Dear Dennis, let this post introduce you to Fran Herndon, the Beat-era California painter I’ve admired and loved for the past 20 years or more. This month and next a gallery in San Francisco, Altman Siegel, is running a retrospective exhibition of her work, so I want to urge San Franciscans and visitors to come on down and take a look at it. The show has been organized by the young Canadian curator Lee Plested, assisted by myself. Maybe some of your readers will take a look at this post here, and come and see for themselves, in person, the things I like most about this strange and disquieting work.
Fran Herndon and Kal Spelletich. I see many younger artists drawn to Fran Herndon today. Here's Kal Spelletich, best known perhaps for his work with Survival Research Laboratories, a genius of hydraulics and the made, approaching Fran at her opening at Altman Siegel.
----I became acquainted with Fran Herndon through my work on Jack Spicer, the poet whose biography Lew Ellingham and I worked on in the 80s and 90s. Eventually our book, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, appeared in 1998 (Wesleyan University Press). When I met Lew in the early 80s, I asked him, did Spicer really know about art? (He had founded, with five of his former students at the San Francisco Art Institute, an exhibition space they called the “6 Gallery,” but you know how sometimes you do things just to go along with a pushy crowd? Maybe, I thought, maybe Spicer was weak like I am in this one regard.) Lew advised me to look at Fran Herndon’s work and then make up my mind for she, Lew said, was the visual artist with whom he was closest.
Fran Herndon and Lewis Ellingham. Lew is the man who wrote Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance (Wesleyan University Press), which benefitted from many interviews with Fran. Asterisk: he and I are co-authors.
----When I met her I remember feeling that strange thrill that I had when introducing myself to the redoubtable Elaine Sturtevant, or when grabbing the hand of Marianne Faithfull as she stormed into “Why D’Ya Do It” onstage at the Fillmore. Each had been there (“there” in some ultimate, Platonic sense) at the beginning, and done something unique, bizarre, beautiful and misunderstood. Fran Herndon showed me into her place in the unfashionable Richmond district of San Francisco—on an avenue totally off my route!—and it would be hard to describe what an Angela Carter-esque experience this was, but in fairy tales one is often taken offguard because one is on wholly new territory, without most of the rules one lives by, unable to cling to familiar landmarks. I wasn’t there long, but I asked her to sign my copy of Everything as Expected, and she concurred. She had been asked about Jack Spicer, I expect, many times before, but I thought if I took the high road, and approached him through her own art work, I might come up with a different angle than all those other bozos. Thus began a long engagement.
Herndon Family.... Fran Herndon at the opening of her retrospective at Altman Siegel with her younger son, Jack, and Jack's wife, Tamara.
----Everything As Expected is a peculiar book, written by Fran’s then-husband, the late Jim Herndon in the early 1970s. James Herndon was once quite a famous author, a schoolteacher who has written up his experiences teaching in the inner city schools of the Bay Area and made a pair of amazing books about them, works of radical pedagogy that had enormous infuence in their day. The Way It Spozed to Be came out in 1968, and its successor, How to Survive in Your Native Land, in 1971. Remember the season of The Wire that focused on public school systems and its built-in wiring for failure? Total Jim Herndon knockoff. In Everything As Expected, Herndon wrote of the summer of 1962, when Fran Herndon had embarked on a complicated series of “sports collages” under the tutelary spirit of Jack Spicer (1925-1965). Fran worked from sports magazines, tearing out illustrations that caught her eye, and making a new picture each week by arranging the found elements and then treating them with watercolor, gouache, sculptural ornamentation, mounting them on masonite, cardboard, sometimes adding homemade frames. Herndon’s book reproduces almost all of the collages finished that spring, summer and fall, adding some wry, even caustic anecdotes in the Vonnegut manner. The text becomes an extended meditation on magic—the magic of bringing something to our world, from what Spicer called the “Invisible World.” Here in San Francisco it’s easy to feel magic all around one every day, but to find its source is a sometimes terrifying avon.
Claudia Altman Siegel (gallerist), Lee Plested (curator), Fran Herndon (artist) meeting for the first time at Fran's San Francisco home, mid-December, 2010.
----Years later, last October in fact, the curator and writer Scott Watson came to visit San Francisco from Vancouver, where he directs the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia. Scott came to attend the opening of SFMOMA’s exhibition “New Work: R.H. Quaytman,” but we organized a trip to the Richmond so Scott could pay a studio visit on Fran Herndon. We brought a second curator with us Lee Plested, who had worked with Scott at UBC and with me at CCA, the art school in San Francisco where I sometimes teach. Scott asked Fran to show us not only her most recent work, but to take us back to the beginning, to her garage, where in a stable of flat files she had miraculously kept her large paintings from the earliest days of work. I hadn’t seen but the tiniest number of these pictures before, and Lee, whose first meeting with Fran this was, was as blown away as I. He hit on the idea of somehow organizing a show to exhibit this early work, and within a week or two after our visit announced to me that he and I were going to curate it together, and that he had secured the participation of the gallerist Claudia Altman Siegel, and the thing was practically was for the fall. Well, that was around the New Year, and now months and months later the show is up.
