This installation is a re-iteration of the type of junk assemblage installation I’ve been making almost annually at Art Rat Studios in Roanoke VA during AfterMAF (MAF = Marginal Arts Festival) for nearly a decade, minus the years of the Covid pandemic. Only this time I didn’t have to travel so far to install it! The 3rd photo and the last photo include views of the visual poetry pinned on the wall: work by John M. Bennett which he thinks of as a ‘book on the wall’. Not shown are two groupings of five each of my small wood box wall assemblages and two larger works that include works on pedestals, plus a group of 8×10″ collages made with marbled paper then framed and matted (in background at LR of 3rd photo is a distant view of framed collages). The gallery opens at 4pm Saturday Feb. 17th (2024) with last day open hours noon to 3pm March 9th. (NO closing reception) Website for more images of my wall pieces and info: https://934gallery.org/
I was unaware of JERRY SALTZ until I saw many of my artists friends were looking at his Facebook posts. I joined the group and began delving into Jerry’s posts about the art scene.
We learned about Prologue Bookstore when the owner made a presentation at an Aldus Society meeting one evening. Information about this book collectors’ group can be found at their website https://aldussociety.com/about-the-aldus-society/ When we visited the store to check it out, I bought ART IS LIFE partly to show support for the bookstore, but also out of curiosity. I’m glad I did, because it is very informative, not academic at all, and surprisingly different from the obtuse art critic articles I used to read in art magazines back before the internet. Yet, I should point out that no photos of the artworks or artists or museum exhibits discussed are included in this book. So keep your internet handy to look up images, especially for artists whose work is unfamiliar to you.
Jerry Saltz has been a columnist for NEW YORK magazine since 2007 and was formerly senior art critic for The Village Voice for almost 10 years. He is known as a “critic of the people” per Architectural Digest. Quoted from this book: “He democratizes art for a broad audience through his irreverent column and his social media channels, where he has nearly one million followers.”
In 2018, he won the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for “My Life as a Failed Artist,” an essay about how his disappointing career as an artist is responsible for his success as a critic. The essay in New York magazine helped sell nearly 400,000 print editions of the magazine and gained over 250,000 readers online, plus helped earn a National Magazine Award for New York magazine. No wonder that the editor of Riverhead Books reached out to him for a book that would expand on that article. I haven’t read that first book, HOW TO BE AN ARTIST, but the first chapter in ART IS LIFE is titled, “My Life as a Failed Artist”, so I assume many of the points from that first book are summarized in this book’s first chapter.
ART IS LIFE has a long subtitle: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night. It’s introduced as a “survey of the art world in turbulent times”, or “in an era of radical change”. To me, this book initially seemed to be a matter of gathering essays he wrote between 2017 and 2022 with editing help from Riverhead Books editor, Calvert Morgan. But the introduction and specially written chapter about his personal life with his wife, Roberta Smith, who was trying to beat uterine cancer during the Covid pandemic (which affectively shut down the art galleries), is very moving, as well as Jerry’s stories about personal exchanges with Jasper Johns and other artists. There is a chapter about his early life growing up in Chicago which sounds like bad news, starting with the suicide of his mother when he was only eight, and continuing with the harrowing adventures of melding with a new step-family when his father remarried.
Jerry is a great writer about life, not just about art.
But as he says, “ART IS LIFE”.
C. Mehrl Bennett Jan. 27, 2024
From dust cover bio:
“Jerry Saltz has been a columnist for New York magazine and its entertainment site, VULTURE, since 2007. Formerly, he was the senior art critic for The Village Voice for almost ten years, where he was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. A frequent guest lecturer, he has spoken at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, and many others, and has appeared at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere. Jerry Saltz has received honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Kansas City Art Institute. He was born and raised in Chicago and now lives in New York City.”
Glitch photo of edge of dust cover (pink area) and bottom side view of book:
The Viewpoints Method, for CCC Writing Workshop – CMB 2023
I was invited to a workshop by Claire Elizabeth Barratt aka CillaVee, director of The Center for Connections + Collaboration (CCC) in Asheville NC, which happened physically in Ashland NC at between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm. Claire is familiar with Mary Overlie. Her writer father, David Barratt, introduced the aims of the day’s workshop and closed the day out with a summary.
