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by Andy Robbins
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My flung careful few, steady bells at the pleat ends of the operating skirt our carburettori have draped over the planet, napkin framed around the unformed fontanelle of now, the soon-to-be-cicatricose present, for which, as the price goes up, many will be sacrificed: now, as the willow is in first bud like a giant whip of green pearls in a chthonic fist, and in the wind the metasequoia roars as if on fire, now they approach with scalpel and spoon, our polity lies on the metal tray in a pool of noxious black liquor, the semen of men fed on anthracite. |
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by Steve Dolan
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EVIL DWELLS IN THE SOUL OF AMBITION
THE BEAST KNOWS THE HOPELESSNESS OF GRANDEUR
TO MATE AND GRAZE AND SLEEP WITHOUT FEAR
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by Tom Patterson
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| Basil King at 75 | Coinciding with his birthday, an exhibition from his “Green Man” series at Poets House shined a rare light on an artist who has charted an independent course.
 “Responsibility is to keep
the ability to respond.”
--Robert Duncan
“The Law I Love is Major Mover”
The selection of paintings and drawings by Basil King on view through spring 2010 in the new home of Poets House, in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City, was a small, low-key exhibition, but it marked a minor milestone for this irrepressible veteran of the New York art scene, whose work has been far too rarely shown in New York or elsewhere. King, who turned seventy-five during the show’s run (May 30), is an alumnus of Black Mountain College, the backwater bastion of avant-garde art that existed in the North Carolina mountains for about twenty-five years spanning the mid-20th century. While other artists associated with Black Mountain (Franz Kline, Willem De Kooning, Jacob Lawrence, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Cy Twombly et al) gained international recognition long ago, King has languished in relative obscurity, despite his steady ouput of distinctive work, his longtime residence in New York, and close friendships with cultural luminaries on both coasts.
Given the rarity of public opportunies to see King’s work, Poets House’s showing from his series “The Green Man” was worthy of celebration and a proper critical response. Despite the less-than-ideal conditions under which these pieces were presented; it was good to see them on view before a potentially receptive audience in the city where King has lived for fifty years. They offered a tantalizing glimpse of his oeuvre.
Since the end of the 1960s King and his wife Martha--a writer and editor who briefly attended Black Mountain--have owned and occupied the same Brooklyn brownstone, where they’ve raised two daughters while continuing their creative work and remaining engaged with the city’s cultural life. New paintings and drawings are almost always in varying stages of progress in King’s third-floor home studio, which I’ve been privileged to visit repeatedly. But since 1979, when he had his last one-artist show in a New York gallery, his only solo exhibitions in New York have been at literary venues such as the Gotham Book Mart, the Poetry Project at St. Marks, and the Bowery Poetry Club. Veteran New York art dealers, curators, and critics know King’s name and maybe a little about the art, but he remains without a New York gallery affiliation, and he has never had anything resembling the proper retrospective his work deserves.
Poets and poetry-centered organizations have been receptive to King’s art because of his longtime interest in poetry, his friendships with important American poets, and the fact that, since the mid-1980s, he has nurtured his own poetry career. Although a relative late-comer to poetic practice, he evidently retained plenty of what he picked up in his studies at Black Mountain with Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. He writes like none of them, but there’s a clear literary kinship. Seven of his books and six chapbooks have been issued by small-press publishers such as Cy Gyst, Marsh Hawk, and Spuyten Duyvil, and his poems have appeared in a number of independent print and on-line magazines. Some of his drawings have been reproduced on the covers and inside pages of his own books, and others have appeared in literary magazines and books by fellow poets including Paul Blackburn, Allen Ginsberg, and LeRoi Jones. His identity as an artist first and foremost (and one with a formidable knowledge of art history) iis reflected in the fact that much of his poetry is about visual art, artists, and art-making.
That King’s own art has been so consistently neglected is inexcusable, but I suspect commercial and curatorial resistance to the work stems from its unfamiliarity and refusal to fit neatly into existing categories. King’s strikingly idiosyncratic paintings occupy their own aesthetic terrain, so the standard brushoff line of all gallerists when rejecting an artist’s work-- “It doesn’t fit with what we’re showing.”--is, unfortunately, always applicable in his case. His career illustrates some of the perils of going one’s own way in an increasingly systematized, globalized art world. The uncompromising integrity of his vision is matched by the determined perseverance with which he has pursued it in spite of the long odds. He has, in Duncan’s words, kept the ability to respond.
Like other artists who were students at Black Mountain in the 1950s, King painted in an abstract-expressionist vein at the outset of his career, but he abandoned this way of working when he was in his late twenties. At the time he was a new father feeling increasingly dissatisfied with his art and out of step with his generation, and the resultant stress triggered a nervous breakdown that creatively immobilized him. After a hiatus of about two years and a reassessment of his creative priorities, King resumed painting and experimented for several years with a repertoire of biomorphic shapes. Eventually such forms evolved into--or were replaced by--loose depictions of figures as King began developing a more personal approach, applying his own kind of gestural, painterly, ab-ex treatment to recognizable but sparingly detailed imagery. He has continued to pursue this evidently fertile line of visual investigation in subsequent years, producing substantial results in the form of several hundred paintings and countless drawings.
