George Quasha
Everything Is Language
If you put Basil King — or, friendlier, Baz — on the top of a snowcapped mountain with at least one listener, he might tell his life/mind/art story non-stop, and if you recorded it, you could make a series of unique and engaging poetry-prose books, probably without a lot of editing.[1] Such is the avid, spontaneous, and natural display of a singular art mind where mature personal ego and generosity meet; and they meet in work that feels like it’s giving itself freely to the world. That combination makes for the non-stop-express-train, with unlimited stops, approach to story. And I find it more than a little interesting to think of its intrinsic poetics, which is to say: what it really has to tell us.
How I know about Baz’s narration is, first, that I recorded him for my ongoing video project art is/poetry is/music is (Speaking Portraits)[2] in Kingston, New York in 2010, with the purpose of getting him to say what art is and what poetry is. I’ve managed since 2002 to get many others to do this — over a thousand poets, artists and musicians in eleven countries — and it has been instructive to register the vast range of nuanced responses. Baz’s approach to saying what either is, or both are, was first of all to say who he is. Once he began talking I knew we had entered a potentially interminable stream; we only stopped when we were told forcefully that time had run out, the building (R&F Paint in Kingston) where he had earlier given a reading, was closing. And this fact of continuous telling with no internal principle of ending is one key to his painting/drawing and poetry, and to what art and poetry are for him.
Speaking of the long commitment and discipline necessary in making art he says that art doesn’t just come naturally; so I named the video piece for the “Basil’s Arc” celebration Art Is Not Natural: A Speaking Portrait of Basil King.[3] He also says: “Everything is language,” which means everything is saying what it is all the time. Apparently what this artist/poet does is extend the telling in a new way; he tells it all over, as it is to him now — as what it comes to be in the telling. If art, like everything else, is language, then the telling embodies the art — and its poetics.
In general the notion of unbroken discourse is not necessarily attractive to new thought, but beyond the fact that Baz’s fluency seems undiminished in his early eighties, there’s the compelling fact that the poetics shows itself vividly in the self-extending process and its ongoing sharpness. First of all, the impulse to continue at length — the flow of drawing and painting like the quasi-narrative books of poetry/prose — is related to the life-embracing drive to say it all. And it’s not unrelated to Pound’s notion of epic as “a poem including history,” reflected as well in the work of Baz’s Black Mountain mentor Charles Olson (and Robert Duncan too). The history in Baz’s writing is mainly art history interwoven with personal history embedded in world history. And the art history is not history as definitive account, assessment, orderings and influences, but art history as art—history as it belongs to the artist, doing what art would be doing, creating reality—invoking, that is, the concrete historical particulars, in order to be in the presence of the primary force of the thing itself as it is still evolving in mind and telling. The micro-narratives in Learning to Draw/A History[4] come suddenly, sharply and briefly and in the order of mental affections, recalls, obsessions, and incursions with somewhat ambiguous allegorical force. I’m thinking of Keats’s “allegory of the poet’s life and endeavor” that was so important to Robert Duncan. Everything is language and it has something to say. The way you know this is in the (re)telling, its singular poetics of actual continuance.
The telling is narrative with a quality of the ordinary through which run currents of the fantastic. The telling’s rather plain, matter-of-fact voice breaks into a variously spaced litany and almost incantatory intensity. One or another refrain is never long in coming. Leave home meet strangers learn to draw, for instance, becomes the mantra of its moment, with little if any relation to the immediate narrative environment in which it appears without warning.
He wants to include everything and he has to constantly remind himself you can’t put everything into one painting one poem — another mantra — because from early in life he has wanted, and often tried, to say it all all the time. But he knows you can’t.[5] So he asserts the hard-earned truth throughout. This kind of repetition is something like the shadow of obsession side by side with the tracking of historical overflow. One moment Matisse, the next Ingres, soon de Kooning. The names are also mantric — charged entities whose mention brings a primary intensity and energy to the surface of the text. Mind-holders (as “mantra” etymologically implies). The play of names, events, themes comprise a mode of embrace, the impulse at the heart of the work. “It is my habit to bring disparate things together.” The written pieces
like my paintings, have no final solution. They initiate my hand. I put my hand inside you and squeeze your heart. I want you
to feel what I feel. I want to feel what you feel….