Christian Marclay made an appearance at the opening of "Fran Herndon" and, paparazzi-style, autograph book in hand, I approached him studying Herndon's anti-Vietnam War collages from 1965.
----Fran has always maintained the respect of coterie of experimental poets; from Spicer, Blaser, Duncan, George Stanley and Jess in the early days, to the very young of today. In recent years the poet Avery Burns and his wife, Andrea Koehler, have organized several shows of Fran’s work at the North Beach gallery Canessa Park: beautiful shows, vivid, wildly ornate and personal. Altman Siegel is a very different sort of art space, clean, uncluttered, with a clientele of international artists, curators and collectors, what my dad would have admiringly called a “blue chip” gallery. At 82 or 83 this was a different sort of opening for Fran Herndon, but she was there, still somehow as young as she was the day I met her, very radiant and composed under this new, somewhat bewildering barrage of attention. (Dennis, even Christian Marclay poked his head in.) Here’s the essay I wrote for the catalogue of the present show, which closes at the end of October, please go in and take a look if you’re in town.
Saturday, September 24, 2011 we had a poetry reading at Altman Siegel. Eight poets read briefly in honor of Fran Herndon, the artist was present as well as a distinguished (well, a wonderfully random) crowd. Back row: Steven Seidenberg, Kevin Killian, Avery E.D. Burns, Matt Gordon. Middle row: Norma Cole and Lewis DeForest Brown. Front row: George Albon, Fran Herndon, Elizabeth Robinson, Colleen Lookingbill. Photo by Takming Chuang.
Fran Herndon
prepared for exhibition, “Fran Herndon,” at Altman Siegel Gallery, September 8, 2011
The Gospel According to Joe [Louis] ... This was the first of Fran's pictures that Claudia Altman Siegel selected to take with her to New York's Armory Show last spring, where the response was favorable enough to warrant a whole retrospective. Yay Altman Siegel!
Born in Oklahoma in 1929, of Native American origin, Fran Herndon escaped to Europe just as Senator Joseph McCarthy turned this country upside down. The US, she told us recently, was then “no place for a brown face.” In France she met and married the teacher and writer James Herndon, and the couple moved to San Francisco in 1957. (The first of their two sons, Jay, was born the same year.) Shortly after arriving in the Bay Area she met four old friends of her husband’s: Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan and Jess—the brilliant crew that had invented the Berkeley Renaissance ten years earlier, artists now all working at the height of their poetic powers in a highly charged urban bohemia.
----Fran Herndon became most deeply involved with to the most irascible of them all. From the very first evening that they had spent time together, Jack Spicer (1925-1965) seemed to see something unusual, something vivid in Fran that she had not seen herself. It was as if he were establishing a person, the way he created a poem, out of the raw materials she presented, and for a long time she did not know what it was he wanted her to be. Fran was mystified but elated by a power that Jack saw hidden inside her demure, polite social persona. He knew before she did that she would never be completely satisfied with the roles of mother and housewife.
Campsite (1959), an early painting showing Herndon's then-husband Jim, and their first son, Jay, then a toddler.
----When Spicer scrutinized her, as if envisioning in his mind’s eye a new and somehow different person, she began thinking: there must be some off-moments from being a mother—and during those moments what would she do? “I remember clearly discussing school with him. And out of the alternatives I mentioned, he zeroed in on the Art Institute.”
----She began to drop off two-year-old Jay at a nursery school in North Beach, and walk up the hill to the Art Institute on Chestnut. She was quietly astonished at this turn of events, but already Jack was “a very powerful figure in my life. His opinions were crucial.
Catch Me If You Can, one of the sports collages Herndon worked on in the summer of 1962 under the watchful eye of poet Jack Spicer.
----“He saw in me,” she recalls, “something greater than I saw in myself.” In 1959 she and Spicer inaugurated a series of joint projects, beginning with their editorial work on the mimeo magazine “J.” Simultaneously they collaborated on Spicer’s poem “Homage to Creeley,” each working independently and meeting weekly to share results. “J” was devised as a reply to the Beat magazine “Beatitude,” recently launched in San Francisco by Spicer’s rival, poet Bob Kaufman. Spicer and Herndon launched an open letter, saying what they wanted and more importantly, what they didn’t want. Submissions were to be left in a box behind the bar at The Place, a promiment poetry/ jazz/ performance space in North Beach. Fran took charge of the artwork, requiring her artists to work in stencil or typewriter font or a combination of both. Under the constraints of DIY was born what has been called “in many ways the most beautiful of all the mimeo magazines” (Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips, in A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980, their 1998 survey of mimeographed poetry journals and ephemera.)
