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Robert Duncan, Jess, and Friends
range of artists, many from the California School of
Fine Arts, and, as Christopher Wagstaff noted in an
exhibition just on the gallery, artists were often paired
who would contradict each other. And for the
opening show, in addition to the uneven hanging of
the artwork and murals painted on the walls creating
a Dr. Cagliari imbalance, Miriam Hoffman’s
sculptures created further dimensionality. And Jess
later displayed a number of “Necrofacts,”
assemblages of “real junk off the rubbish pile” in the
gallery. But the gallery was also the venue for poetry
readings for the likes of Jack Spicer, Philip Lamantia,
Kenneth Rexroth, and Weldon Kees (who worked in a
wide range of arts and music). Stan Brakhage’s first
two films were played at the King Ubu. And Duncan
put on Gertrude Stein’s The Five Georges complete
with crayon-drawing backdrops by Duncan, of which
King George III is in the current exhibition. One
almost wishes that the exhibition could create the
atmosphere of the King Ubu for the performance –
because, after all, Duncan, Jess, and their friends
were engaged in their own form of Wagnerian
Gesamtkunstwerk – a combination of all the arts. It
would be in the Six Gallery, which took over the
space of King Ubu after its one-year run, that Allen
Ginsberg first read his Howl (while Duncan and Jess
were in Majorca) and Duncan put on his play Faust
Foutu with Lawrence Jordan as the poet Faust, Jess
playing his mother, and Michael McClure, Jack
Spicer and other friends in various roles. It’s not that
San Francisco with Jess and Duncan’s interlocking
group of friends were alone in amalgamating the arts.
Black Mountain College – where Duncan taught in
the last year of its existence and put on plays (many of
his final cast coming back to San Francisco with him)
– offered a wide range of arts, with a faculty that
included Josef Albers, modern dancer Merce
Cunnningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and
Charles Olson. It’s just that the amalgamation of the
arts were particularly important in San Francisco.
Duncan himself remarked that poetry – before
Ginsberg’s reading – was particularly a performative
art in San Francisco. Although he was talking about
the performance of the reading, Duncan notably
wrote Medieval Scenes in 1947 in ten nightly sessions
in a séance-like atmosphere with his poet friends
around him – he wrote as performance. The art
exhibition could also be a “happening” avant la lettre,
such as Wallace Berman’s Semina Gallery exhibitions
that lasted typically for a single night on a houseboat,
which followed his friend George Herms’s “Secret
Exhibition” in Southern California.
Arguably, Jess is best known for his collages
– with the multi-decade Narkissos at the apex. Jess
himself claimed in an interview published as an
appendix to An Opening of the Field: “I first thought
of collage when I visited Brockway’s mother in
Naples, near [Alamitos Bay] in Southern California,
not far from where I grew up . . . and she said, ‘Look
at he collage I’ve just done.’ She had cut pictures of
flowers from magazines, and it was at that moment I
saw collage for the first time.” Never mind that
Brockway’s mother knew the term “collage.” Never
mind the long tradition of collage in modern art by
the likes of artists like Picasso and Braque. In fact,
collage and assemblage – and I think they should be
seen as two-and three-dimensional siblings, or rather
of a piece – seemed to generate in both northern and
southern California. If one writer on Jess dismissed
as a joke the 1949 “Museum of Unknown and Little
Known Objects” by the California School of Fine
Arts teacher Clay Spohn – the same man who urged
Calder to use wire – that is simply to forget that
humor is quite a serious tool in art. Similarly, Hassel
Smith, an important teacher of Jess, had done his
own assemblages and held a party in the late 1940s
where he asked his each of his guests to bring a Dada
object. As Richard Diebenkorn noted about the late
1940s, “Assemblage was just in the air” – as were
various forms of collage. So Jess’s collage did not
spring full-bodied like Athena out of the head of
Brockway’s mother.
More important, however, is to recognize
that both collage and assemblage are by themselves a
form of the multibiosis around Jess and Duncan for
the very reason that they take their elements from all
parts of life, past, present, future, as well as the
esoteric and the mythological, and pull them together
in concert and disconcert. In Jess’s log for the
creation of Narkissos, he delves – and Duncan would
partner in this research – deeply into the Narcissus
myth as well as its offshoots, various echoes, such as
in Chaucer as well as the flower. And his large collage
is full of images reflecting each other as well as
integrating large numbers of popular culture elements,
such as a Krazy Kat cartoon, Chicago’s Monadnock
building, and a frame from Fritz Lang’s film
Metropolis. So too would his The Chariot: Tarot VII
(1962) cram an enormous number of images, only
starting with ancient Eastern and Western sculpture
(including Dionysus with grapes), umbrellas, old cars,
train engines, owls, a fox, lobster claws, the hull of an
ancient boat, and various eyes. In fact, the various
eyes – and eyelike images – looking from various
perspectives (even upside down) and in various
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