Ashbery takes his coordinates from a constellation of British, American, and continental European poetic and visual art practices-from romantic nature poet John Clare’s presentational immediacy to the French “New Realism” movement’s “direct appropriation of the real” in the early 1960s-that share an emphasis on somehow transforming the material of art into a “second nature.” Nature, as Ashbery and his company understand it, is a vanguard horizon, a metaphor for art, that which lies beyond “art as we know it.” The fact that the artist can never realize this aesthetic fiction-which overturns what we generally mean by “art” and “nature”-makes it all the more powerful as a tool for staking out the limits of art. Invisible Terrain examines Ashbery’s poetic mediation of this fantasy, reading his work alongside an array of practitioners, from Wordsworth to Warhol, as an exemplary case study of avant-garde transvaluation of Western nature aesthetics. In his debut collection, Some Trees (1956), John Ashbery poses a question that resonates across his oeuvre and much modern art: “How could he explain to them his prayer / that nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?” When Ashbery asks this strange question, he joins a host of transatlantic avant-gardists-from the Dadaists to the 1960s neo-avant-gardists and beyond-who have dreamed the paradoxical dream of turning art into nature.
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