John Culbert has taught literature and composition at Williams College, UC Irvine and Scripps College and is currently a lecturer in French at the University of British Columbia.

The Purgatory Press & After the End

By John Culbert

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2013 John Culbert
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78279-061-7

Contents

The Purgatory Press………………………………………………..1My Life…………………………………………………………..3Janet Tully-Stevens………………………………………………..5Left Turn…………………………………………………………9Stories for Second Childhood Nebulae, vol. 1………………………….11Camino……………………………………………………………15Alan Johnson, Outsider Artist……………………………………….19The Case of Thom Cahill…………………………………………….22The Love of Animals………………………………………………..26Self-Portraits…………………………………………………….29Zap………………………………………………………………31Masks of the Ceremony………………………………………………35A Secret Life……………………………………………………..40Legends of Memory………………………………………………….44The Beaten Track…………………………………………………..48Dead Ends…………………………………………………………51Orinocos of the Heart………………………………………………54Crazy Quilt……………………………………………………….63The Typist………………………………………………………..74After the End……………………………………………………..81Red-eye…………………………………………………………..83Disclaimed………………………………………………………..84Killjoy…………………………………………………………..87Unanswered………………………………………………………..90Riders……………………………………………………………94Cameo…………………………………………………………….99Y2K………………………………………………………………102Echos [sic]……………………………………………………….108Voice Over………………………………………………………..111Recycler………………………………………………………….114Dr Ekman’s Implement……………………………………………….117Out of Body……………………………………………………….119Belayed…………………………………………………………..124News from Livermore………………………………………………..128Time Code…………………………………………………………132Visitation………………………………………………………..138After the End……………………………………………………..143Incidence…………………………………………………………146Acknowledgments……………………………………………………148About the Author…………………………………………………..149

CHAPTER 1

The Purgatory Press is ceasing operations. The followingtitles are available from our backlist.

Michael Harrow, My Life

Mike Harrow’s reputation as a writer rests on a single slimvolume found among the author’s effects following his death atthe age of 56. A well-known figure in the art circles of Baltimore,Maryland, Harrow often spoke to friends of writing an autobiography.What they discovered after his passing is this strange andremarkable work, totaling a mere ten pages, that contains hisentire life story. Harrow’s preface describes his aims and inspiration,and its lyrical beauty hints at the writer’s secret talents.

A schoolgirl’s drawers sometimes hide a picture with a facemarked out. A lone portrait or a face among others, but apen’s blot has covered it up. To know and to choose: skillshoned in the grind of standardized tests, later in the privacyof the election booth. Here the blot speaks of a passion toobliterate. And behind that passion, of course, is a formerlove, a friendship betrayed, rivalry, shame. Mingling with aheady smell of ink (ii).

Each chapter of Harrow’s autobiography is only one page longand consists of a “blot” such as he describes above. This blackmark is the trace left by each letter of every word the authorwrote, one on top of the other. The result is of course illegible; thereader is left in perplexity before a text that can be viewed in aglance but defies the eye, a pupil staring back. Should we readthese blots as a vengeful act of destruction like the pique ofHarrow’s schoolgirl? Do they hide secrets Harrow felt unable toshare? Such grim speculations are countered, however, by theplayful tone introducing the chapters, whose titles, in themanner of the 18th-century picaresque, provide a synopsis ofwhat purportedly follows. Chapter 3, for instance, is jauntilytitled, “In which the Author Learns the Pleasures of Competitionand Sportsmanship; Reflections on their Use in Later Life.”

Just as they defy reading, these chapters resist categorization;the pages of My Life were first mounted in a graphic art exhibit atThe Drawing Center in New York and traveled on to shows inLondon and Barcelona. The catalogue for the exhibit includedessays by art critics who made great claims for Harrow’s experimentalstyle. Alison Ormond-Peña writes, “Harrow’s black spotsseem like an exercise in negation; no image, no line, no color. Butthis negation is like the force of a black hole, fatally attractive andleading to other realms of creative imagination.” Less grandly,Mark Ehrens sees Harrow’s work as a potent commentary onmemory in the digital age. “We are used to the idea that our mostcherished things can be stored in a flash drive held in the palm ofour hand,” he says. “Harrow provides an unsettling image of thatarchive, always corruptible and invisible to the naked eye.”Danika Müller’s “Harrowing the Field of Vision” is perhaps themost interesting of these essays. Pointing out that the word”harrow” refers to a method of plowing, Müller draws on MartinHeidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” to bring out what thephilosopher calls the Riss (a “cleft” or “fissure”) at the heart ofcreative expression. Further, Müller makes use of JacquesDerrida’s theory of the trace to argue that Harrow’s work isquintessentially deconstructive. “Neither sign, symbol or index,the ‘trace’ is the primary mark that is always already effaced,”Müller declares. “Harrow’s blots are an apt figure of thatvanishing source of creative work intuited by the philosophy ofDestruktion. No one has managed better than Harrow to wed therich furrow of the artist’s line to its simultaneous erasure.”