 One of the singular aspects of the hybrid vision King has evolved over the last forty years is the way his imagery often appears to be emerging from or slipping into murky, abstract space. To my mind the vaguely defined figures in some of the paintings suggest ghostly apparitions undergoing a process of metamorphosis or mediation between worlds.
In the case of “The Green Man” series, the operative mediation is between human identity and nature. All thirteen of the paintings are tightly composed oil portrait busts of figures wearing fez-like headgear. King made them in 1996 following a trip to England, where he was born and lived until he was twelve. Their inspiration was the carved figures that have come to be collectively known as the Green Man, incorporated into the architecture of England’s medieval cathedrals. For the first time during that trip he paid close attention to these figures, with their faces peering out from dense growths of leaves and vines. In the centuries since they were sculpted by anomymous artisans, they have been symbolically associated with the energies of the forest and the forces that inspire artistic creation.
In King’s variations on the archetype, leaf-like forms are often incorporated directly into the facial features--as lips, eyebrows, or mouths, as if cellulose and human skin were equivalent. In one painting two symmetrically intersecting paisley shapes that resemble leaves (or a pair of disembodied bird wings) are superimposed directly over the eyes to create a kind of racoon-face mask. In another a leaf-like form superimposed over the face’s single, cyclopean eye also reads as the profile head of a bird whose long neck runs down along the nose-line to the leaf-like lips. King has characterized these paintings as “portraits of the Green Man’s facets,” and because of the Green Man’s English origins he has given them single-name titles he associates with English historical figures--Guy(Fawkes), Robin (Hood), (Christopher) Marlowe, Horatio (Nelson), and Walter (Raleigh).
The palette features shades of green, of course, and also includes other colors typically found in forested landscapes--grays and browns, as well as the pink, orange and white of certain wildflowers. Other hues are employed in three thematically related, untitled drawings also at Poets House, all from a 2009 series called “Looking for the Green Man.” Each of them features two or more abstracted, faceless figures presumably representing seekers of the creative, regenerative energies the Green Man emblemizes. The group of six standing figures in one drawing suggests an entourage of pilgrims, while four dark-clad figures in another are huddled together as if in a strategy session. In the show’s most striking drawing, a blue birdlike entity stands or perches alongside a yellow figure of about the same size, more amorphous but vaguely humanoid--a suspended moment from an interspecies encounter.
At Poets House King’s paintings and drawings were dispersed among in-service bookshelves and other furnishings in three separate rooms, and none were accompanied by wall labels, nor was there any other wall text to identify the artist or briefly summarize the unifying theme of the works. Poets House made this information available only in the form of a two-page printed handout that was easy for visitors to overlook.
To be fair, Poets House makes no pretense at being an art museum or gallery, and the organization is still settling into its new digs. Due to the frequent intersection of poetry and visual art in collaborative projects, illustrated books, and poet-penned art criticism, it makes good sense for Poets House to maintain some kind of art-exhibition component. But the set-up in the new headquarters doesn’t lend itself very well to that purpose, so I hope the directors and staff give some thought toward improving accomodations for the art they show. With that caveat, Poets House deserves credit for exhibiting the work of this undeservedly neglected, autonomously motivated, boundlessly inspired artist. It remains to be seen whether this small selection might have caught the eye of anyone with the capacity to mount a larger, more proper exhibition of King’s workk. That would be the best-case scenario, but one knows better than to count on such responsive attention in a world where just about everyone has gotten too busy to look, much less to see.
“The Green Man: Paintings and Drawings by Basil King” was on view from March 20 through June 12, 2010, at Poets House, 10 River Terrace (at Murray Street), New York; more information from www.poetshouse.org; phone (212) 431-7920.
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by Maggie Dubris & Scott Gillis
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In the Dust Zone: part 4
NEW CORPSE SERIAL
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IN THE DUST ZONE :: www.dustzone.com
written by Maggie Dubris
drawings by Scott Gillis
READ 1st CHAPTER CLICK HERE
READ 2nd CHAPTER CLICK HERE
READ 3rd CHAPTER CLICK HERE
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Maggie Dubris is the author of Skels (Soft Skull Press, 2004), and Weep Not, My Wanton (Black Sparrow Press, 2002). She worked for twenty years as a full-time 911 paramedic in the Times Square district in New York City, and is currently employed by Kids Kicking Cancer, working as martial arts health care specialist with children in hospitals.