The Viewpoints Method is something I first came across via the internet as an idea for writers. Upon further searching I learned that it was developed in the 70’s by dance choreographer Mary Overlie. Anne Bogart later developed it as a method to create staging for actors and wrote a book with Tina Landau titled The Viewpoints Book, pub. 2004 by Theatre Communications Group. Today it is generally known as a post-modern training method for actors. As Claire is a dancer, she is familiar with Mary Overlie’s work.
Anne Bogart had worked with Japanese director, Tadashi Suzuki, to found the SITI dance company in 1992, so there is an Eastern culture connection. The Viewpoints Method reminds me of the influence of Eastern philosophies reaching the West by way of Zen philosophy and Buddhism in the 1960’s and ‘70s. Today in the West, the Eastern Zen influence is common with yoga devotees, particularly with meditation & in today’s buzz word, “Mindfulness” — an inner awareness of the HERE & NOW. We can also find balance by being open to contradictory viewpoints such as the Yin and the Yang, and in what today is called a person’s effort to be “authentic”. As part of the Boomer generation, we used to call it “finding oneself”.
Yet, we need to loosen the grip on the egocentric version of Self so that writing becomes more experimental and ‘thought” centered. It’s not important to find a single approach to writing style, then stay with that so that your ‘readers’ or the people you want to publish your work will recognize & feel comfortable with what you write. Let’s agree on this right at the outset. Whatever material a writer first comes up with must be open to the editing process. What happens in the editing process is where the real work & play happens. The ‘self’ doesn’t come back into it until a signature is added to the finished work, yet our ego is always present… I believe that it is helpful to identify ourselves as writer, poet, or artist. To sustain us in a world where the liberal arts & humanities are considered unpractical or self-indulgent, or for retired people, or as a left-wing hobby, self-identification as an artist and/or writer gives a boost to our ego. It’s not easy being YOU, but it’s the only YOU you’ve got.
What comes of finding our ‘authentic’ selves?
It leads to confidence in making choices. We can break through ‘writer’s block’ and take those first shaky steps to construct our art. As we keep going, we start to trust in our intuition and spontaneity. We enjoy editing when, through our edits, we uncover even more of ourselves and more of the world around us as well. We delve into our subconscious and at the same time expose the wholeness of our universe. Writing can be a balancing act between the two.
What do we mean by ‘experimental’ or ‘avant garde’ writing?
Making room for accidents, being open to contradictions during the thought process, and being open to fresh ideas so that an interesting narrative with sights and sounds that touch all the senses will evolve. We may focus on small sections of a narrative but hopefully, at the same time, we develop a arc for the work as a whole. “Experimental” can involve creating unique structural rules for a single piece, yet we’re free to break our rules at any point for the sake of our art, as there are no rules in art.
It might seem to readers as if the writer invents, constructs, and creates in a VOID but in truth, we are all part of a WHOLENESS or ONE CONSCIOUSNESS… and here we connect again with ZEN philosophy, which was also a place from which Fluxus philosophy seems to have developed. Much of my own art and writing since around 2009 has been influenced by Fluxus.
Here is my 2023 fluxus event score titled “How to Write a Poem”:
Sit down.
Wait.
Write something.
Edit.
Sign your name.
We read, question, and investigate our cultural influences which are always in flux. At the same time, our inner mind is in flux. The wheels are turning.
A writer friend of ours, Jim Leftwich, wrote a blurb for John M, Bennett’s book, LAVANDERĺA NOMBRE. Jim said, “Are Bennett poems always primarily about reading, in the sense that reading is often if not always primarily about thinking?” I’m not sure that Jim is specifically saying that “reading is thinking”, but a blurring between the two separate processes is an interesting viewpoint.
