NYAB Event - Richard Kostelanetz "SCRAM/BLEDS"

Richard Kostelanetz "SCRAM/BLEDS"

AC Institute

This event has ended.

AC [Chapel] presents "SCRAM/BLEDS," a sequence of visual poems by Richard Kostelanetz, one of America's foremost intellectuals and prolific avant-garde artists. Enlarged in scale from its original chapbook size and offering a rare opportunity to collectively interact with the piece in a public forum, "SCRAM/BLEDS" is being exhibited as an installation for the first time since its publication (Luna Bisonte Prods, 2008).

There is no category,"ism" or area of creative expertise that is expansive or porous enough to contain to all of Kostelanetz's work. His versatile mastery of both written and visual language through experimental, unconventional art forms is unparalleled. Through his poetic vision, the means through which we communicate experience and decipher language around us become palpable and inclusive encounters.

A versatile artist, critic, writer, editor, publisher, composer, filmmaker and holographer, Kostelanetz has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the following institutions: Fulbright, Guggenheim Foundation, the Pulitzer Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Born and raised and New York, he has contributed poems, stories, articles, reviews and experimental prose to hundreds of magazines both in the US and abroad. He has written more than fifty books of criticism, cultural history and creative work, in addition to editing over three dozen anthologies of art and exposition.

Among the recent books authored by him are SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artist's Colony (Routledge), 3 Canadian Geniuses (Colombo), More Wordworks (Talisman), and second editions of A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (Schirmer/Routledge) and Conversing with Cage (Routledge).

New books edited by him include AnOther E. E. Cummings (Liveright), The Gertrude Stein Reader (Cooper Square) and Virgil Thomson: A Reader (Routledge). Long active in alternative literary publishing, he co-founded Assembling Press in 1970 and alone founded Future Press in 1977 and Archae Editions in 1978.

As a media artist Kostelanetz has created language-based audiotapes, videotapes, films and holograms that have been exhibited and broadcast around the world. Both Anthology Film Archives (New York) and Bumbershoot (Seattle) have presented retrospectives of his audiovideotapes. "Wordsand" was the title of a multimedia exhibition of art with words, numbers and lines that toured North American universities in 1978-81. International Artists Books (Paris) mounted a retrospective of his book art in 1996.

Individual entries on Kostelanetz appear in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Webster's Dictionary of American Authors, The HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, NNDB.com and the Encyclopedia Britannica, among other distinguished directories.