Lytle Shaw - Böcker

Narrowcast explores how mid-century American poets associated with the New Left mobilized tape recording as a new form of sonic field research even as they themselves were being subjected to tape-based surveillance. Media theorists tend to understand audio recording as a technique for separating bodies from sounds, but this book listens closely to tape's embedded information, offering a counterintuitive site-specific account of 1960s poetic recordings. Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Amiri Baraka all used recording to contest models of time being put forward by dominant media and the state, exploring non-monumental time and subverting media schedules of work, consumption, leisure, and national crises. Surprisingly, their methods at once dovetailed with those of the state collecting evidence against them and ran up against the same technological limits. Arguing that CIA and FBI "researchers" shared unexpected terrain not only with poets but with famous theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, Lytle Shaw reframes the status of tape recordings in postwar poetics and challenges notions of how tape might be understood as a mode of evidence.

Narrowcast explores how mid-century American poets associated with the New Left mobilized tape recording as a new form of sonic field research even as they themselves were being subjected to tape-based surveillance. Media theorists tend to understand audio recording as a technique for separating bodies from sounds, but this book listens closely to tape's embedded information, offering a counterintuitive site-specific account of 1960s poetic recordings. Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Amiri Baraka all used recording to contest models of time being put forward by dominant media and the state, exploring non-monumental time and subverting media schedules of work, consumption, leisure, and national crises. Surprisingly, their methods at once dovetailed with those of the state collecting evidence against them and ran up against the same technological limits. Arguing that CIA and FBI "researchers" shared unexpected terrain not only with poets but with famous theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, Lytle Shaw reframes the status of tape recordings in postwar poetics and challenges notions of how tape might be understood as a mode of evidence.

Gumshoe is a new series of architectural books that introduces an original approach to the writing of architectural history. Emulating the detective novel, the focus is on actual buildings rather than on speculative designs and theories. The style and form is fresh and scholarly but also easy and enjoyable to read. In Mysteries of a Communist Cave, the second book in the Gumshoe series, Lytle Shaw conducts an investigation of Oscar Niemeyer’s building for the French Communist Party’s (PCF) central committee in Paris.Designed in 1965, just as party theorists began to rethink many bedrock assumptions about representation, Oscar Niemeyer’s PCF building is a microcosm of the shifting political and architectural landscape of the 1960s. It is also a literal Marxist structure that can thus help us concretely picture just exactly what Structuralist Marxism might have been. Shaw draws out the PCF’s language and context one element at a time and puts the elegant curtain-wall building with its cave-like assembly hall into revelatory dialogue with interlocutors in film, philosophy, anthropology, and politics.Perhaps the ultimate mystery of the communist cave is that its owners have not more often and more powerfully presented their landmark building as the vivid source of imagery it could be for the kind of world the PCF might like to construct.

I Fältarbeten argumenterar Lytle Shaw för att en inriktning mot plats och ­senare mot site inte bara tillät poeter som William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Amiri Baraka, Joanne Kyger, Clark Coolidge och Bernadette Mayer att dyka ned i en värld av fördjupad specificitet; en fält­arbetets poetik gjorde det också möjligt för dem att tänka sina relationer till angränsande discipliner – framförallt historiografi och etnografi – på nya sätt, och att kritiskt reflektera över och omkoda dessa fält. Genom att koppla platsens poesi till ­site-specifik konst omkontextualiserar Shaw i synnerhet Robert Smithsons arbete i relation både till dess konsthistoriska reception och till poesins historia, där Smithson idag för många yngre poeter framstår som en allt ­viktigare föregångare. Lytle Shaw är författare och kritiker. Han är också verksam vid New York University.

New Grounds for Dutch Landscape uses an experimental, site-specific method to demonstrate how 17th century painters Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Meindert Hobbema did not so much represent the newly made landscape of Holland as re-enact, through their painterly factures, its reclamation and ongoing threats to its stability: from flooding and drainage to abrasion and erosion. These low-level dramas of recalcitrant matter allowed the Dutch to develop an ongoing temporality at odds with history painting’s decisive instant and a vocabulary of substance that wrested meaning away from humanist landscape painting’s expressive figures. Lytle Shaw’s books include Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, The Moiré Effect, Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics, and Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research. His museum catalog publications include essays on Robert Smithson, Gerard Byrne, Zoe Leonard and the Royal Art Lodge. Shaw is professor of English at New York University and a contributing editor for Cabinet magazine.