A new two-track EP, Death, Reverb and Decay, is available at the above link; It’s composed and performed by a trio: John Also Bennett/bass flute and synthesizer, Christina Vantzou/electronics and Oliver Coates/cello. It was just released on December 19, 2025 which was the winter solstice. Full disclosure, and I say this with pride: John Also Bennett is our youngest son, and Christina Vantzou is his wife/our daughter-in-law.
Sr Martha Simon SCMM was my father’s (Dr. Wm. J. Mehrl) sister, Dr. Martha Mehrl. After college and then a chemist job, she decided on a path to become a nun, ultimately joining the Medical Missionary Sisters based at a Philadelphia PA convent. Choosing dentistry for her medical profession, she became one of the first two women to graduate from dental college in 1958 (she went to Georgetown University’s Dental College, Washington DC, graduating at the top of her class). She joined a medical missionary team in Pakistan and later in Africa (Kenya and Uganda). This drum was given to her as payment by the headman of a village, whose medicine man referred him to her for treatment and antibiotics for his abscessed tooth. He had to walk for three days for treatment, as Dr. Martha Mehrl was the only dentist in the region at the time. The drum head is stretched cowhide, attached using bone needles and handmade twine to the wooden base which was hollowed out by burning. While in the states on rest leave, Sr. Simon raised money to fund a mobile dental office. Her brother, Robert Mehrl, (ca. 1970’s Dubuque IA) converted a Mercedes Benz van and shipped it to Uganda for her to drive and work in. The drum has resided at my house for some years now, the cow hair having fallen out since this early B+W photo of my Aunt Martha.
– C. Mehrl Bennett 2025
This article about Sr. Simon was published in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald (IA) in mid-1970’s. I have transcribed the full article below the image:
Iowa Nun Is Dentist In Uganda by Jerald Heth (Published mid-1970’s in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald)
The woman sat in the dentist’s chair, her eyes wide with fear, her mouth tightly closed. She was in Dr. Martha Mehrl’s dental clinic in a village on the Mountain of the Moons in Western Uganda and the pain in her mouth was severe. She lived near the village with the other wives of her husband and she didn’t know anything about dentistry. In a few minutes, she fled. Ten days later, the native was back in the chair, relaxed and smiling. She opened her mouth and Mehrl extracted a decaying molar.
“What scared the woman the first time was that she thought
Mehrl, a graduate of Brie pain was from totem, a forbidden religious food that she might have eaten unknowingly,” said Mehrl. “She was healed by a witch doctor between the two visits. I don’t know what little psychological drama he used to get rid of the psychological disease, but he cured something I couldn’t.” The witch doctor might have read the cure in the way chicken blood was sprinkled on the ground, she said. Mehrl, a Roman Catholic nun as well as a dentist, said the incident occurred 10 years ago shortly after she arrived in Uganda. She’s been treating patients-with the help of witch doctors-ever since.
Mehrl, 47, was at her parents’ home in Dubuque recently, resting from a flare-up of lupus, an incurable and relatively little known disease that’s fatal unless controlled by cortisone.
She talked, sometimes with amusing irreverence and always with modesty, about how she got to Uganda and how she would be traveling around in the region in a mobile dental van when she returns in a few weeks.
Mehrl, a graduate of Briar Cliff College in Sioux City, was working as a chemist at a Dubuque packing plant and enjoying her swims across the Mississippi River when she decided to become a nun. “I just decided to try it,” she said. After taking her vows, she decided to become a dentist, becoming the first woman to enroll in Georgetown University’s Dental College in Washington, D.C. “It was no big deal,” she said of accomplishing a first. “It just happened.” And it just happened that she was the top student of her graduating class in 1958. “In another class, I may not have been number one,” she said.
Her first assignment was Rawalpindi, West Pakistan, where she set up the first dental clinic and where she learned she had lupus in less than a year. “It was hot there, and heat affects lupus,” she said. Lupus attacks muscles and joints in any part of the body, she explained. She was near death when she was flown back to Philadelphia, Pa., home of her order, the Medical Mission Sisters. The disease finally was brought under control by cortisone. Too much cortisone can be fatal, too, she said, adding, “but you don’t waste sleep over it; you do what you can.” While she was recuperating in Philadelphia, she did dental work for other sisters and for two years served as administrator of a home for unwed mothers.
