Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde

Description

Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde documents the collaborations and conflicts essential to the history of the post-war avant-garde. It offers a study of composer Morton Feldman�s associations and friendships with artists like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Frank O�Hara, Charlotte Moorman, and others. Arguing that friendship and mourning sustained the collective aesthetics of the New York School, Dohoney has written an emotional and intimate revision of New York modernism from the point of view of Feldman's agonistic community. Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Figures Introduction Notes Chapter 1: Spontaneity, Intimacy, and Friendship in the 1950s Theorizing Spontaneity and Intimacy in New York School Modernism Early Meanings of Spontaneity in Feldman’s Chance Music Marginal Intersection and the Failure of Cagean Acceptance Frank O’Hara and the Limits of Spontaneity Into the 1960s Notes Chapter 2: “Élan vital . . . and how to fake it” “. . . just the outlines of becoming”: Intermission 6 “My person is a protean being”: Figure of Memory Feldman’s Filmic Vitalism Namuth’s Jackson Pollock 51 and the Space of Freedom Sculpture by Lipton and the Germinal Force of Life New York School Vitalism Notes Intermission: The Necessary Other Notes Chapter 3: The Elegiac Science “Happy to be ‘set’ by you”: Feldman and O’Hara’s Friendship Mourning Coterie Late-style Mourning The Mediumship of Joan La Barbara Notes Chapter 4: “We broke up because of style” Instituting the New York School: Mercedes Matter, Feldman, Guston, and the Studio School Guston’s Mourning of Feldman Feldman’s Mourning and Melancholia Notes Conclusion: Friendship’s Silence Notes Acknowledgments Bibliography Archive Published Sources Discography Filmography Index