Richard Kostelanetz
- Preambles
- All Along the Edge
- Choice Bits
- Las Vegas Performance
- Book of Kostis
- Contemporary American Literacy
- Modern Polyartistry
- End of Intelligent Writing, reprint
- More On Innovative Music(ian)s
- Autobiogaphies at 50 & 60
- Book-Art & Alternative Publishing
- A Literary Life in America
- Animated Music
- Artists in America
- Arts & Artists in America
- Master Minds, rev. ed.
- The Maturity of American Thought
- Great American Comedians
- Continuing Tradition of the New
- Charles Ives and the American Imagination
- Special Sounds: The Art of Radio in North America
- Great Jewish Cemetery of Berlin
- Sports & Sportsmen
- Elizabeth Streb
- More Crimes of Culture
- The Fall and Rise of the Rockaways
- Home & Away: Travel Essays
- American Composers in Their Own Words
- The Art of Literary Demolition
- Possibilities of Longer Poetry
- Alternative American Autobiographies
- The American Tradition in Poetry
- John Cage's Poetry
- Foster Damon's Uncollected Writings
- Libertarian Tradition: American Anarchist Thought
- E.E. Cummings ReConSidered
- Conceptual Dance: Choreographic Comedies
- An Emma Goldman Reader
- American Composers as Writers
- AnOther Ogden Nash
- Classic Essays on Rock
- New American Radio Plays
- Second Anthology of Merce Criticism
Proposal for An Exhibition of Literary Holography
Richard Kostelanetz has produced holograms that differ from other holography in that their entire visual content is language. The first, On Holography (1978), is a revolving cylinder containing five syntactically circular statements about holography itself. One technical detail that makes this film hologram puzzling is that the five lines appear to revolve in unison, even though they are of demonstrably different lengths. By itself, On Holography has previously been exhibited in group shows at New York’s Museum of Holography and elsewhere; it was also included in Richard Kostelanetz’s traveling retrospective, Wordsand (1978-). The cylinder is 16 1/2" in diameter, 9†high, and rests on a revolving stand that is itself 17" high. Accompanying it is an audiotape of the same words in continuous loops; but while this audio compliment can aid comprehension, it need not be played constantly, if at all. The second hologram, Antitheses (1985), is a two-sided framed glass, hung in space, 10" x 16" that contains opposing fields of complementary words, one side suggesting warmth, the other cold, with antithetical words in typographic pairs; and in each field, the words fall into four planes projecting forward from the plate, optimally to points two feet in front of the plate (itself a state-of-the-art achievement). Although this pure hologram is ideally laser-viewable, it can be displayed successfully with a halogen lamp, requiring at least ten feet of viewing space on each side; it is presently installed in a structure of short poles, chains and Plexiglas mirrors that is easily transportable. In the late 1980s Kostelanetz produced a series of simpler transmission holograms meant to be viewed from only one side: Ho/Log/Rap/Her, Ho/Log/Rap/Hy, Madam/Adam, Abracadabra, Ambiguity, Hell/Elle..
Literary Holography will be a small exhibition, easily installed, that would inhabit a darkened space of roughly 500 square feet. Possible sponsors (museums, galleries, libraries) seriously wishing to consider photographs or slides of the two extant holograms, as well as an extended 5,000-word essay about them, are advised to contact either the artist. Thank you.