Working in the gap between art and life: Frank O'Hara's process poems

This essay looks at the concept of "process art" as a trend within various neo-avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 60s. It suggests that the aesthetic of process provides a useful way of re-thinking Burger's problematic central idea of the reintegration of "art" and "life" as a goal of the avant-garde. Process art calls for a reordering and re-thinking of these categories in that the stability of "life" (as action) and "art" (as object) is challenged or put into play. The paper reads Frank O'Hara's poetry as self-consciously working in "the gap" between art and life (as Robert Rauschenberg once put it), and thus complicating Burger's oversimplified theory.