Born Burgess Collins in Long Beach, California, the artist who chose to identify simply as Jess enrolled in the California School of the Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1949. In San Francisco, Jess met his lover and life partner, the poet Robert Duncan. The two artists helped to craft a buzzing, experimental post-war Bay Area art scene, forming the influential King Ubu Gallery with painter Harry Jacobus in 1952. Later reconceived as Six Gallery, the space was a central intersection for Beat art and poetry in the 1950s. It was here, in 1955, that Allen Ginsberg first presented his poem Howl.
Jess is best known for his intricate collages, which incorporate themes of mysticism, chemistry, seduction, and aesthetics. Open-Mouthed but Relaxed (1952) is one of the artist’s earliest collaged works. The evocative word Beauty dominates the frame. Central to Jess’s project was the subjective role of the viewer in drawing associations between words and images, allowing the work to speak multiply at a social-historical moment when categories were typically understood as fixed. Clichéd phrases such as if it’s unexpected, expect it are pulled from advertising and pasted alongside works of poetry and the words real, Zen, stop, and go. The provocative title has a sexual undertone but could easily have been taken from a work of literature or poetry; media such as these formed the majority of Jess’s source material.
Jess’s The Truth and Life of Myth (1969) was originally intended as the cover of the 1973 paperback edition of Duncan’s autobiography by the same title, first published as a clothbound volume in 1968. Jess’s collage was not ultimately used for the project and wasn’t published until 1986, when it appeared as the frontispiece to Robert J. Bertholf’s Robert Duncan: A Descriptive Bibliography. The juxtaposition of mythology, religion, and spirituality is typical of Jess’s imagery, and the intricate composition evidences his artistic maturity. A significant figure in the exhibition, Jess evidences through his work the important link between visual art and poetry in 1960s America.
Jess Biography
Jess (b. 1923, Long Beach, CA; d. 2004, San Francisco, CA) received his BS from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena (1948). During World War II, he served in the United States Army at the Atomic Energy Laboratory, and held a small role in the production of plutonium for the Manhattan Project. Jess soon abandoned his scientific career due to a nightmare about nuclear holocaust, and attended what is now called the San Francisco Art Institute, California (1949). Along with his longtime partner, poet Robert Duncan, Jess became a key member of the 1950s Beat generation. Jess, Duncan, and painter Harry Jacobus opened the King Ubu Gallery (1952), renamed the Six Gallery by poet Jack Spicer, which became a significant venue for alternative art. Jess is best known for his “paste-ups,” i.e., elaborate collages composed of magazine, poster, and illustration clippings. Jess became publicly known after his work was included in influential museum exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1961, 1965) and at the Oakland Museum of Art, California (1963). His first notable retrospective opened at the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (1993) and traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Other recent solo and retrospective exhibitions were held at Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco (2005, 2008), and at the San Jose Museum of Art, California (2007), which traveled to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Pasadena Museum of California Art; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin; Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon; The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City; and the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois. The Jess Estate is represented by Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.
Maddie Phinney Biography
Maddie Phinney is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. She received her MA from the University at Buffalo, New York (2014) and is currently Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Visual Studies. Her work centers on the art of identity and its critical reception, with particular attention paid to the politics of the AIDS epidemic in the US. Her writing has appeared in artcritical, V Magazine, Bomb, Nukta Art and others.
Robert Indiana has described the 1960s as the most meaningful time of his life. His print portfolio Decade, published by Multiples, Inc., in 1971, commemorated this period with the reproduction of ten paintings made between 1960 and 1969. Included in this exhibition are two serigraphs from the portfolio, Mississippi and The American Dream. In the latter print, based on Indiana’s painting The American Dream I (1961), the artist employs his signature visual vernacular, which he honed over the early part of the 1960s. With its simple geometric configuration, stenciled letters, and flat, bright paint, the work resembles equally a series of fictionalized traffic signs and the hard-edge abstraction made popular by Indiana’s friend and lover Ellsworth Kelly. While Indiana’s work is often characterized in terms of the cool detachment of Pop, the content of American Dream holds personal significance for the artist. US Routes 29, 40, 37 (on which Indiana lived), and the famous 66 figure prominently. The word “tilt” is taken from the pinball games and jukeboxes Indiana encountered in roadside bars and cafes, while “take all” references the naturalized consumerism implicit in the American Dream.1 In this ode to Americana, Indiana speaks to individual nostalgia and to collective experience with his own visual vocabulary.
Following a number of separatist movements in the 1960s, the 1970s US saw coalitions of activists with diverse backgrounds working together with the common goal of social change. As a queer artist, Indiana drew a relationship between his own oppression and that of those struggling for civil rights. Mississippi, from Indiana’s 1965-66 Confederacy series, was produced as a response to the 1964 murder of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. A star on the city of Philadelphia, Mississippi, memorializes the disappearance of the three men, who, following a slew of national media attention, were found to have been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, with Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey and deputy sheriff Cecil Price charged as one of nine members and conspirators in their murder.
By 1971, Indiana’s iconography had become widely recognizable: bright, flat applications of stenciled uppercase letters, five-pointed stars, circles, squares, and diamonds. In the Confederacy series, including Mississippi, Indiana is verbally explicit about his political critique, incorporating the statement, “just as in the anatomy of man every nation must have its hind part.” Using impactful language—both visual and textual—to draw attention to prejudice, Indiana also draws a relationship between his personal struggle as a gay man and that of a larger community working toward social reform.
1. Robert Indiana, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Artist Questionnaire, December 1961, via http://robertindiana.com/works/letter-form-m/
Robert Indiana Biography
Robert Indiana (b. 1928, New Castle, IN) spent three years in the United States Air Force after attending Arsenal Technical High School, Indianapolis (19420-1946). He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (1949-1953), was in residence at the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting, Madison, Maine (1953), and attended the Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland (1953-1954). Two years after moving to New York, Indiana relocated to Coenties Slip, a port at the southeast tip of Manhattan, to join a community of artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist and Jack Youngerman. Indiana’s work was first featured in influential group exhibitions in New York at the Martha Jackson Gallery (1960), at The Museum of Modern Art (1961), and at the Sidney Janis Gallery (1962). The first major acquisition of Indiana’s work was in 1961 by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Indiana’s first solo exhibition opened at Stable Gallery, New York (1962), and his work has since been the subject of one-man shows at over 30 galleries and museums worldwide, including most recently in his retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2013). He currently is represented by Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, and Galerie Gmruzynska, Switzerland. More information about his work may be found at http://robertindiana.com/.
Maddie Phinney Biography
Maddie Phinney is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. She received her MA from the University at Buffalo, New York (2014) and is currently Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Visual Studies. Her work centers on the art of identity and its critical reception, with particular attention paid to the politics of the AIDS epidemic in the US. Her writing has appeared in artcritical, V Magazine, Bomb, Nukta Art and others.
