William Rand and Rene Ricard 1988, Rand Studio NYC 1988. Photo by Will Daley © Estate of Will Daley

William Rand, has dedicated his latest book, ‘Rene’ to the life of his friend, tumultuous artist and poet, Rene Ricard. Here he reminisces with Maryam Eisler about New York’s exciting community-led art world during the 1980’s and 90’s and his more mellow life now as he resides in Maine

Maryam Eisler: ‘Rene’, your latest book, is a form of diary of your East Village studio from the 80’s to the 90’s, with a backdrop of your friendship with the artist and poet Rene Ricard, set within an atmosphere of tragic events interlaced with street crime and drug addiction. Let’s talk about the shoe box time-capsule method you used for recording these events.

William B. Rand: I remember writing things down because the first time I did it, I couldn’t believe what was happening at my studio. It was so surreal; the drama and the fear around Rene was the most intense you could probably find in the whole of New York City.

ME: You have made references to a ‘safari’. Was it really the ‘jungle’ you have often referred to?

RENE book cover, front and back. Photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, quote by Raymond Foye, executor Rene Ricard Estate. Courtesy of William Rand and Osprey Press

WR: Rene himself referred to it as ‘Abercrombie & Fitch’! It was all so over my head really, that I felt like ‘ok I’m just going to write this down, because this is all too unbelievable for me not to write down’. The way Rene spoke, the order of his words, it was all so unique that five minutes later, he wouldn’t remember anything. So, writing things down as he said them was the closest way to preserving his rapid-fire complex communication – I just put them all in a box, and I certainly couldn’t let him know.

ME: What I found interesting about the time you are referencing is this sense of strong (artistic) community that reigned in New York City. Rene sometimes slept on the street, but there was a real sense of community that pulled itself together to support him … at times even paying him above normal artist rates, to perform, so as to keep his voice alive! In today’s art world, I don’t feel we have this same sense of artistic community and support. It may have been very chaotic then, on many levels, but to me, it seems like there was more authenticity in feelings, in compassion, in humanity, than there is now?

WR: Well, the people that cared about Rene could calm him down; Brice Marden and he had a very stable and authentic friendship; Brice is from the Boston area, as was Rene – they really understood each other. There were a number of us who were truly dedicated to him, and as Schnabel and other friends of his learned only too quickly, Rene loved being broke. ‘If he got $60,000, it would be gone by 5:00 pm, and Rene would be begging for cigarette money’ as Raymond Foye once said.

William Rand by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 1982 from the series Art world. Collection of MoMA, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas. © Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 2023

ME: Were there many other big names in the art world whose careers were strongly linked to Rene’s?

WR: Yes. Rene, for example, wrote about Francesco [Clemente] and it was used for a publication at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London. Rene was the one person who could cut through everyone and tell them what he thought; they all loved his poetry, Clemente especially. Rene would often say ‘We’re going out, we have a mission!’ and I’d get dressed and go with him, and it was often on a very good adventure; sometimes, there was trouble lurking around the corner. He was a junkie but there was always this fabric of poetry, art and life behind it all, which made it both interesting and intellectually rewarding.

Debra Grid, William Rand. 16 canvases assembled, collage. All decades 32″ x 32″ © William Rand/ARS NY 2023

ME: Any stories of Ricard with Basquiat?

WR: I remember when gallerist Pamela Willoughby was living on Ave A over the Pyramid Club, in the 80’s, with my friend Hayne. One summer, Rene and Jean Michel were living in a tent across the street on Tompkins Square Park. They would always ask to come up and take showers, and Hayne would always let them in, much to Pamela’s horror. They would put on such innocent faces at the door- you had no choice but to let them in!

Rene was the one who said ‘Jean Michel doesn’t draw, he makes lists’. He would often talk to me about Jean Michel in his studio. He was heartbroken when Jean Michel died; after his death he famously went to a gallery opening of Jean Michel’s works, and placed a bottle of champagne on the table; it literally exploded! Rene believed in magic and he often referred to Basquiat as a saint. What Jean Michel became was the voice of inclusion for all the people that had been excluded to the party. He was a major movement-shaker for human change.

