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| i never knew what time it was
ISBN: 9780520938298
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Performance art -- Texts; California -- Civilization; Arts -- California;
In this series of intricately related texts, internationally known poet, critic, and performance artist David Antin explores the experience of time--how it's felt, remembered, and recounted. These free-form talk pieces--sometimes called talk poems or simply talks--began as improvisations at museums, universities, and poetry centers where Antin was invited to come and think out loud. Serious and playful, they move rapidly from keen analysis to powerful storytelling to passages of pure comedy, as they range kaleidoscopically across Antin's experiences: in the New York City of his childhood and youth, the Eastern Europe of family and friends, and the New York and Southern California of his art and literary career. The author's analysis and abrasive comedy have been described as a mix of Lenny Bruce and Ludwig Wittgenstein, his commitment to verbal invention and narrative as a fusion of Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein. Taken together, these pieces provide a rich oral history of and critical context for the evolution of the California art scene from the 1960s onward.
David Abraham Antin was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 1, 1932. He received a bachelor's degree in English and speech from the City College of New York in 1955 and a master's degree in linguistics at New York University in 1966. After working as an educational curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, he taught in the department of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego. From 1968 to 1972, he directed the university's Mandeville Art Gallery. He was also a poet who created a new performance style called talk poems, which was part lecture, part stand-up routine, and part Homeric recitation. After editing his tape-recorded performances, he wrote the poems down. He published several collections of poetry during his lifetime including Talking, Talking at the Boundaries, and What It Means to Be Avant-Garde. A collections of his articles on art, Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966-2005, were published in 2011. He died from complications of a broken neck that he suffered in a fall on October 11, 2016 at the age of 84. (Bowker Author Biography) |
