Justyna Wierzchowska – författare

This book analyzes art criticism on Abstract Expressionism, lauded as «the triumph of American painting.» It traces the ways in which the movement’s meaning has been construed and constructed in reference to the changing cultural and political framework. Starting from the purely formal analyses of the 1950s and early 1960s, through the radical political statements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, until the later interpretations inspired mainly by gender and postcolonial studies, this book cuts across the domains of politics, philosophy and art criticism. The question of whether Abstract Expressionism was a «path to the Absolute» or a «weapon of the Cold War» is inscribed into the larger debate concerning the links between culture and politics.

This book is a comprehensive approach to interpreting Frank O’Hara’s highly influential work. Frank O’Hara’s poetry, initially inspired by the Modernist avant-garde, underwent a radical change around 1960. This change parallels the decline of Abstract Expressionism and the rise of Pop Art. The book includes historical contextualization as well as practical criticism. The author analyzes how Frank O’Hara could be regarded. As a Modernist poet, or as one who realizes that the aesthetic of High Modernism is on the wane, and is preparing himself for a paradigmatic change. Earlier poems are best seen as Modernist/avant-gardist, while the later ones as no less vanguard forays into uncharted territory. While the book takes up issues such as mimeticism, realism and abstraction in both poetry and painting, the boredom of the new as seen by Walter Benjamin, and the representational potential of the camp aesthetic, the main emphasis is on practical criticism, modes of reading O’Hara’s œuvre.

This book explores the significance of photography for Iain Sinclair’s London prose. The visual medium is one of the writer’s most prominent motifs, featuring extensively in his fiction and non-fiction. This study, however, proposes that its role in Sinclair’s work extends beyond that of a literary theme, to an actual literary principle. In its interdisciplinary rereading of his writing, this book uses key notions of photography theory to examine the correlation between the principal ideological aspects of the visual medium and the main characteristics of Sinclair’s unique brand of literature. The analysis reveals that photography may actually serve as a key to understanding the peculiar dynamics and inherent pluralities that define the writer’s literary practice.