Hell, No -- A few years after completing her sports collages, Herndon began work on a similar series of collages in sympathy with the social struggle of anti-draft activism during the LBJ era of the US war in VietNam.
----Simultaneously, Spicer’s “Creeley” poems and Herndon’s lithographs startled and enchanted them both.
----In the evenings Spicer came by the Herndons’—sometimes three or four times a week, sometimes every night. Fran felt herself waiting for his visit, convinced of the link between the lithographs she was creating and the poems that were pouring out of him. He was never present while she worked on her graphics, and she never saw him writing, but somehow the results of their private endeavor meshed in a way that seemed perfect to them both. Jim Herndon later wrote about the experience. “Jack would show up at his certain night with his new poem and Fran would have a new litho. Jack would point out a correspondence between the two. He would show how Fran couldn’t have known about the content of the poem. He would show that he couldn’t have known about the image in the litho.” Fran said, “Sometimes it was reaching, but he knew that there was some connection in [my] work and what he was writing. It was as if at times it was prophetic (I mean, he would never have expected that to happen)—and he was just ecstatic when he could see that connection. At times it surprised me, because I had no inkling of the poems that were preceding or coming after those lithos. He saw it as not in any way illustrating the poems, but just an interaction of some kind.”
King Football
----In the evenings Spicer came by the Herndons’—sometimes three or four times a week, sometimes every night. Fran felt herself waiting for his visit, convinced of the link between the lithographs she was creating and the poems that were pouring out of him. He was never present while she worked on her graphics, and she never saw him writing, but somehow the results of their private endeavor meshed in a way that seemed perfect to them both. Jim Herndon later wrote about the experience. “Jack would show up at his certain night with his new poem and Fran would have a new litho. Jack would point out a correspondence between the two. He would show how Fran couldn’t have known about the content of the poem. He would show that he couldn’t have known about the image in the litho.” Fran said, “Sometimes it was reaching, but he knew that there was some connection in [my] work and what he was writing. It was as if at times it was prophetic (I mean, he would never have expected that to happen)—and he was just ecstatic when he could see that connection. At times it surprised me, because I had no inkling of the poems that were preceding or coming after those lithos. He saw it as not in any way illustrating the poems, but just an interaction of some kind.”
King Football
----She was skeptical, but wavering. She wasn’t sure what to believe. Herndon wrote, “She wanted to forget it. She wanted to have it. She didn’t want ghosts drawing her lithos. She hoped they were. She wanted the visible. She loved the litho-stone, apparently firmly connected to the invisible. One night Jack produced a poem about a white rabbit absolutely outlined in whiteness/ upon a black background and Fran produced her litho of a white rabbit absolutely outlined in whiteness upon a black background, and the correspondence between the two was thus exact, as if the ghosts had gotten tired of just hinting about it.” This experience lasted no longer than four or five months. “It was a magic process.” She loved the litho stone she used, its perfect smoothness and porousness, its absorption of acid. Never again, she recollected, did she achieve the singularity she achieved with the lithos for “Homage to Creeley.” “Somehow when the poems were finished, that’s when it was over, really.”
Opening Day (for Willie Mays)
----In the meantime Fran turned to painting, and never really looked back. (Her second son, Jack, was born in 1960). The work in the present exhibition is largely drawn from a furiously concentrated period of time, where she painted as though her life depended on it. In these pictures all of American painting seems drawn into the vortex: the social realism of such predecessors as Grant Wood, Thomas Benton; the furious blend of abstraction and figuration that flowed into De Kooning’s brand of “action painting”; the canny, mystic attention to details of nature and landscape of Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe. Pop art, too, figuress into the mix, and the mixed media suspensions of Rauschenberg, Bruce Conner and Jess. Not here, buit in the library at Special Collections of SUNY Buffalo, hangs Fran’s portrait of Robert Duncan, festooned with spakrly cloth to represent his shirt of many colors. In the present exhibition note the thickness and the sculptural mass of the paint, writhing and byzantine, as though trying to p[ry itself loose of the canvas. In “Opening Day,” the exuberant, rabbit-filled picture of Willie Mays, number 24, Mays’ famous words float in medieval gold. “I don’t compare ‘em,” he told a sportswriter in 1959, on being awarded his third Golden Glove award. “I just catch ‘em.” Similarly Spicer never took credit for his own poems; they didn’t really belong to him, he said, he hadn’t written them, he had just received them from an outside force he called the “Invisible World.”
Ghost Riders .... One of the "sports collages" Herndon created in 1962, this is the only picture in the retrospective that's not for sale. Dodie and I bought it years and years ago, and we took it to White Columns with us when we had our show there (of objects from our apartment).
