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. […]
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 […]
Doowah… Doowah… Doowah…
![Portrait of William S. Burroughs © by R. Crumb [1985]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/RCRUMB-portrait-of-Burroughs-366x470-200x200.jpg)
Have you ever seen a movie trailer about a writer that swings like this one?
‘Miriam, Part 2, The Chair’
“A woman trapped in domestic boredom moves toward a nervous breakdown. Institutionalized, she attempts to create a performance for a shortly expected visit from her children, but can find no words to express her feelings. She discovers she has no language of her own and recedes more and more into silence. Only her instrument can serve as an expression of her […]
Widjits for Idjits
The software folks at WordPress, which provides the backend template for ArtsJournal, have updated the procedure for posting AJ blogs. The update is meant to simplify the process with widgets so that idiots can use it with blindfolds on. Unfortunately, my tireless staff finds the new procedure a helluva lot less helpful than supposed and […]
When Cinephiles Celebrate Reading
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Reality as a Metaphysical Construct
It is a rare thing when a book comes along that looks as magnificent as Flesh Film and reads like an hallucination. To be clear, Jürgen Ploog is an author who does not write for everyone. The “story” he tells in Flesh Film has the pulpy tone of science fiction, a narrator who sounds like a globe-trotting private […]
2018: Thanksgiving in Trumpistan
!['American Porn' by Heathcote Williams [Thin Man Press, 2017]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/American-Porn-by-Heathcote-Williams-Thin-Man-Press-2017400-200x200.jpg)
To mark the moment, a Straight Up tradition continues. From William Burroughs, and Norman O. Mustill, and Heathcote Williams, and our staff of thousands … thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison . . . thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through . . . […]
Nuttall’s ‘Bomb Culture’ Is Back
When I first read Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, I saw the title two ways — descriptive and prescriptive — “bomb culture” (the kind that made nuclear annihilation possible) and “bomb the culture” (a call for revolution). A half-century later I still see it that way. Far from being bound by its time, Nuttall’s 1968 investigation […]
A Centenary of Mass Butchery . . .
. . . marking the end of the war to end all wars. From The Limping Messenger: Away with the glorification of the battlefield, the courage of soldiers, and how we are indebted to their futile sacrifice for whatever honoured the pride of nations . . . Speak rather about those who refused to be […]
Missing from the Warhol Retrospective
The historic Warhol retrospective at the Whitney Museum is “the biggest in almost 30 years.” And it is being swooned over with raves like Peter Schjeldahl’s in the current New Yorker, or as the headline puts it on an Artsy review by Darren Jones, You May Think You Know Warhol–but His Whitney Retrospective Holds Surprises. […]
‘Steps Toward the Invisible’
Take a look at Edward O’Donnelly’s stunningly beautiful short film made with and about the poet Malcolm Ritchie on the Scottish Isle of Arran. Click the image for a video of the film.
Dick Higgins’ Writings Are Back
A new book by Dick Higgins? Posthumous, of course. He died 20 years ago, unexpectedly, his life cut short by a heart attack at age 6o. It was a terrible shock to all of us who knew him. The book — Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins — is […]
An Evolution of ‘Other Means’
!['Immense Stone' [ca. mid-1960s]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Gary-Lee-Nova-IMMENSE-STONE-365-200x200.jpg)
Speaking of drawing by other means, Gary Lee-Nova messages that “after first encountering things like Fuzz Against Junk,” he discovered Max Ernst’s collage novels, and in that neo-Victorian mode created his own collages during the mid- to late-1960s. Among his “very first” was “Immense Stone” (below). Another was “Detecting the Forgery” (left), which was later […]