Emily Harvey Gallery 537 Broadway at Spring New York NY 10012 tel: 212 925 7651 fax: 212 966 0439
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE EMMETT WILLIAMS – STORY LINES Emmett Williams returns to New York City and the Emily Harvey Gallery with Story Lines, an exhibition of recent verbal/visual collages that reflect a personal tradition which first took shape in the early 1960s with a group of ‘Hieroglyphics for Do –It-Yourself Translations’. The artist and poet describes these pieces as finding their source in a vast collection of old fashioned decals – “transfer pictures depicting life and lore galore in France and her colonies, some of them dating back to the first world war and beyond” - to which he offers new life and adventure as the cast of characters in a world of cryptic narrative. It’s also a world in which they make the acquaintance of the personal images of “little Fluxus people,” a constant hallmark of Emmett Williams’ work. As always, these “little Fluxus people” are quite surprising, since they seem so very “low-brow” – so intimate – in a world of far more peregrine riddles, and of far more philosophical procedures. Each of the collages is completed by a phrase that helps it make sense, while also making it clear that although meaning is something our minds require, actual experience may not supply it, and at times may even deride it. Willaims was born in Greensboro, South Carolina, in 1925, and was one of the original points of lights in the Fluxus constellation espied by George Maciunas in the early 1960s. He was a participant in 1962 at the first famous Fluxus Festival on New Music in Wiesbaden, Germany. Before that time, however, he was already well know as a Concrete Poet. If that mix seems odd, it’s odder still that Williams’ activities have always belied that touch of something doctrinaire which hovers in the air near these terms. As a performer, he’s also known to reach astounding levels of lyricism,and a kind of erotic calm. Williams has lived most of his life in Europe. After his discharge from the Army in 1946, he worked his way to Poland and Greece on cattleboats. Graduating from Kenyon College in 1949, he went to Paris, and remained in Europe for seventeen years. His friendship and collaboration with Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Robert Filliou and other European artists began in the 1950s. Williams returned to the United States as editor-in-chief of Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press in New York. In 1976 he toured Japan with his friend and Fluxus colleague, Ay-O, and returned to Tokyo a decade later as a artist in residence at the Machida-shi Museum of Graphic Art, living at the Ryodenji Temple. He was artist in residence and research fellow at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University from 1977 until his return to Europe in 1980. Williams lives in Berlin, performs and exhibits widely throughout Europe, and is president of the international Artistss’ Museum in Lodz, Poland. In 1997 the prestigious Brerlinische Galerie awarded him the first Hannah Hoch Prize for a “lifetime of achievement in the arts”. His ‘Anthology of Concrete Poetry’ (1967) is considered one of the best guides to the innovations and experiments in visual and concrete poetry. And John Updike wrote of the “pleasure and wonderment” that Williams’ ‘Selected Shorter Poems’ (1974) gave him. Williams’ autobiographical ‘My Life in Flux – And Vice Versa’ was published in 1992 by Thames & Hudson. ‘Mr Fluxus’, a collective portrait of George Maciunas edited by Williams and his wife, the English artist Ann Noel, was published in 1997, also by Thames & Hudson
