Fart Enjoy — Syd Barrett (1946-2006)

SYD BARRETT – HIS BOOK (1964/65)
by Andrew Rawlinson

I was at school with Syd in Cambridge. He was a couple of years younger than me, which is a lot at school, but he lived just round the corner from Roger Waters, and Roger and I were in the same class.

When Roger and Syd (and Geoff Mott of the Mottoes, who went to the same school) started playing music, I used to go along to listen. I was more into Surrealism, happenings and concrete poetry myself but Syd was interested in all this as well. Our heroes were Burroughs and Kerouac, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, the films of Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage. It was heady stuff.

Participation was essential. Happenings included the audience: the event was the people who were there. In like spirit, I bought a large map of the world, copied the outlines of 40 or 50 countries onto sheets of paper, sent them to various people with the instruction, ‘Decorate this how you like and send it back to me’ – and stuck the countries back on the map. Result: a group creation, one that nobody could predict. Syd got Russia, I think – the biggest country in the world. He painted it light blue all over. (I don’t know what happened to that world – it just disappeared.)

Syd took to these experiments with relish. So when I sent him a book I’d made, he sent back FART ENJOY as a ‘reply’ (or maybe the sequel). I’m not sure about the exact date. I know where I was living, so that places it between the end of 1964 and the summer of 1965. He was in London (Tottenham Street I think, not Earlham Street) and I was in Cambridge. I don’t suppose it took him very long – he was always a fast worker. It’s seven sheets of cardboard held together by sellotape.

It’s also a little gem and as good a reflection of the man himself as I know: experimental, colourful, wide open and right on the button. He used the cut-up technique several times (‘Lieutenant Lunch Date’ and ‘Post Office Tower’), sometimes with nursery rhymes as an implied backdrop (‘Sprat Locket Patch’. ‘Hark!’). Origin of Floral Structures’ splices together a textbook and Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Jeremy Fisher. The collages and paintings are exactly like the words: a mixture of austere-bordering-on-abstract and what could be called blazing whimsy. (Just like his music).

‘Add a Mark’ is typical participatory art’. ‘Divided Self’ is a list of synonyms from a thesaurus (and you read into it what you like about Syd’s self). I’ve no idea what ‘Topical’ is about. And as for ‘Dear Roge’, I always thought it was a real letter he just copied out. Now I’m not so sure. It could be a spoof that is indistinguishable from the real thing. If it is, it fooled me.

Quite a few rock’n’rollers have tried their hand at writing and painting. Syd is different from them all. He’s far more accessible than Dylan’s unreadable Tarantula (which must be a cut-up though I’ve never seen any proof) but a lot tougher than Bolan’s sword-and-sorcery romance or Jim Morrison’s self-conscious indulgences. He’s quite as experimental as Henry Rollins and Lydia Lunch (thought not as angry) – or as Lennon and Eno, come to that (though they worked harder at it). He certainly isn’t as ‘serious’ as Nick Cave, Pete Townshend, Leonard Cohen (who’s had a whole volume of criticism written about him, for crying out loud) or Patti Smith (the pick of the bunch). But then Syd’s a sprinter not a long-distance runner. (Or perhaps it would be better to say that he’s a decathlon-er; doing several events at the same time.)

As for the painters, he’s way beyond the amateur-cum-doodlers like Dylan; John Entwhistle, Nick Mason. And he’s far more original and experimental than the ‘serious’ artists like Don Van Vliet/Capt. Beefheart, Joni Mitchell and Paul Simonon. Of course, they are trying to build up a body of work which he wasn’t. Yet you feel he coulda been a contender.

But nobody in the rock world has ever integrated words and images like Syd or produced anything quite as fresh and complete as this. Syd did it in a day or two at the age of 18 or 19.

So what happened to him? It’s an obvious – and an easy – question to ask but just because I knew him doesn’t mean I can answer it. He was one of the sunniest individuals I’ve ever met. Brimful of talent. He could turn his hand to anything and it would work. He never had to sweat over anything. “I don’t seek – I find” as Picasso said.

One of the symptoms of LSD overload seems to be that the connections between things disappear. (Don’t ask me how or why, especially as the main effect of a ‘good trip; is that things get more connected.) I wasn’t around while Syd was cracking up (although I met him several times afterwards, when he was in pieces) so I don’t know if that’s what happened to him. But it seems he couldn’t connect anything up anymore – a fantastic loss for someone for whom words, music and painting were really just different facets of a single brilliant orb.

There is a view that Syd was a doomed hero who went too far and got lost. As I see it, he was only just beginning. He was an explorer but not a survivor. He didn’t know how to protect himself. He wasn’t tough or careful. He was an innocent who tried one thing too many and it did him in. I wish I could say more – but there isn’t any more.