----Spicer couldn’t type, and enrtusted the manuscripts of his new book-length projects to Fran’s sceretarial skill. She typed The Holy Grail for him, as it appeared to him little by little, in 1962, and created a series of lithographs centering on the figures in the Arthurian legend. (“Percival” 2 and 3 appear in the present exhibition.) At the same time, Fran completed the “sports” collages that make up her most intriguing achievement in art. The lithographs for Spicer’s “Homage to Creeley” were, of course, black and white; in the collages she burst into color as though entering a paradise of revealed myth and truth. Across town Jess was creating a similar series of “paste-ups,” like Herndon ripping and slicing up visual images and rearranging them onto canvas. Spicer assigned Herndon the humble pages of Life and Sports Illustrated for her materials, and she painted over and under these images and achieving a rich, often misty glaze. The subjects of this series were sports-world versions of betrayal, tragedy, and loss, such as the trade of Y. A. Tittle for Lou Cordelione by the San Francisco 49ers—“King Football”— the first Liston-Patterson heavyweight fight; the scandalous death of the boxer Benny “the Kid” Paret. “The Devil and Archie Moore.” “Collage for Jim Brown.” Take the haunting “Catch Me if You Can”: Herndon;’s brushtrokes transformed the photographed horses straining for the finish line into wraithlike creatures, like Kandinsky’s horses, not “real” beasts but expressionistic, ephemeral, alert animals, closer to unicorns. Perspective is flattened: foreground and background keep switching, giving the collages a watery, dreamlike quality removed from Jess’ ornate, precise surrealism. The “sports collages” also are very direct about race subjects; in the throes of the civil rights struggle, America was ripe for the sort of rich, dazzling imagery Herndon brought to her athletic subjects; there’s tragedy and anger here—as in the later anti-draft, anti-war collages—but there’s also a glorification of black and Latino athletes that anticipates the work, forty-years later, of a later SFAI graduate, Kehinde Wiley. Even Marilyn Monroe pointedly becomes The White Angel, in Herndon’s memorial collage of the same name; we see first Bert Stern’s memorable Vogue image of a fretful Monroe, then her whiteness collapses into a mad sprawl of faces, body parts, skull, wraith and animal imagery as she sinks underground into the dark.
The Death of the Poet. These lithographs were among the very first works Herndon made as an artist in the late 1950s, and they appeared as illustrations to Jack Spicer's book The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether.
----These pictures were made by a kind of given chance structure, whatever was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated from week to week dictated the image stucture of the work. That was the magic part; the rest was up to Fran Herndon, and into art history through a very long circuitous route.
----All the artists in the Spicer circle vacillated between trying to get their work shown, and another, queasy feeling that art was over. In addition, Spicer was intently contemptuous of those who tried to make money from art or writing. His own books were issued without copyright. Anyone who published a poem in a magazine outside of San Francisco was labelled a “sell out” to the larger, eat-em-up consumer culture. Or they were part of what he called the “Fix.” It would have been enormously difficult to move out from beneath that psychic plane, that heavy disapproval. In Secret Exhibition, her 1990 survey of Bay Area art, that focusses on “six California artists in the Cold War era,” critic Rebecca Solnit employs a cultural studies approach to analyze the propensity of many San Francisco artists to make art in secret. On the one hand, such propensity stems from occulted traditions, including that of the hermeticism of the artist; in another light, as Solnit shows, San Francisco was so far off the art map that the artists she describes felt curiously free to invent their own, tiny, freakishly distorted art world, and a new kind of art to show in it: the funk-junk assemblage rag bag thing we all know well now. Few artists took any precautions to preserve their work, taking a Darwinist view, “sink or swim,” or perhaps yielding to an Existentialist urge to cast one’s fates to the wind. Documentation was unheard of. The scene was thus rather nihilistic. And gave birth to a lot of artists-run spaces, from the King Ubu Gallery of 1952 to the Batman Gallery later in the 60s. Spicer and five of his students from the California School of Fina Arts established the “6” Gallery in 1953. But Solnit’s book omits discussion of the galleries run by this group of artists, Borregaard’s Museum of 1960; the Peacock Gallery of 1963; and Buzz, the gallery organized by Paul Alexander, Bill Brodecky and Larry Fagin in 1964. The outsiders and rebels of Solnit’s world, whose work was shown in the big Whitney show of 1995, “Beat Culture and the New America,” had only a very distant interest in this group, who were beyond the pale in many ways, even to the outsiders of Secret Exhibition.