Another viewpoint of the postmodern sort is the idea of FLARF. On the surface, some people dismiss FLARF as ‘nothing’ or of insignificant value as a writing methodology. An example of FLARF is to surf the internet for surprising textual content & reprocess it until further computer glitches afford even more exaggerations or new lines of thought to follow. We can use Google Translator to change text from one language to another & again to more languages then back to English. All those fresh ideas generated by the FLARF method or through surprising ‘glitches’ is all still ‘thinking’ concealed by PLAY. Our own thoughts surface with choices we make as we use playful editing of text sourced from others or from ourselves. Wm. Burroughs came upon the ‘cut up’ method to create something new through his friend Brion Gysin. Take a source text & cut it into four pieces, then re-arrange the placement of those sections OR simply use each smaller section to develop further thoughtful texts. After doing this a few times, your editing process will open up enough that you can discard the physical process of cutup, and just let it happen in your own mind.
After tearing up a poem I originally titled “THE PINK CLOUD” into four parts, I used it as source material for a new eight stanza poem. Each stanza also forms a word using the first letters of each line, using the acrostic method.
Speaking of source materials, consider junk mail letters from politicians and other organizations begging for donations to a cause. Many appear as if they’ve been composed by artificial intelligence (AI). Input a few ideas about the cause and why donations are important, and AI can generate multiple different paragraphs which basically state the same thing over and over. Do they think that if they say it enough times that it will seem more genuine and real? I’ve also used source text found inside dark chocolate bar wrappers with Victorian poetry. Even when I restrict myself to sources like these, which often lack authentic ‘content’ in the flowery language used for poetry at that time, I can find my own content using the BLACK-OUT method of writing (also called ERASURE poetry). This method was used in 1972 by the Englishman, Tom Philips, as he blacked out parts of the text in the 1892 Victorian romance novel titled “A Human Document”. Philips continued to work on the same source for 50 years, then titled the completed book project as “The Humament”. His influences, and mine as well, were John Cage, William Burroughs, Dada, and the concrete poets.
A blog about my book, It’s a Poem or an Event or Maybe Both, and more can be found at my website: cmehrlbennett.wordpress.com In the poem, Sake (p.110 of my book), the first stanza is from an erasure I made on an Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet. Another poem, Cat in the Hat and Captain Rat, came from an erasure I made on a fund raising letter from President Joe Biden.
The final poem I present here was created from a cut-up note included in a mailart envelope received this month from Nonlocal Variable. I will include an image of that note at the end.
Darwin Asks A CowMarginal Arts FestOhio Cat BellOhio Gun ControlThe Rooster GameTwins Descend into The Underworld
C. Mehrl Bennett December 2023
Six inch diameter / One inch depth
2024 Installation View at 934 Gallery, Columbus OH, includes “Googly Eye Critters” at center, which is a collage of cutup pieces of acrylic paint on canvas with googly eyes and mscl. trim.
Never have I seen the idea/attitude of fluxus scores addressed within a novel before, but here, it is. Most thoughtfully, it’s accompanied by chapter intersessions by “The Book”. The story line pivots around a zen woman monk and her own book, a greiving mother & her adolescent son, Benny Oh (upon the death of jazz musician/husband/father), and the son’s ‘found’ family: ‘The Aleph’ (the beguiling fluxus girl) and a poet/writer/philosopher, both basically homeless, unless you count the library, where Benny Oh also finds refuge. It’s a modern ‘coming of age’ story, with a deep dive into the realities of mental illness.
Herding
Branded cattle
Presently noted meat
Party
With animals
Kindly play records
Modified
Wrapped razor
Found noise results
Latent
Immersive rhyme
Cracked my knee
Goats
And beards
They move together
Dreaming
Expansive sleep
Tour the territory
Shoes
Passive wife
Cultural foot binding
Modicular
Posh particles
Luxury apartment building
Cooking
Utensils paint
A mental kitchen
Think
Scrabble board
Immersive cryptic spelling
Often
These days…
Unexpected planetary weather
C. Mehrl Bennett, June 2023
This is a book of multiples: postcards, artist stamps, text or images from little booklets, scanned drawings and caricatures, rubber stamped text or images, digital art, Fluxus scores, poetry, and visual poetry. Much of it was sent out as mailart. The book takes up where my 2009 book, “What It Says”, left off. The chapters are organized chronologically although some of the images are more illustrative of texts in other chapters and are placed accordingly. The paper is heavy weight, coated paper that produces quality graphic images. The introduction includes information about contemporary Fluxus festival gatherings and the philosophy and history behind them. Many of my own event scores are included in each chapter of the book. A collaborative Flux Mass was co-created with Diane Keys and performed in Chicago, and I’ve written up all the rituals and included some photographs from the event. Experimentation with the erasure of found text with additional editing is illustrated with the final text published next to a scan of the original erasured source. Other writing processes are explained in context with other poems, and an informal essay is included about asemic writing and improvisation. It is hoped that the spirit of play in creation will be infectious and stimulating for the reader.
