News was just recently released that Penguin will be publishing a novel co-authored by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs which was written in 1945, before either achieved fame, or, one might argue, before either achieved talent. Not that this is necessarily a case such as that sketched in my over-dramatic first paragraph, but I can say with something approaching certainty that there is a reason why artists decline to put particular works out there.

Is this one a festering pustule on the golden, glorified legacies of two beat luminaries? I have no idea. Burroughs himself dismissed it as “not a very distinguished work.” ⊕ So the question begs to be asked, though we hail famous artists as “geniuses,” and fawn over their pronouncements, and make pilgrimages to their grave sites, and gobble critical texts parsing their brilliance, does it just so happen that the one area in which they are totally deficient is judging the merits of their own work?

The title of this “undistinguished” novel is evidently something Burroughs heard on a newscast about a zoo fire: And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. I actually love the title, though perhaps And the Artists Were Exploited in Their Caskets would be closer to the bone.

The events which inspired And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks certainly sound novel-worthy, complete with obsession, drunken knife-fights, murder, body dumping, and the incarceration of our intrepid beat luminaries. Surely its publication will have some redeeming value? Whether just for historians and completists and rubber-neckers, or as a work in and of itself, is yet to be seen.

I have to wonder what the artists themselves would think were they alive? Would they be embarrassed? Displeased? Would the fact that even their “undistinguished” works made it to a clamoring marketplace simply satisfy their egos and overrule their internal editors? Would they grin from their easy chairs unable to beat back the maniacal words, “I am legend”?

Letting “unsuccessful” works linger in drawers and boxes under beds is a weakness for most artists I’d say, but then, when they are your creations, even abortive ones, abhorrent ones, embarrassing ones, and your intention is to mournfully review them every decade or so as you would review old correspondences or family photographs, they retain a definite personal value. A personal value.

After Henry Miller’s death Moloch and Crazy Cock came to light, neither of which were sterling examples of his incredible talent ⊕, likewise Bukowski has had damn near as many books of poetry published since his death as before. At what point does the pile of “not ready for prime time” work of an artist begin to tarnish his or her legacy? Does it ever? Is our insatiable desire to know everything about those we’ve immortalized self-defeating? And are we actually entitled to see the things artists didn’t want to have seen? It may well be that we afford our idols more “personal space” physically, after their deaths, than we do metaphorically. 

It’s a moot point I guess. There’s money to be made and industry marches on. ⊕ And perhaps, just perhaps, the rationalization that even a turd from a master is better than nothing is true. One thing we can be sure of is that neither Jack, nor William, nor Henry, Nor Buk give a good god-damn either way right now, and we can take heart in the fact that while they lived, their art was their own.

The reigning young-bloods of the world love to needle the hippies. This, I surmise, is because the hippies are now their parents, grandparents, weird uncles, and, worst of all, their dick-head corporate bosses. The words Haight-Ashbury are as likely to induce a lemon-faced cringe as be met with a blank stare I would guess.

Not that most of us have been allowed to forget it for a single instant, but I’ll gently remind you anyway that there was a time when hippies were the avante-garde. A time when there were few personages thought more “happening” on planet Earth.

In any case I have no interest in discussing the hippies’ utopian experiments or their eventual backslide into the big black boots of the establishment… no, as is the norm in these parts, I simply want to share some pretty pictures with you, and as it happens, The Diggers quest for a “free city” did yield quite a bit of quality printed matter.

Quote: “The commune’s founder brought his printing presses to San Francisco in the summer of 1968, inspired by two fellow Diggers who suggested a free publishing venture. Over the next several years, the Free Print Shop published a variety of materials including flyers for other communal groups, for free services, ecology groups, free arts groups, and the occasional political protest. In the spring of 1969 the Sutter Street Commune began publishing an intercommunal newspaper, Kaliflower, named for Kaliyuga, the Hindu name for the last and most violent age of humankind and the Hindu goddess Kali. Each Kaliflower was printed and bound by hand. The binding used the Japanese method of yarn overstitched on either the top or side. Every issue was a different color, and offset printing was the method by which the issues were printed. Kaliflower became an important mode of communication among the communes.” –Patricia L. Keats.

