The artist Norman Ogue Mustill was an extreme dissenter. Nothing pleased him more than reaming out the human race. His collages stopped you dead with their vicious satire, like the writings of William S. Burroughs, and for technical precision Max Ernst didn’t do better. But Mustill is little known, his work unseen, his praise unsung. […]
Archives for January 2019
Auschwitz & the Art of Advertising
Something was horribly wrong with the full-page ad for an upcoming exhibition about the Auschwitz death camp. It appeared yesterday on Holocaust Remembrance Day. I know the folks behind the ad meant well. But really . . . Auschwitz and the art of advertising are a nauseating mix. Here’s the unthinking kicker which caught my […]
Election Day in America
Speaking of small-press publications, we are still waiting for Carl Weissner’s Le Regard d’Autrui to go live in a new posthumous trade edition, as promised. But Amazon KDP has been doggedly screwy. Please pardon the delay. (It is now available.) Meanwhile, Printed Matter, the best place in New York to find artists’ books, has just […]
Cold Turkey Press: A Bibliography
I don’t know exactly how many chapbooks, folios, broadsides, and poetry cards Cold Turkey Press has published. I never counted. But it must be in the hundreds. All of them—produced in handmade, illustrated, and limited editions—are unique manifestations of their publisher’s mind: scholarly without being academic, exotic but not obscure. They constitute an archive that […]
Martin Luther King Jr. Had a Dream . . .
Whatever the blowhard president of Trumpistan has to say about Martin Luther King Jr. tomorrow on MLK Day, a federal holiday, or about what King died for — if he says anything — rest assured it won’t be worth the pixels it’s written on. And for the record let’s not forget that when King made […]
Trump’s Sermon on the Mount
His practiced pose makes him look positively beatific, doncha think? Here he is at the Pentagon pushing the notion of building a wall in space with missile-defense technology that has never really worked in the past, doesn’t exist now, and isn’t likely to “for decades to come,” as one expert put it. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘Gently, Gently, Stronger, Harder, Deeper’
UPDATE: Jan. 23 — “Le Regard d’Autrui” may now be purchased in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Italy, Japan, France, and Spain. CARL WEISSNER (1940-2012) was the preeminent German translator of dissident writers such as Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Zappa, and Nelson Algren, having published […]
No Shore Receives Them
The front-page story by Patrick Kingsley in today’s print edition of the NY Times, “Rescued Migrants, at Sea for Weeks, Struggle to Reach a New Life,” calls from the depths. “We are crying,” said one of the migrants in an interview on the boat this week. “We can see Malta with our own eyes, but […]
Infected by Light Verse
![Drawing by Malcolm Ritchie [2018]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Drawing-by-Malcolm-Ritchie-2018border-360x528enh-200x200.jpg)
A rational deformation that should have been left in the drawer to ferment into something deranged as well as deformed, this is instead a poème d’occasion. As Ikkyū once said, “Ask nothing from words on a page.”