After five years, she decided to return to dentistry full time. She took a crash course in Swahili after deciding to go to Uganda. “It’s near the equator and it’s 65 to 70 degrees year-round,” she said. “The cool weather is easier to survive in with lupus.”In the early days,” she said, “I’d go on safaris, carrying a portable (dental) chair and a bunch of forceps. I’d stay out a couple of days, pull a bunch of teeth and then go back. It wasn’t very satisfying.”
In 1972, the Ugandan government ordered Asians and some Europeans out of the country. The American Embassy was closed and departing officials warned Mehrl and other missionaries of the dangers if they stayed. “We were not there for our comfort or for politics,” she said. “We were there to serve the people. Women are safe from local trouble,” she said. “Local people look out for us professional people. They know who we are; our white faces stick out pretty good.” Mehrl said her missionary work does not interfere with the tribal religions. “We didn’t go there to sing songs and preach,” she said. “We went there to give them good medical care.” She walked through army roadblocks on her way to work and soon Ugandan police and army officials became her patients. One of the generals gave her eggs that were hard to come by, she said.
The daily routine became tougher. Mehrl said she was the only dentist in the western regions to serve hundreds of thousands of people and treated at least 30 patients a day.
“I worked five days a week and I did the books for the (sisters’) house,” she said. “I did some shopping and looked after the car and still got my prayers in.”
When Mehrl returned to the United States two years ago on a regular leave to rest she brought with her an idea that pleased Ugandan health officials. She would raise the money to buy and convert a van into a completely equipped mobile office. She would travel the western regions treating difficult dental cases and helping dental auxiliaries who, in Uganda, perform simple extractions and clean teeth.
She got what she wanted, soliciting money and help to finance the $48,000 project. Part of the project included the work her brother, Robert Mehrl of Dubuque, provided in converting a Mercedes Benz van into a dental office that now is on its way to Uganda.
As soon as she gets approval from her doctor in Philadelphia, Mehrl said she is heading back to Uganda.
Asked if reports of war and unrest in Uganda would make it difficult to get back there, she replied: “They are anxious to have medical personnel. I’ll probably have more trouble with the American government than the Ugandan government in getting back there.
“It’s really pretty routine there,” she concluded. “I get a vacation, eight hours of sleep and go swimming or fishing on holidays.”
(Note by CMB: Aunt Martha also enjoyed mountain climbing in Uganda and loved the people of Africa. She felt like she had left her home behind when she had to return to the states due to the illness that ultimately killed her, Lupus.)
Here is a link to a PDF file with scans of photos from Sr. Martha Simon sent to her parents in Dubuque IA:
And Maybe
It’s not unusual to be seen by anyone
It’s not unusual to be found inside my house
It’s not unusual to be writing down a poem
And maybe it’s a dud and
Maybe this is crud.
It’s not unusual to feel lost inside my head
It’s not unusual to feel fingers on my hands
It’s not unusual to feel toes upon my feet
And maybe life is short and
Can be of no import.
It’s not unusual to see mailart friends around
It’s not unusual to find mailart in this home
It’s not unusual to read something they wrote
And maybe they’ll appreciate
And listen to this poem.
HARK BACK BAWA!
Hark Back BaWa!
Wept Agatha Christie
CORN PILES DOUBLE
DOUBLE CORN PILES
Xray chimp lives
Globally via postage
Read, dream, sleep!
Burning pee in a sack
YOUR PANTS EGG OUT
EGG OUT YOUR PANTS
Rubber teeth necks
Glean a new pope
Leaking Milk Duds!
Figs and stinky cheese
OLD LADY FROM DUBUQUE
A CITY OF OLD LADIES
Doubting truths
Glistening on the web
How can you / could you even / do you ever / ASK A COW ?
Will it answer / will it MOO / will it even / talk to you ?
Do you want / why would you need them / are bay leaves a scam ?
{ A hot topic on public radio in regards to Thanksgiving foodies }
Ginkgo leaves do not smell bad / Only if the tree has fruit / rotting fruit can stink
Auntie Ginkgo gives a damn / Auntie Ginkgo doesn’t stink
A black cat on a fence / Was it Butts, our cat, who lived long?
