Editor's Corner
corner: n. 1. a. The position at which two lines
or surfaces meet. b. The immediate interior or exterior or exterior
region of the angle formed at this position, bounded by the two
lines or surfaces. 2. A vertex, esp. the interior region of a
vertex, formed by the sides of roads or streets that join, meet,
or intersect. 3. A threatening or embarrassing position, esp.
one from which escape is difficult or impossible. 4.a. A part,
quarter or region. b. A remote, secluded, or secret place. 5.
A guard or decoration fitted on a corner, as of a bookbinding.
6. A speculative monopoly of a stock or commodity created by
purchasing all or most of the available supply in order to raise
its price.
(The American Heritage Dictionary)
This issue is dedicated to the memory of Anna Balakian (1915-1997)
Since the 1970s the women artists
and writers associated with the avant-garde movements (in particular
Surrealism) have increasingly attracted the attention of critics.
One of the pioneers in feminist critique of Surrealism was Xavière
Gauthier. Her book Surréalisme et sexualité
(1971) inspired further important scholarship related to
the marginalization of women in relation to "the avant-garde."
One of the first essays dedicated to women Surrealists was a
survey article by Gloria Feman Orenstein published in the Spring
1973 issue of The Feminist Art Journal. In 1977, the French
review Obliques devoted its special issue to La Femme
Surréaliste. In 1980, Lea Vergine's L'Autre Moitié
de l'avant-garde documented the lives and works of women
artists associated with all major European avant-garde movements.
Three years later, in 1983, Jacqueline Chénieux discussed
the works of women surrealist writers in Le Surréalisme
et le roman. Other scholars have contributed to feminist
explorations of the avant-garde. They include, among others,
Renée Riese Hubert, Whitney Chadwick, Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf
Kuenzli, and Susan Rubin Suleiman. Their important works allow
for continued exploration and reflection about women and the
avant-garde. [1]
The essays included in this CORNER offer different critical
approaches to the work of women artists and writers associated
in a direct or indirect way with the avant-garde. In order to
reevaluate the marginal spaces, Iris Garland and Carlota Caulfield
talk about the forgotten Spanish dancer Tórtola Valencia,
whose art deserves attention. Her life was marked by la Belle
Epoch, Modernism and the avant-garde movements of the beginning
of the XX Century. She was one of the most famous solo women
dancers in Europe between 1908-1930, but her contribution to
modern dance is not documented in the English language history
of dance. Her experiments in movement and her search for the
"absolute dance" link her to the New German Dance of
1917, in particular to Mary Wigman's experimental work, as well
as to artistic explorations of the dadas (in particular Hugo
Ball).While Caulfield's essay-note gives a general presentation
about the dancer, Garland in her "Modernismo and the Dancer
Tórtola Valencia" engages in a more complete discussion
about the pioneer role that Valencia played in the evolution
of modern dance, and her role as muse for many modernistas
from Spain and Latin America.
Stephen Ratcliffe's "MEMO/RE: Reading Stein" returns
to Modernism and experimentation. His essay is part of an important
body of critical work that brings new light to the nature and
the history of Anglo-American Modernism, acknowledging and giving
deserved recognition to the work of writers like Gertrude Stein.
Ratcliffe discusses Stein's early writing and how it works on
a reader/listener. He focuses on Stein's Melanctha, her
portraits of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, and Tender
Buttons.
Renée Riese Hubert's essay recognizes the work of Leonor
Fini. Born in Buenos Aires of an Italian father and a mother
of mixed German, Slav and Venetian heritage, Fini spent her childhood
in Trieste. From 1937 to 1944, she made her home in Paris and
met many avant-garde artists including Max Ernst, Paul Eluard,
Man Ray and Salvador Dali. Fini always kept her independence
as an artist and questioned the exclusion of women from the centers
of avant-garde activity. As Hubert's essay notes, Fini's talents
were numerous. In the late 1940s, besides being a powerful painter,
she designed sets and costumes for famous ballet productions
such as Georges Balanchine's "The Crystal Place" and
Roland Petit's "Maidens of Night," In later years,
she was the designer for many other major ballet, film and theatre
productions. She also authored numerous collections of tales
including Mourmour, Contes pour Enfants Velus and
L'Oneiropompe, as well as a book about cats (her life's
passion). Hubert's "Le Livre de Leonor Fini: Self-Portrait
and Autobiography" analyses the autobiographical, visual
and narrative aspects of Fini's fascinating text(s).