Below you will find 20 examples of printed Digger ephemera, mostly culled from Kaliflower, but also including content from Free City News and a few leaflets and posters. Have a look.

(I love that last one so much.)

Digger output in the form of Kaliflower and related items from the Free Print Shop were only produced for a few years it seems. Before long the mock-funeral for the “Death of the Hippies” was staged, the communes began disappearing, and well… we know how the rest turned out.

For a ton of information and many many more examples of The Diggers’ work look no further than The Digger Archive which is packed with avant-of-yore goodness.

Meanwhile, if you’re in the mood for some related reading you might try Manhood in the Age of Aquarius By Tim Hodgedon, which goes into considerable depth.

Note that the image which began this post is not by Diggers, but of them, I adapted it from a photo of the famous free food giveaways.

Hope you enjoyed.

Around 1919, after having studied philosophy at the University of Bonn and serving in the German army on both the Western and Eastern fronts, Ernst began experimenting with collage. He explains the impetus as follows:

“One day (in 1919), whereas I looked at an illustrated book of objects (umbrellas, watches, tools, clothing, etc) I was surprised to see such different things tight beside the others, things which one does not see together usually, my eyes saw other objects, I wanted to add with the pencil some lines and hatchings between the various objects so that it gives the same images that I see in my dreams.” –Max Ernst.

“It was enough at that time to embellish these catalogue pages, in painting or drawing, and thereby in gently reproducing only that which saw itself in me, a colour, a pencil mark, a landscape foreign to the represented objects, the desert, a tempest, a geological cross-section, a floor, a single straight line signifying the horizon ... thus I obtained a faithful fixed image of my hallucination and transformed into revealing dramas my most secret desires—from what had been before only some banal pages of advertising.” —Max Ernst: Beyond Painting 1948. 

The collage-novels which Ernst began creating in 1929, including La Femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Women) and Une Semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness), undoubtedly represent a pinnacle of the form.

I’d like to share with you some examples from a third collage novel by Ernst, published in 1930, titled, Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel or, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, which I am lucky enough to own a copy of. It is the story of a girl who loses her viginity on the day of her first communion and so commits herself to “taking the veil.” The collages, each accompanied by a few short lines,  are visualizations of the impious, schizophrenic, and mostly nightmarish dreams she has that night.

The book begins with a 5 page surrealistic sketch by way of introduction. Here is an excerpt:

Academy of Science.

The night will come when the Academy of Science itself will not disdain to cast its gaze on the sewers of the world. The night will come when, covered with all their jewels, the secondary skeletons that one calls scientists will ask themselves this question:
?What do little girls dream of who want to take the veil?
?On that night a violent storm will break against the doors of the academy of science and the water will roar in the pipes.
?The water will remember the shameful year 1930, the year it would have liked to see all the cathedrals of the universe parade in far-too-short dresses. It will remember above all a certain night because…
?On Good Friday night of the shameful year 1930 a child hardly sixteen years old dipperd her two hands in the sewer, pricked her skin and with her blood traced these lines”
?To love the holy father and to dip one’s hands in a sewer, such is happiness for us, children of Mary.

77 collages follow, separated into four sections. Below I’ve reproduced 15 of them complete with accompanying text. Have a look.

The book’s translator’s note has this to say on the collages themselves:

“Each one of these collages uses cuttings often from the most banal of pre-photography illustrated penny novels, and from popular tomes about nature, science, and exoticism. The result may seem to embody our most frequent tragedies, our wriest enslavements, our most terrible solutions. Specificity dissolves in the timeless and the general.” —Dorothea Tanning.

The introduction to Max Ernst: A Retrospective adds the following:

“Max Ernst’s collages, for all their strangeness, strive for overall coherence and technical plausibility. This ‘plausible’ imagery, unlike the papiers colles of Picasso and Georges Braque, depends on an expurgation of the visible difference between artist’s hand and non-artistic quotation. The joins and overlappings had to be concealed from the viewer. This is why Ernst frequently published his composite imagery only in printed form, in photographic reproduction or in versions later touched up with watercolour. Thanks to these tactics of concealment he succeeded in presenting collage as that which he thought it should be: a completely developed and autonomous system in which the origin of the separate elements is submerged in the final, total image. He was out to produce irritating imagery in which, as in the perfect crime, every clue to its identity had been erased.” — Werner Spies.

