“This Is Just to Say This Is the End of Art: Williams and the Aesthetic Attitude”

Abstract

This Is Just SayI have eatenthe plumsthat were inthe iceboxand whichyou were probablysavingfor breakfastForgive methey were deliciousso sweetand so cold (CP2 372)James Longenbach's Nation review of Herbert Leibowitz's 2011 biography Something Urgent I Have You, points an admittedly minor controversy about whether William Carlos Williams attended the 1913 Armory Show. Leibowitz claims a painting the poet saw at the show- Wassily Kandinsky's Improvisation 27: The Garden of Love-had made a deep impression, emboldening Williams to start liberating his poetry from moribund forms (Leibowitz, 80) and that he also admired Brancusi's Bird in Flight (241). Williams maintained in his autobiography that he was on hand, while Longenbach, following Flossie's memory, insists the author was misremembering a later event-the Society of Independent Artists in 1917 at which Duchamp's Fountain was rejected.1 What is not in doubt is that Williams scholars-myself included-have for decades noticed affinities between his thingy poetry and avant-garde movements within the visual arts. From scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s by Dickran Tashjian, Henry Sayre, William Marling, and Peter Schmidt a recently published essay on Williams and Duchamp by Lisa Siraganian, Williams has been interpreted, borrow Marjorie Perloff's phrase regarding Frank O'Hara, as a poet among painters. What I have not seen in the criticism, and what I will address, is a discussion of Williams among the Aestheticians.In a legendary essay from the Journal of Philosophy in 1964, Arthur C. Danto, writing in the wake of two Andy Warhol exhibits at the Stable Gallery in 1962 and 1964, stated, [w]hat in the end makes the difference between a Brillo Box and a work of consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a of is other than that of artistic identification). According Danto, Warhol departs from modernism because he did not fetishize the hand-painted artifact as authenticated by the signatory gestures of the artist. Although a commercial Brillo box is already an aestheticized object, for Danto, Warhol deconstructs the boundary between fine and ordinary material culture. In his 1974 study Art and the Aesthetic, George Dickie built on Danto's disavowal of imitation and expression theories of in order focus on a framework theory. Less focused on history, and more on an institutional theory of than was the case in Danto, who had used the term art world refer something like what T. S. Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent meant when he discussed an author's historical sense and of how the really new work at once coheres and alters that history, Dickie studied the complex process in which an object has conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or person acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld).2 I find the Danto/Dickie framework models be powerful tools for approaching Williams's found poems such as This Is Just Say, which I will read closely in this paper. Danto on his major subject, Warhol, has taught me consider This Is Just Say in a philosophical manner. I now read Williams's poem as an example apres la letter of Danto's view of Pop as transfigurative of otherwise indecipherable objects. At the same time, I will critique Danto's understanding of Warhol's Brillo Box as the ur text of an that is indecipherable the eye, but only discernible as because of a philosophical understanding of it as belonging the world. I will do so not merely score points against a major theorist whose writings have illuminated me. My intention is link Brillo Box and This Is Just Say as both decipherable-visually decipherable-in ways Danto must significantly downplay for his conceptual theory of add up. …