{ Butts died of pneumonia & was buried out back }
ZMAG is an acronym for Zoom Mail Artists Group, a monthly Zoom gig first organized by The Sticker Dude (Joel Cohen, Brooklyn NY) and Gerda Osteneck (SK, Canadada) during the Covid-19 epidemic. This year, 2024, a magazine came together through the contributions of 19 ZMAG’s members, an organized editing committee, and with the design facilitation of Carl Chew and nonlocal variable. I contributed a five page article to it, which I won’t duplicate here on wordpress. Instead, I encourage readers to go to the ZMAG website and purchase a copy via the link to BLURB.com, and/or download a free PDF file.
zmagmailartistgroup.com/magazine. (click link to go there or copy & paste in your browser)
What is Visual Poetry? (VISPO)
The beginnings of concrete poetry were primarily in S America in the 50’s with Brazilian brothers, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and then Eugen Gomringer, a Bolivian-born German concrete poet. Or one can go back further in history to the 4th century A.D. with Greek or Roman pattern poems. An example is the Phaistos disk at the archeological museum in Heraklion, Crete. (We saw it when we visited Greece in 2019.) It’s thought to be a prayer to a Minoan goddess.
A Chinese palindrome poem is also from around the same period. Twentieth century concrete poets, in the age of typewriters, sometimes referred their work as “typed artpoe” or simply “typewritings”. Today’s digital software enables more color and graphic techniques than a typewriter could, though back then some found ways to add color with different colored ink ribbons or colored carbon papers.
The Futurist typographical revolution began in Italy in 1912 when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote his first “parole in libertà” (words in freedom). Fifty years later the term “Poesia Visiva” was coined by a group of 62 Italian Poets, and at the time it included language or concrete poetry with visual images from newspapers or popular magazines. In Germany in the early 20th century, Dada artist Hannah Hoch and Merz artist Kurt Schwitters introduced words & letters into collage and painting. From the literary side, credit for early visual poetry goes to Frenchman, Guillaume Apollinaire for his book Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War, published in 1918. Vincente Huidobro, a Chilean poet, probably influenced Apollinaire with his literary and visual poetry experiments. They were both ambulance drivers in WWI and knew of each other’s writings.
A spinoff from visual poetry is asemic poetry, first used by mailartist, Jim Leftwich (USA), and Tim Gaze (Australia) for their calligraphic works that were “desemantisized”. Asemic language might be ancient languages in glyphs only decipherable by a limited group, living or dead (Exp: the Phaistos disk). Or it may have been created without intended meaning, though it’s got the feeling of calligraphic “spirit writing” or “automatic writing” (Exp: trails under tree bark made by beetles). In this digital age, “Glitch art” is asemic when original text material is digitally processed beyond recognition. Below are examples of asemic glyphs: first in analogue form (C. Mehrl Bennett) and then in a digitized ‘glitch art’ form (Alexander Limarev). Both are in Willie Marlowe’s curated project, Visual Poetry + Color, described next.
VISUAL POETRY + COLOR – An Exhibit Curated by Willie Marlowe in 2023
Willie Marlowe’s curated project solicited contemporary visual poetry that includes a color component, mounted on a wooden 8″ x 8″ panel, reinforced in back (cradled) for mounting..(available at Dick Blick). 44 panels were exhibited at The Arts Ctr of the Capital Region in Troy NY Nov 13 to Dec 20, 2023, along side an invitational show of 8 regional artists, co-curated by Joseph Mastroianni, Bella Burnett & Willie Marlowe. There were performance elements as well, scheduled one day in November and on another day in December.
The images we focus on here include about half the pieces in the VISUAL POETRY + COLOR exhibit, those by artists we could identify as mailartists once or still active in the Eternal Network.
Here are visual poems by Willie Marlowe. The bottom image is her 8″ x 8″ panel in the exhibit; followed by a statement from her about her background in visual poetry and mailart:
Willie Marlowe:
“I came to mail art as a painter. I often work on an intimate scale, so when I found that I could make a small painting, put a stamp on it and send it out into the world, I was hooked. No frames, no glass, no entry fees, no artist’s statement! I went on to curate several international mail art shows: Post Impressions, Stamp Act, Pony Express, The Mail Box Blues, and House Project I, ll, & lll.
I began to notice calls for visual poetry, I sent to a number of zines, journals and folio collections. I was attracted to Guillermo Deisler’s Peacedream project and contributed to his publication, UNI/vers(;). My visual poems were often in a ziggurat matrix format. I composed them in pencil on graph paper, then they were made into computer images. I used printouts of those images to send to visual poetry publications, and then as collage elements in my paintings.