Caulfield 's "Textual and Visual Strategies in the World
of Remedios Varo" discusses Varo's piece of experimental
writing De Homo Rodans. The essay emphasizes the verbal
and visual games of this Surrealist painter. Varo was also an
accomplished writer, who under the pen name Hälikcio von
Fuhrängschmidt, composed a series of new surreal theories
on the origins of humans and their ancestors. Fascinated by Varo's
umbrellas and wheels, the critic explores the dimensions of the
"marvelous," in her work as well as the presence in
her paintings of assertive female subjects constructed out of
Varo's own mythologies and spiritual values. Returning to Surrealism,
Pilar Viviente's "Surrealismo y tradición esotérica
en Remedios Varo" discusses the surrealists' fascination
with the occult as a way of understanding the relationship of
automatism and creativity. Viviente extends her discussion of
the technique of automatism to Varo's interest in experimental
verbal and visual languages.
Within surrealist spaces and visions, thanks to Antonio Beneyto,
CORNER presents for the first time in English, four
letters of Alejandra Pizarnik to Beneyto himself. The letters
dated October 26, 1969, November 8, 1969, and November 27, 1969
were published in Spanish in the literary review Hora de Poesía
in 1993; the first letter has never been published. Pizarnik's
letters offer the reader the opportunity to appreciate the literary
and personal ties between the Argentinean poet, and noted writers
such as Beneyto, Julio Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, Olga
Orozco, Antonio Bioy Casares and A. Pieyre de Mandiargues, among
others. They are written in an informal tone and with an extraordinary
sense of humor in which word plays and literary and personal
references abound. We witness through them the development of
a strong epistolary friendship that began in 1969 and lasted
until the poet's suicide in 1972. CORNER's readers also
have the unique opportunity of seeing examples of Pizarnik's
original letters illustrating the translations.
Faithful to her Author's Note to Book One where Loba is
presented as a work in "progress" ("The author
reserves the right to juggle, re-arrange, cut, osterize, re-cycle
parts of the poems in future editions. As the Loba wishes, and
the Goddess dictates"), Di Prima continues writing her long,
multifoliate poem, which she began in 1971. Jack Foley's essay-review
of the new Loba describes the "flesh," "soul,"
and "spirit" of Books One, Two and Three that continue
to integrate the work until the present. Di Prima is the only
major woman poet of the Beat Generation. She was a power on the
New York literary scene, with her Poets Press and Floating
Bear. In 1958 she played an important role when the conflict
between the sexes arose on the poetry scene. Her "The Practice
of Magical Evocation" was a response to Gary Snyder's "Praise
for Sick Women." In the 60s she moved to San Francisco and
became well-known on the poetry scene. Di Prima is considered
an anarchist-Zen-avant-garde-beatnik poet. About her Loba poems,
Adrienne Rich wrote that they are "an epic act of language,
a great geography of the female imagination."[2]
Kathleen McClintock's interview with the dancer Molissa Fenley
presents a dialogue in movement. Fenley talks about her career,
the evolution of her aesthetic with regard to her dances, as
well as her experiences in the dance world as a solo artist.
This conversation discusses in detail how Fenley's approach to
dance has modified over the course of her twenty-five years of
making dances and how she is still considered a unique voice
of the avant-garde dance scene.
In order to finish with the marginalization of the Catalan visual
poets, Xavier Canals looks at the work of Teresa Hereu, Montserrat
Felip, Montserrat Ramoneda, Fina Miralles, Eugènia Balcells,
Cuca Canals and María Mercè Marçal in his
"La poesia visual de les dones catalanes, una ab/pre sència."
More links to the Catalan visual world of women artists are presented
in the Dossier Carme Riera. One of the most important and interesting
of Catalan contemporary artists, Riera's world is characterized
by constant experimentation. Thanks to the art critic Antonia
Bovè, a selection of short essays about Riera's work and
illustrations of many of her collages, visual poems and paintings
take the reader/viewer on a rewarding journey.
