Month: February 2025

Frank O’Hara, Sensitivity, and American Art

By Harry Laventure

Ah nuts! It’s boring reading French newspapers
in New York as if I were a Colonial waiting for my gin
somewhere beyond this roof a jet is making a sketch of the sky
where is Gary Snyder I wonder if he’s reading under a dwarf pine
stretched out so his book and his head fit under the lowest branch
while the sun of the Orient rolls calmly not getting through to him
not caring particularly because the light in Japan respects poets 

• Les Luths, 1959

Frank O’Hara. Somewhere between the consonants and the syllable count and the ink, there is always a lining of jazz. This retains its tuning on and off the page. Cinematic close-ups dripping with cigarette smoke, darting from object to still and place to space with the flicker of a Red-Spotted Purple Admiral’s wing-blink. The poet, tethered by personality to an infinite ricochet of cocktail parties, New York intellectuals, lovers, and the avant-garde. “Les Luths” epitomises the rarer alleles in O’Hara, those that permitted the most microscopic of attentions to encounters with people and things that most would not endow with profundity beyond the happenstance. An effortless habit of admiration that comes when the reservoir of an ardent spirit laps over the brim and spills itself on an outside no longer collateral. More morbid – he would himself remark that the slightest loss of attention leads to death.

O’Hara’s sprezzatura of the soul flaneurs through the arteries of his corpus with an insouciance which never loses its natural ancestry from the heart. Indeed, it is this love and elevation of the quotidian which elicited poet Ron Padgett to choose his “A Step Away From Them” for the Library of Congress as an encapsulation of American Identity. Written shortly after his friend Jackson Pollock’s death, O’Hara opts for no grandiose lament, no hagiography, no tender confessions. Instead, he choreographs a historical record of his experiences during a lunch-break trundle. From yellow hats, to cats playing in sawdust, to a cheeseburger at JULIET’S CORNER, the parade of the random betrays circumlocution of the most dazzling sadness – these are not distractions, but elements of grief incarnate in the places he’s left to inherit without those he’s lost. First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them?

Riotous in his energies and replete with artistic force, it is no surprise that this attentive, charismatic socialite would exert a particular magnetism on the cultural elite of the New York intelligentsia. One privilege of being so close to so many artists is that one garners an innovative, thoughtful armoury of compliments across dozens of different media. Jane Freilicher and Elaine de Kooning executed portraits that projected their respective styles onto O’Hara, carving out his idiosyncrasies amidst great slashes of the palette knife in tropical technicolour. Grace Hartigan attempted to translate his 1953 poem cycle of Oranges onto the canvas, even embedding his words in their abstractions. Alfred Leslie would personally request subtitles and translations for his short film from O’Hara. We cut to Frank, drinking again, bumbling into yet another atelier, in “Why Am I Not A Painter?”

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says. 

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange.

To consider the perpetual stimulation proffered between these individuals, whether in the New York School or the Abstract Expressionists or any other self-nomination, is to learn the currency of O’Hara’s central, artistic voltage. The exchange rate is as generous as a drunken handshake. Guston recalls being air-lifted from a creative pit after a brief poking in of the head and a few suggestions. In this gauze of compliments, we must deliberate how much of Frank seeped into the art itself. On numerous occasions, we hear of spontaneous collaborations in the litter of summer afternoons. My favourite anecdote comes from Norman Bluhm: the pair sat in the velvet of October 1960 and listened to a Prokofiev sonata in chatter together. What begins as Bluhm attempting to demonstrate his understanding of the musical theory employed culminates in a moment of cerebral confluence, and – music still playing – him and O’Hara conduct an improvised set of sketches, complete with poetry composed entirely off the cuff. 

It is this fashion in which he is to be remembered by those he is most loved by. Not in the poetry that he hid in his drawers only to be lauded for now, nor the grand exhibitions he facilitated as Assistant Curator of the MoMA (a position which he’d attained having been promoted all the way from the front desk), but as the charmed, sparkling artistic intoxication with which he seemed to adorn the dance in his footprints. For all the compliments paid to him in his lifetime, 1999 saw a posthumous congregation of a most fitting collaboration. Brought together by the meticulously fervent work of Russell Ferguson and the Museum of Contemporary Art, In Memory Of My Feelings wove the literal personal effects of O’Hara and his clans into something that was simultaneously biographical, panegyric, and aesthetically instructive. Between many of the artists already mentioned and other titans such as Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock, there lies the inexorable inability to amputate O’Hara’s life from the story of his generation’s artistic trajectory. Artist and poet, friend and critic. Those four nouns can be reconfigured as adjectives or adverbs to each other in any number of iterations without any loss in accuracy of expression. A tip of the hat in malleability. 

