Cultural Critique and Abstraction

Book excerpt: This study of Marianne Moore and the visual arts focuses on how art productions serve to break down and re-create cultural practice, proving that culture is a mutable organism, reluctant to change, but not impervious to it. In doing so, author Elisabeth W. Joyce shows that, even though Moore may have restricted herself to the quiet, provincial life of Brooklyn, her poetry attests to her resistance to the constrictions imposed by the predominating bourgeoisie. This study presents the bifurcation between modernism and the avant-garde where, while the modernists retreated from engagement in society, the avant-gardistes remained focused on political and social issues in order to critique stifling cultural phenomena so that art could effect cultural changes. In taking this stance, instead of viewing Moore's poetry as typically and provincially American, Joyce places her in the international and radical art movements of the early twentieth century.