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Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends
for Jack Spicer’s mimeographed J, and a cover for the
mimeographed Floating Bear created by Diane di
Prima and LeRoi Jones. Even Duncan got into the
part, writing text in his own hand in Jess’s work and
even creating the cartoonish colophon bunny rabbit
used for the White Rabbit Press – as well as writing
numerous essays for exhibitions for Jess, Herms,
Berman and others. And it was Berman’s photograph
of McClure with a lion mane and fur glued to his face
that graced the cover of Ghost Tantras. These
collaborations in their original versions are exactly the
sorts of ephemera that fill the vitrine space of the
exhibition. But the exhibition, the accompanying
catalog, and the two men’s lives – along with those of
their friends – is filled with a much more important
form of collaboration, an important interdisciplinary
symbiosis, or rather multibiosis, of art forms and
media.
Film was also a critical part of this
multibiosis. Pauline Kael – best known for her
decades as the doyenne of film criticism at The New
Yorker – was a close friend of Duncan’s starting as an
undergraduate at Berkeley. In 1955 she introduced
European films as well as pairing unlikely films at the
Cinema Guild and Studio on Berkeley’s Telegraph
Avenue, and it was natural that Jess produced posters
and flyers, such as, for her showings of Jean Cocteau’s
Orpheus and Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach. One of
the key elements in the development of the art film in
the San Francisco Bay Area was the creation in 1946
of the Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco
Museum (which would last for nine years) by Frank
Stauffacher under the museum’s pioneering director,
Grace McCann Morley, who organized the first solo
museum shows to numerous Abstract Expressionists
from San Francisco (Jess’s teachers) and New York,
including Jackson Pollock. So it is very much part of
the Jess-Duncan story that James Broughton, the poet
and filmmaker (also Pauline Kael’s lover who had a
child with her) met with Duncan, Jess, Madeline
Gleason, Even Triem, and Helen Adam in an ongoing
poetry group as the selfproclaimed
“Maidens,”
had the premier of his
short film made with
painter/photographer
Sidney Peterson The
Potted Palm in the first
year of the Art in
Cinema series. If Jess
and Duncan rented
Broughton’s house while
he was away from San
Francisco, the
experimental filmmaker
Stan Brakhage lived
briefly in the basement
of Jess and Duncan’s
house, just as
Brakhage’s high-school
friend from Denver, the
filmmaker Lawrence
Jordan, lived with
Michael and Joanna McClure. With Bruce Conner,
who worked in a multitude of media, including film,
and became one of the stars of California assemblage,
Jordan started Camera Obscura, a film society, as
well as a theater devoted to 16 mm films, simply
called the Movie. And Jordan collaborated with a
number of the Jess and Duncan crowd, as well as
collaborating directly with Jess on a film using Jess’s
collages, Heavy Water, or The 40 & 1 Nights, or Jess’s
Didactic Nickelodeon in the 1960s.
Perhaps at the center of the story of the
multibiosis around Jess and Duncan should be their
creation, along with Jess’s classmate, Harry Jacobus,
of the former garage turned into a gallery space and
named by them the King Ubu Gallery after the 1896
play by that forerunner of Dada and Surrealism,
Alfred Jarry (copies of the New Directions translation
with Jarry’s drawings can be found in the Dada-
Surrealist bookcase across from the City Lights cash
register for impulse buying like gum and candy at a
supermarket checkout counter). King Ubu showed a
Artworks by Jess and photo of Duncan
& Jess © The Jess Collins Trust.
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