Richard Milazzo was the editor and co-publisher of Out of London Press in the 1970s. Among the books he edited were The Syntactic Revolution: Collected Writings of Abraham Lincoln Gillespie (New York, 1980) and the first English facsimile edition of Pontormo’s Diary (New York, 1982). In 1981, he co-edited La rosa disabitata 1960-1980 for Feltrinelli, one of the first anthologies to document the post-Gertrude Stein ‘Language’ writing movement in America, which included the writings of Vito Acconci, Charles Bernstein, John Cage, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Frank Kuenstler, Jackson Mac Low, Bob Perelman, Bern Porter and Jerome Rothenberg, among others. Before he stopped writing poetry in 1982, his works appeared in Il Verri and Tam Tam, among other magazines. These early writings were recently collected into a book entitled, Alogon: Early Poems 1969-1981, published by Tokyo Publishing House (Tokyo, 2007).
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Since 1982, Milazzo has worked internationally as a critic and curator in the art world. His exhibitions and critical writings with Collins & Milazzo brought to prominence a whole new generation of artists in the 1980s – artists such as Ross Bleckner, James Welling, Richard Prince, Peter Nagy, Not Vital, Mark Innerst, Allan McCollum, Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, Haim Steinbach, Jeff Koons, Philip Taaffe, Robert Gober, Saint Clair Cemin, Annette Lemieux, Sal Scarpitta, Meg Webster, Lawrence Carroll, Vik Muniz and Tyler Turkle, among others. In the early 1980s, he co-published and co-edited Effects: Magazine for New Art Theory in the East Village, and from 1986 to 1988 he was the American co-editor of Kunstforum (Cologne). Among Milazzo's many publications from these years are Radical Consumption and the New Poverty (New Observations, 1987); Art at the End of the Social (The Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden, 1988); and Hyperframes: A Post-Appropriation Discourse in Art, the lectures Collins & Milazzo delivered as Senior Critics at Yale University in 1988 and 1989. The latter were originally published in 1989 and 1990 in two volumes in Paris, with Editions Antoine Candau, and became known as the “Green Books.” They were recently reissued in an Italian edition by Campanotto Editore in Udine, in 2005.
In the 1990s, he curated an exhibition space he founded, 11, rue Larrey at Sidney Janis Gallery, and co-founded and edits the publishing house, Edgewise Press. In 1993, after a hiatus of eleven years, he returned to writing poetry, with the volume Le Violon d’Ingres: Sunday Poems and Lineations 1993-1996. In 1996, he curated Realism After Seven A.M.: Realist Painting After Edward Hopper – An exhibition of 25 Artists in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of the Hopper House; and, in 1998, he organized an art auction and benefit exhibition to re-launch Barney Rossett’s Evergreen Review on line. He has curated, both in the United States and Europe, major one-person exhibitions of the works of Malcolm Morley, Ross Bleckner, Sandro Chia, Abraham David Christian, Robert Longo, Saint Clair Cemin, Alessandro Twombly, David Salle, Alex Katz, Mark Innerst and William Anastasi. He has written the major monographs, Saint Clair Cemin: Sculptor from Cruz Alta and The Paintings of Ross Bleckner.
Among his other recent books are Malcolm Morley; Streets of Gold; Caravaggio on the Beach: Essays on Art in the 1990s; Hotel of the Heart: Poems 1997-2001; Jonathan Lasker: Expressions Become Things; Along the Hudson: Poems (with drawings by Abraham David Christian); Il Facchino di Venezia (The Porter of Venice): Poems 2002-2003; Green Nights / Golgotha / Love’s Quarrel: Poems 2001-2003; Mute Sirens: Poems (with photographs by Carlo Benvenuto); Stone Dragon Bridge: Poems 2006-2007; An Earring Depending from the Moon: Poems 2006; Circus in the Fog: Poems 2005-2006; and The Fishmonger’s Door: Poems of Modena (with photographs by Carlo Benvenuto).
Recently, he delivered six lectures at the Instituto Universitario di Architetura di Venezia on the paintings of Philip Taaffe. Most recently, he edited, with an introduction, Ross Bleckner's book, Examined Life: Writings 1972-2007, published by Edgewise Press, 2009. Forthcoming are two books of art criticism, According to What and Theory Sauvage, monographs on Peter Halley and Philip Taaffe, and a book of poetry, With Grass Ropes They Dragged the World to Her in Wooden Boats: Poems of Jordan, Syria and Egypt (with accompanying watercolors by Alessandro Twombly) (2008). Milazzo lives and works in New York City.