This catalogue accompanies an exhibition at Ikon (September – November 2010) which is a survey of woodblock prints by Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro (c.1753 – 1806) from the collection of the British Museum. The exhibition focuses on images of women, in particular the courtesans of Yoshiwara, the regulated brothel district in Edo (now Tokyo). Born in the mid-1750s in Edo, Utamaro was taught by Toriyama Sekien, a painter of the academic Kano school, and subsequently formed a professional partnership with master publisher Tsutaya J?zabur?. This collaboration was key to the rise of Utamaro's reputation as a chronicler of the Yoshiwara district, and more generally, as a leading exponent of ukiyo-e ('pictures of the floating world'). Images of bijinga (beautiful people), Kabuki actors, landscapes and city life were typical of ukiyo-e, espousing a life lived only for the moment. They informed, amused and distracted their audience by depicting available pleasures. Utamaro's images of the women of Yoshiwara, often conceived in series, functioned as sophisticated advertisements or guides to a sensuous world, untroubled by overt references to the dif?culties of work and politics. Ikon also shows a number of Utamaro's explicitly erotic works, called 'spring pictures' or shunga. Issued as albums of sheet prints and as illustrated books, they are unambiguous in their intention to titillate. Curated by British artist Julian Opie and Timothy Clark (Head of the Japanese Department, British Museum).
In Reading Duncan Reading, thirteen scholars and poets examine, first, what and how the American poet Robert Duncan read and, perforce, what and how he wrote. Harold Bloom wrote of the searing anxiety of influence writers experience as they grapple with the burden of being original, but for Duncan this was another matter altogether. Indeed, according to Stephen Collis, "No other poet has so openly expressed his admiration for and gratitude toward his predecessors." Part one emphasizes Duncan's acts of reading, tracing a variety of his derivations--including Sarah Ehlers's demonstration of how Milton shaped Duncan's early poetic aspirations, Siobhán Scarry's unveiling of the many sources (including translation and correspondence) drawn into a single Duncan poem, and Clément Oudart's exploration of Duncan's use of "foreign words" to fashion "a language to which no one is native." In part two, the volume turns to examinations of poets who can be seen to in some way derive from Duncan--and so in turn reveals another angle of Duncan's derivative poetics. J. P. Craig traces Nathaniel MacKey's use of Duncan's "would-be shaman," Catherine Martin sees Duncan's influence in Susan Howe's "development of a poetics where the twin concepts of trespass and 'permission' hold comparable sway," and Ross Hair explores poet Ronald Johnson's "reading to steal." These and other essays collected here trace paths of poetic affiliation and affinity and hold them up as provocative possibilities in Duncan's own inexhaustible work.
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