References
Robert Indiana, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Artist Questionnaire, December 1961, via http://robertindiana.com/works/letter-form-m/
Some of the 1960s’ most important visual poetry came from an exceptionally unlikely source: a Benedictine monk from England’s Prinknash Abbey. Dom Sylvester Houédard, or dsh, as he signed his works, was one of the period’s most prominent concrete and visual poets. Houédard published extensively in small press literary journals, including Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., and maintained a correspondence with many of the leading poets and language innovators of his day, even collaborating with some of them, including John Cage, Gustav Metzger, and Yoko Ono. Educated at Oxford before ordination, Houédard evinces a profound intellectual engagement in his critical writings, citing Postmodern theorist Rosalind Krauss and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein with as much facility as biblical verse.
Almost all of Houédard’s works were composed on his portable Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter, many on Abbey letterhead, and often using the different colored ribbons available for this model, an aspect of his work that was frequently lost in publication. Houédard’s use of the typewriter gave rise to the neologism “typestracts” to describe his poems, and he is recognized as one of the leading practitioners of typewriter art. Like Finlay, he alternated between concrete poetry, such as bombombomb… and typikon by, and visual poetry, such as cover cased / case covered and prayer poetry, all from 1963.
bombombomb… illustrates concrete poetry’s precept that the image created by the poem’s words serves as a visual analogue to the idea expressed by the poem. As such, the arrangement of the words takes precedence over syntactical concerns, and traditional poetic values such as rhythm, meter, and metaphor give way to spatial arrangement, negative space, and visual architecture. bombombomb… consists of the arrangement of ten letters and three words: bomb, bomber, and bombsite. Arranged horizontally across the top of the page, four rows of varying length spell out bombombombomber, each word running into the next, evoking the anxiety of a sky filled with planes arranged in the finger-four tactical formation of the Luftwaffe. A steady stream of BOMBs drops vertically from three of the bombers to the bombsite on the ground.
While a work like bombombomb… relies on the direct relation of word to image, many of Houédard’s visual poems relied on what he referred to as the work’s “pluritotality” – the sum of its multivalent meanings, both denotative and connotative, sincere and ironic. Houédard was a great admirer of the Beats, read extensively in and corresponded with Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsburg, and his writing reflects the jazz-inflected syntax and frank, often homoerotic, sexuality of the Beat aesthetic. Houédard’s prayer poetry links a variety of experiences—poetry, jazz, and sex—to the sublime quality of prayer.
This poem emphasizes the degree to which Houédard, and others of the time, were invested not in determining meaning for the reader, but in making readers aware of their freedom to discover new meanings. As he wrote in the catalog for the 1965 exhibition Between Poetry and Painting at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, in which his work was featured: “dictionary(convention) as language coffin – this word/poem means the WAY we use it – we (not them) convene its meaning”.1 As an example, consider the word pair prayer/jrzz which pivots off of the shared r. We must assume that Houédard intended the dual reading of jazz/jizz, considering that he could easily have shifted the vertical word one letter to the right, creating the word jazz and avoiding the suggestion of any sexual meaning. But that would have hewed too closely to fixing the word in the “language coffin” that he wished to avoid.
Are we to assume that the poem refers to the pleasures of mutual or solitary sexual satisfaction? It could easily be either, but the decidedly masculine sexual slang facilitates a homoerotic interpretation of the poem as a whole. Similarly, cover cased / case covered undertakes an investigation that, while not overtly sexual, is nevertheless all sexual innuendo and longing. The inventory of sizes (long, medium, short) and tumescence (soft, medium, hard) bracketed at the top and bottom by yes and mmm mark this work as a catalog of male homoerotic desire.
That we can read the words in cover cased / case covered in a sexual manner, against their common meanings as simple adjectives describing the physical qualities of objects, demonstrates Houédard’s investment in opening language to a “pluritotality” of meaning, even, and perhaps especially, if some of these meanings run counter to those privileged by dominant culture. Just as the alternate readings of jazz/jizz pivot on the r, the words in cover cased / case covered pivot on the totality of each individual word in relation to the whole. By enabling each word to convey both a traditional and a dissident meaning, Houédard shows that it is possible to escape the language coffin. Like his collaborator Cage, Houédard facilitates our understanding of language as an instrument of control wielded by dominant culture and the discovery of a radical freedom precipitated on our redeployment of language against it. His minimalist typestracts exemplify his desire to create “jewel-like semantic areas where poet and reader meet in maximum communication with minimum words”2: areas in which we can discover the power to create meaning, and with it, the power to create new realities.
1. Dom Sylvester Houédard, “Statement by Dom Sylvester Houédard” in Between Poetry and Painting (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and W. Kempner, 1965), 55.
2. D.S.H., Charles Verey, and Ceolfrith Gallery, Dom Sylvester Houédard (Sunderland, Durham: Ceolfrith Arts Centre, 1972), 47.
Dom Pierre Sylvester Houédard Biography
Dom Pierre Sylvester Houédard (b. 1924, Bailiwick of Guernsey; d. 1992, Great Britain), also known as dsh, attended Jesus College, Oxford (1942-1944, 1947-1949), and served in the British Army Intelligence (1944-1947). He became a monk at Prinknash Abbey, Gloucestershire (1949) and was ordained as a priest (1959). dsh made major theological contributions and was considered to be a luminary in the ecumenical movement. He was a renowned translator of religious texts: he published his translation of the Office of Our Lady (1962), and he served as the literary editor of the Jerusalem Bible (1961). He was Co-Founder of the Eckhart Society and an Honorary Member of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society. dsh became one of the most notable British concrete poets: his work occupied the space between poetry and visual art. His so-called “typestracts,” created with an Olivetti typewriters, often incorporated color by way of carbon paper or ribbons. His most renowned work poem, entitled Frog-Pond-Plop, was an English translation of a zen Japanese haiku by Matsuo Basho. dsh contributed to magazines and exhibitions throughout the 1960s. His first solo exhibition was held at Artists for Democracy’s Cultural Centre, London (1976).
Sarah JM Kolberg Biography
Sarah JM Kolberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo specializing in the American and French post-WWII period, with additional areas of focus in narratology, queer theory, and queer subjectivity in experimental film. Her dissertation will focus on the Nouveaux Réalistes. She has won numerous awards as both a writer and independent film producer, holds a joint MA in English and Film, and will complete her MFA in Media Study this year.
References
Dom Sylvester Houédard, “Statement by Dom Sylvester Houédard” in Between Poetry and Painting (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and W. Kempner, 1965), 55.
D.S.H., Charles Verey, and Ceolfrith Gallery, Dom Sylvester Houédard (Sunderland, Durham: Ceolfrith Arts Centre, 1972), 47.
