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The in-progress list below points readers to writing by Ashbery that relates to the topic of domestic environments—either his own, those of others, or in general. By including items on this list, the compilers do not propose "intended meanings" for Ashbery's work. Readers are invited to explore these writings, which are also cited in our online catalogue.
Prose
- "Fragments of Celestial Trash," Newsweek, Volume CVI, Issue # 1, 1985 July 01, p. 59.
- On a Kurt Schwitters exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, including discussion of Schwitters's conscious creation of his domestic environment: "He . . . lived in the family home until forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1937. [. . .] Meanwhile he had transformed the house's solemn Teutonic interior into a mad, dreamlike environment that he termed Merzbau. For Schwitters, this constantly evolving project was to be the summit of his life's work; tragically, the house was destroyed during an Allied air raid in 1943. Yet it is perhaps fitting that his art survives as fragments -- collages, junk assemblages, garbled poetic texts. Merzbau was a sort of Tower of Babel, meant never to be completed, and fragments were what it was all about."
- "Artist's Daring Dream House," House and Garden, Volume CLX, Issue # 5, 1983 May, pp. 101, 104, 108, 192.
- On artist David Ireland's San Francisco home. "Ireland is a conceptual artist and his house is a work of art that can be lived in—must be, in fact, to be experienced whole. It is a combination often attempted but seldom realized" (p. 104)
- "Frederic Church at Olana: An Artist's Fantasy on the Hudson River," Architectural Digest, Volume LIV, Issue # 6, 1997 June, pp. 60, 62, 68, 70, 74, 78.
- On the home of Frederic Church. "The ensemble is breathtaking, and despite the proliferation of architectural elements and polychrome tile decoration, it is not busy but solemn and wildly fanciful, like Church's painting. [. . .] It is as though a moral and aesthetic lesson (on the order of Hopkins's line "The world is charged with the grandeur of God") was being wordlessly expounded" (p. 74).
- "Mystery Mansion," House and Garden, Volume CLIX, Issue # 3, 1987 March, pp. 148-151, 208, 212.
- On the home of eccentric millionaire Sarah Winchester: "[P]aradoxes abound in the house as it survives today . . . [it] seems a purposeful hodgepodge" (p. 208)
Poetry
- "Heavenly Days" (originally published in Ashbery's collection Chinese Whispers, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, pp. 93-98) and "Heavenly Days [Illuminated]"
- Artist Archie Rand painted panels that depict various spaces and objects in Ashbery's home in Hudson, NY, inspired by Ashbery's poem "Heavenly Days." Ashbery then chose lines from his poem to accompany Rand's panels. The collaboration, "Heavenly Days [Illuminated]" was published in Nest magazine (Number 21, 2003 Summer, pp. 86-102), and it is the subject of Rand's contribution to the Rain Taxi project, A Dream of This Room: A Created Spaces Portfolio of Works on John Ashbery's Textual and Domestic Environments. See this website's Rain Taxi page for more information, or go directly to the Rain Taxi project.
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