Richard Kostelanetz
Encyclopedia
Richard Kostelanetz (14 May 1940, New York City
) is an American artist
, author
and critic
.
He was born to Boris Kostelanetz and Ethel Cory and is the nephew of the composer Andre Kostelanetz
.
After a lifetime in Manhattan and thirty-five years in its SoHo district, he has moved his studio christened Wordship to Ridgewood-SoHo, as he calls it, in Far-East Artists' Bushwick. He is a passionate defender of the avant-garde
.
and an M.A. in American History from Columbia University
under Woodrow Wilson, NYS Regents, and International Fellowships; he also studied at King's College London
as a Fulbright Scholar.
Grants have come to him from the Guggenheim Foundation (1967), Pulitzer Foundation (1965), DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm (1981–1983), Vogelstein Foundation (1980), Fund for Investigative Journalism (1981), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2001), CCLM (1981), ASCAP (1983 annually to the present), American Public Radio Program Fund (1984), and the National Endowment for the Arts with ten individual awards (1976, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1991). He also assumed production residencies at the Electronic Music Studio of Stockholm, Experimental TV Center (Owego, NY), Mishkenot Sha'ananim (Jerusalem), and the MIT Media Lab, among other entities.
' and The Hudson Review
, then profiles of older artists, musicians and writers for The New York Times Magazine
; these profiles were collected in Master Minds" (1969)'.
Not one to shy away from controversy
, he turned on his literary elders with The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in Ameroca (1974). SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony (2003) evinces not the Latest but the Last.
Books of his radically alternative fiction include "In the Beginning" (1971)
(the alphabet arranged in single and double letter combinations), "Short Fictions' (1974), "More Short Fictions" (1980, and Furtherest Fictions (2007)); of his mostly visual poetry, "Visual Language" (1970), "I Articulations" (1974), "Wordworks" (1993), and "More Wordworks" (2006).
Among the anthologies he has edited are "On Contemporary Literature" (1964, 1969), "Beyond Left & Rght" (1968), "John Cage" (1970, 1991), "Moholy-Nagy" (1970), Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973), Scenarios (1980), and The Literature of SoHo (1981).
A political anarchist-libertarian
, he authored "Political Essays" (1999) and "Toward Secession: More Political Essays" (2008) and has since 1987 been a contributing editor
for Liberty Magazine
.
in audio, video
, holography
, prints
, book-art, computer-based installations, among other new media
. Though he coined the term "polyartist" to characterize people who excel at two or more nonadjacent arts, he considers that, since nearly all his creative work incorporates language or literary forms, it represents Writing reflecting polyartistry. "Wordsand" (1978–81) was a traveling early retrospective of his work in several media.
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
) is an American artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
, author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
and critic
Critic
A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...
.
He was born to Boris Kostelanetz and Ethel Cory and is the nephew of the composer Andre Kostelanetz
Andre Kostelanetz
André Kostelanetz was a popular orchestral music conductor and arranger, one of the pioneers of easy listening music.-Biography:...
.
After a lifetime in Manhattan and thirty-five years in its SoHo district, he has moved his studio christened Wordship to Ridgewood-SoHo, as he calls it, in Far-East Artists' Bushwick. He is a passionate defender of the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
.
Education
He has a B.A. from Brown UniversityBrown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
and an M.A. in American History from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
under Woodrow Wilson, NYS Regents, and International Fellowships; he also studied at King's College London
King's College London
King's College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. King's has a claim to being the third oldest university in England, having been founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, and...
as a Fulbright Scholar.
Grants have come to him from the Guggenheim Foundation (1967), Pulitzer Foundation (1965), DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm (1981–1983), Vogelstein Foundation (1980), Fund for Investigative Journalism (1981), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2001), CCLM (1981), ASCAP (1983 annually to the present), American Public Radio Program Fund (1984), and the National Endowment for the Arts with ten individual awards (1976, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1991). He also assumed production residencies at the Electronic Music Studio of Stockholm, Experimental TV Center (Owego, NY), Mishkenot Sha'ananim (Jerusalem), and the MIT Media Lab, among other entities.