Merging the visual with the textual, concrete poetry presents a coterminous relationship between text and image: reading the words is not sufficient for understanding; one must see the words in order to apprehend the poem. In many cases, were one to read the text aloud the meaning of the poem would be lost. Early forms of concrete poetry used the positioning of words to create visual images, whether simple geometric shapes or objects that reflect the poem’s concepts, such as Ian Hamilton Finlay’s stones stones stones (1966). The positioning of the word stones, eight of them forming a squared arch, and the single word clouds in the upper right corner immediately creates an unmistakable image in our mind: a small garden hut with a window to the sky.
This work illustrates concrete poetry’s investment in the totality of meaning that emerges out of the intersection of word and image. Finlay’s stones stones stones is accompanied in the University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection archive by a page of questions, inviting reader response and providing his address for the return of replies: “answers to: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Coaltown of Collange, Ceres, by Cupar, Fife, Scotland.” Some questions refer back to the poem’s words, reinforcing the notion that the image and its constituent text are coequal: “The subject of the poem is a small hut: what is the hut made of?” Others invite the reader to contemplate aspects of the work external to its content: “Does it seem to be a) in a valley b) by a river c) on top of a hill?” and “Might there be weeds around the hut? If so, why has the author not mentioned them?” These questions demonstrate that for Finlay, despite his work’s structural emphasis on the image/word relationship, even a concrete poem was not quite as closed to interpretation as one might initially assume.
In addition to traditional concrete poems, Finlay experimented with a wide range of other poetic forms, including anagrams, one-line and even one-word poems, and other poetic fragments. In many of these works, he shifted away from an emphasis on the creation of a visual object toward an emphasis on investigating the process of signification and the networks of correspondence that constitute meaning. In these visual poems, the investment is in the variety of meanings available within the work and in the system of relationships across the entire work, as opposed to the relationship between one line or verse and the next, as in more traditional poetic forms. Finlay frequently materializes these relationships by employing a single word read in multiple directions or by pivoting multiple words around a single letter, much like in a crossword puzzle. As they require one to read multiply, these poems make manifest the ways in which such a text – and by extension, all texts – may be opened to multiple meanings. In refusing the hierarchical succession of lines we generally assume in reading, these poems can seem closer to art than text.
Finlay’s y-o-u y-e-s offers an example. Two iterations of the word -r-o-s-e-s- appear horizontally, while on the left, two instances of the word -y-o-u- traverse the page diagonally, one reading from top to bottom, the other from bottom to top. In a mirrored configuration to the right is the word -y-e-s-. In the space between the two horizontal -r-o-s-e-s- the u from -y-o-u- and the s from -y-e-s- lie adjacent. The o in -y-o-u- is equally the o in -r-o-s-e-s-, while the e in -y-e-s- becomes the e in -r-o-s-e-s-. In addition to the words that are given to us by use of connecting lines, we read between the lines to discover the unconnected us. This unmarked word, emerging from the heart of the work, is the key to its meaning. The unrelated you, roses, and the Molly Bloom-esque yes all coalesce around us, clearly marking this as a love poem.
Such decentering of authorial control and focus on networks of correspondence allow each reader to determine their individual experience of the poem. In Finlay’s y-o-u y-e-s, rather than following the traditionally prescribed left-to-right, top-to-bottom flow, the reader can choose which line to read first and how to travel through the poem. Reading the poem puts the reader in the position of contravening the conventional rules of reading, which awakens the awareness that alternatives are possible. This awareness lies at the heart of the work’s political potential. When we are able to recognize that it is possible to read against conventional norms, we realize that other norms may be similarly challenged, other rules similarly breached, and it becomes possible for us to imagine other relationships with power.
Ian Hamilton Finlay Biography
Ian Hamilton Finlay (b. 1925, Nassau, Bahamas; d. 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland) was sent to Scottish boarding school at the age of 6. As a teenage, Finlay briefly attended Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. He joined the Royal Army Service Corps (1942). Following the war, he was employed as a shepherd, during which time he generated paintings, plays and short stories. Along with Jessie McGuffie, Finlay co-founded the Wild Hawthorn Press (1961). Finlay soon emerged as a leader of the concrete poetry movement, becoming one of Scotland’s most renowned artists. Finlay and his wife relocated to a Stonypath farm and transformed the surrounding hillside into a garden so-named Little Sparta (1966). Other examples of Finlay’s garden work include the Secret Grove at Kröller-Müller Sculpture Park, Otterlo, Netherlands; Improvement Garden at Stockwood Discovery Centre, Luton, England; and Fleur de L’Air at Provence, France. Finlay was short-listed for Britain’s Turner Prize (1985) and received the honorary appointment of a Commander of the British Empire (2002). Recent solo exhibitions took place at The Scottish National Gallery of Art, Edinburgh (2001); Victoria Miro Gallery, London (2003, 2007, 2011); David Nolan Gallery, New York (2009, 2013); Tate Britain, London (2013); and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2014). In addition, Finlay’s work was included in the Tate Triennial at Tate Britain, London (2006). More information about his work may be found at http://www.ianhamiltonfinlay.com/.
Sarah JM Kolberg Biography
Sarah JM Kolberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo specializing in the American and French post-WWII period, with additional areas of focus in narratology, queer theory, and queer subjectivity in experimental film. Her dissertation will focus on the Nouveaux Réalistes. She has won numerous awards as both a writer and independent film producer, holds a joint MA in English and Film, and will complete her MFA in Media Study this year.
“People sometimes say about my painting, ‘That’s a real Happening.’” — Jim Dine1
In the early 1960s, Jim Dine was one of the leading artists of a new inter-media performance art. Combining performance, visual art, spoken word, and music, these Happenings trace their origins to an event staged in 1952 by John Cage at Black Mountain College. Cage read excerpts from Zen texts, selections from Meister Eckhart, and played a radio; Robert Rauschenberg displayed his White Paintings, upon which shadows fell and random images were projected; dancer Merce Cunningham led dancers through the audience aisles; musician David Tudor played a prepared piano and poured water between two buckets; while poets Charles Olson and M. C. Richards read poetry. Although Cage organized the event, the performers were free to structure the time that they were given.
When Cage began teaching at the New School for Social Research in 1956, among his students was Allan Kaprow, who would later meet Dine in 1959. Together they pioneered the Happenings movement. The Crash #2 and The End of the Crash belong to a series of lithographs Dine created to accompany his 1960 Car Crash happening, which recalled two crashes Dine had suffered: the first, in which Dine was thrown from the car, was precipitated by the shock of hearing news on the radio of the death of a friend in an accident; and the second, in which his wife, Nancy, broke her arm while securing their son, who was riding in the backseat. The Car Crash performance was an emotional exorcism in which Dine, assisted by three others, attempted to recount the events’ terror to the audience.