To me there is a gravitas to etchings and wood engravings, a sort of official-ness, which is unshakeable. Perhaps it is simply the obvious effort involved in their creation or their historic connection with inherently valuable printed matter (be it newspaper or book) which lends the form these overtones. In any case, I think it is exactly this implied gravitas playing against Ernst’s strange, poetic, feverish, and funny subject matter, which creates the oddly arresting magnetism they still manage to exert almost 80 years later. I can only wonder at the effect they had on viewers in the 30’s… Some mixture of giggle and shiver I would imagine.

Anyhow, hope you enjoyed these.

For more on Ernst’s collage-novels see:
Une Semaine de Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage on google books.
Une Semaine de Bonté at La Boîte A Images.
A Week of Kindness at Giornale Nuovo.
La femme 100 têtes at Koninklijke Bibliotheek.
Werner Spies’ piece at Artchive.com.
The enduring significance of the work of Max Ernst By Stuart Nolan.
Max Ernst’s Adventures in Collage from The New York Times.
Kindness Week a film by Ernst based on his collage.
Ernst related videos at Tiosam.com

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Note: This post is in a series of reworkings of old posts which date from before the redesign of The Nonist. The text has been reworked and added to considerably, the amount of images has been doubled, and the links are all new. I will be periodically adding these reworkings into the flow of new content in an effort to eventually remove all the old pages from circulation.

The issue begins with an introduction by Charles Rosner which I’ll spare you the bulk of. It does strike me as disrespectful and lazy somehow to not at least offer a few words, however, for context’s sake. So here is a single paragraph to get light your way forward.

Quote: “As for the impact [of advertsising] on society: the economic implications are closely linked up with deep-rooted inferences. The ‘social function’ of advertising is to stimulate wants, to make people dissatisfied with the little they have, and to work harder and earn more. Yet this function—to stimulate dissatisfaction—is relatively recent, for the goods people want, the auto, the washing machine, the radio, the television, electric iron, dishwasher, are all products of the lasty forty years or less. All this is part of the transformation, of the Western world at least, to a high-consumption society. There is more advertising in the United States not because salesmanship is a peculiar American virtue, or vice, but because of the comparative opulence of the country. As Professor Galbraith has written, A hungry man could never be persuaded that bread that is softened, sliced, wrapped and enriched is worth more than a cheaper and larger loaf that will fill his stomach.” —Charles Rosner, Graphis annual ‘57/58.

I only wish these older volumes had more plates printed in color!

Lastly I’d like to leave you with a final paragraph from the annual’s introduction. In our internet age with Tumblr and Flickr and Ffffound it seems as relevant as ever, weather some of us like it or not.

Quote: “The public is demanding more pictures and fewer words. American housewives want a lot of pictures and little copy. They want the picture to tell the story. Ideas expressed in art can do more and reach more people than any other form of communication. Witness the picture magazines, the great decrease in text in all advertising, the outdoor poster, television. The eye has a far better memory than the ear and the advertising man who is in tune with the times will seldom want for an idea.” —Charles Rosner, Graphis annual ‘57/58.

So there you have it. Until next time.

Evidently audiences in the 60’s and 70’s had other ideas because in 1967 a ballet came to the stage which became an absolute sensation. It was called Astarte, after a naked semitic Goddess of fertility, sexuality, and war, who’d eventually be absorbed by the Greeks under the name Aphrodite.

Choreographed and directed by one Robert Joffrey it was considered groundbreaking in its staging and it remains the only ballet to ever grace the cover of Time magazine. A spread featuring it’s two lead dancers recreating poses from the ballet was also published in Playboy 5 years later. It ran for just short of a decade.

The images which follow were created by photographer Herb Migdoll. They are not documentary shots of an actual performance but rather interpretations of what took place on the stage. They are montages, built up layer by layer, with multiple color photographs way back in the mists of pre-photoshop design.

Have a look—

I’m particularly fond of that last one for some reason.

Looking at these as a group I can’t help but think of Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd, on mushrooms, at Cirque Du Soleil, or indeed of my own experiences in a similar vein. It’s easy to see from the photos why the late 60’s / early 70’s audiences flocked to it. After all, the Pink Floyd Laserium light shows didn’t really take off until 1974.

