Richard Kostelanetz

Richard Cory Kostelanetz (May 14, 1940, New York City) is an American artist, author and critic.

He was born to Boris Kostelanetz and Ethel Cory and is the nephew of the conductor Andre Kostelanetz. After a lifetime in Manhattan and thirty-five years in its SoHo district, he has moved his studio christened Wordship to Ridgewood-SoHo, as he calls it, in Far-East Artists' Bushwick. He is a passionate defender of the avant-garde.

Education

He has a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. in American History from Columbia University under Woodrow Wilson, NYS Regents, and International Fellowships; he also studied at King's College London as a Fulbright Scholar.

Grants have come to him from the Guggenheim Foundation (1967), Pulitzer Foundation (1965), DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm (1981–1983), Vogelstein Foundation (1980), Fund for Investigative Journalism (1981), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2001), CCLM (1981), ASCAP (1983 annually to the present), American Public Radio Program Fund (1984), and the National Endowment for the Arts with ten individual awards (1976, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1991). He also assumed production residencies at the Electronic Music Studio of Stockholm, Experimental TV Center (Owego, NY), Mishkenot Sha'ananim (Jerusalem), and the MIT Media Lab, among other entities.

Works

He came onto the literary scene with essays in quarterlies such as Partisan Review and The Hudson Review, then profiles of older artists, musicians and writers for The New York Times Magazine; these profiles were collected in Master Minds" (1969)'.

Not one to shy away from controversy, he turned on his literary elders with The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America (1974). SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony (2003) evinces not the Latest but the Last. In 1967, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest,” vowing to refuse to pay taxes raised to fund the Vietnam War.^[1]

Books of his radically alternative fiction include In the Beginning (1971) (the alphabet arranged in single and double letter combinations), Short Fictions (1974), More Short Fictions (1980, and Furtherest Fictions (2007)); of his mostly visual poetry, Visual Language (1970), I Articulations (1974), Wordworks (1993), and More Wordworks (2006).

Among the anthologies he has edited are On Contemporary Literature (1964, 1969), Beyond Left & Right (1968), John Cage (1970, 1991), Moholy-Nagy (1970), Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973), Scenarios (1980), and The Literature of SoHo (1981).

A political anarchist-libertarian, he authored Political Essays (1999) and Toward Secession: More Political Essays (2008) and has since 1987 been a contributing editor for Liberty Magazine.^[2] In 1973 he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.^[3]

Media

Uniquely among his literary contemporaries, Richard Kostelanetz has also produced literature in audio, video, holography, prints, book-art, computer-based installations, among other new media. Though he coined the term "polyartist" to characterize people who excel at two or more nonadjacent arts, he considers that, since nearly all his creative work incorporates language or literary forms, it represents Writing reflecting polyartistry. "Wordsand" (1978–81) was a traveling early retrospective of his work in several media.

Partial list of works/media

Essays

Alternative Exposition

Book Autobiography

Memoir

Political Criticism

Profiles of Major Artists & Intellectuals

Arts History

Social History

Cultural History

Literary History

Book Reviewing

Music Criticism

Literary Criticism

Music Journalism

Extended interviews

Film & Video Criticism

Book Art

Iris prints

Radio Plays

Radio features

Silkscreen prints

Audio Documentary

Drawings with lines & numbers

Hörspiel (German ear plays)

Electro-Acoustic Musical Composition

Texts for Composers

Video narration

Multiplex Holography

Transmission Holography

Documentary Photography

Creative Photography

Performance Texts

Verbal Poetry

Satire

Visual Poetry

Verbal Fiction

Visual Fiction

Acoustic Fiction

Travel Writing

“Creative Non-Fiction”