My own path shows a bond between mail art and visual poetry.”
Both Willie and Rod Summers have spent time in Venice Italy through the Emily Harvey Foundation residency program. Willie has said that Rod Summers is one of the foremost visual poets in The Netherlands, and she gave me this quote from Rod,
“Mail Art and Visual Poetry have travelled together harmoniously since day one”.
WM: During an artist’s residency at The Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice I was invited by Ruggero Maggi of Milan to be on a Panel on Mail Art at Spazio Thetis Venice. I was asked to speak about the connection of Visual Poetry to mail art. In the photograph taken on May 8, 2024 (from left): Chuck Welch from New Hampshire, Alessia Grinfan (translator), Willie Marlowe, Albany NY, and Ruggero Maggi (Milan, Italy) who created the event.
Statement from Ruggero Maggi:
“For me mail art could be defined as grandiose overall scheme, where the individual voices form an interactive process. Postcards, artistamps, envelopes are the main elements of mail art, but not only that, there is also a good dose of non-conformism, of decontextualization of images and words, of unhinging rules and canons, thanking Marcel Duchamp and Piero Manzoni.
The profound connection between mail art and visual poetry has always been evident since the first futurist postcards with “parole in libertà” to Ray Johnson’s inventions in which words, outlined with his characteristic writing, floated on the paper forming archipelagos of concepts, of thoughts.
In 1985, speaking with Eugenio Miccini, a dear friend of mine and one of the founders of Italian visual poetry, during an event in which he curated a review of visual poetry and I one of mail art, observing the works of both sections of the exhibition, we realized that the boundary line between the two ‘worlds’ was truly thin.”
“Mail art isn’t done for money, it isn’t done for fame, it’s done… it’s lived… it’s emotion.”
From a brochure for Ruggero Maggi’s 2024 retrospective at the Univ. of Pavia, Italy: “Since the early seventies he has dealt with Visual Poetry, Copy Art, Artist’s Books, Mail Art, and later dedicated himself to experimenting with the relationship between art and technology using holographic installations and Laser Art. Since 1985 he has focused his research on the theory of chaos, entropy and fractal systems.”
After the 1st exhibition at The Art Ctr. of the Capital Region in 2023, all the panels from the Visual Poetry + Color installation were mailed from NY to Albuquerque NM where it is part of the permanent collection in Cecil Touchon’s Ontological Museum. Cecil Touchon put out a call to his network of collage artists and mailartistsfor additional 8″ x 8″ vispo+color panels. Now, with a total of over 100 panels, he is mounting the 2nd exhibition at the Ferrari Gallery in Dallas Texas, which opens on July 27 and goes through September 2024.
THE FUTURE of VISUAL POETRY + COLOR:
Cecil Touchon will continue to grow the VISUAL POETRY + COLOR archive by making open calls, which will happen as new exhibition opportunities open up for this project over the next 10 years.
Statement from Cecil Touchon:
“I am a mail artist and a part of the network and the whole museum project is based on the mail art system of networking. I do the typical mail art correspondence and all mail art that I receive is registered in the collection like everything else.
In terms of Mail Art and Visual poetry. I don’t think there is any specific connection between the two because mail art is a network and visual poetry is a ‘deliverable’. It is only one of the deliverable elements in the mail art network along with anything else that can be on a post card, in an envelope or a small package along with any other poetry, asemic writing, or image, drawing, collage, photo, announcement, poster, etc. or just pure correspondence. Is there more visual poetry because of the mail art network? Maybe. I am not sure how one might quantify that except through searching through well developed collections. But not every visual poet uses the mail art network I would guess.”
THE ART OF TYPEWRITING is a beautiful hard cover book by Ruth and Marvin Sackner, documenting much of the concrete poetry, and some visual poetry, from their extensive Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry. We were able to visit them and see their collection in Miami many years ago. They came to Columbus in 2010 to attend an Avant Writing Symposium at The Ohio State University main library, organized by John M. Bennett. Marvin was the keynote speaker. Ruth passed away just before the release date of the book, and Marvin died in 2020. Their archive now resides at the University of Iowa library in Iowa City, where there is also an excellent Fluxus collection which includes original fluxus boxes & kits (we’ve visited the special collections library to see these). The Univ. of IA also has a collection from Chuck Welch’s mailart archive. Chuck Welch is one of the mailartists included in THE ART OF TYPEWRITING, along with Vittore Baroni (Welch visited Baroni after the 2023 panel discussion in Venice), Hartmut Andryczuk, Paolo Bruscky, Geoffrey Cook, and Bill Gaglione. Also included are works from these deceased mailartists (in the order of their deaths): Robert Rehfeldt, davi det hompson, Betty Danon, Rea Nikonova and Serge Segay, and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. [Not a definitive list, as it’s entirely possible there may be others in the book who I am simply not familiar with as having been active in the mailartist network.]