Works
He came onto the literary scene with essays in quarterlies like "Partisan ReviewPartisan Review
Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003, though it suspended publication between October 1936 and December 1937.-Overview:...
' and The Hudson Review
The Hudson Review
The Hudson Review is a quarterly journal of literature and the arts. It was founded in 1947 in New York by William Ayers Arrowsmith, Joseph Deericks Bennett, and George Frederick Morgan. The first issue was introduced in the spring of 1948...
, then profiles of older artists, musicians and writers for The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine is a Sunday magazine supplement included with the Sunday edition of The New York Times. It is host to feature articles longer than those typically in the newspaper and has attracted many notable contributors...
; these profiles were collected in Master Minds" (1969)'.
Not one to shy away from controversy
Controversy
Controversy is a state of prolonged public dispute or debate, usually concerning a matter of opinion. The word was coined from the Latin controversia, as a composite of controversus – "turned in an opposite direction," from contra – "against" – and vertere – to turn, or versus , hence, "to turn...
, he turned on his literary elders with The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in Ameroca (1974). SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony (2003) evinces not the Latest but the Last.
Books of his radically alternative fiction include "In the Beginning" (1971)
(the alphabet arranged in single and double letter combinations), "Short Fictions' (1974), "More Short Fictions" (1980, and Furtherest Fictions (2007)); of his mostly visual poetry, "Visual Language" (1970), "I Articulations" (1974), "Wordworks" (1993), and "More Wordworks" (2006).
Among the anthologies he has edited are "On Contemporary Literature" (1964, 1969), "Beyond Left & Rght" (1968), "John Cage" (1970, 1991), "Moholy-Nagy" (1970), Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973), Scenarios (1980), and The Literature of SoHo (1981).
A political anarchist-libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
, he authored "Political Essays" (1999) and "Toward Secession: More Political Essays" (2008) and has since 1987 been a contributing editor
Contributing editor
A contributing editor is a magazine job title that varies in responsibilities. Most often, a contributing editor is a freelancer who has proven ability and readership draw. The contributing editor regularly contributes articles to the publication but does not actually edit articles, and the title...
for Liberty Magazine
Liberty Magazine
Liberty is a magazine published by the Seventh-day Adventist Church that covers issues involving separation of church and state, and current events in politics...
.
Media
Uniquely among his literary contemporaries, Richard Kostelanetz has also produced literatureLiterature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
in audio, video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
, holography
Holography
Holography is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that when an imaging system is placed in the reconstructed beam, an image of the object will be seen even when the object is no longer present...
, prints
Printmaking
Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints with an element of originality, rather than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable...
, book-art, computer-based installations, among other new media
Media (arts)
In the arts, a media or medium is a material used by an artist or designer to create a work.-Architecture:In the art and science of architecture, the design and construction of buildings and interiors, infrastructure and other physical structures are created...
. Though he coined the term "polyartist" to characterize people who excel at two or more nonadjacent arts, he considers that, since nearly all his creative work incorporates language or literary forms, it represents Writing reflecting polyartistry. "Wordsand" (1978–81) was a traveling early retrospective of his work in several media.
Partial list of works/media
- Essays
- Alternative Exposition
- Book Autobiography
- Memoir
- Political Criticism
- Profiles of Major Artists & Intellectuals
- Arts History
- Social History
- Cultural History
- Literary History
- Book Reviewing
- Music Criticism
- Literary Criticism
- Music Journalism
- Extended interviews
- Film & Video Criticism
- Book Art
- Iris printsIris printerAn IRIS printer is a large-format color inkjet printer introduced in 1987 by IRIS Graphics of Bedford, Massachusetts and currently manufactured by the Graphic Communications Group of Eastman Kodak, designed for prepress proofing...
