Anne Tardos: The Dik-dik's Solitude: New and Selected Works - Softcover

Tardos, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 188712361X ISBN 13: 9781887123617

Publisher: Granary Books, 2002

Synopsis

At every level of Anne Tardos's paintings, films, poetry and cross-genre work, the familiar is engaged while acknowledging the violently contested landscape of what we think we know. Connection is the dominant mode of composition. A brand new vernacular emerges when Tardos's unique voice announces itself in her rapid language switches, gleeful humor and rare willingness to blend the personal and political. With new and previously published work as well as an introductory interview with the author and prominent poet Lyn Hejinian, The Dik-dik's Solitude is the first comprehensive collection of work by this significant, avant-garde contemporary artist.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Cannes and raised in Paris, Budapest, and Vienna, Anne Tardos is a poet, performer, visual artist, and composer. She is the author of Cat Licked the Garlic, Mayg-shem Fish, and Uxudo, and her recordings have appeared most recently on A Chance Operation: Tribute to John Cage and Open Secrets. Her visual work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Tardos lives in New York with her husband and frequent collaborator, Jackson Mac Low.

Reviews

Excerpting from poetic, video and photographic work from over 12 years, this largish, elegantly designed book is a virtual encyclopedia of artistic techniques mostly operating within the traditions of Dada and collage (Kurt Schwitters looms heavily), Fluxus and early digital art (much of it created with Ataris), right through Language poetry, but creating a gendered, polylingual, image-enhanced reality all its own. In the epistolary dialogue with Lyn Hejinian that prefaces the book, Tardos explains her approach as being one of uncertainty: "Maybe it's a question of creating a condition of not knowing what one is about to do. Or should I say it takes enormous discipline and control to surrender control." Reflecting her nomadic European roots, Tardos also conveys a more poignant concern that her operations between media, not settling on one genre such as "poetry," may strand her in a "liminal" zone between art forms, though not outside of "art." Yet the poems of "The Tree Grille" have a lithe, but meaty, quality, their Dada impertinences countered by a stable, never tepid rhythmic base, resembling in this way the work of Tardos's partner and frequent collaborator Jackson Mac Low, who appears in several of the digitally enhanced images throughout the book. "Mayg-shem Fish" is a jaunty imaginary chronicle of a Tardos-and-Mac Low performance that provides a touching window on their meeting, while the footnotes to "Four Plus One K" provide an irreverent counterbalance to the sequence's center-stage word-voyages: "Dictionary sailboat refers to the practice of going sailing inside a dictionary." Fans of Tardos' previous books, including the terrific based Uxudo, will discover a versifying wordsmith they hadn't anticipated, one with notes of formal grace and a sense of cross-media camaraderie that expands bandwidths all around.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Granary Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 188712361X
• ISBN 13: 9781887123617
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296