Paradoxically enough, Harrow’s unreadable autobiographyhas led to his life’s renown. And there are some, moreover, whodoubt his blots actually contain any words. “What I rememberabout Mike,” says one of his friends, “is him sitting for hours atthe coffee shop. He had a fountain pen, which was different, youknow? He’d sit there, dreaming, with his pen on the blottermaking stains.”

10 pp.

Albert Moss, Janet Tully-Stevens

In the Black Hills of South Dakota, between the improbableMount Rushmore and the seemingly impossible Crazy HorseMemorial, a sheer face of polished granite floats above the pines.At dusk its rectangular shape glows like the immense screen ofan abandoned drive-in theater. This unfinished monument is thework of Janet Tully-Stevens, whose fitful, visionary and tragiclife is the subject of Albert Moss’s new book. To some, Tully-Stevensis the Valerie Solanas of the Western American art scene,an unhinged groupie with delusions of grandeur. To others, sheis a contemporary Lou Andreas-Salomé, the underrated andnearly-forgotten muse of an entire artistic generation. Mossclearly leans toward the latter, and his book, a monument in itsown right, aims to shift the canon and install Tully-Stevens in herrightful place in the history of American art.

Born in Oakland in 1945, Tully-Stevens practiced performanceand conceptual art in the 1960s before turning to earthworks andland art. Companion and lover of such figures as Ed Ruscha,Robert Smithson and Bas Jan Ader, she found unwelcomenotoriety in 1974, the year she received a prestigiousGuggenheim grant. Rather than fund an art project with hergrant money Tully-Stevens decided to use it to murder RobertSmithson, but on the eve of her departure to meet him inAmarillo, Texas, she learned of Smithson’s accidental death at thesite of his final earthwork. The artist then decided to return thecheck for her grant money, an act she incorporated into a performancepiece: driving her car from San Francisco to theGuggenheim headquarters in New York, she kept her car’s left-turnsignal blinking for the entire journey. Her account of the trip,Left Turn (available from Purgatory Press), tells of the reflections,events and encounters provoked by her performance. Parttravelogue, part manifesto, and part visionary lyric, Left Turnexcoriates the art establishment and signals Tully-Stevens’ leave-takingfrom the art world she had traversed like a comet.

Moss’s reassessment of the work of Tully-Stevens is more thanthe account of a colorful and controversial life, however. Thestakes of his book are most apparent in Chapter 3, where Mosshighlights the influence of Tully-Stevens on Smithson and theLand Art movement. Tully-Stevens first met Smithson at the timeof his Mono Lake Nonsite, a period just prior to Smithson’s largeearthworks. At Mono Lake Tully-Stevens apparently spoke toSmithson about her own project for nearby Lake Tahoe, titled”Draining Tahoe,” which, as the name suggests, would haveemptied the mountain lake of its water. The project of course wasconceptual in nature, but most significant is Tully-Stevens’startling vision of a swirling vortex at the center of the lake.Drawing on Tully-Stevens’ journals and correspondence, as wellas on interviews with friends and associates, Moss asserts thatthis vortex is the likely inspiration for Smithson’s own SpiralJetty. The claim is momentous indeed, as it gives credit to Tully-Stevensfor what is arguably the most important work ofAmerican art of the post-WWII era.