From November 1 to 6, 1960, Dine performed the fifteen- to twenty-minute Car Crash six times at New York’s Reuben Gallery. The anteroom of the gallery was filled with paintings, drawings, and lithographs—including these two—displaying a shared imagery of tire-like circles and crosses. The gallery room was filled with various tubes, belts, cords, and other debris, all of which was whitewashed. From the ceiling hung a silver foil-covered cross; additional crosses hung or were painted on various surfaces. In the dark, accompanied by recordings of honking and other traffic noises, Dine entered the room wearing a silver jumpsuit, a bandage wrapped around his head, white face paint with black eyeliner and lipstick accentuating his features, and two lights attached to his head. While emitting a stream of guttural sounds and despairing moans, Dine frantically drew, erased, and redrew a car on a blackboard. Dine represented the car itself, while two flashlight-bearing collaborators represented other cars, repeatedly re-enacting the accidents by “crashing” their beams into him. A third collaborator recited a Dada-esque stream-of-consciousness recounting of the crash, which sounded extemporaneous but had actually been carefully scripted by Dine.
Akin to the operation of concrete poetry, here words and images combine to evoke a comprehensive account of the crash. The word crash functions as both a noun and a verb: the energetic scribbling conveys the action of the crash, while the cross designates the site of the crash itself. The tangled black lines and spider-like arrangement import an ominous quality to the work, which underscores the inherent violence of the event. In contrast to The Crash #2, in which the word is enmeshed within a web of black lines, in The End of the Crash the word crash materializes seemingly out of nowhere, emphasizing the frightening suddenness of the event. The presence of the cross (an iconic red in The End of the Crash) helps shape our interpretation of the word crash, as it implies the presence of victims. The Crash series is, as Jean Feinberg noted, “a potent metaphor for danger, tragedy, and the omnipresent specter of death that Dine sensed in American life.”2
The chaotic scribbling represents the snarl of Dine’s emotions and echoes the Abstract Expressionists’ gestural brushstroke, that indexical trace of the maker’s body. Dine materializes this boundary between body and memory, between what we can see and what we cannot. In tracing the lines with our eyes, we recreate the action of Dine’s hand as he created them. The black lines additionally call to mind the dizzying trajectory of the crash. Whereas Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns ironized the gestural brushstroke, revealing the fraudulence of its promised authenticity, Dine embraces it, putting it in service to the work’s deeply personal and emotional import.
The Crash series helps illustrate the complex interplay between word and image that was under investigation at this time. While the totality of the work evokes the idea of a crash, Dine’s use of nonsensical language underscores the impossibility of accurately communicating the individual truth of such an experience. At its heart the work challenges the notion of a totalizing meaning fixed by the maker, requiring viewers to draw upon their own unique experiences to complete the work.
1. Michael Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1966), 203.
2. Jean E. Feinberg and Jim Dine, Jim Dine (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995), 16.
Jim Dine Biography
Jim Dine (b. 1935, Cincinnati, OH) attended the University of Cincinnati and the Boston Museum School, and received his BFA from Ohio University, Athens, where he also studied in the graduate program. Dine moved to New York in 1958 and had his first group show at The City Gallery (1959) and his first solo shows at Judson Gallery and Reuben Gallery (1960). He staged many of the first “Happenings” in New York with artists such as Robert Whitman and Claes Oldenburg. Dine’s works have been the subject of almost 300 solo exhibitions worldwide: his most recent solo exhibitions were held at The Morgan Library and Museum, New York (2011); Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris (2012); Cincinnati Museum of Art (2012); LeeAhn Gallery, Seoul (2013); Galerie de Bellfeuille, Montreal (2014); Alan Cristea Gallery, London (2013); and Galerie Daniel Templon, Brussels (2014). Since 1976, Dine has been represented by Pace Gallery, New York.
Sarah JM Kolberg Biography
Sarah JM Kolberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo specializing in the American and French post-WWII period, with additional areas of focus in narratology, queer theory, and queer subjectivity in experimental film. Her dissertation will focus on the Nouveaux Réalistes. She has won numerous awards as both a writer and independent film producer, holds a joint MA in English and Film, and will complete her MFA in Media Study this year.
References
Michael Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1966), 203.
Jean E. Feinberg and Jim Dine, Jim Dine (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995), 16.
In the 1950s, San Francisco was experiencing a renaissance led by a vibrant counter culture that spanned the literary, film, and artistic communities, with many participants active in more than one medium. In Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era, Rebecca Solnit’s exploration of San Francisco’s mid-century artistic subculture, she notes that the rebellious spirit that would sweep the country in the 1960s as a reaction to the repressive culture of the ‘50s had its origins in San Francisco. As she writes, “the art of this California underground constituted an assault on the neat boundaries of formalism and convention, and its tactics included explicit language and imagery and forays into mixed and new media.”1
Bruce Conner embodied the spirit of this time, working in a wide variety of mediums: film, sculpture, collage, drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, and assemblage. #114 is from a 1970 edition of lithographs on paper, reproducing the intricate black and white drawings that he made in the 1960s using a felt-tipped pen, then a relatively recent innovation. The artwork’s overall edge-to-edge surface and gestural marks call to mind the visual syntax of Abstract Expressionism, while its arrangement suggests the pages of a book and collaborative relationships between artists and writers. Indeed, Book Pages is the title of a similar felt-tipped pen drawing that resembles this one. The white and black lines mimic scribbled writing, though there is a distinct difference between Conner’s lexicon and the similar investigations included in this exhibition by Frank Badur, Elena del Rivero, and Mary McDonnell. In these works, other forms of mark-making are substituted for writing, but in ways that facilitate their interpretation as writing. For example, the marks are distinct from their backgrounds, and the convention of leaving margins around the writing is maintained. Although we can’t actually read what the artists have “written,” the works suggest that we might be able to do so. Conner abandons these conventions. His marks meander across the page, extending all the way to the edges. He creates no distinction between the “writing” and the background, such that we can barely determine what constitutes each, whereas Badur, del Rivero, and McDonnell offer a lexis that stands in for the personal intimacy of writing.
At first glance, the image evokes certain frames in Stan Brakhage’s 1963 hand-processed experimental film Mothlight, in which moth’s wings pressed between two layers of celluloid reveal their intricate webbing. Conner was a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder when he met Brakhage, who had recently returned to Colorado from San Francisco after lodging for several years with Jess and Robert Duncan. Brakhage, too, had participated in San Francisco’s cross-pollinated arts scene and was an early pioneer of American experimental film.
The black and white palette recalls Conner’s own work in experimental film. Given the prohibitive expense of purchasing, shooting, and developing new film, Conner worked entirely from found footage using old newsreels, other existing films, and the discarded leaders that he was able to collect from developers, to which he added a completely unrelated soundtrack. Conner made about two dozen of these non-narrative films, including 1958’s A MOVIE; a 1960 collaboration with Jess, THE FORTY AND ONE NIGHTS OR JESS’ DIDACTIC NICKELODEON which focused on Jess’s collages; 1961’s COSMIC RAY; and 1967’s REPORT, the heavily politicized satire of the Kennedy assassination and media culture. He experimented with other hand-processed image-making techniques, such as puncturing, slicing, and scratching the film.
