“Mess kit” is defined as “a portable set of usually metal cooking and eating utensils, used especially by soldiers and campers.” For Norman O. Mustill, America’s “messkit” consisted of silent weapons, play money, dancing the two-step, and industry in art. During the Vietnam War, when MESSKIT was published, that meant flamethrowers, napalm, Agent Orange, billions of wasted dollars, disastrous military strategy, torture and executions. No different from today, actually — just add cyberweapons and other upgrades.
Norman Ogue Mustill took his middle name from the fashion magazine Vogue but dropped the ‘V.’ It was his one-word manifesto against everything fashionable. Born in 1931, he grew up in Montreal and moved to California in the 1950s. The last dozen or so years of his life were spent in Arizona’s “high desert,” where he died in 2013. MESSKIT was published in 1970 by Nova Broadcast Press.
This indeed is a great item, I’ve nevaire seen it before … except the cover. Hell, why doesn’t Norm have a website? Showing all his great work?
Messkit … another fine item from Nova Broadcast at 29B Guy Place, SF … Burger Beach w/ a glass of fresh milk plus a corn-fed lass? Correct me where I’m wrong. Don’t step on my blue suede shoes out in the Gulf of Tonkin. And the Elephant wd be there kneeling on my chest, sending me down into my boots for a breath. Once I thot I saw a light moving in the jungle and I caught myself just under a whisper saying, ‘I’m not ready for this, I’m not ready for this’ –––
Me, I wdnt compare Mustill to Hoech nor the Mittageisen-Meister (‘Metall ist stark, Metall will scheinen/ verrostet nicht wenn geschmiert und rein’/ courtesy Siouxsie) or anyone else, Norm being very much out on his own turf, in his own class. Come to think, it’s funny how Peter Blake (of Sgt Pepper fame) managed, in 2000, to craft astounding collages in the style of Schwitters, Ernst and Hoech, respectively (‘In Homage to Collagists’) –– but then, his own work has become a bit boring lately? Or so it wd seem to me.
I feel what Mustill mapped out with his scissors, was strictly his own territory … and there certainly wasn’t room for a Monarch of The Glen. Stalingrad Soccer Pin-ups for a Beatle Living room? Them pages from Cuisine Rapide (Cold Turkey Press 1975/2013), they jump at you like servings dished out by a fry-cook-from-hell … no tofu burgers on this here menu … see le chef whip up a gristle-throb pork taifun … hold back the edges of yr gowns, ladies … gents, doff yr grease splattered hats … and bow to a horrorscope expert!
Wait, there’s more. Confer UNCOLLECTED from Improptu Editions (2015), and of crs TWINPAK from Nova Broadcast (1969) … ‘As venus completes orbit, I’m feeling slightly mashed/ The stir fry didn’t absorb it, I need another slash’ (K.K.) … it’s kinda odd, I’m now picking out the Nigel Henderson book ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ (2001) from my shelf … Has King Krule ever heard of NO Mustill? Who cares … We Travel On Intersection Points … oh well: Refusing to play the art game? Surely Mr Henderson is a contender? Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (another great collagist, esp in the silkscreen vein) owned lots, lots to his erstwhile collagist buddy Nigel, who himself was nevaire knighted … etcpp … I disgress ––– ‘A photo-fit of loose ends, framed in 3D’ (Siouxsie) –––
Hallo Walter — He WAS one of a kind.
You are correct, and you put it so well when you say: “Me, I wdnt compare Mustill to Hoech nor the Mittageisen-Meister . . . or anyone else, Norm being very much out on his own turf, in his own class. . . . I feel what Mustill mapped out with his scissors, was strictly his own territory.”
Mea culpa. The comparisons you refer to — which I’ve been guilty of making in an effort to rate him — do in fact sell him short.
Oh well … thinking twice, I must admit … there’s that 1920s Czech Commie? Poetist Karel Teige … of all the snippetmeisters, he’s sort of, well, moving perhaps in a Mustill hood? The way he’s handling things in his collage work. Surrealist vein, huh? A truly versatile mensch … ending up as a ‘Trotskyite degenerate’, according to Soviet propaganda. (Wikip sez, ‘his papers were destroyed by the secret police, and his published work was suppressed for decades’.)