Our Thanksgiving team of the late William S. Burroughs and Norman O. Mustill has been a longtime happy pairing. It still is. So here they are again sweetened by Heathcote Williams’s words in a narration-cum-montage by Alan Cox. The total combo is delish.
A Silent Empire Against Conciliation
It Was Nearly Fifty Years Ago . . .
“I’m holed up in Superville … flat broke … what happened is this: I took off with Dick (you know him) in his Dyno … The idea was to sell it here & score for the uh amenities … By the time we got to Cuneo Lingo the engine broke down … it cost us 200 to get it fixed … That was all the dough we had between us … I tell you we crawled into town on all fours … So we sit in this café nursing a glass of lemon juice & trying to figure out what next … when out of the blue this chick appears & sits down at our table: Suzie Wong (you know her!) … & now dig this: she’s got a Dyno & … well, you can guess the rest … This hick country is strictly from General Motors … & anyone trying to get rid of a European car invariably finds himself facing a solid wall of hostility & suspicion … shoved around by rude inspectors, searched at customs, the works …”
The Week Begins
Two New Books That Have Come Our Way
“Now and again a poet is found who is a complex of many capabilities and patterns, all relating but none so isolating in its practice that the one is lost to the other. I have marveled for years at Gerard Malanga’s articulate endurance as a poet.”— Robert Creeley
“Some memoirs feel more trustworthy than others. Nhi tells her stories not in a straight line but more like a roundelay. Outsider, refugee, immigrant, outsider again…. Some of her memories are horribly sad, others are funny, and all are recounted with a simple grace and an admirable survivor’s strength.” — John Stausbaugh, author of City of Sedition and Victory City.
Vostell’s ‘Lipstick Bomber’ Caught My Attention
MoMA’s redesigned galleries have put some great previously unseen pieces on display, like Wolf Vostell’s antiwar art. Lipstick tubes replace bombs in a “widely circulated war photograph” of a B-52 dropping its bomb load over Vietnam. I won’t argue with MoMA’s explanatory description that Vostell was “equating mindless consumerism with apathy toward contemporary injustices and violence.” Of course he was. But I would go much further than those abstractions. Seems to me he was equating it with mass murder and genocide. Coincidentally, a friend sent me a 50-year-old “telegram collage” about the Mi Lai massacre of March 1968, which he happened to see in some library archive. No abstractions here.
A Matter of Attribution & Legacy
“The art world has disfigured the legacy of the Puerto Rican Lower East Side artist Angel ‘LA2’ Ortiz by failing to acknowledge his contribution to Keith Haring’s work. Nobody has dealt with the racist issue of his exclusion from the Keith Haring legacy. Nobody of any consequence in the art world has the internal strength to deal with this ‘oversight.’ We all know what it is like to be cheated out of our rightful credit. But years’s worth of credit? Even though Ortiz’s art is clearly visible for all the world to see in Haring’s work? Ortiz has been cheated out of his credit in shows at prestigious museums, in books published by powerful institutions like the Whitney, and in credit left off Haring’s work at a world-famous auction house. Just totally ignored. Would that happen to a white artist?” — Clayton Patterson.
It Was Impossible to Estimate the Damage . . .
Fluxus, Intermedia and . . .
The Something Else Factor: Alison Knowles, Barbara Moore, Martha Wilson and I will be participating this evening in a panel about the glory days of Something Else Press, moderated by Hannah B. Higgins, at the Emily Harvey Foundation. It’s the first of four discussions organized by Christian Xatrec and Alice Centamore. The events are free. RSVP to ehf.nework@gmail.com
Jerry Pagane, Art Warrior
Born in 1948, underweight, no ears, and on Christmas Eve dumped on a church step. In the ’40s and ’50s people were afraid of the deaf. Imagine the mental isolation. The system had no way of dealing with a deaf orphan. He was placed in Pressley Rigeway for Disturbed Children and Home for Cripple Children, and seven foster homes.
N.O. Mustill: Master Collagist Before My (NY) Times
A Gothic Tale Set in Black and White
Other works by Ligia Lewis include Sensation 1/This Interior (High Line Commission) (2019); so something happened, get over it; no, nothing happened, get with it (Jaou Tunis) (2018); Melancholy: A White Mellow Drama (Flax Fahrenheit, Palais de Tokyo) (2015); minor matter (2016), a poetic piece illuminated by red; Sorrow Swag (2014), presented in a saturated blue; $$$ (Tanz im August) (2012); and Sensation 1 (sommer.bar, Tanz im August -2011, Basel Liste- 2014).
A Contrary View of Gysin’s Calligraphies
A painter I know had this to say about Brion Gysin’s
work as an artist. “Pleasantly surprised by his watercolour. First thought was an early Yves Tanguy, whom I admire very much. But the calligraphies are outwitted any time by one little Michaux. That doesn’t invalidate the man’s effort, but I see too much repetitive strain there. Gysin’s calligraphies are paintings and, as such, can and should be viewed within a comparative context. There is of course André Masson to begin with—right up to Lee Krasner.
Brion Gysin: ‘Dante in the Tasile’
Richard Aaron writes in an email: “Here is a work by Brion that I have in front of me. He did very many of these. Around 1958 the calligraphic element began to appear, but this is from 1951. I used to own a large bunch of his surrealist work from the 1930s. Typical of the period. He was fortunate to have been tossed out of the movement by Breton.”
Twisted!
The Beast Is Back
The editors of the London Review of Books say their first edition of The Beast of Brexit, the late Heathcote Williams’s takedown of Boris Johnson, sold out “in a matter of weeks” just before the Brexit referendum in 2016. After it went through several reprints, the book was published in a second edition “with a […]
Alison Knowles: ‘Proposition #2 for Emmett Williams’
A transcript of this piece was published under the title “A house of dust, computer poem” in FANTASTIC ARCHITECTURE edited by Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins (Something Else Press, 1969). The reading, on a cassette recording made ca. 1967, was salvaged from a recent basement flood at S|U’s Manhattan perch. It features four readers, including Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins. Any help identifying the two other voices would be appreciated.