These techniques were intended to breach the conventions of Hollywood editing, in which editing is meant to be invisible, enabling the viewer to seamlessly enter the world of the film, suspending any disbelief that what we are watching is a construction. As film scholar Bill Nichols notes, experimental and structural films mobilize the medium of film itself to underscore an ideological agenda: the radical form “distances viewers from a purely realist style and engages them in the process of understanding how productive, material forces actually construct a social reality.”2 The radical politics of the ‘60s, characterized by civil rights struggles for African Americans, women, and gays and lesbians, was grounded in exposing the falsity of many ideological constructs previously upheld as natural and inevitable. By conflating notions of surface and depth, and by flattening the binary relationships that Badur, del Rivero, and McDonnell preserve, Conner invites the viewer to consider these relations anew.
1. Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990), x.
2. Bill Nichols, Engaging Cinema (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 315.
Bruce Conner Biography
Bruce Conner (b. 1933, McPherson, KS; d. 2008, San Francisco, CA) attended Wichita State University, Kansas, and earned his BFA from the University of Nebraska (1956). He received a scholarship to attend the Brooklyn Museum Art School, New York (1956) for a semester. Conner had his first solo exhibition at the Rienzi Gallery, New York (1956). Conner then continued his education through a scholarship to the University of Colorado (1957). He soon moved to San Francisco, where he became associated with artists and poets such as Wallace Berman, Jay Defeo, and Michael McClure. The first retrospective of Conner’s work was held at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000). Recent solo exhibitions took place at Gagosian Gallery, New York (2002); Susan Inglett, New York (2003, 2004, 2007, 2010); SFMOMA, San Francisco (2004, 2005, 2010); Miyake Fine Art, Tokyo (2008); and Creative Time, New York (2010). Recent group exhibitions were held at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2008); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2008); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009); Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2010); and The Katonah Museum of Art, New York (2011).
Sarah JM Kolberg Biography
Sarah JM Kolberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo specializing in the American and French post-WWII period, with additional areas of focus in narratology, queer theory, and queer subjectivity in experimental film. Her dissertation will focus on the Nouveaux Réalistes. She has won numerous awards as both a writer and independent film producer, holds a joint MA in English and Film, and will complete her MFA in Media Study this year.
References
Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990), x.
Bill Nichols, Engaging Cinema (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 315.
The work shown here is just one element of John Cage’s Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel (1969), a series of compositions comprising eight Plexigrams—each itself eight sheets of silk-screened Plexiglas, mounted in a slotted wooden base and accompanied by one of two different lithographs. Fragments of words, letters, and images are scattered across the surface of each component, as seen the lithograph on view here. Depending on the viewer’s angle before the assembled work, aspects of each pane line up with or fall away from those on other panes. Not only does each viewer’s experience of the work differ, but one individual viewer can have multiple experiences of the work depending on the angle of view, a metaphor as much about politics as it is about art.
Created by Cage as a memorial to fellow artist and friend Marcel Duchamp, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel echoes Cage’s practice of mobilizing silence in his musical compositions to erase the typical power relationship between artist and viewer. By allowing silence to enter the performance, Cage brings the unique circumstances of each listening context into play, thereby letting sounds he cannot control supersede those he can. For Cage and his fellow homosexual artists, silence served another crucial function: as a form of covert resistance to the dominant culture’s totalizing control. Recognizing that any actions perceived as openly oppositional would only elicit further repressive impositions of power, Cage and his cohort developed strategies, like silence, that allowed forms of camouflaged dissent, evading control by not being openly resistant.
As Cold War-era homosexuals learned to disguise their authentic selves behind a publicly acceptable front of heteronormativity, a less pernicious form of this self-silencing strategy was being adopted by legions of “men in grey flannel suits.” As William H. Whyte’s best-selling book of the era The Organization Man explores, the code of conformity imposed on American life in the ‘50s, particularly in corporate culture, necessitated if not actual conformity, then at least the outward appearance of it. Corporate workers quickly learned that to get ahead they must cultivate a carefully crafted public self that might be quite different from one’s more authentic private self. As a result, Jonathan D. Katz argues, heteronormative America was being similarly trained in the value of the closet as a mode of survival.1
The Cold War politics of selfhood demanded a practice of not saying. In the opening of his 1949 essay “Lecture on Nothing,” Cage writes, “I am here, and there is nothing to say,” and then, in typical Cageian fashion, continues for 575 more lines. His point, however, is not that there is literally nothing to say, but rather that he wants to draw our attention to the dynamics of power inherent in language and, in relinquishing this power, to transfer agency for meaning-making to the reader. At the heart of Cage’s aesthetic is a deeply ethical political project. In refusing the normal majority/minority operative binaries, Cage erases the prevailing hierarchical dialectic of power, creating the possibility of multiple and shifting hierarchies. Elsewhere, Cage speaks against communication, in favor of conversation. Communication entails a unidirectional flow of ideas, a message to be conveyed and received, as opposed to conversation, which allows for the free exchange of ideas. Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel is a conversation with the viewer, who creates meaning from the various word and image fragments Cage has provided.
Cage frequently used chance operations in creating his works in order to eliminate his personal tastes, which he saw as necessarily delimited by what he already knew. Here the placement of words and images, their size, and their color were determined by the I Ching, an ancient Chinese chance-based system of divination. Devoid of any specific focus or narrative, the resulting surface invites the viewer’s eye to wander, taking in word and image fragments and reworking them in endless combinations. In this way Cage silences his own voice and allows the viewer to complete the work. In the context of the Cold War, the notion of individual freedom was a conservative fundamental idea, one that ideologically differentiated us from the Soviet Union’s forced collectivity. By offering the viewer freedom to make meaning, Cage deftly camouflages his radical freedom in the terms of America’s most fundamental claim about itself.
Whether in his musical or visual compositions, Cage created opportunities for the production of a new form of subjectivity, one in which the viewer is not merely a consumer, but an active producer of meaning. This is the element that gives these works such subversive power. Cage enables viewers to perceive themselves and their relation to power in new ways and, in imagining these new relations, to discover new means of eluding power’s control. As is often the case with Cage, not saying anything at all said more than saying something in the first place, since the absence of statement forced the audience to embrace the freedom to make meanings on their own. As he wrote, “I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it.”
1. Jonathan D. Katz, “Passive Resistance: On the Success of Queer Artists in Cold War American Art” L’image 3 (December 1996): 119-142.