Lest we take anyone else’s word for it, let us return to O’Hara’s own work. I hope that he would not find it too offensive to suggest that, for all its brilliance, Frank never really saw his poetry as anything beyond another outlet. But what an outlet. He had been immensely experimental in his time as a Harvard student. I won’t try to rival Ferguson in eloquence of catalogue: 

… a striking diversity of forms that includes ballads, songs, a blues (so-called), a madrigal, musical exercises such as a gavotte, a dirge (complete with strophe, antistrophe, and epode), and even more exotic forms such as the French triolet. There are also an imitation of Wallace Stevens (with a touch of Marianne Moore) titled “A Procession for Peacocks”; a strict sonnet; a litany; poems in quatrains; couplets, and heroic couplets; poems with faithful rhyme patterns; and various prose poems.

Left in the company of such technical virtuosity, it is touching and telling to witness the consistency of his voice in the bare, casual, and sentimental tones of his main corpus. Drawing on the lesser-known greats of Reverdy and Apollinare, there is something confessional in O’Hara’s declared objectivity, and an unmatched sensitivity to the theme in the random or circumstantial. It sounds blisteringly blatant, but his poetry possesses a curation of contingencies which is almost musical in its cadence. Now That I am in Madrid And Can Think//I think of you. Such thoughts could only balloon to bloom at this very moment, in this very place, under these very auspices. The American air is only to be enjoyed because his lover is sharing [his] share, and the lungs that do so have sonorously subside[d] to greet him each morning with the flutter of your brown lashes. We then move to Toledo, where the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver like glasses like an old lady’s hair. The apprehension of the sheer number of happenstances that lead to the moment of observation is disarmingly beautiful in its appreciation. Even in his agony, O’Hara sounds grateful just to soak it up. This Personalism is immensely difficult to pin down or define, precisely because of the vast swathes of experience that the poet can cram into a matter of lines. In but one, then, his capacity to seek objects and scenes for what they meant rather than what they were retains a complexity which borders on abstraction only elsewhere found in music. Rothko gunned for the same in his colour-fields; Pater had previously observed all art’s aspirations to ‘the condition of music’. It makes sense that O’Hara was an exceptional pianist before he ever picked up the pen. Oversaturation by example to the point of the universal; when enough ostensibly random facets are showcased together, it is their key centre that is transmitted to us over the material. For this reason, we cannot trust O’Hara in his assertion that My eyes, like millions of glassy squares, merely reflect. It is not reflection, it is not projection – it is appreciation by address rather than praise. William Carlos Williams conjured no ideas but in things, Ferguson refined it to no ideas but in people, the obvious truth is that O’Hara is both. A kind of ventriloquist, bound to autonomous puppets. They are inseparable by their strings, the themes, though they still operate independently. It is a demonstration that the act of creation and the finished creation are the same, to poach from Ashbery. All this written down whilst sneaking out from the MoMA to type a few thoughts in the Olivietti showrooms. That is true sensitivity – or rather, Feldman would say, the dialectic of the heart. 

So poetic a life could only come to an end on a similar theme. Tragically, O’Hara was struck by a jeep just off the Fire Island beach in the wee small hours of 24^th July, 1966. He was 40. I daresay the absurdity would have made him chortle. Profound exactly because it was engulfed by the everyday. In Larry Rivers’ funeral speech, he observed that at least sixty people would have known him to be their best friend. I do not think there is a better testament to O’Hara, in all his tenderness and personability, than Jasper Johns’ Memory Piece. In 1961, Johns made a plaster cast of Frank’s left foot. Two years later, in a poem dedicated to Johns, O’Hara wrote When I think of you in South Carolina I think of my foot in the sand. I leave it to Ferguson to close: In 1970, four years after O’Hara’s death (…) Johns completed the sculpture he had envisaged making. The cast is attached to the lid of a box that contains a layer of sand. Each time the lid is closed, a fresh footprint is impressed into it. The sculpture makes an intimate kind of memorial, keeping O’Hara’s physical footprint in the world in an echo of the way his poetry lives on in the minds of his readers. Rather,

oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

By Matty Timmis

Believe me, I am not a fan of Instagram. It’s the closest fit I can think of to a ‘Babylon machine’, except maybe something like a credit score, but who the fuck really knows what that is. The strange thing is though, when examined honestly, Instagram’s Babylonian currents have been a powerful force for moulding who I am today, how we all exist in this strange new age, and where we all think we’re going. I’m not quite sure that’s the tragedy everyone would have you believe.

