a response to the homophobic invasion of privacy during the Cold War, but also through his own investments in aestheticism and the idea of the avant-garde. By looking at Ashbery’s art criticism and his conception of art in the long poem ‘Fragment’, as well as others, the chapter traces a concatenation of thoughts about autonomy in relation to American politics. The chapter argues that for Ashbery the lyric exchange functions as a way to posit an autonomy that is as provisional as the individual’s projections onto the external world. It concludes by making the case for John Ashbery’s work, and ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ (1975) in particular, as an attempt to achieve apolitical poetry. The chapter considers what it means to take that seriously, rather than simply saying that Ashbery decentres or deconstructs the liberal subject of rights.