This is a kind of confession of faith in the interpersonal force of art/writing, here in Warp Spasm,[6] a title that reveals the other side of that confession, namely the high tension declaration of underlying agon:
before you went into combat the Warp Spasm would seize you and make you into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless,
unheard of. That your body would contort so violently that no description can do justice to the menace that you would
become. It’s told that your strength and fighting powers were unstoppable. It’s told that your mother was a goddess, and
that your father may have been Delacroix, who said, ‘One can never paint violently enough.’”[7]
He has his own art history that is indistinguishable from social-political history, itself indistinguishable from personal history, which makes the aggregate unlike any history you’ve read before. History here is an (ongoing) event inside its telling, its (re)making, and all subsequent historical categories are further consequential fictions. The title of one Learning to Draw piece is “History Is Incomplete Without Art.” The driving insight of this approach falls somewhere between Olson’s reading of “‘istorin” by way of Herodotus as “to find out for yourself” and Stan Brakhage’s 1971 film and its title The Art of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes as a reading of “autopsy.” If art completes history, it also completes reality itself, especially since our Western orientation to reality is mainly historicist, whether personal, public or aesthetic.
There are certain particularly revealing moments reflecting the artist/poet’s personal passions that are quietly revelatory, as when he speaks about de Kooning’s later art or the Green Man. His most “personal” observation can reframe an entire discussion:
Too much has been said about Bill de Kooning’s dementia. Bill was a painter he loved to paint what he needed to paint. And
when he was old he painted the poem that was always in his head the one that had always been there dormant…. Sweeping
open faced like his smile he takes pleasure in line and color, he uses shapes that he always used, shapes that are in all of his
paintings “Excavation,” “The Woman” series and his landscapes. But the shapes and the space in his late paintings look as
if they have never been used before, they are free of restriction, there is no compromise all inhibition is gone.[8]
This is commentary that meets what it observes at its actual source and impulse to be. And it tells us equal amounts about what it sees and who is seeing it. And when the commentary concerns not a person from his own personal history like de Kooning but something harder to call real like the Green Man, it still speaks in two directions at once, toward the world, as mythologized/visioned, and the interior dynamic of an artist/poet’s world:
Branches come out of his mouth, his eyes, and head. Sometimes he’s growing out of or he is a tree. The Green Man is certainly
no image for Bambi-lovers. Green Man is fierce, erotic, is he creating or is he eating? His image is close to my toons, my personal
demons are toons and I’ve come to love them. I need to feed my demons three times a day. Will they eat everything?[9]
Reading this you won’t see his paintings the same, and seeing them you won’t think of the Green Man the same.
This is one of the many subtle ways that in my mind Basil King is related to William Blake, especially where the latter altered the relation of image to text, far beyond illustration or the illustrative equation of painting and poetry. As in Blake, image and text modify each other and complicate any abstraction about the reality they belong to. It might even be a measure of visionary depth that the play of image and text prevent us from exercising the illusion of abstract understanding. And when history is subjected to the fierce accuracy of such trans-rational force it may be transmogrified in a way that reveals certain truths previously unnoticed.
So much is implicit in these brief tellings. The principle of historical economy in the telling — its peculiar condensare, to cite Pound citing Bunting citing an Italian dictionary translation of dichten (German for poetry-making) — is to say only what you actually mean, however down-and-dirty real or over-the-top fantastic it is. No extra background, foreground or sideground. No winning effects. The same could be said of the drawings and paintings. This is one reason why the art of Basil King fits no art category particularly well and why it is endlessly refreshing.