Scott Gillis is an artist and illustrator who has worked for major publications and music companies and has shown his work in the United States, Asia, Europe and Australia. He had his works in the famous RAW magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and many more publications. He also does comics and graphic novels. He did the art for Barry Gifford's Perdita Durango and collaborated with writer Greil Marcus His latest book is with New York City writer Maggie Dubris.
In The Dust Zone (Centre-Ville Books, 2010) is available from:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/in-the-dust-zone/6481058 |
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by Ruxandra Cesereanu
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The Birth of Liquid Desires | by Ruxandra Cesereanu
translated from the Romanian by ALISTAIR BLYTH
The men a woman twists around in words are post-males. As a rule, all that is left of them is flayed skin laid out to dry. But sometimes they leave behind visions, phantasms, sensations and emotions.
The man of whom I shall write at the beginning of this series of men of every variety was a cat. Many people might think he was a tomcat, but no, he was a green cat, with piercing eyes and a well-trimmed bushy moustache. A hussar-cat, with strange desires, about which he once told me, as we were sitting on the steps of a pavilion. He had a warm voice, albeit rugose from tobacco, a colonel’s voice, half Prussian, half Polish. He was a short man, striding softly or even slightly swaying, his eyes a little inflamed by alcohol, like a merry frog. That was why I liked him: he was both a cat and a frog. He was a man who was one of us, a women’s man, almost like us, without having lost his virile sense and without ever having had the urge to be with a man bodily, to consummate sex with one like and identical to him. What he saw in women were warm roundnesses and he had acquired a taste for voluptuousness. I didn’t know what a woman warm roundnesses was, but I liked how it sounded. He spoke slowly, munching his words like slices of halva, swallowing them at leisure. That was how the idea of writing about men came to me. For, it was he who began to tell me about how he would have liked to be a woman for a day. He would have liked to find out, for one day in the whole of his man’s life, how it was for female blood to flow there, through the crevice, what kind of blood it was, how it flowed outside. He was very attached to our life, that of women, in a tender and blithe way, because, as I have already said, he was a cat. He did not, however, want to know about what it is like to give birth; the pangs of creation did not arouse him in the least. He wanted to be a woman just for one day. As a man, his desires were both strange and normal; in any case they had enchanted me. He would have liked to be endowed with a marsupial pouch, but not like that of a kangaroo: a better-concealed, preferably invisible, marsupial pouch in which to carry his lover. To be more exact, he would have liked his lover to dwell all day long in that marsupial pouch, to carry her with him day and night, to shield her from the temptations and the despites of this world. He would have let her breathe fresh air only at night, by the light of the stars and, as he made a point of mentioning, he would have let her watch television for a little. But he would also have made her coffee at the crack of dawn and he would have washed her like a badger cub. He would have spied on her as she said her prayers, to see whether she said a prayer for him. He would have hand-fed her, like a frail creature. Well, I told him, but this lover of yours would have to be the size of a five-year-old girl, otherwise she wouldn’t fit in your marsupial pouch. What can you do with a lover who has the body of a five-year-old girl? A lover who is always with you and in you, he told me, what more could I ask? “A pocket lover,” I murmured. “I would tell her stories and brush her hair,” he interposed. I looked closely at the man before me: he was a cat of a man, and so I said meow-meow and off I went.
He was a tall red-haired man, almost always dressed in black. He was an interesting man, but I avoided him like the plague. I would not have liked to be touched by him at any time or under any circumstances. I felt revulsion, as towards a hysterical and incomplete man. His small hands were those of a girl, his eyes autistic. He was lively and full of charm and a great storyteller, picturesquely loquacious when he was not in the grip of paranoia. His body was never to be seen, because it was always swaddled, camouflaged in roomy and concealing layers of clothes. He refused to make his body felt in any way or another, and that was why he was reminiscent of a gravedigger. He had white skin, unaccustomed to being touched. He did not know what it meant to be tempted or to desire, because he did not permit himself to feel anything. He was frightened of the world and of the bodies that circulated through it. Had he been able to choose the way in which he could be born, he would have opted to be a soul without a body. That is why he was, in fact, a kind of ghost. He was a man enclosed within his own body as though in a crypt. He had the sharp voice of a quarrelsome or nosy woman: it seemed that he had concentrated his hope of life in that hysterical, squeaky voice of his, in the manhood that it ought to have contained. What was to be done with such a man? To leave him to his own devices, to let him find his own way. He had a horror of the male sex, because he had a horror of his own body. Sometimes he and his solitude made me nauseous. Other times, he was very dear to me, because he had red hair and dressed in black.
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by M.G. Stephens
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VISITORS
The Piccadilly Line to Leicester Square,
I said, and then change for the Northern Line,
But make sure it is the Edgware Branch,
Get off in Hampstead, I’ll be waiting outside,
Old, bald, worn, your classmate from grade school,
Our old parochial school on Long Island,
Many lives ago, when we still believed
In the transubstantiation, and thought ourselves
Quite cool souls migrating through the universe. |
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September 21, 2009
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