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Figure Ground Reversal Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art By Stephen Fredman Stanford University Press, 2010. 240 pages
Alexandra Socarides
The irony of the word "contextual" is that while, by definition, it emphasizes something very specific-some context or another-it is often, in practice, utterly vague. This is the initial challenge of Stephen Fredman's new book, Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art (2010): to define for the reader of this otherwise descriptive and engaging book what "contextual practice" actually means. Given that most readers already know the "contexts" they are interested in having a book about post-World War II American poetry elucidate (biographical, historical, formal, textual, etc.), it is to Fredman's credit that he doesn't gesture toward all the literary critical possibilities. Instead, he immediately situates the reader inside the vibrant practices of a handful of artists working in America between 1945-1970, artists who created and used the term "contextual" for themselves.
"Contextual practice" refers to "a way of making art" and "a new relationship between art and life" (xi) that emerged together during this period, and Fredman spends the better part of his introduction and Chapter One explaining this formation. The "how" of contextual practice is the easiest to grasp, for "contextual practice involved drawing together discarded or unremarked fragments (whether visual or verbal) from daily life." In this way it was related, at least structurally, to collage. But as these poets and artists turned to the material of their everyday lives, the body became a site of interest "as a repository of unrecognized cultural potential." This emphasis on (and assemblage of) the everyday, the bodily, the overlooked, and the fragmentary resulted in an artistic practice "that reveled in sexual display and drug experimentation, espoused an anarchist politics and a communal sociality, and encouraged mystical and shamanistic excursions." Fredman defines and situates this practice historically, as both the beginning of a series of countercultural movements and as a reaction to the "defensive rigidity and self-enclosure of postwar American society" (30). Although he makes big claims for the period, he often only invokes them at the beginning and ends of chapters, leaving him free to build the book's narrative and argument from descriptions and analyses of...