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Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s by Reva Wolf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 210. $70.00, cloth; $27.95, paper.
Reva Wolf's rigorous, scholarly account of the New York underground art scene in the 1960s is a welcome addition to avant-garde studies-a field that has traditionally thrived on paradox, partisanship, and, not infrequently, self-destruction. Paul Mann's 1991 The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) may have been the apogee of that tradition. In it, Mann articulates the foundational hypocrisy that has long kept avant-garde theorists like himself in work: "The avant-garde consistently defines itself both in terms of and against the definitions imposed upon it" (9). Mann's text weaves a fugue on this basic dialectical theme: "The avant-garde is first of all an instrument of attack on tradition, but an attack mandated by the tradition itself" (11); and continues, "The discourse of the death of the avant-garde is the discourse of its recuperation" (15); and most damningly, "The avant-garde is not a victim of recuperation but its agent, its proper technology" (92).
As the embodiment of the "always already" motoring the late capitalist discursive economy, the avant-garde is merely a synecdoche for the total mechanism of culture, rather than an actual wrench in the machine. The neat circularity of such a model prompts two questions: Why do artists and writers continue to engage in avant-garde practice? and, Why do scholars and theorists, who certainly ought to know better, continue to study them? Reva Wolf's implicit response in Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s is to decenter the theoretical quandary in favor of a densely documentary approach. That she never explicitly addresses the paradox of the avant-garde is part of what makes her book, which traces Warhol's socioartistic entanglements with the Lower East Side poetry scene, such convincing evidence of its continued existence in late twentieth-century America. If a defining goal of the historical avant-garde was to reconfigure existing relationships among artists, the marketplace, critics, and the public, then the poets, artists, and filmmakers with whom Warhol worked were its direct descendants, radically integrating networks of production, distribution, and consecration normally kept separate in the highly stratified artworld economy. Warhol was an artist with roots in commercial...