Papers of Anne Tardos (1943-), a multilingual poet, composer, and artist. The collection documents Tardos's highly collaborative creative process, especially her decades-long partnership with poet Jackson Mac Low. Her papers include personal documents; correspondence with friends, family, and colleagues; manuscripts of poetry, essays and talks; writings of others, especially Jackson Mac Low; materials gathered and created for conferences, exhibitions, concerts, interviews and other events; ephemera; and extensive audiovisual and digital media.
Anne Tardos Papers, 1937-2014 (bulk 1960-2014) (MSS 770)
Extent: 45 Linear feet (66 archives boxes, 16 records cartons, 1 flat box, 1 map case folder, 4 films), + 106 GB of digital files
Digital Content
The collection includes 274 digital sound recordings. A list of the file names is available upon request.
Poet, composer, and visual and performance artist Anne Tardos was born in Cannes, France in 1943. She grew up in Paris, Budapest, and Vienna, developing fluency in French, Hungarian, German, and English before moving to New York in 1966. Her parents were both artistic: her father a writer of fiction and her mother a radio producer and speaker which, Tardos says, is a kind of performance art. Both parents were fervent communists and then, disillusioned, just as fervently anticommunist. This lack of philosophical continuity during her formative years is a reason, Tardos believes, that she isn't inclined toward political commitment or to trust any belief system that offers certainty, a stance that was greatly reinforced by the destruction on September 11, 2001 of the World Trade Centers, located a few blocks south of her Tribeca home on North Moore Street.
Tardos pioneered a unique multilingual writing style, and often complemented her texts with video stills, photographs, and collages. Her writing is renowned for its fluid use of multiple languages and its innovative forms. She has worked in numerous media, creating performance pieces, radio plays, videos, and musical compositions. In 1975, Tardos met poet and composer Jackson Mac Low. In 1980, they began a decades-long collaboration composing, writing, and performing poetry and music, and they married in 1990. In addition to numerous live performances, their collaborative and individual works have been featured on numerous radio programs in the United States and in Europe, including WNYC-FM and Westdeutscher Rundfunk. The nature of their artistic collaboration can be suggested by music critic Anthony Tommasini's description of their jointly composed piece "For Dick Higgins" as "a sound collage of spoken texts, vocal effects and an occasional struck bell, performed by the two composers."
Hejinian begins Tardos interview with a similar observation: "You have worked in an enormous variety of artistic mediums…and in mixed media and cross-genre forms of your own invention." Tardos herself has said of her writing process, "The text becomes music and the writer becomes a composer who listens." Adding to this aesthetic amalgam is the fact that many of her poems are multilingual, using French, Hungarian, and German as well as English words and passages.
Before, during, and after her marriage to Mac Low (which ended with his death in 2004), Tardos pursued many solo endeavors as well. A typical example of a "found sound composition" is her 1975 recording of the sounds her refrigerator made as she defrosted it, which she then overlaid with a series of her own vocalizations, creating in effect a Duet with Refrigerator. She has illustrated covers of many small press publications, her texts have been set to music by several contemporary composers, and her visual work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art and galleries in New York, Paris, and elsewhere.
Her publications continue to demonstrate new ways in which disparate media can be creatively partnered. As the esteemed critic Marjorie Perloff has written, "Tardos plays with every possible verbal/visual/ musical relationship…and can work magic with the…tension between high art and 'ordinary' signage." And as Hejinian has succinctly stated, "Your work throughout is exemplary of what is truly 'innovative.'"
Tardos married the composer Michael Byron in 2012.
Papers of Anne Tardos (1943-), a multilingual poet, composer, and artist. The collection documents Tardos's highly collaborative creative process, especially her decades-long partnership with poet Jackson Mac Low, and ingenuity and originality in digital artwork. Her papers include personal documents; correspondence with friends, family, and colleagues; manuscripts of poetry, essays and talks; writings of others, especially Jackson Mac Low; materials gathered and created for conferences, exhibitions, concerts, interviews and other events; ephemera; and extensive audiovisual and digital media. Prominent correspondents include Ay-O, Steve Benson, Carol Bergé, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Simone Forti, Lyn Hejinian, Geoff Hendricks, Jackson Mac Low, Charlotte Moorman, Joan Retallack, Larry Rosing and Nancy St. Paul, Jerome Rothenberg, Anne Waldman, and Rosmarie Waldrop.
Arranged in ten series: 1) BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL, 2) CORRESPONDENCE, 3) WRITINGS, 4) ARTWORK, PRINTS, AND PHOTOGRAPHS, 5) WRITINGS OF OTHERS, 6) INTERVIEWS, 7) PERFORMANCES AND EVENTS, 8) PROGRAMS, POSTERS, AND FLYERS, 9) AUDIOVISUAL MATERIALS, AND 10) DIGITAL MEDIA.
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