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Gesamtkunstwerk in a Vitrine Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends by Carl Landauer T he exhibition, An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan and Their Circle, curated by Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff, includes a film that tours Jess and Duncan’s Victorian home at 3267 Twentieth Street in San Francisco, starting with the entry hall and winding through all the rooms until you get to the third storey marked by the sloped roof of the house. The tour is essentially a microcosm of the exhibition because it encapsulates their artistic lives and so many of the people close to them. The front parlor with its stained glass includes a pen drawing by Jess, a profile drawing of Wallace Berman (the assemblage and collagist who published Semina, which would include visual and literary work by Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, and Artaud in addition to Duncan and Jess), a piece of folded dollar bills by Dean Stockwell coiling more like one of Berman’s kabala letters than a snake, and a whole corner devoted to George Herms, one of the central figures of California assemblage. The music room, with the couple’s classical collection, is also full of the art of friends, including a wonderful baguette and coffee-pot painting by Lyn Brockway, one of the standouts of the show and an artist who should get more attention, as well as art that simply made an impact on them, including a print by the great art nouveau poster designer Alphonse Mucha and a William Blake reproduction. The hallway and the stairwell include a fantastic gray oil painting by Edward Corbett, Jess’s teacher at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and one of the leading figures of the San Francisco Abstract Expressionism that exploded out of the school, along with a couple of Bruce Conner works, and a colorful painting by their friend, Jack Boyce. Jess’s studio resonates with the iconography of his “Paste-Ups,” his famous collages, with files of sorted images cut out of magazines and scientific books and carefully labeled, so that one box lists “Forms” and then subsections on “spheroid,” balloon,” “sphere,” “knob,” “egg,” an “lens.” Another includes “bigot,” “police – prison – execution,” “rebel-terrorist,” and “militarist.” And, significantly, there is the “working board” for his multi-decade collage, Narkissos. Their bedroom is full of works Jess and Duncan loved, including a dramatic, primitive sculpture of a head by their friend Miriam Hoffman, whose works dominate the first exhibition at the King Ubu Gallery that the couple opened for a year with their friend Harry Jacobus. The top floor includes the “Gertrude Stein Room,” the “French Room,” and Duncan’s office with its tacked-up iconic photos of Sigmund Freud, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, as well as poets Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Jack Spicer (Spicer despite their decades-long quarrel). There are books throughout, including camera pans of the collection of original L. Frank Baum books, whose Oz series 6
Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends Duncan and Jess loved to read and re-read, and the large letters “H.D.” stick out in the pan of the bookcase in the Gertrude Stein Room simply because of the size of the lettering and reminds us of Duncan’s long, never-completed book on HD. For this we can turn to Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan, which gives a tour of the couple’s library including the science books with its substantial collection of books by and about Darwin; a room full of books by a range of classical authors, like Ovid and Homer, as well as a Freud collection and books by a favorite philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead; a wide range of children’s books; the large collection of Joyce and Gertrude Stein in Gertrude Stein Room, and the foreign-language books of the central kabalistic text, the Zohar, in the “French Room.” It is well known that Duncan’s letters, interviews, and lectures – along with his conversation – are packed with a vast array of authors. There’s little surprise about his in-depth reading of the Western tradition, as well as his twentiethcentury forebears, such as Yeats, Pound, Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Rexroth, Patchen, D.H. Lawrence, H.D., Anaïs Nin, Dylan Thomas, and Henry Miller, only the way he read them and the obsessiveness with which he read and wrote about some like H.D. There is also his long reading of anarchist writers, so that early letters to Pauline Kael include lists of anarchist books he was trying to obtain. There are also endless references to philosophers and social scientists from Emile Durkheim to Arnold Toynbee, and from the philosopher Ernst Cassirer to Herbert Marcuse, who’s Eros and Civilization was part of the background reading on the Narcissus myth for Jess’s enormous collage project. And we are often told about Jess and Duncan’s shared love of fairy-tales and children’s literature, endlessly reading the fairy-tale writings of George MacDonald, the science fiction of J.L. Lloyd, C.S. Lewis, and J.R. Tolkien along with constant frame of the Oz books. But of particular interest was the oft-cited fact that Jess and Duncan – before they met each other – became intense readers not just of James Joyce but in particular of Joyce’s nearly unreadable Finnegan’s Wake with its non-stop allusions and puns, and puns making illusions. Finnegans Wake is just one, but perhaps a particularly illuminating touchstone for the work of both men. Similarly, Duncan was deeply invested in the visual artistic background of Jess’s work and not only by having given Jess an original copy of Max Ernst’s Surrealist collage book, Une semaine de bonté, as a birthday present in 1952, which became so important to the aesthetics of Jess’s “Paste-Ups.” He traces Jess’s work in a “tradition” leading back to Hieronymous Bosch, and including artists like Henry Fuseli, William Blake, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Odilon Redon. Even Jess’s teachers from the California School of Fine Arts, Edward Corbett and Hassel Smith, make appearances in Duncan’s poetry. It was, indeed, the immense impact of Clyfford Still’s show at the artist-run Metart Gallery in 1950 that Duncan attributed to his not following through with plans to go to Europe but rather to stay in San Francisco, where obviously important things were happening. At the core of An Opening of the Field is an interdisciplinary collaboration. That collaboration only starts with the pairing of Jess’s illustrations for Duncan’s poetry, as in the Duncan’s book of poems, Caesar’s Gate in 1955. Jess illustrated a children’s book written by Duncan, The Cat and the Blackbird, in the 1950s published by White Rabbit Press in 1967, as well as illustrations for Michael McClure’s children’s book for his daughter, The Boobus and the Bunnyduck, in 1958. And Jess created cover art for numerous friends’ books, like Michael Davidson’s The Mutabilities & Fould Papers and Lynn Lonidier’s A Lesbian Estate: Poems 1970-1973. Significantly, he contributed art reproduced in a wide range of little magazines by friends of the couple, such as a comic 7 Robert Duncan by Jess
Page 1 and 2: Number 73 Summer 2014 £4.50 Lew We
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Page 5: fall 1972 I moved from California t
Page 9 and 10: Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends ra
Page 11 and 12: BILL BURROUGHS IN AMSTERDAM by Eddi
Page 13 and 14: Bill Burroughs in Amsterdam ‘Patt
Page 15 and 16: A Half-American Writer During the p
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Page 19 and 20: CONVERSATIONS with KEN KESEY edited
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Page 29 and 30: Ginsberg on Kerouac Buddhism, too,
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Page 33 and 34: Ginsberg on Kerouac Inter ntervie v
Page 35 and 36: ----------- It’s Monday morning.
Page 37 and 38: they discover a dead seal and say,
Page 39 and 40: We pick up all our garbage and spli
Page 41 and 42: eaders. Since I was driving taxi, I
Page 43 and 44: Write a Madder Letter if You Can by
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Page 47 and 48: Billy Burroughs’ Prediction by Ed
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Page 53 and 54: Damn Fine Letters work but he reall
Page 55 and 56: Jack Kerouac The Haunted Life and O
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The Haunted Life talk on porches, l
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Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn The Coll
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Amiri Baraka & Edward Dorn happens
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Diane di Prima having her long hair
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