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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 Andrei Oisteanu
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NARCOTICS AND HALLUCINOGENS
In 1674 Moldavian boyar Nicolae Milescu took residence in Moscow, having been offered a high official position at the Posolski Prikaz, the Tsar’s chancellery charged with foreign affairs. In 1675, Milescu was sent by the Tsar of Russia, Alexei Mikhailovich, as high ambassador on a diplomatic mission to the Khan of China. One of his missions was “to learn at any cost and beyond the shadow of a doubt whether friendly relations and mutual affection are to be established in the future between His Majesty the Tsar of Russia and Kangxi, Great Khan of China.” Milescu was also under orders to gather geographic, demographic and ethnographic facts from all the territories that he was bound to cross. |
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by Andrei Oisteanu
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JEWS, CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS I shall try to present from a comparative perspective a historical (as well as legendary and literary) motif which has been very widespread in the Middle Ages. The motif in question is that of public theological disputations. These inter-confessional controversies were commonly “staged” according to the following scenario: spokesmen of two or more religions were set to challenge one another in a public theological disputation, often having as an “arbiter” none other than the sovereign or the Pope. I shall present several debates of this type that took place in Western (chapter A), in Eastern (chapter B) and in Central Europe (chapter C). I shall not approach the subject from a properly speaking theological perspective, but rather from a history of religions perspective. |
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by Susan Connell
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Polyestra |
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by Polly Frost
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THE CURATOR The Curator oversees the acquisitions of new works, takes responsibility for the maintenance of the museum’s holdings, and carefully sculpts the museum’s future with her vision of where Art Is Going. If, as a practical matter, The Curator spends most of her energy enhancing her reputation among the cosmopolitan museum set -- well, so much the better! After all, you don’t expect her to stick around this hick town for long, do you? ROLE MODELS Athena The Curator works hard to stand for the art community the way Athena symbolized Athens. Like the Greek goddess, The Curator always strives to be magnificent, noble, and austerely stylish.
Simone de Beauvoir Feminist, philosopher, bohemian, and scarf-wearing lover of Sartre, de Beauvoir showed The Curator that a woman could have brains, panache, and significance. The Curator finds it curiously arousing that such a proud woman could also have abased herself so thoroughly in the service of her mentor.
Andy Warhol He achieved artistic fame by mixing up the low and the high. He was a master manipulator. And, let’s face it, The Curator would rather be a creative person than a bureaucrat anyway. Who wouldn’t? |
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by Judith Hertog
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Three weeks after my daughter had started first grade, we received a letter in the mail with her English-as-a-Second-Language test results: she had scored the lowest possible assessment: Tier A – described as “appropriate for language learners who have arrived in the U.S. this academic school year without previous instruction in English.” I didn’t know she had been tested. I didn’t even realize Dina wasn’t considered a native speaker of English. She has lived in the US since she was one year old and there is no language she speaks more fluently than English.
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by Brian P. Hall
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Project Gone Postal
“Going to work” was one of the first status updates I read after I joined Facebook. At the time, I was naïve about the nature of Facebook communication, so I immediately wondered if this friend had been previously out of work and, if so, why. Had he been laid-off or fired? Had he been sick or injured on the job? Of course, he could have just changed jobs, but the lack of punctuation in the update made me think, for no real reason, of the doldrums of a familiar workplace, the type of place that becomes so repetitive that the lack of punctuation was a metaphor for how he saw his job: endless. Since I was new to social networking sites, I thought it was important for me to respond to every update, but “Going to work” frustrated me because what should I say? Telling him “that sucks” could be just as insulting as writing “Yay!” because I didn’t know how he really felt about going to work. Should I click the “like” button, but what if he works in a sweatshop? Do I really want to give that the thumbs up? I thought about telling him, “Good for you” and adding, at the end, the coy emoticon wink “;)”showing that this was a sarcastic statement meant in good fun. I felt it was better to wait for others to respond, but no one did. I assumed that everyone was sharing my problem, and in the end, I wrote nothing because I became too angry with this “friend” and his inability to use punctuation. Honestly, it would have been easier for me if he had used, for example, an exclamation point: “Going to work!” Then I would have known his excitement and would have given the perfect response: “It’s about time you lazy ass! ;)." During my first few weeks on Facebook, I found that the more friends I collected, the more I was assailed by grocery lists, “Need to pick up milk”; exercise routines, “Ran five miles today. Whew! I’m tired!”; drinking preferences, “uncork the bottle, it’s wine nite”; sarcastic parents, “I only slept three hours last night. Thanks, (insert newborn’s name)”; and angry non-sequiturs, “Listen, I don’t care what you heard, but it wasn’t my idea!” And as I read the updates, I couldn’t help but to have an overwhelming feeling of apathy for these friends. In fact, I felt so depressed that that’s all they had going in their lives that I stopped using Facebook, deciding if they really had anything important to say they would call me. After two months and no phone calls, I received an email from “The Facebook Team” telling me what I already knew: “You haven’t been back to Facebook recently.” The email’s second sentence was simple enough: “You have received notifications while you were gone.” But, to me, it dripped of a mother’s “Oh, I-saw-your-slightly-senile-great-grandmother-the-other-day-and-she-said-she-understands-that-you’re-too-busy-to-visit” passive-aggression. So I thought, “Okay, Facebook, you win. I’ll visit.” And just like visiting a senile great grandmother, I spent most of my time trying to figure out what people were saying and not knowing how to properly respond. During the same week I received the Facebook email, I went to a party and the conversation turned to Facebook. After I questioned the site’s usefulness, I joked about people sending status updates through the mail. “Wouldn’t that be disappointing,” I said, “to receive a postcard from someone and thinking that person took the time to buy the postcard and stamps, and then, on the back, it read something like, ‘just woke-up’.” We continued to laugh about random postcard status updates the rest of the night, but the next day I seriously started to question the nature of language. Shouldn’t we expect more out of communication? Shouldn’t language be an insightful dialogue and not simply status updates? To prove that there is more to communication, I decided to begin a social experiment/experience that I called, “Gone Postal”. For thirty days I would send all my status updates through the mail, hoping the recipients began thinking about the weight of words. It would be the ultimate postal satire. I posted my idea in a note on Facebook and within minutes six friends called me a genius and wanted to be part of the experiment. At the end of the first day, I had fourteen friends who were excited to get my status updates in the mail. And, in mid-June, when “Gone Postal” officially began, I was sending my updates to 19 people, which was approximately 15 percent of my “friends list”. Now, I thought, they’ll all share my disappointment in language.