The Long Snorkel
Opening Day (for Willie Mays)
----In the meantime Fran turned to painting, and never really looked back. (Her second son, Jack, was born in 1960). The work in the present exhibition is largely drawn from a furiously concentrated period of time, where she painted as though her life depended on it. In these pictures all of American painting seems drawn into the vortex: the social realism of such predecessors as Grant Wood, Thomas Benton; the furious blend of abstraction and figuration that flowed into De Kooning’s brand of “action painting”; the canny, mystic attention to details of nature and landscape of Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe. Pop art, too, figuress into the mix, and the mixed media suspensions of Rauschenberg, Bruce Conner and Jess. Not here, buit in the library at Special Collections of SUNY Buffalo, hangs Fran’s portrait of Robert Duncan, festooned with spakrly cloth to represent his shirt of many colors. In the present exhibition note the thickness and the sculptural mass of the paint, writhing and byzantine, as though trying to p[ry itself loose of the canvas. In “Opening Day,” the exuberant, rabbit-filled picture of Willie Mays, number 24, Mays’ famous words float in medieval gold. “I don’t compare ‘em,” he told a sportswriter in 1959, on being awarded his third Golden Glove award. “I just catch ‘em.” Similarly Spicer never took credit for his own poems; they didn’t really belong to him, he said, he hadn’t written them, he had just received them from an outside force he called the “Invisible World.”
Ghost Riders .... One of the "sports collages" Herndon created in 1962, this is the only picture in the retrospective that's not for sale. Dodie and I bought it years and years ago, and we took it to White Columns with us when we had our show there (of objects from our apartment).
----Spicer couldn’t type, and enrtusted the manuscripts of his new book-length projects to Fran’s sceretarial skill. She typed The Holy Grail for him, as it appeared to him little by little, in 1962, and created a series of lithographs centering on the figures in the Arthurian legend. (“Percival” 2 and 3 appear in the present exhibition.) At the same time, Fran completed the “sports” collages that make up her most intriguing achievement in art. The lithographs for Spicer’s “Homage to Creeley” were, of course, black and white; in the collages she burst into color as though entering a paradise of revealed myth and truth. Across town Jess was creating a similar series of “paste-ups,” like Herndon ripping and slicing up visual images and rearranging them onto canvas. Spicer assigned Herndon the humble pages of Life and Sports Illustrated for her materials, and she painted over and under these images and achieving a rich, often misty glaze. The subjects of this series were sports-world versions of betrayal, tragedy, and loss, such as the trade of Y. A. Tittle for Lou Cordelione by the San Francisco 49ers—“King Football”— the first Liston-Patterson heavyweight fight; the scandalous death of the boxer Benny “the Kid” Paret. “The Devil and Archie Moore.” “Collage for Jim Brown.” Take the haunting “Catch Me if You Can”: Herndon;’s brushtrokes transformed the photographed horses straining for the finish line into wraithlike creatures, like Kandinsky’s horses, not “real” beasts but expressionistic, ephemeral, alert animals, closer to unicorns. Perspective is flattened: foreground and background keep switching, giving the collages a watery, dreamlike quality removed from Jess’ ornate, precise surrealism. The “sports collages” also are very direct about race subjects; in the throes of the civil rights struggle, America was ripe for the sort of rich, dazzling imagery Herndon brought to her athletic subjects; there’s tragedy and anger here—as in the later anti-draft, anti-war collages—but there’s also a glorification of black and Latino athletes that anticipates the work, forty-years later, of a later SFAI graduate, Kehinde Wiley. Even Marilyn Monroe pointedly becomes The White Angel, in Herndon’s memorial collage of the same name; we see first Bert Stern’s memorable Vogue image of a fretful Monroe, then her whiteness collapses into a mad sprawl of faces, body parts, skull, wraith and animal imagery as she sinks underground into the dark.
The Death of the Poet. These lithographs were among the very first works Herndon made as an artist in the late 1950s, and they appeared as illustrations to Jack Spicer's book The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether.
----These pictures were made by a kind of given chance structure, whatever was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated from week to week dictated the image stucture of the work. That was the magic part; the rest was up to Fran Herndon, and into art history through a very long circuitous route.