Moss supports his argument with new and enlighteningdocuments. A previously unpublished sketch of “DrainingTahoe” (41) shows a narrow pier reaching out to a viewingplatform at the lip of an enormous whirlpool. The similarity withthe Spiral Jetty is striking and sheds light on Tully-Stevens’rivalry with Smithson and her bitter disavowal of the art world.As Moss himself admits, however, one cannot conclusively datethis drawing, which could in fact post-date Smithson’s mostfamous work. Fascinating and enigmatic, the sketch of the jettyand vortex leaves the reader suspended in wonder at the sheerforce and centripetal pull of Tully-Stevens’ life and work.

The name of Tully-Stevens appears occasionally in themargins of Michael Heizer’s work as well, which credits herparticipation in a number of Land Art projects in Arizona andNew Mexico. Heizer’s private journals of the period aresomewhat less generous, though. “Tromp down to Rosario andsouth to see the Mad Woman in the Dunes. At all costs do not getdrawn in …” Elsewhere he slaps her with the moniker “LadySisyphus of the grain of sand.” These journal entries referobliquely to Tully-Stevens’ preparations for an ambitious projectin Mexico’s Baja California, where the artist would have siftedthe beach to transform a 3-mile stretch of uninhabited coastlineinto two distinct sections of black and white sand. The projectentailed complex negotiations with Mexican authorities and theconstruction of a massive sifting and separating mechanismcommissioned from a local quarrying company. Unfortunately,after two years of work the project was halted due to environmentalconcerns and the equipment was sold off to a glass-manufacturingfirm. At the project site there remain two moundsof sand, one nearly black, the other a stark white, like powderedpaint on a gigantic abandoned palette.

The last chapter of Moss’s book is devoted to Tully-Stevens’final and unfinished work in the Black Hills, where the artistretreated into near-total seclusion for twenty years. The BlackHills project was conceived as an anti-monument in the heart ofthe most monumental of American landscapes but was perpetuallymired in conflicts with the Bureau of Land Management,the National Parks Service and the Lakota Sioux. Tully-Stevens’sketches, reproduced in Moss’s book, show the intended shape ofthe final project: a square piece of paper like an enormous post-itnote, one corner crimped and lifted, is carved into the bare rockface. On the paper, scrawled in the likeness of handwriting, arethe words, “Honey, we’re out of milk.” As Moss says,

In spite of, or perhaps due to its unfinished form, the BlackHills project is the definitive rejoinder to the presumptuousnessof monumentality, including the bloated masculinepretensions of Earth Art. The giant inscription on the cliffinvokes the cherished illusions on which this country wasbuilt, but deflates the American dream in a mock-monumentthat makes the “land of milk and honey” a vapid alibi for theprosaic and stunted life of our domesticated landscape (93).

At moments like these, Moss seems to channel Tully-Stevens’rants in Left Turn. His anger is most pointed when he takes on thecritiques of Tully-Stevens by such artists as Barbara Kruger, whodismissed the Black Hills project as “trite” and “pathetic.” AsMoss says, however, “Before Kruger, before Jenny Holzer, andbefore the consecration of graffiti art in the 1980s, Tully-Stevens’riff on milk and honey lambasted our commonplaces andconfronted the myths of politics, advertising and media in afeminist guerilla war on language and art” (97). Malicious criticsseem to delight in the fact that Tully-Stevens’ inscription got onlyso far as the first two letters, “Ho.” One commentator judges thatthe letters are “the artist’s final signature on a futile body ofwork.” Moss retorts, “these letters are illegible, and perhapsshould be. Truncated, intentionally or not, they swarm withimplications, evoking a dubious ‘westward ho,’ or perhaps asingle syllable of the artist’s derisive laugh launched intoposterity” (98).

137 pp.

Janet Tully-Stevens, Left Turn

First published as a chapbook by the author herself and long outof print, Left Turn recounts Janet Tully-Stevens’ seminal work ofperformance art: a journey across the United States by car, left-turnsignal blinking for the entire trip. The narrative is a searingmonologue, often descending into patent diatribe, part Season inHell and part On the Road.

Imagine a country named “Little Corner of the Earth,” or”Pathetic S***hole of the World.” Now let’s say that countryshortens its name, out of convenience, to “The World.” Howlsof protest. Mockery and rage. But this country enjoys itsshorthand name with impunity. “America” the gluttonous, theinsatiable, with endless black tongues of asphalt, every mileanother neon sign touting precious “vacancy.” And everyminute another good citizen tells me I’m not turning left (33).