Now I am not a psychologist or a sociologist, in fact I can sometimes be a bit suspicious of those more abstract sciences, so this is not one of those tiresome researched or sourced papers. As an insufferable arts student, I much prefer to triangulate my sense of self and reality with the medium of other people’s creative expression. The other week then, as the clock on my phone taunted me with the grandiose digits of the evening, through midnight’s crescendo of zeros and onward to the meek little numbers of the pre-dawn morning, I stumbled upon something genuinely interesting. Amidst the chintzy buzz of the search feature, trapped in the gaudy mosaic, between tiles of hideous car crash videos, offensive memes and plastic surgery was a strange post that genuinely struck me.

What I had stumbled upon, in the suitably unpalatable hours of the morning, was a collection of ten paintings by Egon Schiele. These were like nothing I had ever seen before – piercingly raw, expressive, and tormented in their vivid simplicity. A protege of fellow Austrian Gustave Klimt –  Schiele led a suitably troubled, bohemian existence. Dead by twenty-eight following a twisted, reckless life – pursuing an incestuous relationship with his sister and having a less than healthy relationship with alcohol, he bore well the stereotypes of a troubled artistic genius. This however is not an article about such a blackened bolt of lightning – this is an article about me, and hopefully about you too.

To start, what I think is so interesting about this unlikely discovery is the way in which it speaks to the power of art to occasionally triumph over the patter of the mundane. I certainly did not search for this, or any other kind of artistic revelation, and I’m certain my dastardly algorithm is not skewed to present me with anything so profound. Yet when I glimpsed it amongst the discards of empty degradation I was affected deeply, enraptured with the power of a few lines.

Those lines, those bewildered, tortured faces Schiele summoned, were strangely prescient to my online experience. I feel those wailing lines, sketched in a kind of visceral flow that would often see him fix his manic pencil to his paper for the duration of the piece, can be traced onto the minds of the digital age. There seems to smoulder in the singe of those brandished pen strokes, a very strange kind of symbiosis. Between those warped, shrewd sketches and the pale flame of our minds that flicker so fickle at every swipe, burning to the pace of the digital age.

There’s a desperate kind of compulsion lurking in our digital presence that, when considered, is fundamental to our conceptualisation of ourselves. That kind of stupefied, arresting gaze that we fix to our screens for interminable periods lingers in Schiele’s lucid, striking faces. I suspect Schiele’s inspirations stemmed seldom from contented individuals or joyous experiences, heaven knows he wasn’t a beacon of certitude. But he had the cogency to articulate a particular facet of those prosaic lives, to reveal the swirling mire of darkness that beckons us, that we have always escaped into. 

I, for one, have never desired any relations with any of my family, nor do I have such a harrowing relationship with substances, but all of us I think remain ghastly consumptives. Instagram is often referred to as addictive, but I think the connotations of that word constitute a slight misunderstanding. We know that Instagram works almost exclusively to our detriment, yet we cannot resist complicity. We are not helpless to the ravages of addiction, we are engaged in creating our own snare. We not only consume but contribute. There is a darkness implicit in that, and that twisted human agency is written with crushing lucidity across these seemingly regular, strangely devastated faces. Like any true piece of art they are an accompaniment, a mirror in which looms a charmed derangement – the frantic consumption of our lives.

The elevation of beauty is scrawled over all of our Instagram feeds, and it sucks us into a strange semi-reality, ogling the embellished truth of lives. We too cannot help but project a vision of a life in its most favourable terms, but the depth lies in our desire to do this, which Instagram feeds off. What is so striking in these works then is their undressing – their candid presentation of our sparser, but more emotionally complex minds. Something that lies not in our mere projections onto Instagram, rather in a far more layered embodiment of our interaction with it. What I read in those warped lines of lives is far more complete than a post – it is the murmurs of all live’s choruses, crushing us and contenting us. In our age those strange figures, leering so tormented from the page, are more than glossy holiday posts or a ‘chronicling of memory’ , they also gape for our mindless hours of swiping. They know of the strange curse of existence, of our idle, ivory desires.