Flux mass scores were written/performed by two priestesses (Diane Keys & C. Mehrl Bennett), with assistance from deacon (Jonathan Stangroom), and congregation; Performed May 27, 2018, at Portage Park during Chicago Flux Fest, an annual event organized by Keith Buchholz.
Priestesses each wore a penny stole: first one was originally designed/sewn by Mary Campbell and C. Mehrl Bennett made a second stole fashioned after the first. The photo below is by Adamandia Kapsilis:
Objects on table: Red wine / dixie cups / candy body parts / peanut butter jar labeled “Wyrd of Glob” / glob spreader / “Wonder” bread – (slices for Glob & loaves for ”AfterGLOB event) / “Holy Bible” / pink materials to swaddle initiates / hand sanitizer labeled “Anti-Fluxus Gel” / “Flying Cow” suspended from a string/ hand bell
Deacon Duties:
Collection of Common Cents:
Bowler hat is used for collection plate – Deacon passes it around asking for “common cents” (a few pennies already in hat)
Liturgical Flux Packet of Prayer:
Deacon gives each member of the congregation a Liturgical Flux Packet of Prayer on which is printed prayer responses “Praise Cheezus Crust” and “Eminem”. M&Ms in packet are referred to as “Fluxpills”. Each pill is to be taken when giving the “Eminem” response [an alternative response to “Amen”]. – When priestesses say the following phrases: “Holy Bible” – “In God we Flux” – “Praise be to Glob” or other ritualistic phrases, the Deacon rings hand bell to signal for prayer responses. If congregation does not respond, the deacon must ask “Can I get an Eminem?”
Three Part Communion Ritual:
1) Open Bible revealing holes drilled inside and say, “Holy Bible”. Put straw thru biggest hole. Communion begins. Say “The Blood of Crust” as ‘wine’ or other purple liquid is poured through the big hole inside Holy Bible, and caught by communicant holding a cup underneath.
2) Communicant is given a candy body part using phrase, “The Body of Crust”. 3) Communicant is offered white bread and a knife for peanut butter, as priestesses ask each to “Spread the Wyrd of GLOB.”
The photo below was taken by Allen Bukoff during part one of the communion ritual:
After GLOB Event: BREAD FIGHT with loaves of Wonder Bread – (Feed leftover bread to chickens/birds/fish.) NOTE: BREAD FIGHT event is by Keith Buchholz, published under the title “Communion” in his book SCORES FOR A CHURCH, and was originally performed as part of FluxmaZZ at a church in Roanoke VA on 3/5/2011.
“Be Born Again” Ritual:
Priestesses swaddle each initiate in a pink cloth for the rebirthing ritual, rocking “the newborn” either on the ground or standing up, whichever they prefer. When initiate comes out of pink cocoon, they are told what a beautiful baby they are and anointed with “Anti-Fluxus Gel” (hand sanitizer) via an “X” on the forehead. Each born again baby is encouraged to praise each subsequent “born again” baby. Buchholz is the baby being “born again” in the photo below by Andrew Oleksiuk:
Eternal Circle Ritual:
The two priestesses wearing penny shawls perform this ritual, which is based on an old saying about an action for good luck, “See a penny, Pick it up.” Priestesses each take pennies from the donation bowler hat and follow each other in a circle, alternately dropping and picking up pennies. Event ends when both stop dropping pennies or no more pennies can be found (which happened quickly because we performed on grass!).
Over the Sofa/ Under the Skin/ Inside the Head 