I’m not expecting his book to fill the void. But a light shines in it, through it, nonetheless.

Details and Further Information

Size: 20cm x 25.5cm

The only time that Fart Enjoy has been on public display was at the Interstellar Exhibition in Paris in 2003/04.

Conrad Marca-Relli — History Lesson

Conrad Marca-Relli (1913-2000) was an important 20th Century painter and collage artist who often mixed collage with oil paint and other materials including plastics and metal.

Born June 5, 1913 in Boston to Italian immigrants he was an early proponent of Abstract Expressionism and a prominent member of the artist group known as the New York School which included Franz Kline and Willem De Kooning; both of whom he met while painting for the WPA.

Conrad Marca-Relli (photo by Hans Namuth)

On a trip to Mexico in 1952, Marca-Relli radically altered his artistic practice in response to his surroundings. A probably apocryphal story claims that a lack of paint stimulated his initial experimentation with collage at this time; however, the artist’s account states that he turned to this pictorial technique to solve technical problems related to his interest in capturing the effects of sunlight on adobe buildings. Juxtaposing pieces of light-colored canvas allowed him to define the edges of his forms and establish a sense of depth in largely white-on-white pictures. Furthermore, the collage process enabled him to work quickly and change his creation constantly since he did not have to wait for the paint to dry.

The Woman of Samura, 1958 (oil, chalk, and canvas collage)

Circa 1960, from the Archives of American Art (photographer unknown)

In 1967 Marca-Relli had a retrospective show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The curator, William Agee, noted that Marca-Relli’s “achievement has been to raise collage to a scale and complexity equal to that of monumental painting.”

The following two images, 5-3-58 & Untitled (J-S-2-63), are from the Hackett-Freedman Gallery archvies:

CX-9-76 is from Gary Snyder / Project Space in New York City:

Conrad Marca-Relli & Jackson Pollack in East Hampton, 1955 (photo by Seldon Rodman)

History Lesson — Martha Rosler (b. 1943)

Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn and studied at Brooklyn College (B.A. 1965) and the University of California, San Diego, where she received an M.F.A. in 1974. She has worked in various media including video, photography, installation, performance, and photomontage.

In her 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen, Rosler reveals the suburban kitchen to be a war zone where routine food preparation masks the violent frustrations felt by women at being confined by the home.

During the Vietnam War, she produced Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-72), a series of photomontages assembled from the pages of Life magazine, where news stories featuring images of the dead and wounded shared column inches with glossy adverts for consumer products.

Cleaning The Drapes

Playboy

Beauty Rest

Red-Stripe Kitchen

In this example, Rosler shows two GIs rooting through an up-to-the-minute designer kitchen color-coordinated in blood red. More than a trenchant comment on America’s first “TV war,” Red Stripe Kitchen is also a harbinger of our own present moment, in which media images of domestic comfort and security no longer seem to keep the violence and chaos of the outside world at bay.

Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, new series (2004) is a reworking of her earlier project, but now focused on the United States’ War in Iraq.

Photo-Op

Sadaam’s Palace

Cellular

In 2006 she received the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Austria’s highest fine arts award.

Recently, Rosler loaned her personal library comprising over 7,000 titles for public use/viewing:

“In an act of incredible generosity, one of Americas most important living artists temporarily dispossessed herself of the vast majority of her personal library so that it could be made available for consultation. No borrowing was possible, but the eclectic ensemble of books on economics, political theory, war, colonialism, poetry, feminism, science fiction, art history, mystery novels, children’s books, dictionaries, maps and travel books, as well as photo albums, posters, postcards and newspaper clippings could be studied at will.”

Rosler teaches art at Rutgers University and the Städelschule in Frankfurt.

History Lesson — Hannah Höch (1889-1978)

Hannah Höch was one of the founders of Berlin Dada, working primarily in collage and photomontage. She worked with Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, and George Grosz; along with fellow women artists Beatrice Wood, Sophie Tauber, and Baroness Else von Freytag (who often receive less recognition then their male counterparts).
From Clara, The Database of Women ARtists: “Höch met Raoul Hausmann in 1915 and the two artists, who had a turbulent love affair, are often credited for “inventing” photomontage. Using camera-made images, Höch and other Dadaists pieced together works with satirical and ironic messages about the chaotic sociopolitical state in Germany. Höch showed nine works at the infamous First International Dada Fair in 1920 including Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-1920.”

Höch’s collage “Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany” is in the collection of the Staatliche Museum in Berlin.

Later, Höch lived in the Netherlands and forged professional relationships with Kurt Schwitters and Piet Mondrian. She was a versatile artist who also made puppets, designed textiles, painted in oils, exhibited photographs, made prints, and engaged in performance art.

