Scholars, poets, writers, translators, and artists to celebrate the works of Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach. Featuring Benoît Delaune, Jacques Donguy, Franca Belarsi, Matthieu Perrot, Bruno Sourdin, James Horton, Pierre Joris, Gérard-Georges Lemaire, Peggy Pacini, Pamela Beach-Plymell, Antonio Bonome, and Raphael Haudidier.
A Great One Died Four Years Ago Today
![Heathcote Williams [Photo: JH, 2013]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/heathcote-williams-photo-copy-200x200.png)
“He was the Shelley of his age and more.” —Gerard Bellaart
“As you sat In your dotage, fountain pen / Pouring futures onto the calligraphied page / With such ease, That every political pose / And every social Shift achieved scansion, / rhyming under you, the verse surgeon whose / equal vision and zeal cured disease.” — David Erdos
Cut-ups, Music, Soundscapes
Moloko CD: ‘Being On The Beat’
This 23-track CD compilation includes a 28-page booklet of essays, illustrations, and detailed track descriptions. The CD is dedicated to the memory of Jürgen Ploog.
Into the Mainstream
MoMA to Feature Clayton Patterson Documentaries
“Canadian-born multimedia artist and writer Clayton Patterson has lived through, and broadly documented, more of outsider culture and the evolving history of New York’s Lower East Side than anyone else of his generation. The virtually unseen archive of VHS and 8mm videos he shot there between 1986 and 2001 numbers over 2,000 tapes of astonishing diversity. … Always resolutely on the fringe, as a videographer he is best known for recording the battle between New York City police and protesters in the streets around Tompkins Square Park on the night of August 6, 1988, an event that led to multiple court appearances and appearances with Oprah and others on the talk show circuit.” — Ron Magliozzi, MoMA Curator Department of Film
Mixing Literature, Media Theory, Cartoons, and Science
“In striving for a sustained friction between the verbal and non-verbal in his practice, Gary Lee-Nova allows literature, theory, cartoon, occultism, science and music to inform and even collide in the work, but not to overtake it. And this balance is most evident when you look at his entire practice. As often as he strips down his pieces to foundational forms such as vibrating color bars, penetrating hectogons, and evolving pyramids, Lee-Nova visits with pop-culture formats like the cartoon strip, or art-historical tropes like the Dadaist riddle and the Surrealist collage. He plays with exhibition culture, as well, slyly labeling his sculpture with yet more meaning … It seems that as often as Lee-Nova is driving head-on for pure effect, he’s throwing in another dislocation.” — Sky Gooden
David Erdos: ‘A Life in Lines’
The books have become a worry.
They’ll live long beyond my need for them.
Looking at them this last evening,
The pages I chase, filled with fear,
Their words redacted by death
As colorful lines in time blacken
And I grow blind to the visions
That each volume contains with each year.
I would have to do nothing but read
Which I still can’t properly do at this moment . . .
— David Erdos
At The Broad in L.A.
A Gathering of Basquiats, Lichtensteins, and Warhols …
The Broad Museum in Los Angeles re-opens on May 26. It will include an “in-depth installation” of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool, and others. Have a look at some of the Basqiats that will be on view. Totally punk. Well totally punk in its time. Now it’s historical. But it looks in pixel reproduction as fresh as ever.
Art Love Nature Think to Dupe
It was a getaway / from the concrete city. / No bears alas / no porcupines alas / no mosquitos / no lyme-tick bites / one little fruit tree / knocked down by the wind / now gone alas / bears liked its berries / no deer alas
except one on the road / and there I was / alone alas. — jh
Brion Gysin Uncut
Have you ever seen a more revealing photo of Brion Gysin than the one on the cover of “His Name Was Master: Texts; Interviews”? It shows a profound sense of dislocation, something Gysin often talked about but rarely showed in his demeanor—which was characteristically grand and worldly and often laced with humor. This sprawling book by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge with Peter Christoferson and Jon Savage offers Gysin in talking mode. It is Gysin uncut. Having already been comprehensively reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, it needs no review from me. More interesting than anything I might have to say is Gysin’s account of his brief, teenage involvement with the Surrealists. The disappointment, not to say trauma, of that experience was a harbinger of later ones.
Taking a Break
Back soon.
Rich Allen’s Film Dances to the Music
‘Lost in Lydia City’: Four minutes of pure sad funny nostalgic joy.
Gone But Not Forgotten
The Pyramid Club on the Lower East Side
Gone, finished, closed, shut forever. Though less well known than CBGB, Webster Hall, The Palladium, the Continental, it gave birth to much LES culture. Over the last few years, the Pyramid Club struggled to stay alive. Then came the Covid-19 death grip.
Transubstantiation
Christopher Hitchens Would Be Chortling
Words by Heathcote Williams. Montage and narration by Alan Cox.
Video redux for Easter Sunday 2021.
He Had A Dream
He was assassinated fifty-three years ago today. His dream did not die with him.
Carl Weissner’s German Essays and Reportage
Notes on Outsiders
UPDATED: To get the drift of “Aufzeichnungen über Aussenseiter” by Carl Weissner, I’ve been typing pieces of text into google translate. It’s a helluva time-consuming job, as if re-setting type you understand. Matthias Penzel, who edited the collection and wrote an afterword, tells me I should have better things to do with my time. But it’s more than worth the effort.
A Photo Portrait for the Ages
They don’t make characters like this any more unless you think of Trump’s sourpusses.
Rare Book Collecting
Connecting Brion Gysin and Paul-Armand Gette
UPDATED // To rate collectors by the use they make of their collections rather than simply by completeness, or by the rarity and excellence of individual items, makes great sense. Jed Birmingham’s new series about collectors of Burroughsiana is essential reading for anyone interested in the usefulness of collecting books of any kind, not just those by Williams Burroughs.