In his essay "Escritura desdoblada y simulacro del sujeto:
Zona de Clivaje, de Liliana Heker," Héctor
Mario Cavallari analyzes the novel of the Argentinean writer
as the site for the production of a double spectacularization:
that of a represented vital process and of the writing practice
which inscribes it. Cavallari approaches the textual representation
of the links between sexuality, identity, and women's gender
conditions through the novel's manifest quest for discourse spectacularized
as a genealogy of writing. His analysis is articulated as a form
of intervention based on three generative textual structures:
silenced speech, repressed sexuality, and the simulacrum of the
feminine subject.
We return to Catalan visual avant-garde subversions and transgressions
in "Ester Xargay responde a Antoni Clapés."
Xargay, one of Catalonia's most important experimental poets
and performance artists, talks about her own writing, her obsession
with existentialism as well as her visual affinities with Marcel
Duchamp, Laurie Anderson, Joan Brossa and Benet Rossell. In discussing
her work, Xargay also presents a fine-grained historical analysis
of the vanguard (including Fluxus and Zaj) and rescue from the
margins of the work of several women performers and artists.
The last essay of this CORNER is "El sueño
oscuro: La poesía de Blanca Andreu y la crítica"
where Isabel Navas Ocaña traces the footsteps of Andreu's
literary career and presents the critical discourses that originated
in the poet's work. The critic discusses in particular De
una niña de provincias que se vino a vivir en un Chagall,
a polydimensional book rich in hallucinatory and surreal images
that established Andreu as one of the most important poets in
the 80s. Navas Ocaña also addresses here the theme of
the Spanish vanguard in a series of associations and historical
perspectives that present a new approach to Spanish Contemporary
Poetry.
As in our first on-line issue, we have included a Selected (Short
and Powerful) Bibliography of essays and books related to Women
and the Avant-Garde.
I don't
want to leave this corner without thanking the people who have
provided me with suggestions and encouragement for this second
issue. I am most grateful to Antonio Beneyto, Jaime D. Parra,
Xavier Canals and Teresa Henreu for their support. The first
issue of CORNER was displayed as part of the exhibition
"Poesía Visual Catalana" which opened in the
Centre d'Art Santa Mònica of Barcelona on January 14,
1999 and is now a traveling exhibition in Catalonia. Many newspapers,
such as El País, El Temps, La Vanguardia,
Avui and Lateral have dedicated important notes
and articles to the Catalan Visual Poetry and to its CORNER.
Most of all, I thank Servando González, the Webmaster
of CORNER for his heartwarming enthusiasm and his excellent
design. CORNER was selected by the Internet Free-Press
Library as a good example of an electronic journal, worthy of
being visited as such by visitors to their web page.
I have dedicated this second issue of CORNER to Anna
Balakian. I am especially grateful to her for offering me advice
and encouragement in my work related to the avant-garde, and
in particular to Alejandra Pizarnik. I met Balakian in 1990 at
an International Conference on Surrealism and the Oneric Process,
organized by Joseph Tyler in Atlanta. Having been familiar with
her Surrealism, The Road of the Absolute as well as with
many of her articles, I admired Balakian without knowing her.
Meeting her did not disappoint me. She not only welcomed me and
opened new possibilities for my research, but asked me, as well,
to send her my work about Alejandra Pizarnik and wrote back with
very valuable observations about it. She also shared some anecdotes
of her visit to Buenos Aires when she met Pizarnik in 1970, as
well as a valuable letter written from Pizarnik to her, where
the Argentinean poet talks about her poetry as well as some personal
matters related to the Surrealists she frequented in Paris. But
enough of analysis! As Balakian says at the end of her introduction
of Rosamel del Valle's Eva the Fugitive, let us
now move freely out of this Editor's Corner into the other CORNER.
C.C.
-----
1. I refer the reader to our Selected Bibliography.
2. Quoted on Diane di Prima, Loba. Parts I-VIII (Berkeley:
Wingbow Press, 1978).
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