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Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

In our first vector art project, we’ll be creating a graphic work inspired by the poem below.

Ways of Seeing: Representation, Abstraction, and Non-objectivity

Cubism, Dada, De Stijl

What do old art movements have to do with poems about blackbirds? They can help us understand ways of looking at them.

Not only are there interesting interpersonal links between Stevens and the artists of the European avant-garde, but they all share an overriding modern interest in the function of a device we call abstraction. Abstraction… in poetry? Critic Holland Cotter shows us the origins of Stevens’s evolution into a master of modernist abstraction:

Stevens’s interest in modern art is a matter of record. Although he spent most of his adult life as an insurance executive in Hartford, he was in New York in 1913 when an American avant-garde coalesced after the Armory show. While writing his first book of poetry, he frequented the salon of Walter Arensberg, a college friend who had amassed a ground-breaking collection of advanced European art, which included the work of Picasso and Duchamp.

Holland Cotter ²

Under the influence

Under the influence of these artists, Stevens creates an expressive language akin to Cubism‘s visual world. As Robert Buttel observes, the title of our poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, “alludes humorously to the Cubists’ practice of incorporating into unity and stasis a number of possible views of the subject observed.” ³

Blackbird uses language that evokes images. Contrast (blackness of the bird, whiteness of snow), scale (a mountain juxtaposed with the eye of a bird), repetition and pattern (twenty snowy mountains)—almost every word in the poem suggests a way of seeing the world not unlike that of a painter.

Dada

Arensberg’s collection contained not only many Cubist works by Picasso but also many works by our friend Duchamp, who at the time was loosely associated with the movement known as Dada. Dada can be seen as one side of the coin that was tossed at the kickoff of World War I. Humanity’s first experiment in mechanized mass murder left European civilization without the moral compass that had guided it since the Enlightenment. Artists, among others, concluded the application of industry to needless war could in some manner be blamed on the framework of Enlightenment rationalism. Dada was a satirical movement that asserted the only antidote was anti-art because total destruction was the fault of the establishment.

De Stijl

The other side of the coin flowered into movements such as De Stijl, a Dutch group dedicated to rebuilding society from scratch by integrating art and design into one grand utopian vision. We can credit De Stilj’s distaste for “the pretentious elitist design aesthetics of the pre-war era” to the influence of Dada, but the roots of its visual vocabulary of color and shape are found in pre-war Cubism. ⁴

Oppositions

In the typographic design of their journals seen below, compare expressions of Dada’s chaos-as-order nihilism to De Stijl’s precise utopian order. Both challenged European establishment and both sought any means to do so, from painting to performance, poetry to graphic design. But the movements seem to reflect opposing points of aesthetic departure… right?…

The curious case of Theo van Doesburg

… well, maybe. But consider the double life of the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg.

Van Doesburg was the more extroverted co-founder of De Stijl alongside the more restrained, monkish Piet Mondrian. At the same time, Van Doesburg developed an alter ego, I. K. Bonset (an anagram for “ik ben zot,” meaning “I’m nuts” in Dutch). Bonset indulged in Dada writings which attempted to give words new power of expression by nullifying their original meanings. Instead of simply describing reality, he tried to conjure a new reality from an existing form.

It’s not hard to see van Doesburg approaching the same goal using some radically different means. It is abstraction, the unleashing of form from the grip of representation, that Dada and De Stijl shared. Abstraction is the game that reconciles the precision of De Stijl with the dirty tricks of Dada… and it’s the first important lesson history holds for us as we approach ways of looking at blackbirds.

From blackbirds to cows

Van Doesburg gives us a key to understanding ways of seeing using, of all things, a cow, done around the same time as Stevens’s poem:

Theo van Doesburg, Studies and final image for Composition (the Cow), 1916-7

At left, starting at the top with representation, we arrive at abstraction.

At right, applying color to abstraction becomes the key to creating a non-objective expression in the final work at the bottom.

Through a systematic process of distillation and a gradual but eventually relentless introduction of geometric structures, van Doesburg neatly encapsulates how artists express various ways of seeing: Representation, Abstraction, and Non-Objectivity.

Representation, Abstraction, Non-Objectivity

To understand these ways of seeing better, it helps to understand where meaning is generated—or not—in art.

The terms subject and object are jargon that have specific meanings depending on the context. In grammar, the subject of the sentence is the active noun (the “thing doing something”) and the object is the passive (the “thing to which something is done”). In psychology, the subject is a consciousness in a relationship with something outside itself, known as the object.

For art, the subject/object relationship—how (or whether) meaning is made—is conditional on the means of expression. So, add the actual thing “cow” (we’ll call this Not-Art or ~Art) to van Doesburg’s evolution and this matrix emerges:

Meaning, or being?

• ~Art | Object ⇔ Object. Simply, a thing, with no artistic intervention. It is pointless to ask “What is the cow about?” because a cow is not “about” anything. There is no “subject.” Pure objectivity.
• Representational Art | Object ⇒ Subject. Realism: that is, recognizable things from the world, with the representation of things becoming the subject of the work. It makes sense to ask “What is the work about?” … with the answer being “The work is about the cow.”
• Abstract Art | Subject ⇒ Object. Recognizable but highly distilled things, emphasizing a particular artist’s perceived essence of said things. Thus, the artist’s subjective experience is what becomes represented in the work. It makes sense to ask “What is the work about?” … but now with the answer being a more nuanced “The work is about the artist’s perceived essence of the cow.”
• Non-Objective Art | Subject ⇔ Subject. A hermetic work in which an entirely subjective perception is the subject of the work. Nothing is recognizably represented in an entirely self-referential act of making. As with the real cow (~Art), it is pointless to ask “What is the work about?” because the work simply “is.” Pure subjectivity.

In this project, we won’t go after realism, like the Audubon work illustrated at the very beginning.

And we won’t go for non-objectivity: we’ll save that for another project!

For this work, we will attempt to create a work of Abstract Art: a document expressing your perceptions of the Stevens poem. Thus, it would be inaccurate to say “The work is about the poem.” Rather, we’ll say “The work is about the artist’s perception of the poem.”

Thirteen ways of looking at Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

For inspiration, here is a look at thirteen artists who have looked at Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:

Which of the above works are identifiable as Representational Art? Abstract Art? Non-Objective Art? 

1. Stevens, Wallace. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” 1917. The Academy of American Poets, 23 December 2009, www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/thirteen-ways-looking-blackbird.[↩]
2. Cotter, Holland. “ART REVIEW; The Umbilical Kinship of Painters and Poets.” The New York Times, 24 March 1995, www.nytimes.com/1995/03/24/books/art-review-the-umbilical-kinship-of-painters-and-poets.html.[↩]
3. Buttel, Robert. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. Princeton University Press, 2015. p. 165.[↩]
4. Jirousek, Charlotte. “De Stijl.” Art, Design, and Visual Thinking, 1995, char.txa.cornell.edu/art/decart/destijl/decstijl.htm[↩]