William Rand Maine studio 2017. Painted Collages. Rand Photo © 2023 William Rand/ARS NY

ME: Any memorable stories related to Ricard and Schnabel?

WR: Well, I asked him once if we could go and meet Julian and he said ‘that would take a papal decree…’ because – as you’ll read in the book – Rene had smashed up Julian’s car and he went to jail for it… in Rene’s mind, it was a very big deal. He had to wait a long time to get let out. I mean, Rene was drunk driving. Rene came in and out of the rain like a wet crow, I just held him as he sobbed and sobbed. Jean Michel was dead, his apartment across the hall from Allen Ginsberg had burned down, he was fired from Artforum, the eighties were shutting down hard. I was receptive to his pain. I think Rene did wonderful things for Julian; their work is highly connected and I would like to see Schnabel’s paintings hung with Rene’s paintings one day, because, love and war … well, they are connected. That’s a page of art history right there.

ME: What I find interesting is that whilst the book gives the reader a great insight into Rene’s life, I also think it projects a great picture of NYC’s subculture of the time, both high and low brow… the speed of the city, its psyche. I loved all the references to Warhol, to Edward Robert Brzezinski being rushed to the hospital after eating a Robert Gober artwork … All these funny anecdotal stories, above and beyond Rene’s story, yet all part of his world, and also yours!

WR: Exactly. That world, our world, was like a circus with so many rings going on … some of them were badly lit, and some of them were even less lit. I have to say when I left New York in 1996 to go to Europe, I brought the notes with me to Spain; that’s when I started transcribing them. And I said to myself, I don’t know what will happen when all the anecdotes are put in a row – will they breathe? I didn’t know what it would all do, but what had been a thorn on my side clearly became a rose.

Rene Ricard ‘On the Subway’. Ricard poem 1989. 8 1/2″ x 11″ on photo copy © 2023 Estate of Rene Ricard. Courtesy Willoughby Gallery NY

ME: Well, it’s an amazing way of telling the story of a time, a space, a place, and a stellar powerfully charged bohemian within it all… a mover and a shaker, a real iconic operator. You get a real sense of New York, but also realise how much the art world has changed. How mould- breaking it used to be. I, for one, don’t feel that same sense of art pushing boundaries today. Society and the art world have become more clinical, more sanitised.

WR: To answer your question on the Rene front, most of the gallery people were scared when I walked in because I was so associated with Rene and well, things happened around Rene. And a lot of what happened around Rene was in very select areas, amongst the elite, in a very beautiful but dangerous atmosphere. His friends were Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol… and he had a very strong opinion of his position. Yet, Rene was sleeping on trains. Today, art and money go hand in hand – you can’t be a bohemian anymore in New York City. It’s all about the commerce.

ME: I think there was also less fear of judgement then?

WR: Interesting you say that. Yes. Rene came out of 60s street theatre. These are the people who stopped people in the streets, did things, provoked them, and that was very much part of the fabric of Rene’s life. Of course, now that’s all gone. That was very much the downtown thing, to attack the squares. He truly belongs to a different era.

The Diamond Thief. Courtesy Willoughby Gallery NY

ME: Interesting that you were one of the only few people in Rene’s world who escaped this vicious circle of homelessness, addiction and trauma. You continued beyond that time, fruitfully, as a painter and a poet in your own right. Do you feel like you’re one of the lucky few who managed to escape that chaos?

WR: I left because somebody was going to get hurt. I also left New York in 1996, because the art world was very cliquey – who was in, who was out. It was just like Junior High!

ME: Let’s get onto your own practice – Peter Frank said that you belong to a generation of American artists ‘reared on images, on consuming them, on producing them, but not controlling them’. Do you agree with that?

WR: I grew up on black & white images.

ME: You were the first TV generation, right?

WR: Yes. Black and white TV, photographs, image reproductions in books… Records were also printed in black and white. So, yes, I agree with Peter because I would drown myself in thousands of images, looking for the one that calls itself the question, the one that did something, that hooked you, that engineered something.