----All the artists in the Spicer circle vacillated between trying to get their work shown, and another, queasy feeling that art was over. In addition, Spicer was intently contemptuous of those who tried to make money from art or writing. His own books were issued without copyright. Anyone who published a poem in a magazine outside of San Francisco was labelled a “sell out” to the larger, eat-em-up consumer culture. Or they were part of what he called the “Fix.” It would have been enormously difficult to move out from beneath that psychic plane, that heavy disapproval. In Secret Exhibition, her 1990 survey of Bay Area art, that focusses on “six California artists in the Cold War era,” critic Rebecca Solnit employs a cultural studies approach to analyze the propensity of many San Francisco artists to make art in secret. On the one hand, such propensity stems from occulted traditions, including that of the hermeticism of the artist; in another light, as Solnit shows, San Francisco was so far off the art map that the artists she describes felt curiously free to invent their own, tiny, freakishly distorted art world, and a new kind of art to show in it: the funk-junk assemblage rag bag thing we all know well now. Few artists took any precautions to preserve their work, taking a Darwinist view, “sink or swim,” or perhaps yielding to an Existentialist urge to cast one’s fates to the wind. Documentation was unheard of. The scene was thus rather nihilistic. And gave birth to a lot of artists-run spaces, from the King Ubu Gallery of 1952 to the Batman Gallery later in the 60s. Spicer and five of his students from the California School of Fina Arts established the “6” Gallery in 1953. But Solnit’s book omits discussion of the galleries run by this group of artists, Borregaard’s Museum of 1960; the Peacock Gallery of 1963; and Buzz, the gallery organized by Paul Alexander, Bill Brodecky and Larry Fagin in 1964. The outsiders and rebels of Solnit’s world, whose work was shown in the big Whitney show of 1995, “Beat Culture and the New America,” had only a very distant interest in this group, who were beyond the pale in many ways, even to the outsiders of Secret Exhibition.
The Long Snorkel
----The problem with artists-run spaces is, of course, that though they deliver the means of distribution back to the producer—which has a beauty of its own, an exhilarating freedom—they depend on continued enthusiasm, and enthusiasm comes easy at first but quickly slows to a trickle. Thus Borregaard’s Museum, the Peacock Gallery, Buzz lasted only a few seasons at most. The present exhibition gathers together a representative sampling of Herndon’s portion of the grand November 1963 Peacock Gallery show organized by the poet Robin Blaser (1926-2009). If you squint and look at the splendors of “Ophelia,” “Tile Rats,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” or the sublime “Doodlebug,” it might almost be 1963 over again.
The White Angel
----In the 1970s, as contemporaries like Jess, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo began finding fame, Herndon put aside art for personal reasons, and when she returned to painting she did so in a deliberately lowkey, unheralded way. But in that period a coterie of admirers from many disciplines has grown vocal, and through a sprinkling of small but important exhibitions, interest in her work has reached a new height. Fran Herndon continues to make paintings and collage in her home studio in the Sunset district of San Francisco.
Valentine
----
The White Angel
----In the 1970s, as contemporaries like Jess, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo began finding fame, Herndon put aside art for personal reasons, and when she returned to painting she did so in a deliberately lowkey, unheralded way. But in that period a coterie of admirers from many disciplines has grown vocal, and through a sprinkling of small but important exhibitions, interest in her work has reached a new height. Fran Herndon continues to make paintings and collage in her home studio in the Sunset district of San Francisco.
Valentine
----
*
p.s. Hey. This weekend we get a real treat because the masterful Kevin Killian is generously and inimitably drawing our attention to the painter Fran Herndon, who, like so many artists who have been closely associated with and beloved by poets -- New York School poet favorites and intimates like Fairfield Porter, Trevor Winkfield, and Mike Goldberg spring to my mind -- have been curiously and unjustly underrated by official arbiters of the art world. Kevin does his part to help right that wrong today, and I'm proud that he has considered this blog a viable occasion. Please explore the goods this weekend, and speak to Kevin, if you will. And thanks a lot. And thanks a whole, whole lot to you, Mr. Killian. Otherwise, writer, actor, publisher, d.l. and more Ken Baumann has written a review of 'The Marbled Swarm' at HTMLGIANT, and I'm thrilled by it, and if you want to read it, you can do so here. ** Chris, Hey. Awesome on your list making willingness. Yeah, I'm a list junkie myself. Not that I'm saying you're a junkie. Never mind. Great on finishing your PhD app too and moreso! Whew! ** Mw, Well, hey there, mw! What a total pleasure to see or at least imagine your smiling face. I'm actually a really bad liar, I've been told, so I don't know about the lawyer thing. Can lawyers wear dark glasses in court? I might be able to swing that. Yeah, the Becker quote was a find. Never would have imagined that. Well, yeah, hey. How are you? What's up? ** Oscar B, Thanks, bud. Nuit Blanche, Nuit Blanche, Nuit Blanche! Talk in a while! ** David Ehrenstein, Gosh, thank you so much, David. That's