The Velvet Unknown, Now Emerging
by BEN SISARIO, nytimes.com
May 5th 2011
A YOUNG man stands slouching on the stoop of a crumbling Lower East Side
tenement. His back is turned, but he cocks his head toward the camera, his eyes
hidden behind dark shades. Beside him, staring straight ahead, are three other
young men who will soon become famous. Yet 46 years later the fourth is still a
sphinx.
Rock scholars might recognize this photograph as one of the earliest portraits
of the Velvet Underground, shot on Ludlow Street in mid-1965, and a close look
reveals familiar details: Lou Reed’s smirk, John Cale’s spotless black suit, a
sullen Sterling Morrison. The head scratcher is Angus MacLise, whose role as
the band’s original drummer has earned him a permanent footnote in the annals
of music. But with a new gallery exhibition that documents MacLise’s expansive
career as a musician, poet, visual artist and all-around downtown shaman, he
may finally be getting some recognition.
“Angus was one of the greatest drummers of all time and one of the greatest
poets of all time,” said the composer La Monte Young, whose pioneering 1960s
drone group the Theater of Eternal Music included MacLise and Mr. Cale.
MacLise died in 1979, in Katmandu, Nepal, leaving little on the standard
historical record. He appears on none of the Velvet Underground’s commercial
recordings, having quit on the eve of the band’s first paid gigs; he was so
dedicated a bohemian that, according to both Mr. Reed and Mr. Cale, he could
not tolerate somebody telling him when to start playing and when to stop. (His
replacement was the much better known Maureen Tucker.)
But over the last decade a handful of musicians and historians have been
exhuming tape after tape, document after document, to resuscitate MacLise’s
reputation as a key participant in the underground culture of New York in the
’60s. The latest of these finds might be MacLise’s Rosetta Stone: a suitcase
stuffed with his poems, drawings, photographs and other ephemera, lent to Mr.
Young by MacLise’s widow, Hetty, and left in Mr. Young’s basement for decades.
The contents of the suitcase form the core of “Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of
Angus MacLise (1938-1979),” which opens on Tuesday at the Boo-Hooray gallery in
Chelsea. The show’s curators, Will Swofford Cameron and Johan Kugelberg,
contend that it further bolsters MacLise’s status as a “human link document”
connecting Beat poetry, the art scenes of Fluxus and Andy Warhol’s Factory,
psychedelic film, rock and the classical avant-garde.
“This provides a completely different history of the ’60s and ’70s than we’re
used to,” Mr. Cameron said.
Some of the pieces in “Dreamweapon” make a case for MacLise’s significance by
association: a flier for an eight-hour happening in 1965 with Warhol,
Burroughs, Ginsberg, the Fugs; a handwritten note to his friend Ira Cohen, the
filmmaker who died last week at 76.
Others trace MacLise’s brand of mystical eccentricity through various artistic
movements. Dead Language Press, which MacLise founded in Paris in 1958 with his
high school friend Piero Heliczer, published early work by the Beat poet
Gregory Corso and the filmmaker Jack Smith, as well as MacLise’s pamphlet
“Year,” from about 1960, which lays out an alternative calendar, with new names
for every day (“day of the smoking plain,” “diedricsday”); Mr. Young and Marian
Zazeela, his wife and collaborator, still use it.
MacLise spent most of the 1970s in Nepal, where he printed his poetry in tiny
editions and drew in a fantastical calligraphy of his own creation that
resembles Arabic or Sanskrit. Mr. Kugelberg brushes aside the question of
whether the symbols are a form of language. “It’s an inner poetry,” he said,
likening MacLise’s process to the subconscious “automatic writing” of the
Surrealists.
But if MacLise himself comes across as a cipher, a character to be interpreted
through scraps of writing or in a few jarring photographs — like one taken near
the end of his life, in which a Grim Reaper figure creeps toward him — it’s no
accident. His friends and colleagues remember him as inhabiting some distant
poetic plane and as being full of creative inspiration but also unknowably
remote.
He might show up for band rehearsal or might not. If he did, he might begin
playing before anyone else arrived and continue long after everybody had put
their instruments down. Like plenty of others at the time he took copious
amounts of drugs, but he seemed particularly neglectful of his own health. His
death, at 41, was caused by hypoglycemia, exacerbated by years of drug use, his
family said. (The cause has also been reported as malnutrition.)
Next Page »
“Dreamweapon” runs Tuesday through May 29 at Boo-Hooray, 521 West 23rd Street,
Chelsea; boo-hooray.com.
Original Page:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/arts/music/angus-maclise-of-velvet-underground-in-dreamweapon.html?pagewanted=print
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