‘The other side of the mirror’. Poem by Rene Ricard 1988 3″ by 5″ on green lined paper, pencil and typewriter. © 2023 Estate of Rene Ricard Raymond Foye Executor. Courtesy Willoughby Gallery NY

ME: Much like your memories placed in a time-capsule, your artwork, adopts a grid format; you create a puzzle of images and thoughts, and then you recreate a narrative out of it all. Tell us about this approach to your work?

WR: Yes, I make the grid. The viewers then bring their narrative to the artwork; they make up the story.

ME: It’s like hanging your psyche on the wall, but you ask the viewer to make sense of it?

WR: The grids are modules so they can be combined in any shape or form you want… each slot can be combined; I find this process fascinating and I continue to explore the process. I have grids and grids and grids, 4ft by 4ft, 5ft by 5ft… they’re my notes and I love them. I particularly love what they can say.

ME: Let’s now switch to your 90s modular ‘Ava Gardner’ grid mural, an assemblage of painted canvases brought to life through a collaboration with poet Richard Millazzo… letters, poems, photos and paintings…much of which is based on your conversation with the concierge at the Madrid Hilton Castellana hotel, a man who lived through much of the Ava Gardner narrative you exposed. Talk to me about this project and its inspiration. Is it a form of Ophelia sinking into dark waters?

WR: Well Ava Gardner came to Madrid, when she ran away from LA and Las Vegas, Sinatra and the guns. She loved Spain. She was pretty wild. She had the gypsies over all the time, they’d steal all the silver, all the furniture but she didn’t care – they would stay till dawn!

The Modular Ava Gardner 2000-2002 Madrid, William Rand. 54 square metres, assembled, mixed media on canvases. Exhibited at Galeria Najera Puerta Alcala 2002 Madrid. Essay by Richard Milazzo © 2023 William Rand/ARS NY

I have lots of notes of her antics jumping on beds, running up and down the hallways naked, ringing up the reception ‘Oh I see you have a new bus boy, could you send him up right away…’ She went through the whole staff! The worst thing was how the piano went off the balcony… and the desk rang up and said ‘Excuse me is everything alright in the room?’, and she [Ava Gardner] said everything was fine, then the front desk said ‘We see the piano has gone off the balcony, would you like to explain?’ and she turned around and said, ‘As you can see gentlemen, this is the finest and most expensive suite in Spain, and we are used to the best. The piano was not good enough, so we threw it off the balcony – it was out of tune!’

I unveiled my Ava project in ‘The European’, this magazine back in the 90s which was in every Ritz hotel in Europe. The American Embassy people came to my opening. Funnily enough, the opening was two days before the one year anniversary of 9/11. The embassy had set up a huge ceremony for Americans, with military bands, speakers… but guess what? My Ava Gardner project took up all the press in the whole country. The embassy said: ‘You stole our press for 9/11! You stole our show!’ But in fact, they were happy for me.

Raymond Foye Executor © 2023 Estate of Rene Ricard

ME: What took you to Spain in the 90s in the first place? Why not Paris, why not London?

WR: In the 90s, I had met a lot of Hispanic people in the East Village through the festivals. They would pray to the Virgin Mary and drink beer at the same time! And I said to myself, these people are very relaxed about it all! I also got involved in the Hispanic scene on the Lower East Side. When I arrived in Spain, I didn’t speak a word of Spanish – I had to learn it on the streets. And I didn’t really know anybody but I saw these drag queens, and thought to myself, ‘If I want to get ahead in Spain, I may as well hang out with these people’, so I introduced myself. They then introduced me to all the movie people, and I immediately had a peer group.

ME: Talk to me about your ‘Les Affiches’ project. Affiches were big during the Belle Epoque period in Paris; they were used to advertise military recruitment, political opinions, advertisement etc. What did they mean to you?