The Sackners also collected small press publications which were part of the avant garde literary scene, where much concrete & visual poetry were first published. My spouse, John M. Bennett, published Lost & Found Times (L&FT) magazine, and the Sackners aquired a complete set of its 30 year run. It was a small press journal that published avant garde writing, poetry, and art. Because John received submissions by mail at home for the magazine, I mistakenly assumed many of those concrete or visual poets were mail artists. Yet, many of them WERE active participants in the network, as were we. John contributed the essay below about a couple who were published in L&FT and who are well represented in THE ART OF TYPEWRITING. They were part of an underground cultural scene in Russia before they moved to Germany later in life.
The following four images are from the pages of Lost & Found Times: At left are collaborations JMB did with Rea or Serge; at right are individual visual poems by Rea and Serge.
John M. Bennett:
Rea Nikonova (1942-2014) & Serge Segay (1947-2014)
They were a couple, and lived much of their life in Yeisk, Soviet Union, where they were active as underground conceptual and visual poets, and performance poets. Their work grew from earlier ZAUM art and writing, a Russian Futurist movement and culture from the 1920’s. Much of their innovative work was distributed thru Samisdat networks, using carbon paper to make a few copies of books and other materials. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, with the USSR’s Glasnost (“Transparency”) and Perestroika (“Restructuring”) developments, they were able to contact other artists outside the USSR, and did so via Mail Art. I was in contact with them at that time, and over the years we did many collaborations, and I published some of their work and collaborations thru my press Luna Bisonte Prods. They soon moved to Kiel, Germany, and spent the rest of their life there, dying in 2014. Their work after the early 1990’s evolved to include publication technics such as photocopiers and audio recording. Their work is unique and unforgettable, and is a wonderful example of the international nature of polyartistry, something fundamentally characteristic of Mail Art.
An excellent book about them and others, and the unique culture they were part of, is by Gerald Janecek, ZAUM: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism, San Diego Press, 2015 (New Second Printing)
“TINTA CIRCULAR: Sonnets & Others” by John M. Bennett (the image at LR) has a cover image made from his visual poem on wood which is part of Willie Marlowe’s VISUAL POETRY + COLOR project.
The rest of this post is filled with the remaining images from mailartists’ pieces in the exhibition…
Matthew Rose statements:
(About his 8″ x 8″ collage, above at LL)
This little piece refers to the repetition of inane behavior and how as a moment, it expands and compresses time. Think of mistakes you made – dropping a vase, cutting your hand, a car accident.
Time stops. but strangely
the mind is clear(ed).
Though here,
there is intention.
Poetics of failure.
(About ABAD mailart project = A Book About Death)
“It was first presented in New York in 2009 and last presented in Japan at the Karuizawa New Art Museum in 2019. MOMA has a full collection of the postcards in the first show in NY. There were 30 installations all over the world, involving a total of around 5,000 artists.”
There might be A SIMILAR TRAJECTORY PROJECTED BY CECIL TOUCHON’S AMBITIONS FOR THE VISUAL POETRY + COLOR PROJECT. See the link below for additions he has already made & for documenting future additions of 8”x8” panels. I commend Willie Marlowe in her decision to mail the panels from the first exhibit for adding to Cecil’s Ontological archive in Albuquerque NM. That planted the seed for his ambitions to further the Visual Poetry + Color project.