John Cage Biography
John Cage (b. 1912, Los Angeles, CA; d. 1992, New York, NY) was a singularly inventive, highly influential, and much beloved American composer, writer, philosopher, and visual artist. For two years he attended Pomona College, Claremont, California (1930). Beginning around 1950, and throughout the passing years, he departed from the pragmatism of precise musical notation and circumscribed ways of performance. His principal contribution to the history of music is his systematic establishment of the principle of indeterminacy: by adapting Zen Buddhist practices to composition and performance, Cage succeeded in bringing both authentic spiritual ideas and a liberating attitude of play to the enterprise of Western art. His most enduring, indeed notorious, composition, influenced by Robert Rauschenberg’s all-black and all-white paintings, is the radically tacet 4’33″ (1952). Cage held his first solo exhibitions at the Stable Gallery, New York (1958), and at Galleria Schwarz, Milan (1971). Subsequently, exhibitions were organized on his work at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1977), at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1982), and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania (1982). Cage collaborated with the Carnegie International to create Changing Installation (1991) for the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. Cage curated a ground-breaking show of his own work entitled Rolywholyover A Circus at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, California (1993) that traveled to the Menil Collection, Houston; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; the Art Tower Mito, Japan; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. Cage’s most recent solo exhibitions have been held at Galerie Stihl, Waiblingen, Germany (2009); the New Arts Program, Kutztown, Pennsylvania (2009); Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden, Norway (2010); the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasglow, Scotland (2010); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, United Kingdom (2010); Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona (2010); SCHUNCK, Heerlen, Holland (2010); National Academy Museum, New York (2012) and traveled to the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014). More information about his work can be found at http://johncage.org/.
Sarah JM Kolberg Biography
Sarah JM Kolberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo specializing in the American and French post-WWII period, with additional areas of focus in narratology, queer theory, and queer subjectivity in experimental film. Her dissertation will focus on the Nouveaux Réalistes. She has won numerous awards as both a writer and independent film producer, holds a joint MA in English and Film, and will complete her MFA in Media Study this year.
References
Jonathan D. Katz, “Passive Resistance: On the Success of Queer Artists in Cold War American Art” L’image 3 (December 1996): 119-142.
Each artwork in Richard Bassett’s Art Titles series was made using a standard Braillewriter and reproduces in Braille the title of another artist’s work, such as Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self-Portrait, and, in the case of the work shown in this exhibition, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1987-1990). In order to make this series, Bassett frequented his local Braille academy and interviewed staff and students to learn about Braille’s stylistic conventions and production methods. A Braillewriter is akin to a manual typewriter but has only six keys—one for each of the six possible positions that make up the Braille system, and three function keys: a line return, a space key, and a backspace key. Using a paper template with blank dots arranged in the six positions, Bassett carefully translated onto the template the words and punctuation that he wanted to reproduce in Braille. Once proper layouts of the source text were determined, Bassett typed with the Braillewriter onto a piece of heavy embossing paper, creating an object in relief.
Although learning to work with the Braillewriter delighted Bassett, according to his partner, Donald Bradford, the artist felt that simply typing Braille was too easy. He relished the technical challenge of reproducing realistic Braille through drawing. One of a series of approximately two dozen works drawn by hand rather than typed with a Braillewriter, Porn Clip #5 (1999) is based on a passage from the erotic short story “Night Bus to Reno,” which was published in the December 1990 issue of the gay porn magazine Inches. Bassett selected roughly a paragraph of text, translated it into Braille, and painstakingly rendered the Braille with graphite in hyperrealist style. According to Bradford, Bassett chose stories and passages based on his fantasies. This particular story involves a protagonist named Richard, a young soldier on leave who experiences his first gay sexual encounter. As Bradford recalls, Bassett was amused by the fact that his own work’s lewd and graphic depiction of this encounter hides in plain sight—visible but not legible—and subversively introduces an illicit element into the rarefied air of the gallery.
In selecting methods that yield text legible only to some, Bassett plays with the dialectics of optics, which here become a metaphor for the negotiation between visibility and invisibility in homosexuality. Porn Clip #5 is a visual paradox: an accurate translation that might be legible to a sighted person with knowledge of Braille, but which is frustratingly illegible to the blind because the marks are drawn, not embossed. This illegibility speaks to the inadequacy of both language and art to convey authentic experience, an inadequacy that was at the heart of many Cold War-era artists’ rejection of Abstract Expressionism’s gestural mark. Gesture was understood as the visual trace of the artist’s presence, phenomenologically linked to the body that produced it. Jasper Johns and Robert Indiana relied on stencils to expose the fraudulence inherent in the idea of gestural authenticity, demonstrating that the appearance of the gesturally authentic can be manufactured and reproduced. Bassett performs a similar negation, reducing an intimate physical experience to a series of regulated dots in a grid. And while Porn Clip #5 initially promises a return to the phenomenological in evoking Braille’s tactility, this return is frustrated by its two-dimensional surface. This twinned negation functions to sever the work’s formal qualities from its socio-historical meaning.
Bassett uses the theme of invisibility in his work to political effect, as did his subject Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Untitled (Perfect Lovers), the piece by Gonzalez-Torres that Bassett references in this work from the Art Titles series, was made in tribute to Gonzalez-Torres’s lover, Ross Laycock, as so many of his works were. It consists of two identical battery-operated commercial office wall-clocks, such as might be seen on a news bureau wall, hung side by side, their casings touching. At the time of installation the clocks are synchronized, but as the batteries run down, they eventually drift out of synch and stop. The clocks can be read as a metaphor about the synchronization between lovers, a notion supported by a letter Gonzalez-Torres wrote to Laycock in 1988, in which he wrote, “we are synchronized, now and forever,” and at the top of which he drew two synchronized clock-faces.1 But the clocks’ eventual slowing and stopping would also come to metaphorize the couple’s literal de-synchronization as a result of Laycock’s death from AIDS in 1991, preceding by five years Gonzalez-Torres’s own AIDS-related death.
As a gay Cuban man with AIDS, Gonzalez-Torres inhabited three minoritized identity categories, yet reference to and representation of these identifications is notably absent in his work. His titling convention further distances the work from any self-identificatory signification. Nearly all of his works are titled Untitled, followed by a parenthetical referent “suggesting a meaning related to experiences of the artist’s life, but always open and multivalent,”2 allowing the titles to be both personal and widely inclusive of his audience. José Muñoz argues that Gonzalez-Torres employs a strategy of “disidentification,” which Muñoz describes as “the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”3
Gonzalez-Torres was openly queer, and his HIV-positive status was a well-known subject of his work. His avoidance of these identifications in his art was not a self-protective move, as were the self-distancing strategies of this exhibition’s Cold War-era homosexual artists. Rather, he intended to short-circuit a conservative American museum culture that had refused to address AIDS, in part to avoid drawing fire from a resurgent religious right intent on policing the art world and erasing all representations of both homosexuality and AIDS. With an increasingly bellicose political right in Congress willing to serve as the religious right’s handmaiden, the stakes were clear, as exemplified by the Corcoran Museum of Art’s pre-emptive cancellation of a 1989 Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective in order to avoid the loss of public funding. Gonzalez-Torres’s rejection of these discursive terms was thus a way to produce art fully informed by his status as an HIV-positive gay man, but not explicitly so. His work functioned as a “virus” within the museum world, a term he used advisedly: capable of seeding dissident meanings without being visible as itself dissident. This dialectic would become a central thematic in Richard Bassett’s work as well. That these investigations take place in the culturally symbolic space of the art gallery only brings into sharper relief their metaphoric reminder of how thoroughly homosexuality has been excluded from and rendered invisible within the public realm.