WR: It was funny; one of the last things Rene said to me before I left New York, was ‘You know, you would make a great affichiste !’ – I’ve always loved posters, I’ve always loved graphics … the Russian Revolution… the Black Panthers… flat areas, letters and images with volume… Graphics are what move you… they are punchier than art. ‘Les Affiches’ is very much about war, and the price women pay in war; it’s about the spirit of resistance, socio -politically and culturally.

Les Affiches, 2017-2019, Mixed Media on Wood. Courtesy of William Rand Studio

ME: It seems to me that although there’s continuity in your work, there’s equally a referencing to the past, a continuous dialogue between today and yesterday?

WR: The eternal present.

ME: What are your current concerns?

WR: I’m obsessed with painting with linseed oil, the house smells so wonderful! I love the shiny black surfaces in my new work … I guess I would just say that moving on and continuing is the best reward and inspiration.

ME: And not being afraid to try new things – is abstraction your new frontier?

WR: It’s actually something I never get to do; abstraction is so fun because it’s so different from realism. I’m doing some paintings of the surf at night. I’m interested in the materiality of things, and I’m really not getting too hung up on the images themselves.

Guitar player in the surf, 2021-2023, William Rand

ME: Would it be fair to say that you belong to the fluxus generation, with Marcel Duchamp being a forerunner of that movement?

WR: That’s a very good question – it is precisely what I’m doing.

ME: It’s reductive and it’s meditative.

WR: Very right! Albert Fine saw me painting in art school, French interiors, and he said ‘this is not going to do, we’ve got to take some responsibility of you.’ And he went to the art shop and came back with this black spray paint. And then he said ‘I want you to start going to New York, forget about what they’re teaching you here, none of these colours are permitted; what they’re doing to you is criminal and we have to get you back’. So, I got involved with new materials. I hid the work I was doing with Albert when the professor came around. If I hadn’t met Albert, God only knows what I would have turned into!

Read more: Joel Isaac Black: The Coolest DJ In The Alps

ME: Please share your last memory of Rene.

WR: I saw him at the Chelsea [Hotel]; he had just had a show with Ronnie Wood in London. He had a brooch on, in the shape of a pirates’ skull, encrusted with a big dazzling jeweled eye, probably a ruby. He had received a lot of money obviously and had acquired all these fancy things. We were excited to see each other; it had been a long time. But it also brought back memories of why I left the scene.
Wherever there was cash there’d be crap, parties, degeneracy, and as long as there was cash it would just go on for days, Rene and whoever he got involved with. That was the danger. That’s why I left.

Rene Ricard, 1990, photograph by William Rand

ME: Now you’re back in wholesome Maine, are you happy?

WR: Although I had my parents die, my husband die, and I was very sad, I had learned how to read as a child in Blue Hill [Maine], so I decided to move there. This 1840 house was the town funeral home; no one would buy it and it was sitting there for years, empty. I said to myself ‘I’m getting it’ and I truly love the house – the chapel, the front rooms, this and that… I have a private park of four acres, and I’m writing and painting, and couldn’t be happier.

ME: Are you still using the same method of putting ideas in a box?

WR: Oh yes – people tell me so many things and I go home and write them down and put them all in a box.

ME: Any exhibitions planned?

WR: Yes, I have an exhibition and artist-in-residence week late September 2023 at the new Willoughby Gallery in Southold, on the North Fork of Long Island. Pamela Willoughby is an art world veteran, and this new gallery is unique and very cool. Southold is different from the Hamptons, so that is very attractive.

Find out more:

williambakerrand.com

@mainenewyork

Precious Okoyomon and Gravity

LUX catches up with the New York-based Nigerian-American artist whose immersive installations portray the glorious chaos of nature – and its imperilment by the human race

1. You have been labelled as chef, artist, poet…

I think of myself as a poet. Everything else comes from there. Poetry is where I first found myself – in and within myself – and made something of it. Now, all the other things that I do, whether they want to or not, have to take the forms of poems. Everything is just a sort of non-stop poem at this point.

2. Where does your creative process begin?

Most things that I do start with reading. If not there, they come from just being in the world.

