Jonathan D. Katz on Bill Berkson & Michael Goldberg

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