1. Julie Ault, Félix González-Torres (Göttingen: SteidlDangin, 2006), 155.
2. Monica Amor, “Félix González-Torres: Towards a Postmodern Sublimity” Third Text 30 (1995): 73.
3. José Muñoz, Disidentification (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 4.
Richard Bassett Biography
Richard Bassett (b. 1947, New Haven, CT; d. 2013, Oakland, CA) received his BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware (1969). He attended the California College of Arts & Crafts, Oakland (1970), and was apprenticed to the sculptor Tom Doyle through the Great Lakes College Association Apprenticeship Program, New York. His first solo shows took place at the Triangle Gallery, San Francisco (1985, 1987), followed by a one-man show at Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco (1997). Recent group shows were held at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (1987); the Berkeley Art Center, California (1997); Texas Fine Art Association, Dallas (1999); Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco (2001); LIMN Gallery, San Francisco (2003); and Tatar Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2005). Bassett’s work is included in the public and private collections of The di Rosa Preserve, Napa, California; Tom & Jane Doyle, Roxbury, Connecticut; Marcia Tanner, Berkeley, California; and Barbara & Kenneth Juster, New York. More information about his work can be found at www.richardbassettart.com
Sarah JM Kolberg Biography
Sarah JM Kolberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo specializing in the American and French post-WWII period, with additional areas of focus in narratology, queer theory, and queer subjectivity in experimental film. Her dissertation will focus on the Nouveaux Réalistes. She has won numerous awards as both a writer and independent film producer, holds a joint MA in English and Film, and will complete her MFA in Media Study this year.
Poet Bill Berkson and painter Michael Goldberg became close through their mutual friend, the poet Frank O’Hara. Though O’Hara wasn’t directly involved in this work’s making, he is nonetheless everywhere present within it. Its diction, campy locution, and collaborative creation all betray his fingerprints, as does the work’s affiliation with what the poetry world calls “occasional poetry,” works composed to commemorate a particular moment, often written on the spot. In this instance, Berkson decided to write on sheets of paper and send them to Goldberg, who at that time was confined to the New York Psychiatric Hospital, a voluntary admission that Goldberg elected as a plea deal to keep him out of jail. Goldberg, Berkson, and O’Hara had collaborated earlier on artwork with poetic texts, so the painter understood that the receipt of these blank sheets with fragments of poetry was intended to spur him to creative activity. This was a gesture of friendship, meant to entertain and cheer him up during his long hospitalization.
Berkson recalls that in this particular work, all the writing was his. Yet despite the fact that the hand is Berkson’s, the spirit of O’Hara powerfully infuses the work. In some instances O’Hara’s presence is literal, as in an orange announcement card, seemingly affixed to the upper cable of the bridge. The card publicizes the 1964 production of O’Hara’s new play, The General Returns from One Place to Another, on a double bill with LeRoi Jones’s one-act The Baptism. This explains the dedication to LeRoi Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka) and “exclusivity” at the top of the image, the scare quotes yet another reference to the arch voice of O’Hara, as he sought to marry the significance of a word with its typographic projection. Berkson’s winking locutions evidence O’Hara’s presence more subtly; so resonant are they of the older poet’s characteristic camp voice. Berkson writes, for example, Everybody / that is not inside me / everyday from now on. Further down the page he writes, Day-long decimal of my ardors / An admirer of the arts / And a real gent ($), the dollar sign, along with the reference to decimals in the context of ardors, thus suggesting that artistic patronage was not the only form of this particular gent’s largesse.
I want to be clear that Berkson denies that these lines were intended to read as gay in any way. And I’m not saying he’s misremembering or wrong. Rather, the fact that a palpably gay idiom such as O’Hara’s could be so naturalized across the early 1960s art world as to be invisible as such is precisely my point. Berkson himself freely articulates that, at this moment in his career, “I adopted, imitated, and parodied so many things about Frank between 1960 and about then.”1 (In other words, around the date of this work, 1964.) Berkson was hardly alone in this regard; O’Hara’s influence in the art world was, and remains, legendary.
Painters and poets in the late ‘50s were each other’s chief audience, and their aesthetic cross-fertilization seems a logical outcome of this fact. But it’s worth distinguishing at this point between paintings, such as this collaboration, that feature poets writing on painter’s canvases—perhaps the majority done in concert with O’Hara himself—and another kind of textuality in painting. The latter mode, more centrally the theme of this exhibition, takes place when painters don’t outsource the writing in their work, but both write and paint themselves. In this instance, the particular subject of this exhibition, writing and painting become extensions of one another—and in some regards indistinguishable. Here, however much a collaboration, poet and artist remain separate, each responsible for their own art form. Yet that separation is in no way evident in the painting, which holds together as a single image, no matter how separate the hands that made it.
1. Bill Berkson, telephone conversation with author, June 26, 2014.
Bill Berkson Biography
Bill Berkson (b. 1939, New York, NY) has studied at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; Columbia University, New York; The New School for Social Research, New York; and The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Berkson has authored about 20 books and pamphlets of poetry, such as Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings, a collection of his 1960s collaborations with Frank O’Hara, and Gloria, a portfolio of poems with etchings by Alex Katz. He has received awards and grants for poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, the Poets Foundation, the Marin Arts Council, the Briarcombe Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome. He was a Distinguished Paul Mellon Lecturer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2006). He was granted the Artspace Award for Art Criticism (1990), and published a selection of his criticism entitled The Sweet Singer of Modernism and Other Art Writings (2003). He has acted as Corresponding Editor for Art in America since 1988, as Contributing Editor for artcritical.com since 2008, and on the Editorial Board of American Painters. Berkson regularly contributes to Artforum, Art on Paper, and American Craft. He has curated exhibitions featuring individual artists like Ronald Bladen, George Herriman, and Albert York, and served as Adjunct Curator for the exhibition entitled Facing Eden: 100 Years of California Landscape Art, Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco. Berkson taught art history, art writing, and poetry at the San Francisco Art Institute, California (1984-2008) and briefly assumed the position of its interim dean (1992). Berkson currently lives and works in San Francisco.