Link to additional images for the expanded exhibit of VISUAL POETRY + COLOR, posted by Cecil Touchon: https://om-2024.blogspot.com/search/label/Visual%20Poetry%20and%20Color%20Exhibition
touchonian.com to keep up with the action as Cecil Touchon posts about the Dallas TX installation
https://buymeacoffee.com/touchon for anybody that wants to be part of the Coffee Club and contribute some gas money for all the travel involved (three trips all together just for the Dallas TX exhibit).
https://om-2024.blogspot.com/p/poetry-and-color-exhibition-1-november.html is an overview with info about the Troy NY exhibit (Nov. Dec. 2023) and a press release about the Dallas TX exhibit (July 2024)
https://2023-ontological-museum-acquisitions.blogspot.com/search/label/Visual%20Poetry%20and%20Color%20Exhibition includes ALL the 8″ x 8″ panels from the 1st exhibit in Troy NY, not just those from mailartists
For more on the Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry at the Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City https://www.lib.uiowa.edu/gallery/exhibit/sackner/
TINTA CIRCULAR by John M Bennett and books by many other mailartists/visual poets like Hartmut Andryczuk (Germany) Luc Fierens (Belgium) Davi Det Hompson (USA, d. 1996) Marilyn R Rosenberg, Sheila E. Murphy, K.S. Ernst, David Baptiste Chirot (d. 2023), Jim Leftwich, Michael Peters, Carlos Luis (d. 2013), César Espinosa (México D.F., d. 2023), and others are at: https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/lunabisonteprods
L&FT magazine issues are scanned & archived at The Ohio State University Special Collections online website – searchable by names of artists & authors. Example below is for Rea Nikonova: https://kb.osu.edu/search?query=Rea%20Nikonova&scope=e89e5ba2-1a83-53ee-b700-7340fa01b8a7
(note: you might need to register for the OSU Knowledge Bank? Then click the L&FT issue you want to see & download the pdf of at bottom of web page)
Guillaume Apollinaire, French “forefather of surrealism”, was the author of the famous book “Calligrammes”, published the year he died, 1918. The book is in the public domain. Find it online at: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/apollinaire-s-calligrammes-1918/
Quote from The Tate Museum about mailart: “Mail art began in the 1960s when artists sent postcards inscribed with poems or drawings through the post rather than exhibiting or selling them through conventional commercial channels. Its origins can be found in Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters and the Italian futurists. But it was the New York artist Ray Johnson who, in the mid 1950s, posted small collages, prints of abstract drawings and poems to art world notables giving rise to what eventually became known as the New York Correspondence School.” https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/mail-art
CMB RE: above quote – Note the parallels (collage, poems) between mailart & visual poetry – especially found in postcard collages and copy machine art. (Instead of copy machines, our private printers are ever more at hand to create broad sides and small book editions.) Rubber stamped text is used in both mailart & visual poetry.
This installation is a re-iteration of the type of junk assemblage installation I’ve been making almost annually at Art Rat Studios in Roanoke VA during AfterMAF (MAF = Marginal Arts Festival) for nearly a decade, minus the years of the Covid pandemic. Only this time I didn’t have to travel so far to install it! The 3rd photo and the last photo include views of the visual poetry pinned on the wall: work by John M. Bennett which he thinks of as a ‘book on the wall’. Not shown are two groupings of five each of my small wood box wall assemblages and two larger works that include works on pedestals, plus a group of 8×10″ collages made with marbled paper then framed and matted (in background at LR of 3rd photo is a distant view of framed collages). The gallery opens at 4pm Saturday Feb. 17th (2024) with last day open hours noon to 3pm March 9th. (NO closing reception) Website for more images of my wall pieces and info: https://934gallery.org/
I was unaware of JERRY SALTZ until I saw many of my artists friends were looking at his Facebook posts. I joined the group and began delving into Jerry’s posts about the art scene.
We learned about Prologue Bookstore when the owner made a presentation at an Aldus Society meeting one evening. Information about this book collectors’ group can be found at their website https://aldussociety.com/about-the-aldus-society/ When we visited the store to check it out, I bought ART IS LIFE partly to show support for the bookstore, but also out of curiosity. I’m glad I did, because it is very informative, not academic at all, and surprisingly different from the obtuse art critic articles I used to read in art magazines back before the internet. Yet, I should point out that no photos of the artworks or artists or museum exhibits discussed are included in this book. So keep your internet handy to look up images, especially for artists whose work is unfamiliar to you.
Jerry Saltz has been a columnist for NEW YORK magazine since 2007 and was formerly senior art critic for The Village Voice for almost 10 years. He is known as a “critic of the people” per Architectural Digest. Quoted from this book: “He democratizes art for a broad audience through his irreverent column and his social media channels, where he has nearly one million followers.”