3. Do words ever fail you?

Everyday language fails and then we find each other sitting in the cracks of everything, trying to fall into the blur.

Okoyomon’s first solo show at the Luma Westbau, Zürich, in 2019

4. Can artificial intelligence create real art?

I’m not sure what real art is. If I did, none of this would be any fun.

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5. Why does the kudzu plant appear so frequently in your work?

I love the vine. It’s been so special to have this extended collaboration with it over these past years. Some of the laws about cultivating it in the US actually made it very difficult to start working with kudzu. But now I know how to get around all of that and I feel like we have developed a real fluency with each other.

6. If you could switch off the internet forever, would you?

Definitely not. The internet is a part of me and you, and everything we touch. Please, no, never turn it off.

In ‘To See the Earth before the End of the World’ (2022), Okoyomon’s sculptures are set against a field of wild kudzu

7. What is your phobia?

I’m afraid of a lot of things, but I would never tell you what. You have to be careful with fear.

8. What talent would you like to have, that you lack?

I take ballet lessons, but I’m not any good at it. I wish I could do a fouetté.

9. Of all the cities you have lived in, which do you prefer?

Well, I love Paris. I love Arles even more, but I’ve never lived there. In short moments, I get the joy of getting to rest and make work in this special city, but maybe one day…

Okoyomon is the recipient of the 2021 CHANEL Next Prize

10. Who or what do you love right now?

Always my mother, my dog, Gravity, and [the Japanese figure skater] Yuzuru Hanyu.

11. Who or what do you hate right now?

I don’t like that question.

12. How will the Chanel Next Prize affect you?

I’m so grateful for the space it has afforded me to think without having to be afraid – and to just get to dream and play. I’m not sure how it will change the way I make things yet, but I’m so excited to get this rare chance to just explore. I really can’t imagine anything more magical.

Okoyomon’s installation, ‘Every Earthly Morning the Sky’s Light touches Ur Life is Unprecedented in its Beauty’ (2021-22), at Aspen Art Museum

13. Louvre or Pompidou?

Louvre.

14. St Tropez or Hackney Wick?

Neither.

Read more: Marina Abramović: The Artist As Survivalist

15. Have you bought an NFT?

No.

16. What’s your favourite building?

The Hayden Planetarium [in New York].

Precious Okoyomon was recently awarded the Chanel Next Prize and won the 2021 Frieze Artist Award

This article appears in the Summer 2022 issue of LUX

‘Shabdiz and Gholghoun, horses of Persian poetic myth;’ Hana Louise Shahnavaz (2018)

Are you a scientist or an artist, a genius or a poet? Do you really have to choose? Perhaps humans are more rounded than that. Some of the world’s leading scientists tell us about their favourite poets, cutting-edge poets nominate the scientific geniuses who changed the world

A LUX x ROSEWOOD COLLABORATION

Genius: Douglas Eck

“I studied English literature as an undergraduate, so I read a lot of poetry at that point in my life. I like structure, so I’m drawn to poetry that plays with metre and rhyme such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love sonnets. I also enjoy the work of American poets Elizabeth Bishop and Ezra Pound. I could [also] go on for hours about lyrics, particularly from artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Joni Mitchell, Jay-Z, Tom Waits, Björk and Georges Brassens.” For an artist to be successful, Eck believes, “They must create something new that extends our understanding of the world around us, persuading us to think differently.”

Principal scientist on the Google Brain team in San Francisco, Douglas Eck spends his days working on Magenta, a research project exploring the role of machine learning in the process of creating art and music.

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Poet: Sabrina Mahfouz

“The concept of a singular genius to me is something very male – that one person can have a great idea and that all the hundreds or thousands of people responsible for making it happen can get pushed into anonymity! I believe in collective genius but not in an individual one. What’s happening in the worlds of technology and activism seem to be the most illuminating examples of collective genius around today – both areas which inform and inspire my own work constantly.”

An award-winning writer, playwright and poet, Sabrina Mahfouz is one of the most exciting voices on the creative arts scene today.

