art as a gorged star: eight erasure poems
by Tyler Friend
These are erasures of a book published by MOMA, which features transcribed versions of three lectures given in the 50’s and early 60’s: Art as the Measure of Man by George D. Stoddard, Art as Education by Irwin Edman, and Art: A Personal Vision by Bruno Bettelheim.
Through the erasures, the text is refocused onto the mystical and spiritual nature of art, working against the way these men tried to define and explain art in mathematical, economic, and social terms.
Another preoccupation is the way art and the artist are gendered within the lectures — almost always the singular, masculine he. The erasures play with the plurality of art, of collaboration, and move away from the patriarchal undertones of it all.
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by Tyler Friend