very kind of you, and it means a lot. Ha ha, I love your guess at and proposal of what I might do next and last. That would be an interesting challenge. Yes, really, thank you so much, David. Your words honor me. David Forest dish should be dishy indeed if it doesn't get vetted to a crisp. ** Michael, Thanks a lot, man. Yes, I seem to be living proof that one can survive and even thrive in Paris without speaking French well whatsoever. But my boyfriend speaks fluently, and I must admit that helps considerably. Still, consider me your go-to future expatriate neighbor. Great that you're on an Honore jag. I love his work, and thanks about my stint in 'Homme au Bain'. Well, the film was supposed to be a short film, maybe 40 minutes long, but he was encouraged to turn it into a feature film after he'd shot it, and he did so during the editing. Christophe had a general idea and drift in mind, and the characters themselves and the basic shot by shot narrative were predetermined, but all the dialogue was improvised by the actors. He met with me a couple of weeks before the shoot and gave me some basic guidelines to work with regarding my character. I'm terrible on my toes, so I wrote that kind of monologue that I deliver in the film in advance and memorized it, and then I kind of improvised around what I had written based on how Francois Sagat responded to it. It was big fun to do, and obviously a total coup for me to be able to be in one of his films. Bon weekend! ** Bacteriaburger, Thanks, Natty! Naturally, I'm interested in your eBook. I'm a fan, man. Cool, I'll go get the pdf because I haven't sprung for a Kindle. Everyone, d.l. Bacteriaburger is also the wonderful and critically acclaimed writer Natty Soltesz, and there's a new eBook of his work out, and I encourage you to score it. Here he is to explain: 'Right now my EBook is only available on Kindle (here), or people can order a PDF version from me (here). It's mostly old material except for two new stories and an introduction - and the introduction is probably the best part of it (which you can read for free from the Amazon sample, natch).' Thanks, my friend! I'm excited to read it! ** Daveyhoule, Hey, Davey! Thanks a lot about the post, pal. Excellent that you were able to see Kevin's event. Envy on your access to the Spicer poem. And, hey, coincidentally, there's Kevin continued right up above. You good, man? What's going on? ** Sypha, Thanks, James. Oh, excellent on your list. Your lists are always a total boon. Cool. ** Kyler, My holiday too. Duh, I guess. Seeing Munch's work in person is quite intense. It made me realize that he's an artist whose stuff really needs to be seen in 3 dimensions to become the total knock out it is. I hope you have a very fine weekend. ** JoeM, Hi, Joe. My memory is definitely not to be trusted when it comes to specifics, especially when it comes to the p.s. I wish I could be better about emails, and I have spurts of being okay, but I have this feeling that as long as I'm doing the blog this way, I'm just never going to be email-efficient 'cos doing the p.s. has a kind of online interaction burn out effect that can be a struggle to fight off. I'll keep trying. Yes, that audio tape from the MJ trial is just ... I don't know that the world needed to hear that, but no question that the media is going to suck all the personal, unflattering stuff they can find out into the public for as long as that trial lasts, which I assume will be for quite a while. ** _Black_Acrylic, Nice 10 seconds, Ben. You got a lot in there. It's very tricky and cleverly done. Kudos. Damn, wish I could be in NYC now or soon. Everyone, _Black_Acrylic has a hot tip for those of you will be in NYC at some point during the next three weeks. Here he is: 'Any anarcho-punks in New York Sept 30th - Oct 20th? Anyone? Well there's an exhibition of fanzines donated to Crass between 1976 and 1984, and it looks good: IN ALL OUR DECADENCE PEOPLE DIE'. Have a great weekend. ** Ken Baumann, Ken! Man, what can I say? I'm just blown away by your review. I had not imagined an ideal response, but when I was reading your piece, I felt like there could not be a better, more honoring review. The fact that you created your own system full of mysteries and direct engagements is so fantastic, and I feel like you really got the novel in the ways I hoped it would be gotten. It thrills me that you found and were impacted by some the novel's really important (to me) secret passages: the actor/ performance thread which is really a central one, the numbers thing, the cartoon/ fantasy/ play thread that is, again, very key, the novel's sleight of hand, the 'Believe lies' recommendation, and etc. The confusion talk, the board game reference, the way it is not like Robbe-Grillet, ... Maybe most excitingly to me, you seem to really, really get the emotional admission, and how I want it work within the novel both in the moment and at large. Honestly, you getting that is a huge relief to me. Yeah, the entire review is just fantastic. I was literally trembling with excitement when I read it. I'm sure I'll say more to you later as I contemplate it further, but, man, so much gratitude to you. And, yeah, I feel tremendous relief, and it's hard to know to thank you adequately for that. Man, promise me that you'll have a great weekend, okay. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Oh, the next 50 books? Hm, okay, I'll give that a shot. Interesting. Sure. I'll get on seeing 'Dog's Dialogue' and 'City of Pirates' asap. Thanks! No, I only discovered Bartlett for the first time a few weeks ago. If all goes as planned, Gisele and I will be showing two of his dolls and some of his photographs in one of the exhibitions in the Pompidou festival. The Brown photos are photos of Halloween from the early 20th century that he has collected. Again, we're showing some in our festival. He's not a photographer, as far as I know. He was in Throbbing Gristle and Coil, and he has his own project/band whose name is escaping me at this very moment. ** Chris Cochrane, That Monday gig sounds sweet. Yet another of the growing horde that I hate to have missed. Excellent weekend to you too, buddy. ** Sublethal, Yeah, he's the Coil Ossian Brown. Ha ha, understood about your Halloween antipathy. I of course love that it turns teenagers into costumed kings for a night, but I mostly love the Halloween build up and general atmosphere and, of course, the spooky houses it occasions. On the night itself, I usually hold up in my pad with the porch light turned off watching a horror movie marathon. I'd love to see your books list. If you flake, it's cool, but if you don't, it's even cooler. ** Charlie m, Hey Charlie. Best holiday ever and by a landslide. Hands down. High five on that, man. Yeah, a books list would be awesome, thanks. Do your weekend proud, man. ** Bill, Aren't they? Eugene Meatyard, sure, that makes sense. I know, $100, and that ghost boy video would have been kind of crap without Jim Shaw's dawning CBS eye attached to it. Your ghosts kick its sorry, wussy ass all the away to kingdom come, Bill. ** Misanthrope, George, water under the bridge, but you should have gone to the ER immediately, man. That's very scary. And if you miss your doctor's appointment and don't tell him exactly what happened and get all the tests he wants you to get and do what he says, you are dead meat, and not in the pleasant dying in your sleep way either. You hear me? Dude, seriously, it is time for you to get your body into a state of decent health. This is not something to procrastinate about. This is serious business, and that holds true even if it was a panic attack, okay? I mean it. Enough is enough. Promise me you're going to take this situation as a wake up call and get yourself in shape. Promise me. I say that with all the love in the world, man. ** 5strings, I think you're right about Heather O'Rourke. I think I saw her grave or niche in the wall, I forget. No, I don't know that interview. Hunh. Perec's grave, ha ha, cool. But the Louvre has that sculpture of the lion rimming the naked warrior guy, and that kind of makes up for everything else. Boston would have a great ghost tour. Of that I have no doubt. They have one here, a walking tour, but since the French aren't really into the paranormal hardly at all for reasons I don't understand, I haven't taken it. Yeah, do a Day in my gallery. Excellent. Anytime, name the date, as soon as you feel it. Thanks! Cool Kiss links. I just sampled them, but I'll watch them to their ends later. Dude, thanks, and rock Saturday and Sunday way hard. ** Lord-s, Hey, Lord! Really nice to see you! And that is awesome news about the Alice Cooper spooky house indeed. And I will get to motherfucking walk through it because it has just made the sometimes spotty, uneven, overpriced Universal Horror Nights event a top priority, which is great, so don't worry about my wallet. Super nice of you. Any chance for a catch up on your end? No pressure. Yeah, great to see you! ** Bollo, Hi, J. Big up on the dough to get the printer. I want to know what you print. That Ossian Brown book is cool. Again, if you can get over here in Feb., you'll get to see a bunch of them in the ... flesh? Great weekend to you! ** Pisycaca, Hi, Montse! Thank you a lot, pal. I was kind of, yeah, proud of that post. Cool. Very cool about your books list. Very cool! Have you and Xet got any groovy weekend stuff going on? Nuit Blanche is tonight, so my weekend is totally covered. ** Armando, Hey, man! Oh, I hope you get to see it. If you don't have a ticket, you should probably get there pretty early because, as you probably know, it's free of charge, I think, and that might get it filled up. I wish I could be there too. Anyway, let me know what you think, and thanks a whole lot for making the effort to see it. ** Slatted Light, Hi, D. Oh, thank you so much, man, about the post. Yeah, I worked my butt off on that one, as you could probably tell, so, yeah, thank you, man! Your thoughts about charisma are fascinating. I'm going to dwell in your comments after I get out of here and clear my head of the particular, motion-filled, blurring attention necessitated by p.s. writing mode, especially as I hit the multi-hour mark towards the end. I don't take what you're saying as accusatory at all or anything like that. Perhaps we're talking about different things, but I'm not sure? The notion of charisma that I'm thinking about when I speak of charisma as a power to work with in prose writing would, in complicated ways, incorporate everything from product design to Hitler type figures to cult religious theories to Top Ten lists to ... whatever. Things whose magic trick vis-Ã -vis allure partly involves a seeming evacuation of the libidinal. I don't know if that's very clear. But I don't think that's what you're addressing at all, or I'm not sure, or perhaps you are, and I want to give your thoughts, which are always just totally extraordinary -- accept it, dude -- the respect of a cleared head, so I will pore over your comments in a little while. I think I might even be utterly in line with what you're saying. Thank you, David. Much love and gratitude to you. ** Now, please enjoy your weekend with Herndon and Killian, and I'll look forward to see you all on Monday. Oh, and get those favorite book lists happening if you don't kind. Thanks! Later!