Become A fan of Gone Postal: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Gone-Postal/89972927683 |
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by Calin Andrei-Mihailescu
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The mummyfestos cracking open after the Bastille came out of her mythochondrial boudoir. |
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by jj phillips
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The Corpse Cookbook is proud to present our first recipe from jj phillips! |
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by Eddie Woods
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 Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approx. 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule. 4 minutes later
The violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk. 6 minutesA young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.
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by Eddie Woods
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 "Hello, I'm home!" It was Harold, calling so loudly from just inside the front door of the Ins & Outs Press building, his voice ringing with pure glee, that I could hear him clearly from my apartment three floors up; which itself was immediately below the two-floor suite I'd given over to him for his couple of weeks stay with me. It was early winter 1984 and Harold had just returned to Amsterdam from a brief reading tour somewhere in Germany. Prior to that he'd made his second appearance at an annual Benn Posset-organized One World Poetry Festival (the previous having been P78 six years earlier, when Hal and I first met). Shortly after the festival, and before he'd moved into I&O, we performed together at an auxiliary event Benn had arranged at the de Melkweg (Milky Way) multi-media center. Harold was casually clad (tight brown leather, I seem to recall), in keeping with Amsterdam's easygoing artistic temperament. Whereas I--in suit, tie and city-slicker Stetson--was dressed way beyond merely to the nines. "Aren't you overdoing it?" Harold finally asked, his sideways glance at my outfit betraying confusion rather than anything remotely judgmental. I simply smiled and kept walking. Following our reading, however, and over drinks at the bar, Harold patted me on the shoulder and said: "I take it back. That get-up is perfect for you. You're the gangster poet, after all." |
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by Brook Wilensky-Lanford
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In the beginning, William Willcocks had wanted to be a missionary, but instead he became the foremost British irrigation engineer of his time, and God saw that it was good.
In 1902 Willcocks designed the world's largest bridge--the Aswan Dam across the Nile--and two years later he was knighted for his work reconstructing the waterways of South Africa after the Boer War. With a resume like this, it was not surprising that Willcocks developed a reputation for megalomania. After observing him at work, the British archaeologist, writer, and sometime intelligence agent Gertrude Bell--no wilting flower herself--wrote: "Sir William is a 20th century Don Quixote, erratic, maddening--and entirely loveable; a streak of genius, a good slab of unreasonableness…Good luck go with him, and may I never have to work with him." Willcocks, tall and lanky, always wore a slight scowl, and he spoke and wrote with a blunt honesty that his well-mannered English colleagues found off-putting. |
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by Thomas Laird
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The book of meditation has fourteen chapters. |
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by Hariette Surovell
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"Do you have any enemies?" "T", the Verizon security expert suddenly asked me.
"Enemies?"
"Yes, Ma'am. Is there someone out there who would want to do you harm?"
I felt like Briscoe and Logan from "Law and Order" were at my door, investigating a homicide, or in my case, potential identity theft.
ENEMIES?!
It was the second week of April, 2009.
I had first contacted Verizon in December, 2008, about a simple customer service snafu. Since then, I had logged in an inestimable number of hours sending e-mails, waiting on hold at the mysterious, David Cronenberg-ian e-center, speaking to human Verizon employees, then speaking to their supervisors, and, most recently, having daily conversations with "T". Could someone in my sphere of acquaintances--a friend, an ex-friend, a neighbor, an anonymous evildoer--harbor a V-for-Verizon vendetta? |
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by Dylan Brody
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Professor Hawking himself has heard me do that joke on stage and he tells me I'm a very funny man. |
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by Eds
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 Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures
by Andrei Oisteanu Foreword by Moshe Idel, translated by Mirela Adascalitei University of Nebraska Press, 2009,
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Inventing-the-Jew,674083.aspx |
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