In 2018, he won the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for “My Life as a Failed Artist,” an essay about how his disappointing career as an artist is responsible for his success as a critic. The essay in New York magazine helped sell nearly 400,000 print editions of the magazine and gained over 250,000 readers online, plus helped earn a National Magazine Award for New York magazine. No wonder that the editor of Riverhead Books reached out to him for a book that would expand on that article. I haven’t read that first book, HOW TO BE AN ARTIST, but the first chapter in ART IS LIFE is titled, “My Life as a Failed Artist”, so I assume many of the points from that first book are summarized in this book’s first chapter.
ART IS LIFE has a long subtitle: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night. It’s introduced as a “survey of the art world in turbulent times”, or “in an era of radical change”. To me, this book initially seemed to be a matter of gathering essays he wrote between 2017 and 2022 with editing help from Riverhead Books editor, Calvert Morgan. But the introduction and specially written chapter about his personal life with his wife, Roberta Smith, who was trying to beat uterine cancer during the Covid pandemic (which affectively shut down the art galleries), is very moving, as well as Jerry’s stories about personal exchanges with Jasper Johns and other artists. There is a chapter about his early life growing up in Chicago which sounds like bad news, starting with the suicide of his mother when he was only eight, and continuing with the harrowing adventures of melding with a new step-family when his father remarried.
Jerry is a great writer about life, not just about art.
But as he says, “ART IS LIFE”.
C. Mehrl Bennett Jan. 27, 2024
From dust cover bio:
“Jerry Saltz has been a columnist for New York magazine and its entertainment site, VULTURE, since 2007. Formerly, he was the senior art critic for The Village Voice for almost ten years, where he was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. A frequent guest lecturer, he has spoken at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, and many others, and has appeared at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, and elsewhere. Jerry Saltz has received honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Kansas City Art Institute. He was born and raised in Chicago and now lives in New York City.”
Glitch photo of edge of dust cover (pink area) and bottom side view of book:
The Viewpoints Method, for CCC Writing Workshop – CMB 2023
I was invited to a workshop by Claire Elizabeth Barratt aka CillaVee, director of The Center for Connections + Collaboration (CCC) in Asheville NC, which happened physically in Ashland NC at between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm. Claire is familiar with Mary Overlie. Her writer father, David Barratt, introduced the aims of the day’s workshop and closed the day out with a summary.
The Viewpoints Method is something I first came across via the internet as an idea for writers. Upon further searching I learned that it was developed in the 70’s by dance choreographer Mary Overlie. Anne Bogart later developed it as a method to create staging for actors and wrote a book with Tina Landau titled The Viewpoints Book, pub. 2004 by Theatre Communications Group. Today it is generally known as a post-modern training method for actors. As Claire is a dancer, she is familiar with Mary Overlie’s work.
Anne Bogart had worked with Japanese director, Tadashi Suzuki, to found the SITI dance company in 1992, so there is an Eastern culture connection. The Viewpoints Method reminds me of the influence of Eastern philosophies reaching the West by way of Zen philosophy and Buddhism in the 1960’s and ‘70s. Today in the West, the Eastern Zen influence is common with yoga devotees, particularly with meditation & in today’s buzz word, “Mindfulness” — an inner awareness of the HERE & NOW. We can also find balance by being open to contradictory viewpoints such as the Yin and the Yang, and in what today is called a person’s effort to be “authentic”. As part of the Boomer generation, we used to call it “finding oneself”.
Yet, we need to loosen the grip on the egocentric version of Self so that writing becomes more experimental and ‘thought” centered. It’s not important to find a single approach to writing style, then stay with that so that your ‘readers’ or the people you want to publish your work will recognize & feel comfortable with what you write. Let’s agree on this right at the outset. Whatever material a writer first comes up with must be open to the editing process. What happens in the editing process is where the real work & play happens. The ‘self’ doesn’t come back into it until a signature is added to the finished work, yet our ego is always present… I believe that it is helpful to identify ourselves as writer, poet, or artist. To sustain us in a world where the liberal arts & humanities are considered unpractical or self-indulgent, or for retired people, or as a left-wing hobby, self-identification as an artist and/or writer gives a boost to our ego. It’s not easy being YOU, but it’s the only YOU you’ve got.
What comes of finding our ‘authentic’ selves?