Michael Goldberg Biography
Michael Goldberg (b. 1924, Bronx, NY; d. 2007, New York, NY) was an abstract painter of the New York School. He began taking classes at the Art Students League of New York and studied painting at Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Art, New York (1938-1950). At the age of 18, he volunteered for service in the United States Army during World War II. After continuing his studies at the Art Students League and with Hans Hofmann, he began to paint for a living and soon took over Mark Rothko’s Bowery loft studio. Goldberg’s work first appeared publicly in the Nine Street Show (1951), a significant exhibition organized by Leo Castelli. His first solo show was held at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (1953). Recent solo exhibitions were held at Knoedler & Company, New York (2007, 2010); Weinberger, Copenhagen, Denmark (2007); Galleria Peccolo, Livorno, Italy (2007); Galerie Biedermann, Munich, Germany (2008); and University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, California (2010). A recent retrospective of his work opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, Florida (2013). His work is represented in numerous public collections, including: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Museum of Modern Art, Jerusalem, Israel; Museum of Modern Western Art, Tokyo, Japan; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania.
Jonathan D. Katz Biography
Jonathan D. Katz (b. 1958, St. Louis, MO) was the first full-time American academic to be tenured in the field of gay and lesbian studies. He founded and chaired both the Harvey Milk Institute, San Francisco, and the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association. He co-founded Queer Nation, San Francisco, and the Gay and Lesbian Town Meeting, Chicago. As an Associate Professor at Yale University, New Haven (2002-06), Katz was Founding Director of its Lesbian and Gay Studies Program. He has been the Terra Foundation Senior Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Katz co-curated the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, which opened at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2010), and traveled to The Brooklyn and Tacoma Museums. Hide/Seek received the Best National Museum Show Award (2011) from the International Association of Art Critics, and its accompanying book was voted the best LGBT non-fiction (2011) by the American Library Association. Katz currently directs the doctoral program in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, New York. He is completing two new books, Art, Eros and the Sixties, and The Silent Camp: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and the Cold War, to be published by the University of Chicago Press. His exhibition entitled Classical Nudes and the Making of Queer History is opening at the Leslie Lohman Museum for Gay and Lesbian Art, New York (2014), where Katz serves as President. His next major exhibition, ArtAIDSAmerica, opens at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2015) and will travel to four other museums across the United States.
References
Bill Berkson, telephone conversation with author, June 26, 2014.
Best known for his work in collage and correspondence art, Ray Johnson remains an enigmatic figure in the post-war American landscape. His use of time- and community-based media—such as objects sent through the US Postal Service—added a dimension to his work that differentiated him from his cohort. Correspondence art resonated primarily with the practices of a slightly older generation of artists, including John Cage, whose work followed principles of conversation rather than communication, the former implying egalitarian involvement and the latter more closely associated with dictation. Ever curious about meaning, Johnson often turned to puns and homonyms as a way of introducing multiple simultaneous meanings into a picture. In Untitled (Man In Hat) from 1960, Johnson uses a found image of a man wearing a hat, onto which is superimposed a spool of thread. Though the spool looks like a collage element, it is in fact native to the printed image; Johnson has added only the thread, which appears to be wound around the spool in the picture. This is a classically Johnsonian conceit: a visual play between what is appropriated and what is inserted, and also a linguistic rhyme (head/thread).
Two later collages in the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, suggest Johnson’s exploratory engagement with the historical evolution of meaning in fine art. Both pieces, undated but likely made in the 1970s, use images cut from art catalogues of the time. One of these collages features a reproduction of an 1804 self-portrait by French Neoclassical painter Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, excised from a magazine and mounted on cardboard. Circular holes have been cut out of the picture and cardboard, echoed by similar holes cut into the strips of paper collaged over various parts of the composition. A collage element affixed toward the right edge, also cut from a magazine, bears a picture of a hand painting a circular shape red, with the words, It’s easy, printed below.
Ingres, one of the early forebears of Modernism, is renowned for his renderings of complex spatial relationships, which served as examples for later generations of artists, including Piet Mondrian, whose work Johnson repeatedly referenced. Indeed, the other collage on view here features a photograph of Mondrian in front of Broadway Boogie Woogie, arguably his most famous late painting. Johnson has cut Mondrian’s body out of the picture, leaving only the artist’s outline to suggest his presence. By making Mondrian conspicuously absent and by partially covering Ingres’s face, Johnson puts particular pressure not just on the relationship of artist to artwork, but also on the authorial presence and visibility of the artist within a finished work of art. If we can understand the inclusion of Ingres as Johnson’s protest against dismissal of artworks on the basis of form without consideration of conceptual depth, the physical absence of Mondrian can in turn be understood as Johnson’s investigation of the presence of the artist – or lack thereof – and its effect on the terms of reception for a particular work or idea.
Johnson’s primary medium was collage, but unlike in the objects discussed above, the majority of his collages comprise a cut-and-pasted combination of found images and the artist’s own repetitive drawings—of snakes, for instance, or of bunnies. By excising images and words from their usual contexts and re-inserting them in other, less frequently used spaces, Johnson coaxes these fragments to assume various new meanings – a practice that opened the door to alternative interpretations. This working method became central to Johnson, Rauschenberg, and other post-war artists. In Janis Joplin (1971), Johnson uses the theme of Joplin’s death that same year as a referent, but the effect of the resulting “portrait” transcends both Joplin and death. It is Johnson’s presence—made known through the hand-drawn moticos and sequences of numbers and shapes—that seems to dominate, not that of his ostensible subject. Johnson is his moticos: we know him by these visual signs, rather than by his biography. The use of imagery linked primarily to Johnson in a work about Joplin in effect collapses the two. What Johnson calls to mind, here and elsewhere in his work, is the way a subject is constituted not by some essential fact, but by its relationship to other subjects. In foregrounding this paradox, Johnson enables the possibility of new and different thinking around identity and its networks.
Ray Johnson Biography
Ray Johnson (b. 1927, Detroit, MI; d. 1995, Long Island, NY) studied at Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1945-1948). The most recent retrospective of Johnson’s work opened at Raven Row, London (2009), and traveled to Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Recent solo exhibitions in 2014 have been held at Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, New York; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; and The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. Group exhibitions have been held at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2009); Max Ernst Museum, Brühl, Germany (2011); the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. (2011); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California (2012); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2012); the Brooklyn Art Museum, New York (2012); the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York (2012); the Musée Denys-Puech, Rodez, France (2012); the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois (2013); The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (2014); and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York (2014). More information about his work can be found at www.rayjohnsonestate.com.
Cat Dawson Biography
Cat Dawson is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo specializing in art of the American post-war postmodern. Her particular interests include the interplay between text and language, conceptual art and theories of the body, mid-century painting and the sexuality of abstraction, and psychoanalysis. Her dissertation is on sexuality and difference in American post-war painting.