Oddly the other thing which these bring to mind for me are “the future.” Seems ridiculous, I know, but I have so many science-fictional images which were produced in this era burnt into my mind that’s it’s a kind of pavlovian response. In as much, though we scoff instantly today at anything which produces the faintest whiff of goofy utopian hippy psychedelia, I can actually imagine a revival of Astarte being quite successful a millennia from now.

By then all the hippies and their spawn and their emulators and their collective patchouli cloud will be long gone. Time will do it’s little trick of erasing all the negatives and complete failures and hippies will be viewed, on decaying film reels, in grey concrete cities, as some kind of wonderful. A new mind-obliterating nano-drug will hit the streets and blam! out will come the day-glo paisley leotards.

Actually, now that I think about it, today, with theater evidently completely out of ideas, with every shitty band having a show cobbled around its music and with scores of movies having a musical version staged, perhaps it won’t even take a millennia. Let’s just give the desperate producers time to run through broadway productions of House M.D. and 24 and To Catch A Predator and then we’ll see what’s what.

Anyhow, hope you enjoyed.

For more check out the following:
Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company.
A Rock Classic: Astarte Remembered.
Dance, Sex, and Gender.
Time magazine’s original piece: Rituals in Rock.

Lastly you can hear a few snippets of the “hard rock” music used in the production as played by the original band Crome Syrcus.

When, as children, we first catch wind of the existence of astrological symbols we are at a point in our lives when anything which might help solidify our identities by differentiation is something deserving of our attention. Most of us, I would venture to guess, take hold of our symbol for some short interval as children, and wring whatever meaning we can out of it, drawing corollaries between ourselves and others who shared the same sign, taking heart in character traits supposedly attached, bolstering, through mythical means, our sense of ourselves. When later in our lives we reject astrology as fanciful and amusing hokum it hardly matters. Our signs are still there as the tiniest footnote at the bottom of our appraisals-of-self. We will always see in them the faintest reflection.

An analogy might be that of the lapsed Catholic, who was brought up going to church, but who on adulthood rejected religion outright. Catholicism was something born-into, something outside oneself, something not chosen but inherited. Even after a definitive choice is made to reject it, however, the symbol of a cross will always manage to successfully travel that guarded pathway to our interiors. Whatever judgement the brain passes that symbol will still hold sway with the eyes.

When I was in art school I was obliged, as all hopeful image-makers are, to re-examine the personal symbology of my life. Did any of the tired old symbols carry any weight or meaning? Could any of them be used, adapted, perverted? It dawned on me around that time that though I was fond of “The Balance” as a symbol ⊕, the equal-armed beam balance which is universally used seemed not quite right. This scale with its symmetry and elegance and precision could simply never be an accurate symbol for me, my mind, or the life that I lived. It was altogether too platonic.

A few years later while working, for a short time, as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art an alternative symbol presented itself. During a shift I was stationed in one of those wonderful, dimly-lit, and comparatively empty areas of the museum ⊕, beside some long glass cases containing Roman artifacts. There were small functional and decorative objects of all kinds inside —vessels and tools and little statues and amulets all jostling together like a the contents of Romulus’ hall closet.

Amongst all of this iron and bronze a single object seemed to demand further scrutiny. It was asymmetrical and brutal looking, with its dangling chains each terminating in a hook. I had no guess as to its function or purpose. Torture device? Weapon? Brutish tool of animal husbandry? Looking at its little placard I discovered it was called a “Roman Balance” or “Steelyard” and that it was in fact a scale. I marveled for a moment at the coincidence. Of all the objects to draw my eye and interest it had to be a scale. I knew immediately that I’d found an object I could get behind, an object which resonated with me somehow. I’d found a proper Libran symbol for myself.

A bit of background information:

The Roman balance (or statera as it was originally known) is so called because no instance has been found of its existence prior to the Roman era. A similar principle was used in ancient Egyptian balances, however, and independently created examples have been found in China. Some evidence seems to exist that this type of scale was actually in use among Greek craftsmen in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.E. before Hellenistic mathematicians like Archimedes ever formally demonstrated the theoretic basis for their workings. 