Returning to Germany, Höch lived through the Nazi years until her death in East Germany.

History Lesson–San Francisco Montage Artist Winston Smith

“Winston Smith is single-handedly responsible for an entire generation’s graphic style.” — Frank Kozik

“Master collage artist Winston Smith snips glorious and terrible tree flesh from the magazines of our mind and pastes it. A mind is a terrible thing to paste. And Glorious!”–Wavy Gravy

Winston Smith studied art in Italy, and has been creating collage and montage art in the San Francisco Bay Area since the 1970’s. His modus operandi since then has been to kidnap “innocent” images from the pages of vintage magazines and then to diabolically glue them into compromising or politically revealing positions in his surreal collage landscapes. Smith is credited with crafting a lasting album cover aesthetic — montage art blisteringly critical of the establishment

Smith’s name is a reference to the character of the same name in George Orwell’s novel “1984″– a clerk at the Ministry of Truth that re-wrote history books to appear in line with the current Government’s portrayal of historical events. Winston’s art fight backs at oppressing forces on our lives (be it the US Government, religion, or the super greed corporations). By carefully juxtaposing the classic 50’s “happy family” illustrations with those of war horror and death, the true irony from “acting like everything’s OK” when in fact it is not, surfaces.

Winston refers to his works of art as “montage” a specific type of collage. The distinguishing factor from collage and montage, he says, is that in montage one assembles a landscape where figurative elements are used next to each other to resemble some sort of “reality”, and in collage the aesthetic is much more formal–composition, color contrast, shapes, and textures.

Through his creation of flyers for punk shows that never existed, dozens of album covers, illustrations for magazines and magazine covers, and gallery exhibitions, Winston’s infectious work has been seen and felt throughout the world.

Winston’s wife Chick, Winston himself, and Nix Turner at the opening of Nicomi Nix Turner’s ‘In Vein’ show at Gallery Extrana, Friday July 14, 2008

The logo he created for the Dead Kennedys, a San Francisco band that for many defined the in-your-face, politically liberal posture of 1980s American punk rock.

Armed Madhouse, 2005

Winston’s illustration for the cover of Greg Palast’s new book Armed Madhouse.

Dead Kennedys: In God We Trust, Inc., 1981

The Money Tree, 1983
A slightly different version of this illustration was used on the April/ May 2000 cover of the New Yorker and Spin Magazine

Pax Americana, 1988

When the Lights go on Again all Over the World, 2008

Winston Smith has an upcoming exhibition of his montage art at Glama-Rama Salon in San Francisco
WINSTON WILL BE SHOWING NEW WORKS PLUS GEMS FROM THE ARCHIVES, CELEBRATING 30 YEARS OF
SURREAL PUNK COLLISION, 1978-2008.
JOIN HIM ON AUGUST 3RD FROM 7-10PM FOR AN OPENING RECEPTION, MUSIC, BOOZE AND MAYHEM AT
GLAMA-RAMA HAIR SALON • 417 SOUTH VAN NESS AT 15TH
SHOW RUNS THROUGH SEPTEMBER 6TH, 2008.
INFO: GLAMARAMA.COM • WINSTONSMITH.COM
Press Contact: Chick Fontaine • (415) 577-7362 • chick@winstonsmith.com

History Lesson — Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)

Kurt Schwitters is one of the 20th Century’s best known collage artist. Born in Hannover, he studied art in Dresden then began to make collage work around the age of 30. It has been said that: He’d been denied membership in Berlin’s Club Dada for not being “political enough,” so shrugged his shoulders and formed the Dada sub-movement of Merz (a fragment of the word “Kommerz,” taken from a bank’s newspaper advertisement and incorporated into an early piece). Though Merz’ membership was limited to Schwitters, he often collaborated with other Dadaists.

The Nazi regime banned Schwitters’s work as “degenerate art” in 1937.

The first of the four images is from the Sprengel Museum Hannover.

History Lesson — Collage work of Jean Arp

Here are two historically important collages by Jean (Hans) Arp. “Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance” which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and “Untitled (Forest)”, a painted wood relief, which is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. Both are from 1916-17.

The MoMA page concerning Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance presents excerpts from various publications including this gallery label text from the 2006 Dada show:

Accounts by several Dadaists describe how Arp made “chance collages” such as this one: by tearing paper into pieces, dropping them onto a larger sheet, and pasting each scrap wherever it happened to fall. The relatively ordered appearance of Arp’s collages suggests, however, that the artist did not fully relinquish artistic control. Skeptical of reason in the wake of World War I, Arp and other Dadaists turned to chance as an antidote.