Genius: Richard Sargeant

“I don’t foresee my favourite poems in my battered copy of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury ever being replaced by AI, because we don’t buy art for its function, but for its story and experience. I might admire poems for their cleverness, but I love them for the character they reveal. I love Milton’s courage in the face of his blindness (which is described in his poem When I Consider How My Light Is Spent) and G.K. Chesterton’s joyful humility in the epic The Ballad of the White Horse.

“As with other art forms, it isn’t ultimately the quality of the stanzas, but the resonance of the experience that stands behind them that gives poetry its purchase on our mood and our imagination. In poetry, the spirit of the work is the essence of what we value.”

Richard Sargeant is chief commercial officer at ASI Data Science, a leader in the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to real world business and public policy problems. The company was listed on this year’s Tech Track Ones to Watch

Poet: Hollie McNish

“I recently watched the American biographical film Hidden Figures, so right now the three geniuses inspiring me are the mathematicians who worked in Nasa during the space race: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. I am so fascinated by this sort of mathematical brain. Saying that, I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of a genius. The first idea I had of this concept was Roald Dahl’s Matilda. But after that, in all my education and university life, geniuses – until this film– were so strongly aligned to the white male that I found the concept almost ridiculous.”

Performance poet and writer Hollie McNish has published five books of poetry, including ‘Nobody Told Me‘, which won the 2016 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry

Read more: Philippe Sereys de Rothschild on fine wine & supporting the arts

Genius: Ian Blatchford

“Poetry has a rapier-like quality, revealing our emotions, motives and sometimes hubris,which is why I love the work of John Donne so much. You can find it in science too. I like to think mathematics is the poetry of science,a kind of haiku in which you can spin a whole universe and its destiny out of a few symbols.”

Ian Blatchford has been director and chief executive of the Science Museum Group for the past eight years. Previously he was deputy director of London’s V&A Museum

Poet: Rosy Carrick

“Nikola Tesla was the Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer who was best known for his contribution to the design of electric currents. What’s interesting about Tesla is the line between creativity and insanity. Often the work of a creative genius can seem like magic or craziness but we realise later that it is someone simply ahead of their time.”

For the past eight years, writer and performer Rosy Carrick has been a co-host of the Latitude Festival poetry stage and also co-curates the Port Eliot Festival poetry stage.

THE CARLYLE, A ROSEWOOD HOTEL

New York is a city steeped in poets, from the likes of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg to today’s virtuosos on the slam poetry scene. The Carlyle Hotel has the great fortune to have a legacy in both camps, as legend on the Upper East Side, home to the city’s aristocracy, and for its Bemelmans Bar, famously decorated by illustrator extraordinaire Ludwig Bemelmans.

rosewoodhotels.com

This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue

Robert Montgomery, ‘Ghost in the Machine’

For this month’s Poetry Muse Rhiannon Williams looks at four genre-bending artists in whose work art and poetry fuse in intriguing ways.

The arts often intersect – visual albums released by musicians, the use of dance in performance art, and of course text in conceptual art; beautiful melt-in-the-mouth words splashed across walls and canvases all over the world. Whether as a source of inspiration or in pride of place as a focus of artworks themselves, poetry is seen in the output of many an artist. But when is poetry a work of art, and when is art poetry? Or what is the difference between the two? Arguably the aesthetic experience of a piece of art mirrors that of a poem – each have form, composition, and are interpreted by a viewer or reader who brings their own experiences and history to the canvas or page, usually with strong emotions induced.

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Carlos Motta

The work of Spanish artist Carlos Motta – who had a performance piece on at Frieze this month – elucidates how the boundaries between word and image can blur. A word can be an image, while also referring through the system of language back to the image that it is, as well as being a representation of something completely different. For example, in Motta’s ‘We Who Feel Differently’ the words themselves are the art, drawing attention to their linguistic meaning through their physical size and shape and colour upon the wall, while also possessing the extra-linguistic meaning associated with what feeling ‘differently’ might entail, and who this enigmatic ‘we’ might be. In this way it is at once a work of art, and a poem, the strength of the words exemplified in a single short sentence.