It leads to confidence in making choices. We can break through ‘writer’s block’ and take those first shaky steps to construct our art. As we keep going, we start to trust in our intuition and spontaneity. We enjoy editing when, through our edits, we uncover even more of ourselves and more of the world around us as well. We delve into our subconscious and at the same time expose the wholeness of our universe. Writing can be a balancing act between the two.
What do we mean by ‘experimental’ or ‘avant garde’ writing?
Making room for accidents, being open to contradictions during the thought process, and being open to fresh ideas so that an interesting narrative with sights and sounds that touch all the senses will evolve. We may focus on small sections of a narrative but hopefully, at the same time, we develop a arc for the work as a whole. “Experimental” can involve creating unique structural rules for a single piece, yet we’re free to break our rules at any point for the sake of our art, as there are no rules in art.
It might seem to readers as if the writer invents, constructs, and creates in a VOID but in truth, we are all part of a WHOLENESS or ONE CONSCIOUSNESS… and here we connect again with ZEN philosophy, which was also a place from which Fluxus philosophy seems to have developed. Much of my own art and writing since around 2009 has been influenced by Fluxus.
Here is my 2023 fluxus event score titled “How to Write a Poem”:
We read, question, and investigate our cultural influences which are always in flux. At the same time, our inner mind is in flux. The wheels are turning.
A writer friend of ours, Jim Leftwich, wrote a blurb for John M, Bennett’s book, LAVANDERĺA NOMBRE. Jim said, “Are Bennett poems always primarily about reading, in the sense that reading is often if not always primarily about thinking?” I’m not sure that Jim is specifically saying that “reading is thinking”, but a blurring between the two separate processes is an interesting viewpoint.
Another viewpoint of the postmodern sort is the idea of FLARF. On the surface, some people dismiss FLARF as ‘nothing’ or of insignificant value as a writing methodology. An example of FLARF is to surf the internet for surprising textual content & reprocess it until further computer glitches afford even more exaggerations or new lines of thought to follow. We can use Google Translator to change text from one language to another & again to more languages then back to English. All those fresh ideas generated by the FLARF method or through surprising ‘glitches’ is all still ‘thinking’ concealed by PLAY. Our own thoughts surface with choices we make as we use playful editing of text sourced from others or from ourselves. Wm. Burroughs came upon the ‘cut up’ method to create something new through his friend Brion Gysin. Take a source text & cut it into four pieces, then re-arrange the placement of those sections OR simply use each smaller section to develop further thoughtful texts. After doing this a few times, your editing process will open up enough that you can discard the physical process of cutup, and just let it happen in your own mind.
After tearing up a poem I originally titled “THE PINK CLOUD” into four parts, I used it as source material for a new eight stanza poem. Each stanza also forms a word using the first letters of each line, using the acrostic method.
Speaking of source materials, consider junk mail letters from politicians and other organizations begging for donations to a cause. Many appear as if they’ve been composed by artificial intelligence (AI). Input a few ideas about the cause and why donations are important, and AI can generate multiple different paragraphs which basically state the same thing over and over. Do they think that if they say it enough times that it will seem more genuine and real? I’ve also used source text found inside dark chocolate bar wrappers with Victorian poetry. Even when I restrict myself to sources like these, which often lack authentic ‘content’ in the flowery language used for poetry at that time, I can find my own content using the BLACK-OUT method of writing (also called ERASURE poetry). This method was used in 1972 by the Englishman, Tom Philips, as he blacked out parts of the text in the 1892 Victorian romance novel titled “A Human Document”. Philips continued to work on the same source for 50 years, then titled the completed book project as “The Humament”. His influences, and mine as well, were John Cage, William Burroughs, Dada, and the concrete poets.
A blog about my book, It’s a Poem or an Event or Maybe Both, and more can be found at my website: cmehrlbennett.wordpress.com In the poem, Sake (p.110 of my book), the first stanza is from an erasure I made on an Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet. Another poem, Cat in the Hat and Captain Rat, came from an erasure I made on a fund raising letter from President Joe Biden.
Find more examples of erasure poetry/writing by Nonlocal Variable (a Portland Oregon mail artist) at https://nonlocalvariable.art/noncurrent/#nonbooklets
The final poem I present here was created from a cut-up note included in a mailart envelope received this month from Nonlocal Variable. I will include an image of that note at the end.
Over the Sofa/Under the Skin/Inside the Head 