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Coming Unhinged: Art and Body in Frank O’Hara and Jasper Johns

Coming Unhinged: Art and Body in Frank O’Hara and Jasper Johns <p>This paper examines the dialogic exchange between New York School poet Frank O’Hara’s long poem, “In Memory of My Feelings,” and contemporary painter Jasper John’s eponymous piece, <i>In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O’Hara</i> that converges both on a fluid negotiation of artistic modes and on a discourse of “the body.” Conferred permission to “read” John’s art or envision O’Hara’s poem, these pieces promulgate a sense of de-familiarization that not only transforms the audience’s embodied response, but that equally problematizes a binary between the private and public spheres. So, too, does the continual movement—the artists’ and our own—between surface (body/ public) and interior (feelings/private) complicate divisions between subject and object, sexual conformity and difference, and life and death. For both O’Hara and Johns there is a fundamental tension between corporeal presence and absence, bodily avowal and negation, that has traction in the artists’ shared male homosexual identity. The deconstructive impulse in these works therefore illuminates the bodily self as inevitable artifice—literally a skilled “making by art.” The body becomes an index that lives on only through “touch” and “memory,” and the paper concludes with a discussion of two O’Hara/Johns post-“Feelings” pieces, which actualize this effect.</p> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Interdisciplinary Literary Studies Penn State University Press

Coming Unhinged: Art and Body in Frank O’Hara and Jasper Johns

Gold, Alexandra
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies , Volume 17 (3) – Sep 16, 2015
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Publisher
Penn State University Press
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University.
ISSN
2161-427X

Abstract

<p>This paper examines the dialogic exchange between New York School poet Frank O’Hara’s long poem, “In Memory of My Feelings,” and contemporary painter Jasper John’s eponymous piece, <i>In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O’Hara</i> that converges both on a fluid negotiation of artistic modes and on a discourse of “the body.” Conferred permission to “read” John’s art or envision O’Hara’s poem, these pieces promulgate a sense of de-familiarization that not only transforms the audience’s embodied response, but that equally problematizes a binary between the private and public spheres. So, too, does the continual movement—the artists’ and our own—between surface (body/ public) and interior (feelings/private) complicate divisions between subject and object, sexual conformity and difference, and life and death. For both O’Hara and Johns there is a fundamental tension between corporeal presence and absence, bodily avowal and negation, that has traction in the artists’ shared male homosexual identity. The deconstructive impulse in these works therefore illuminates the bodily self as inevitable artifice—literally a skilled “making by art.” The body becomes an index that lives on only through “touch” and “memory,” and the paper concludes with a discussion of two O’Hara/Johns post-“Feelings” pieces, which actualize this effect.</p>

Journal

Interdisciplinary Literary Studies – Penn State University Press

Published: Sep 16, 2015

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