|  Richard
Kostelanetz is one of the nation's leading experts on avant garde art,
a hugely prolific author and anthologist, and an artistic polymorph
who has created idiosyncratic poems, fictions, holograms, and films.
Kostelanetz also applies his outside-the-box thinking to politics, and
says he "considers himself libertarian."
Kostelanetz is perhaps best known for his prodigious literary output.
Since the 1960s, he has written or edited close to 100 books, including
The Theatre of Mixed Means (1968), Breakthrough Fictioneers
(1973), Recyclings: A Literary Autobiography (1974), Openings
& Closings (1975), Constructs Two (1978), Metamorphosis
in the Arts (1980), Conversing with Cage (1988), Politics
in the African-American Novel (1991), Crimes of Culture
(1995), Political Essays (1999), and Thirty Years of Visible
Writing (2000). He is also the author of the monumental Dictionary
of the Avant-Gardes, Second Edition (1999).
In the artistic realm, Kostelanetz is famous for his esoteric and daring
work. His 1971 "novel," In the Beginning, consisted
of the alphabet, arranged in single- and double-letter combinations.
His 1976 audiotape, Openings & Closings, featured a series
of single-sentence stories. His "visual poetry" consists of
words arranged on a page in complicated schemes of puns, alliteration,
parallelism, and minimalism. In the 1980s, he used holographs to create
experimental visual poetry.
Kostelanetz has taught at City University of New York, the Indiana University
Writers Conference, and the University of Texas at Austin. He has served
as a contributing or advisory editor to Liberty magazine, the
New York Arts Journal, the Interdisciplinary and International
Review, The Humanist, and the Performing Arts Journal.
He has won a Fulbright Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and more.
On his website (www.richardkostelanetz.com), Kostelanetz lists a number
of anthology projects he hopes one day to work on. Included on his "wish
list" is a book similar to Henry J. Silverman's American Radical
Thought: The Libertarian Tradition (1970). Kostelanetz wrote: "As
a veteran anarchist who also considers himself libertarian, I would
like to do an anthology that brings together those anti-statists favoring
free-market economics (and thus customarily classified as 'right,' such
as Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess) with those emphasizing social freedoms
(and thus customarily classified as 'left,' such as Paul Goodman and
Murray Bookchin)."
Kostelanetz has one other connection to libertarianism: In 1997, he
edited The Frank Zappa Companion. Zappa, who Kostelanetz calls
"the principal intellectual of anti-rock," was a longtime
libertarian who had briefly considered seeking the Libertarian Party's
presidential nomination in 1988.
-- Bill Winter |