The Romans brought these scales to Britain around 55 B.C.E. and the English word ‘steelyard’ by which they are referred today is thought to be a mistranslation of the German ‘Stael-hof’ ⊕, which was itself the name of the base of the Hanseatic merchants of the Middle Ages, who used the Roman balance extensively in their businesses.

Functionally steelyards differ from the balance because they have unequal arms and employ a counterpoise, rather than a series of fixed-mass weights, which is shifted along the long arm in relation the the fulcrum. At the place where the counterpoise keeps the beam exactly horizontal, the weight of the object is indicated on an engraved scale on the long arm. ⊕

Though steelyards are less precise for weighing small objects like coins or jewels ⊕ they have the benefit of employing a single weight for a wide range of loads. They were particularly useful for weighing heavy objects like vehicles, sides of beef, and humans. Additionally they had the benefit of cheap manufacture and portability. In as much they were used as industrial scales straight through the eighteenth century and remain in use in markets all throughout Asia and and the Middle East today.

I happen to find them, with their precarious asymmetry, their hooks and chains and their myriad forms of sculpted counterweights quite compelling, and beautiful.

Visually, viscerally, the steelyard seems to embody some aspect of balance, or perhaps the personal quest for it, which the equal-arm balance does not. After having discovered it there at the Met I visited it often. It didn’t take me long to realize that this object had symbolic potential far beyond the whimsical introspection it might supply for the comparatively small group of us who were born under the sign of Libra.

What, after all, do the scales symbolize for the rest of humanity?

Justice.

Thinking of the equal-arm balance, alone, in silhouette, or held aloft by the left hand of Themis / Justitia / Lady Justice, notions undoubtedly come to mind. They are precise and unambiguously immediate, aspirational and inspirational, they are resplendent and exalted, they are incorruptible and pure. In other words they have no relation whatsoever to the realities of human justice as it is experienced and met out.

Now look at the steelyard. It is hard-looking and vaguely menacing, all hooks and chains and lengths of metal. It has a brutality to it somehow. You can imagine wielding it like a club or a flail and imagine the damage it might do were it wielded against you. Then there’s its asymmetry, which on first glance seems so counterintuitive to achieve any kind of balance. By design its sides are unequal, set against one another at cross-purposes. One side only holds the weight while the other only passes judgement, and a not quite precise judgement at that.

It’s a strange, hard, dangerous looking object, all angles and points set against a shifting bluntness, and one could imagine that were you to hand one to a child she’d be just as likely to smash in a skull as to balance anything whatsoever.

Though functionally the steelyard can achieve the same aims as our aspirational equal-arm scale, visually it suggests a complexity and precariousness and menace entirely more human, and I’d argue entirely more appropriate, symbolically, for our notions of crime and punishment, corporeal or otherwise. If a pound of flesh needs weighing this is the scale for the job.

Add to this to the forms which the steelyard’s counterweight took, and could take, and all sorts of explicit symbolic relationships emerge. In the past these “poises” as they are sometimes called were often fashioned in the shape of gods, men, women or animals. One could easily imagine a slab of beef on the hooks counterbalanced by golden McDonald’s arches for instance, or an emaciated corpse counterbalanced by an Iron Cross, a knife counterbalanced by a black glove, a smoldering retarded child counterbalanced by a weight in the shape of Texas, a boot stamping on a human face, forever, counterbalanced by a giant silver dollar, or… well… whatever delightful image strikes your fancy!

The steelyard can do it all.

Anyhow, since happening upon that Roman balance about 12 years ago I’ve adopted it in my mind. When I think Libra I think steelyard, and so, conversely when I think steelyard I think, in some small way, of myself.

When I see a statue or etching of Lady Justice my mind reflexively erases that flimsy equal-arm balance with its impossible precision and imaginary exaltation and replaces it with its hard, practical, rough and ready, asymmetrical cousin. ⊕

Symbols are what they are, obviously, and not much more, but shouldn’t good ones reflect in some way the truth of a thing? Shouldn’t they hold their weight as it were? For me the steelyard does the job admirably and, yes, before you ask, even Nonists need symbols they can believe in.

Hope you enjoyed.