The work, written or painted, does not particularly ask for interpretation so much as to be participated in at levels of intensity equal to its own impulse to be. Its ambiguities and transrealities are invocations of openness that summon further art/life permissions. His attitudes do not so much assert as claim their right to be. The imaginal force — Coleridge’s esemplasticity or Jarry’s imaginary solutions or any such intrinsic right to cause reality to reach its possible intensity or further nature (Olson) — this is Basil King’s natural; the other kind of natural that his art actually is. The way he rouses it in our minds is like Blake’s call to “rouze the faculties to act.” This is the company he keeps. I doubt that he wants to be called Romantic or Surrealist or Black Mountainist or any other –ist. It’s too historicistically heavy for his much more serious lightness of embrace that owns his life with an optimal grip.
He writes what he writes and paints what he paints without justification; the work is happily defenseless. And it lays bare a species of art truth that is endangered in an art-historical criticism-driven age, namely that an actual art/poetic impulse in its nature is indefensible. Its actual power is unauthorized. Basil King’s art is radiantly unauthorizable. And yet there are endless interesting things to say about it and its endless, always fresh process. What it teaches is what it is.
[1] Such was not the case for this present piece, which was meant to be a transcript of my spontaneous talk at “Basil's Arc” (9-22-12 at
Anthology Film Archives) when I introduced my video portrait of him; spoken word in my case did not transfer easily to text. The
present text diverges significantly.
[2] Several volumes of this project appear online at quasha.com/art-is and vimeo.com/user1534756/videos.
[3] Posted online at vimeo.com/49993577; youtube.com/watch?v=PY9or-cZVQU.
[4] The Spoken Word/the Painted Hand from Learning to Draw/A History (Marsh Hawk Press: New York, 2014), 82-86.
[5] On this point discussed by email he has said: “Understanding this and being able to do it came from my knowing Robert Creeley. He was at Black Mountain when I was there and his tutoring and friendship were very important to me” (1-24-15).
[6] Warp Spasm (Spuyten Duyvil: New York, 2001).
[7] Warp Spasm, 6-7.
[8] The Spoken Word/the Painted Hand from Learning to Draw/A History, 82-3.
[9] The same, 84.
If you put Basil King — or, friendlier, Baz — on the top of a snowcapped mountain with at least one listener, he might tell his life/mind/art story non-stop, and if you recorded it, you could make a series of unique and engaging poetry-prose books, probably without a lot of editing.[1] Such is the avid, spontaneous, and natural display of a singular art mind where mature personal ego and generosity meet; and they meet in work that feels like it’s giving itself freely to the world. That combination makes for the non-stop-express-train, with unlimited stops, approach to story. And I find it more than a little interesting to think of its intrinsic poetics, which is to say: what it really has to tell us.
How I know about Baz’s narration is, first, that I recorded him for my ongoing video project art is/poetry is/music is (Speaking Portraits)[2] in Kingston, New York in 2010, with the purpose of getting him to say what art is and what poetry is. I’ve managed since 2002 to get many others to do this — over a thousand poets, artists and musicians in eleven countries — and it has been instructive to register the vast range of nuanced responses. Baz’s approach to saying what either is, or both are, was first of all to say who he is. Once he began talking I knew we had entered a potentially interminable stream; we only stopped when we were told forcefully that time had run out, the building (R&F Paint in Kingston) where he had earlier given a reading, was closing. And this fact of continuous telling with no internal principle of ending is one key to his painting/drawing and poetry, and to what art and poetry are for him.
Speaking of the long commitment and discipline necessary in making art he says that art doesn’t just come naturally; so I named the video piece for the “Basil’s Arc” celebration Art Is Not Natural: A Speaking Portrait of Basil King.[3] He also says: “Everything is language,” which means everything is saying what it is all the time. Apparently what this artist/poet does is extend the telling in a new way; he tells it all over, as it is to him now — as what it comes to be in the telling. If art, like everything else, is language, then the telling embodies the art — and its poetics.