Schiele’s paintings, particularly those portraits that I first discovered, are exercises in that damnation, quantified in the digital age. They are portraits of the humdrum, of the menial and the uninspired, but they throb with a macabre revelation, one fuelled by the hopeless forces of consumption. They sing for the looming twilight churn we are so often ensnared in, scrolling to the conclusion of our wits, right out to the precipice of our contact with reality.

So whisper it, but maybe there’s something true in the Babylon machine. Maybe it has moments of brilliance, where the hard swing of the numbed chisel unearths a little vein of gold that courses through our minds, when the miasma is illumined by an eerie brilliance. I am aware Zuckerberg has actually managed to get worse recently, as though he were in some fiendish race to the base of man’s ineptitude. Would the world be a better place if he had kept his churlish woman rating creation in his virginal notepad? Probably. Does there remain however glimmers of creativity’s timeless capacity to reflect personhood and inflect reality even there? I think there may well be.

As a footnote, Instagram can’t be too terrible, chances are that it is the means by which you found this pretentious crap!

By Sam Unsworth

“Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at four o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an Oyster. Have a Negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.” – Anthony Bourdain.

Is it really possible for one to be effortlessly cool? Appeal to all? Understand and be understood by those with lots and those with little? Only one man, I find, has this connection. The late great Anthony Bourdain. While Parts Unknown and A Cook’s Tour used to seem to me of the genre of Ice Road Truckers, River Monsters , or whatever everyone’s dad was watching in the late 2000s, they are in fact some of the most insightful perceptions of what it means to travel and embrace culture. I would expect that most readers are familiar with the opening quote, no doubt plastered on an eccentric French teacher’s wall at school, but find it means far more now than it did at the time.

The beauty of Bourdain’s work truly lies in his honesty. Whilst the Clarkson, May, Hammond trio, Michael Palin and even Richard Ayoade have inspired prospering travellers to engage in great feats and navigate the globe purely for thrill and interest, they fail to capture the same intimacy as Bourdain. The audience feels as though they know him, that they are experiencing his strange escapades alongside him, both the good and the bad. We are invited into the very workings of his brain, as though every episode is a tell-all about his multitude of experiences.

I was recently rewatching Parts Unknown, procrastinating whatever essay was sitting in my due folder gathering dust, when I came across an episode I had not watched for a long time. The Sicily trip. This episode is utterly thought-provoking as Bourdain circles into a state of manic depression after a staged diving trip to “capture” some seafood for dinner.. Bourdain swimming along the vibrant coral with octopi falling from above, hurled from a fishing boat not ten metres away. With each splash, and falling fish, the shock and disappointment crept across his face. We, the audience, are then taken through the rest of his travel, and hearing the voiceover we feel as though we are experiencing the trip alongside Anthony. He admits in the voiceover that he had proceeded to get so drunk after the fishing trip that he did not remember the interactions and meals that were filmed after it. He states that had he not been filming he would have returned to his hotel room, mixed up some medicine, drank, and flicked through the porn channel. This kind of gritty honesty is what makes him such an engaging character, we see him through thick and thin.

In Parts Unknown, we are introduced to a slightly older, more mature Bourdain, already a seasoned traveller but now lacking his signature cigarette stuck to his bottom lip. On a side note, I have been meaning to find an interview between Bourdain and Marco Pierre White and count who smoked more cigarettes during the interaction. Bourdain’s early work is what drove his mantra of “enjoy the ride” as we see him eating anything and everything, challenging the new and mysterious with an open heart and mind and firing Kalashnikovs whilst sipping on a Tiger in a Cambodian bar. Interestingly, at said bar, you don’t pay for drinks but for ammunition. Bourdain personifies the traveller, willing to talk with anyone and do anything such as his graphic discussions about bondage in Tokyo. Having grown up in the kitchen, Bourdain is aware of a tough life and hard work and made his name in the culinary field working in Michelin star kitchens. He was a man who knew how to eat, but, more to the point, he knew what he liked to eat. Whether that be at roadside cafes or famously the meal he shared with Obama in Hanoi, there is a refreshing lack of snobbery in his ideas on food. He narrates with a quick wit and humility, dealing with the culinary delights of the world, whilst also dealing with very intense and very real problems facing many people today.

So, if you find yourself at a loose end or simply need some inspiration for your next travel or adventure, then there is no better place to start than with the master himself: Anthony Bourdain.