64 pp.

Ann Silton, Stories for Second Childhood

Ann Silton’s book is the first of its kind: a collection of storiesdesigned for elderly people suffering symptoms of dementia andsenility. While she adopts the expression “second childhood” forher title, the author notes that the dementia of the elderly cannotbe equated with the mental capacities of the young. For thisreason, Silton says, books aimed at children do not address theneeds of an audience of advanced age, though they are oftenseen in hospice libraries and nursing homes.

Readers with elderly parents or those facing the prospect oftheir own diminished mental capacity may find the premise ofStories for Second Childhood to be in questionable taste, possiblyeven cruel. This would be to misjudge the intent of Silton’s book,which casts a frank and clear-eyed look at her readership. Siltonaddressed this purpose in an interview for the Times LiterarySupplement.

A French thinker once stated that to philosophize is to learnhow to die. One might add it’s the point of all writing worthits salt. The Grimms’ fairy tales do not shy from this duty,sadly abandoned by most of their followers. Children learn toconstruct their world with fairy tales’ mysterious puzzle-pieces.The working of the elderly mind, however, is fairly theopposite. Forgive the term, but the elderly are occupied withdecomposing their history, undoing the puzzle of their lifestories.

Accordingly, several of Silton’s texts read like stories in reverse:things tend to fall apart, to scatter, to “decompose.” In “LightsOut,” the character Edna, who calls herself “Enda,” is beset withchildlike fears when the lights in her room are turned off. Enda’sfears, though, are not about monsters in the closet but simplyabout needing to get up in the middle of the night. “What if shetripped and fell? So many things in the dark: the chair, thedresser, the lamp. And what might be on the floor? Boots, papers,books and glasses, glasses and temples, temples and gardens,gardens and plots, soil, sod, logs, clogs” (12). Enda’s jumbledlitany hides a deeper worry: that her room may have changed inthe dark. Is she in the hospice or in her childhood bedroom? Thestory evokes the many places she has slept in her life, all of themalike when the lights go out and she is lying in bed. This allowsEnda to revisit her past, but she cannot recall everything, there istoo much she has “dismembered” (13). Her wandering mind tripsover lists of disparate things that, muddled and disordered asthey may be, allay her fears with their rhythmic incantation.

In “Alphabet Soup,” this incantatory pablum reaches the pointof glossolalia. An unnamed character turns his spoon in a bowl,reading his ABCs in a kind of nonsense primer. Unlike a child,the character does not compose words but only blobs of lettersdestined to become “mash and mush” (28). “No midrash for themishmash,” Silton says, “this masticated mess without messageor meaning.”

Such “sonorous inanity,” to adopt Mallarmé’s expression,seems at times to aim at a higher literary purpose than Stories forSecond Childhood may at first suggest. More than a mere palliativefor the fears and anxieties of old age, Silton’s book questionslanguage itself as means of knowledge and literary creation. Inthis respect, Enda’s bewilderment may be compared withProust’s meditations at the beginning of Combray or the bedriddenmusings of Beckett’s Malone. Likewise, the hopelessmidrash of “Alphabet Soup” is surely closer to Beckett’s TheUnnamable than it is to Hop on Pop. Faced with the challenge ofsuch disorienting prose, all readers, Silton seems to imply, arelike the stupefied amnesiacs of her primary audience.

Stories for Second Childhood is available in standard and large-fonteditions.

49 pp. / 66 pp.

Sanjay R. Patel, Nebulae, vol. 1.

Released on the eve of the global recession, Sanjay Patel’s Nebulaeseems in retrospect a strangely prescient document. Thiscatalogue of cloud maps may be the perfect coffee table book forthe economic times that followed the real estate meltdown, whenprofits and properties dissolved into thin air.

The author of Nebulae retired at 32 from his Silicon Valleycompany to take on a series of projects at the intersection ofcosmology, art and technology. The first of these works helaunched with the help of former members of the San Francisco-basedart group Survival Research Labs. Two years in the making,Patel’s project was a massive installation in an industrial hangar inSan Jose that simulated the speed of the Earth’s rotation and orbitaround the sun. As such, and despite its elaborate nature andextensive cost, the project aimed to do no more than make manifestthe actual velocity of a person standing on the ground.
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