In general the notion of unbroken discourse is not necessarily attractive to new thought, but beyond the fact that Baz’s fluency seems undiminished in his early eighties, there’s the compelling fact that the poetics shows itself vividly in the self-extending process and its ongoing sharpness. First of all, the impulse to continue at length — the flow of drawing and painting like the quasi-narrative books of poetry/prose — is related to the life-embracing drive to say it all. And it’s not unrelated to Pound’s notion of epic as “a poem including history,” reflected as well in the work of Baz’s Black Mountain mentor Charles Olson (and Robert Duncan too). The history in Baz’s writing is mainly art history interwoven with personal history embedded in world history. And the art history is not history as definitive account, assessment, orderings and influences, but art history as art—history as it belongs to the artist, doing what art would be doing, creating reality—invoking, that is, the concrete historical particulars, in order to be in the presence of the primary force of the thing itself as it is still evolving in mind and telling. The micro-narratives in Learning to Draw/A History[4] come suddenly, sharply and briefly and in the order of mental affections, recalls, obsessions, and incursions with somewhat ambiguous allegorical force. I’m thinking of Keats’s “allegory of the poet’s life and endeavor” that was so important to Robert Duncan. Everything is language and it has something to say. The way you know this is in the (re)telling, its singular poetics of actual continuance.
The telling is narrative with a quality of the ordinary through which run currents of the fantastic. The telling’s rather plain, matter-of-fact voice breaks into a variously spaced litany and almost incantatory intensity. One or another refrain is never long in coming. Leave home meet strangers learn to draw, for instance, becomes the mantra of its moment, with little if any relation to the immediate narrative environment in which it appears without warning.
He wants to include everything and he has to constantly remind himself you can’t put everything into one painting one poem — another mantra — because from early in life he has wanted, and often tried, to say it all all the time. But he knows you can’t.[5] So he asserts the hard-earned truth throughout. This kind of repetition is something like the shadow of obsession side by side with the tracking of historical overflow. One moment Matisse, the next Ingres, soon de Kooning. The names are also mantric — charged entities whose mention brings a primary intensity and energy to the surface of the text. Mind-holders (as “mantra” etymologically implies). The play of names, events, themes comprise a mode of embrace, the impulse at the heart of the work. “It is my habit to bring disparate things together.” The written pieces
like my paintings, have no final solution. They initiate my hand. I put my hand inside you and squeeze your heart. I want you
to feel what I feel. I want to feel what you feel….
This is a kind of confession of faith in the interpersonal force of art/writing, here in Warp Spasm,[6] a title that reveals the other side of that confession, namely the high tension declaration of underlying agon:
before you went into combat the Warp Spasm would seize you and make you into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless,
unheard of. That your body would contort so violently that no description can do justice to the menace that you would
become. It’s told that your strength and fighting powers were unstoppable. It’s told that your mother was a goddess, and
that your father may have been Delacroix, who said, ‘One can never paint violently enough.’”[7]
He has his own art history that is indistinguishable from social-political history, itself indistinguishable from personal history, which makes the aggregate unlike any history you’ve read before. History here is an (ongoing) event inside its telling, its (re)making, and all subsequent historical categories are further consequential fictions. The title of one Learning to Draw piece is “History Is Incomplete Without Art.” The driving insight of this approach falls somewhere between Olson’s reading of “‘istorin” by way of Herodotus as “to find out for yourself” and Stan Brakhage’s 1971 film and its title The Art of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes as a reading of “autopsy.” If art completes history, it also completes reality itself, especially since our Western orientation to reality is mainly historicist, whether personal, public or aesthetic.
