Reva Wolf investigates the underground culture of poets, artists, and filmmakers who interacted with Warhol during his apotheosis in the turbulent 1960s. She claims that Warhol understood the literary imagination of his generation and that a study of Warhol's literary activities is essential to understanding his art.
The turbulence of the sixties is reflected in a revealing memoir that documents Warhol's success as a commercial and pop artist and filmmaker and the sudden dramas of his life.
“One acclaimed filmmaker takes the measure of another! Murphy’s candid and richly personal account of Andy Warhol’s filmmaking is a brilliant contribution to our understanding of one of cinema’s most original and prolific masters, exploring the artist's multiple forms of psychodrama with a filmmaker’s insight and attention to detail. As more and more of the restored Warhol films become available, this book will remain an indispensable handbook for film historians and general moviegoers alike—especially because it is such a genuine pleasure to read."—David E. James, author of The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. “Those of us who care about independent cinema have always struggled with Andy Warhol’s massive oeuvre. At long last J.J. Murphy, who has spent a lifetime making contributions to independent cinema, has undertaken the Herculean task of helping us understand Warhol’s development as a filmmaker. Murphy’s precision, stamina, and passion are evident in this examination of an immense body of work—as is his ability to report what he has discovered in a readable and informative manner. The Black Hole of the Camera helps us to re-conceptualize Warhol’s films not simply as mythic pranks, but as the diverse creations of a prolific and inventive film artist.”—Scott MacDonald, author of A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (5 vols.). "In his careful firsthand study of Andy Warhol’s films, J. J. Murphy contributes to the ongoing revision of the enduring but misplaced perceptions of Warhol as a passive, remote, and one-dimensional artist. Murphy's discussions of authorship, the relation of content to form, the role of "dramatic conflict,” and the complexity of Warhol’s camera work show these perceptions to be stubborn myths. The Black Hole of the Camera offers a clear sense of the nuances of Warhol’s fascinating, prolific, and influential activities in filmmaking."—Reva Wolf, author of Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s.
Adopting artist-poet Joe Brainard as its principal focus, this project presents "Pop poetics" not as a minor, coterie movement meriting a sympathetic footnote in accounts of the postwar era's literary history, but as a missing link that confounds and potentially unites any number of supposedly rigid critical distinctions (authenticity versus formalism, the "personal" versus the mechanical). Pop poetics matter, argues Andrew Fitch, not just to the occasional aficionado of Brainard's I Remember, but to anybody concerned with reconstructing the dynamic aesthetic exchange between postwar art and poetry.
Elizabeth A. Kaye specializes in communications as part of her coaching and consulting practice. She has edited Requirements for Certification since the 2000-01 edition.
Stephen J. Ross examines the concept of nature in the work of John Ashbery. Through close readings of Ashbery's poetry and critical prose, he reveals Ashbery's work to be a case study of the dramatic transformation of nature in art and literature since World War II.