- Radio Plays
- Radio features
- Silkscreen prints
- Audio Documentary
- Drawings with lines & numbers
- Hörspiel (German ear plays)
- Electro-Acoustic Musical Composition
- Texts for Composers
- Video narration
- Multiplex Holography
- Transmission Holography
- Documentary Photography
- Creative Photography
- Performance Texts
- Verbal Poetry
- Satire
- Visual Poetry
- Verbal Fiction
- Visual Fiction
- Acoustic Fiction
- Travel Writing
- “Creative Non-Fiction”
- Editing of Taste-Making Anthologies
- Literary Journal Editing
- Autobiographical video
- Organizing Assemblings
- Cameraless video
- Audiovideotapes
- Public art proposals
- Documentary film
- Narrative film
- Abstract film
- Experimental Prose
- Text objects
- Kinetic installations
- Live media presentations
- Thematic collecting of certain books, verbal art, and Rockaway postcards
- Overseeing seminars in experimental writing
Reviews
His work has been acknowledged at some length(s) in the following and additional works:- Ronald S. Berman’s "America in the Sixties" (1967)
- Ihab Hassan’s "Contemporary American Literature" (1973)
- Robert Spiller’s "Literary History of the United States" (fourth ed., 1974)
- "The Reader’s Adviser" (1969 & 1974)
- Daniel Hoffman’s "Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing" (1979)
- Irving and Anne D. Weiss’s "Thesaurus of Book Digests" 1950-1980 (1981)
- George Myers’ "Introduction to Modern Times" (1982)
- David Cope’s "New Directions in Music" (1984)
- Joan Lyons’ "Artists’ Books" (1985)
- Tom Holmes’ "Electronic and Experimental Music" (1985)
- Jamake Highwater’s "Shadow Show" (1986)
- "Columbia Literary History of the United States" (1988)
- Eric Salzman’s "Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction" (third edition, 1988)
- Tom Johnson’s "The Voice of the New Music" (1989)
- Robert Siegle’s "Suburban Ambush" (1989)
- John Rodden’s "The Politics of Literary Reputation" (1989)
- "The Reader’s Catalog" (1989)
- Lydia Goehr’s "The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works" (1992)
- Bob Grumman’s "Of Manywhere-at-Once" (1998)
- Samuel R. Delany’s "About Writing" (2005)
- Kyle Gann’s "Music Downtown" (2006)
- Sally Banes’s "Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing" (2007, University of Wisconsin PressUniversity of Wisconsin PressThe University of Wisconsin Press is a non-profit university press publishing peer-reviewed books and journals. It primarily publishes work by scholars from the global academic community but also serves the citizens of Wisconsin by publishing important books about Wisconsin, the Upper Midwest, and...
) - C. T. Funkhouser’s "Prehistoric Digital Poetry" (2007)
- Geza Perneczky’s "Assembling Magazines 1969-2000" (2007)
External links
- The Fales Library Guide to the Richard Kostelanetz Papers
- RichardKostelanetz.com
- Pulley Press: Richard Kostelanetz
- Richard Kostelanetz Bibliography
- Deep Listening Catalogue: Richard Kostelanetz
- Poem by Richard Kostelanetz in Shampoo Issue 14
- COLLECTED STORIES - A Word with the Writer Richard Kostelanetz by D. Albanese (2001)
- Richard Kostelanetz: experimental prose - EPIPHANIES
- Microstories by Richard Kostelanetz in Gander Press Review
- Openings and (Complete) Shorter Stories by Richard Kostelanetz in The Cafe Irreal
- Invocations Album Details at Smithsonian FolkwaysSmithsonian FolkwaysSmithsonian Folkways is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution. It is a part of the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, located at Capital Gallery in downtown Washington, D.C. The label was founded in 1987 after the family of Moses Asch, founder of Folkways...
- Richard Kostelanetz, "1001 Film Scenarios — Selections from a Proposed Chapbook," SCRIPT 1.2 (January 2010) http://scriptjournal.studiohyperset.com/issues/1.1/1001-film-scenarios.php (3 June 2010).