There are certain particularly revealing moments reflecting the artist/poet’s personal passions that are quietly revelatory, as when he speaks about de Kooning’s later art or the Green Man. His most “personal” observation can reframe an entire discussion:
Too much has been said about Bill de Kooning’s dementia. Bill was a painter he loved to paint what he needed to paint. And
when he was old he painted the poem that was always in his head the one that had always been there dormant…. Sweeping
open faced like his smile he takes pleasure in line and color, he uses shapes that he always used, shapes that are in all of his
paintings “Excavation,” “The Woman” series and his landscapes. But the shapes and the space in his late paintings look as
if they have never been used before, they are free of restriction, there is no compromise all inhibition is gone.[8]
This is commentary that meets what it observes at its actual source and impulse to be. And it tells us equal amounts about what it sees and who is seeing it. And when the commentary concerns not a person from his own personal history like de Kooning but something harder to call real like the Green Man, it still speaks in two directions at once, toward the world, as mythologized/visioned, and the interior dynamic of an artist/poet’s world:
Branches come out of his mouth, his eyes, and head. Sometimes he’s growing out of or he is a tree. The Green Man is certainly
no image for Bambi-lovers. Green Man is fierce, erotic, is he creating or is he eating? His image is close to my toons, my personal
demons are toons and I’ve come to love them. I need to feed my demons three times a day. Will they eat everything?[9]
Reading this you won’t see his paintings the same, and seeing them you won’t think of the Green Man the same.
This is one of the many subtle ways that in my mind Basil King is related to William Blake, especially where the latter altered the relation of image to text, far beyond illustration or the illustrative equation of painting and poetry. As in Blake, image and text modify each other and complicate any abstraction about the reality they belong to. It might even be a measure of visionary depth that the play of image and text prevent us from exercising the illusion of abstract understanding. And when history is subjected to the fierce accuracy of such trans-rational force it may be transmogrified in a way that reveals certain truths previously unnoticed.
So much is implicit in these brief tellings. The principle of historical economy in the telling — its peculiar condensare, to cite Pound citing Bunting citing an Italian dictionary translation of dichten (German for poetry-making) — is to say only what you actually mean, however down-and-dirty real or over-the-top fantastic it is. No extra background, foreground or sideground. No winning effects. The same could be said of the drawings and paintings. This is one reason why the art of Basil King fits no art category particularly well and why it is endlessly refreshing.
The work, written or painted, does not particularly ask for interpretation so much as to be participated in at levels of intensity equal to its own impulse to be. Its ambiguities and transrealities are invocations of openness that summon further art/life permissions. His attitudes do not so much assert as claim their right to be. The imaginal force — Coleridge’s esemplasticity or Jarry’s imaginary solutions or any such intrinsic right to cause reality to reach its possible intensity or further nature (Olson) — this is Basil King’s natural; the other kind of natural that his art actually is. The way he rouses it in our minds is like Blake’s call to “rouze the faculties to act.” This is the company he keeps. I doubt that he wants to be called Romantic or Surrealist or Black Mountainist or any other –ist. It’s too historicistically heavy for his much more serious lightness of embrace that owns his life with an optimal grip.
He writes what he writes and paints what he paints without justification; the work is happily defenseless. And it lays bare a species of art truth that is endangered in an art-historical criticism-driven age, namely that an actual art/poetic impulse in its nature is indefensible. Its actual power is unauthorized. Basil King’s art is radiantly unauthorizable. And yet there are endless interesting things to say about it and its endless, always fresh process. What it teaches is what it is.
[1] Such was not the case for this present piece, which was meant to be a transcript of my spontaneous talk at “Basil's Arc” (9-22-12 at
Anthology Film Archives) when I introduced my video portrait of him; spoken word in my case did not transfer easily to text. The
present text diverges significantly.
[2] Several volumes of this project appear online at quasha.com/art-is and vimeo.com/user1534756/videos.
[3] Posted online at vimeo.com/49993577; youtube.com/watch?v=PY9or-cZVQU.
[4] The Spoken Word/the Painted Hand from Learning to Draw/A History (Marsh Hawk Press: New York, 2014), 82-86.
[5] On this point discussed by email he has said: “Understanding this and being able to do it came from my knowing Robert Creeley. He was at Black Mountain when I was there and his tutoring and friendship were very important to me” (1-24-15).
[6] Warp Spasm (Spuyten Duyvil: New York, 2001).
[7] Warp Spasm, 6-7.
[8] The Spoken Word/the Painted Hand from Learning to Draw/A History, 82-3.
[9] The same, 84.