Editing of Taste-Making Anthologies

Literary Journal Editing

Autobiographical video

Organizing Assemblings

Cameraless video

Audiovideotapes

Public art proposals

Documentary film

Narrative film

Abstract film

Experimental Prose

Text objects

Kinetic installations

Live media presentations

Thematic collecting of certain books, verbal art, and Rockaway postcards

Overseeing seminars in experimental writing

Bibliography

• "A Critical Look at the Critics", Twentieth Century ( essay, Spring 1966)
• The Theatre of Mixed Means (1968)
• Master Minds (1969)
• Visual Language (1970)
• In the Beginning (1971, novel)
• Recyclings, Volume One (1974)
• The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America (1974, criticism)
• I Articulations/Short Fictions (1974)
• Openings & Closings (1975)
• Portraits from Memory (1975)
• Constructs (1975)
• Illuminations (1977)
• One Night Stood (1977)
• Wordsand (1978)
• Constructs Two (1978)
• And So Forth (1979)
• Exhaustive Parallel Intervals (1979)
• "The End" Appendix/"The End" Essentials (1979)
• Twenties in the Sixties (1979)
• Metamorphosis in the Arts (1980)
• More Short Fictions (1980)
• Reincarnations (1981)
• The Old Poetries and the New (1981)
• Autobiographies (1981)
• Invocations (Folkways Records, 1983)
• American Imaginations (1983)
• Epiphanies (1983)
• Recyclings: A Literary Autobiography (1984)
• Autobiographien New York Berlin (1986)
• Prose Pieces/Aftertexts (1987)
• The Old Fictions and the New (1987)
• Conversing with Cage (1988) (second ed., 2003), a collage of interviews with John Cage.
• On Innovative Music(ian)s (1989)
• Unfinished Business: An Intellectual Nonhistory, 1963–89 (1990)
• The New Poetries and Some Olds (1991)
• Politics in the African-American Novel (1991, criticism)
• Solos, Duets, Trios & Choruses (1991)
• Published Encomia 1967–91 (1991)
• On Innovative Art(ist)s (1992)
• Wordworks: Poems New & Selected (1993)
• A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (1993)
• On Innovative Performance(s) (1994)
• Minimal Fictions (1994)
• An ABC of Contemporary Reading (1995)
• Fillmore East: Recollections of Rock Theater (1995)
• One Million Words of Booknotes, 1959–93 (1995)
• Radio Writing (1995)
• Crimes of Culture (1995)
• John Cage Ex(plain)ed (1996)
• Thirty-Five Years of Critical Engagements with John Cage (1996)
• Ecce Kosti (1996)
• Vocal Shorts: Collected Performance Texts (1998)
• 3-Element Stories (1998)
• Political Essays (1999)
• SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony (2003)
• Autobiographies at 60 (2004)
• Thirty-Five Years of Visible Writing (2004)
• Film & Video: Alternative Views (2005)
• Ghosts (2005)
• More Wordworks (2006)
• Autobiographies at 50 (2006)
• Home & Away: Travel Essays (2006)
• Book-Art, Anthologies, & Alternative Publishing (2006)
• On Sports & Sportsmen (2006)
• The Maturity of American Thought (2006)
• Furtherest Fictions (2007)
• Vertical Single-Sentence Stories (2007)
• Toward Secession (2007)
• The Art of Radio in North America (2008)
• Skeptical Critiques (2009)
• Innumerable chapbooks and editions of poetry, fiction, and innovative prose.

Reviews

His work has been acknowledged at some length(s) in the following and additional works:

• Ronald S. Berman’s "America in the Sixties" (1967)
• Ihab Hassan’s "Contemporary American Literature" (1973)
• Robert Spiller’s "Literary History of the United States" (fourth ed., 1974)
• "The Reader’s Adviser" (1969 & 1974)
• Daniel Hoffman’s "Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing" (1979)
• Irving and Anne D. Weiss’s "Thesaurus of Book Digests" 1950–1980 (1981)
• George Myers’ "Introduction to Modern Times" (1982)
• David Cope’s "New Directions in Music" (1984)
• Joan Lyons’ "Artists’ Books" (1985)
• Tom Holmes’ "Electronic and Experimental Music" (1985)
• Jamake Highwater’s "Shadow Show" (1986)
• "Columbia Literary History of the United States" (1988)
• Eric Salzman’s "Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction" (third edition, 1988)
• Tom Johnson’s "The Voice of the New Music" (1989)
• Robert Siegle’s "Suburban Ambush" (1989)
• John Rodden’s "The Politics of Literary Reputation" (1989)
• "The Reader’s Catalog" (1989)
• Lydia Goehr’s "The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works" (1992)
• Bob Grumman’s "Of Manywhere-at-Once" (1998)
• Samuel R. Delany's "About Writing" (2005)
• Kyle Gann's "Music Downtown" (2006)
• Sally Banes's "Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing" (2007, University of Wisconsin Press)
• C. T. Funkhouser's "Prehistoric Digital Poetry" (2007)
• Geza Perneczky's "Assembling Magazines 1969–2000" (2007)

References

2. "Editors and Staff". Liberty Foundation. Retrieved 10 March 2014.
3. "Humanist Manifesto II". American Humanist Association. Retrieved October 15, 2012.

Sources

• NNDB – Richard Kostelanetz
• Britannica Online Encyclopedia – Richard Kostelanetz

External links

• The Fales Library Guide to the Richard Kostelanetz Papers
• RichardKostelanetz.com
• Pulley Press: Richard Kostelanetz
• Richard Kostelanetz Bibliography
• Deep Listening Catalogue: Richard Kostelanetz
• Poem by Richard Kostelanetz in Shampoo Issue 14
• COLLECTED STORIES – A Word with the Writer Richard Kostelanetz by D. Albanese (2001)
• Richard Kostelanetz: experimental prose – EPIPHANIES
• Microstories by Richard Kostelanetz in Gander Press Review
• Openings and (Complete) Shorter Stories by Richard Kostelanetz in The Cafe Irreal
• Invocations Album Details at Smithsonian Folkways
• Richard Kostelanetz, "1001 Film Scenarios – Selections from a Proposed Chapbook," SCRIPT 1.2 (January 2010) http://scriptjournal.studiohyperset.com/issues/1.1/1001-film-scenarios.php (June 3, 2010).