Carlos Motta, We Who Feel Differently

Robert Montgomery

Looking at it from the opposite perspective poetry is also frequently performed as art, for example Robert Montgomery’s (husband of poet Greta Bellamacina) epic ‘Ghost in the machine’ installation, erected upon an esplanade for National Poetry Day in Britain. The words ‘The people you love / become ghosts inside / of you and like this / you keep them alive’ when written as page poetry are powerful enough. But the emotional response to these words is all over again when encountered on a foggy evening, glowing with melancholia against a rough sea-sky.

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Heather Phillipson

Heather Phillipson,
ENDING ALL PARTIES / EXCEPT THE PARTY / WHERE U MEET YOUR OWN BRAIN. Installation view at The Drawing Room, London, 2017. Image courtesy the artist.
Photographer: Dan Weill

Heather Phillipson is a poet who is also an artist. She has had solo exhibitions in places such as the Schirn Frankfurt and the Istanbul Biennial while at the same time being a British Next Generation poet. She describes how her ‘videos and sculptural installations behave as places, musical scores, poems and nervous systems’ demonstrating how ambiguous the definitions of each of these things are, and how arbitrarily language burdens us with meanings. In the same vein as Motta, her 2017 commission uses the power of poetry in conjunction with art to create the piece ENDING ALL PARTIES / EXCEPT THE PARTY / WHERE U MEET YOUR OWN BRAIN.

Seth Price

Seth Price is someone who works with words, code, skin, clothes, walls, metal – anything he can sink his teeth into. His art and poetry dismantles not only established routines and preconceptions, but also the clockwork of feelings. Based in New York, Price is generally considered under the label of ‘artist’ however there is an argument for the titles web developer, architect, essayist, musician, and poet – if titles such as these are particularly relevant by this point. His books of poetry subvert every expectation of what constitutes ‘poetry’ as they resemble artists’ books more than poetry books, and journal entries more than poems, playing with language in the same way that his art does. As part of his show ‘Wrok Fmaily Friedns’ an essay that he wrote entitled ‘Dispersion‘ is displayed amidst a jumble of knots, the scrambling of letters and image and physicality reflecting the disordered reality upon which a system of language tries to impose order. The essay talks about how the endless oscillation between defining something as ‘art’ or ‘not-art’ is ultimately fruitless, while in itself treading the water between each of these categories in the most clever, engaging manner. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ but through Seth’s work we come to see how the limits of language may be overcome – by art.

Seth Price, Bisexual Litigator 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

British poet and co-founder of Brainchild festival, Bridget Minamore. Image by Suki Dhanda

LUX’s Contributing Poet Rhiannon Williams puts the spotlight on British poet Bridget Minamore this month, exploring her unique portrayal of love and her vision for Brainchild festival.

Bridget Minamore′s poetry is red hot. Addressing race, feminism and popular culture in verse that scalds, this epic young British poet appears to be everywhere at once these days – the poetic version of a catchy new tune. However, her star has truly been accelerating in its ascent since the publication of her pamphlet ‘Titanic‘ (Out-Spoken Press), a collection of poems which hilariously and hauntingly dissect what it means to love another. In ‘Titanic’ she uses the most famous disaster story in history as an analogy for a rocky relationship, writing with a spotless humour and style that tangos with your emotions. The excerpt below shows how Bridget portrays the way the violence of doomed love can be transfigured into dark humour, which nevertheless calls out to our deepest fears of being bereft – or shipwrecked – in love, desperate for the beloved to stay:

I want to cut your legs off

not so you can’t walk away,
more in the hope you’ll stay
exactly where I want to put you.

Her talent for a sentence that can leave you floating on pure emotion has done exactly the opposite of the doomed ship, buoying her up and into a stratosphere of significance, and marking her out as a striking new voice of a generation. When I asked what drew her to using this imagery of the ship, Bridget shared her thoughts: “I always felt so embarrassed writing or reading poems about love or heartbreak, and the imagery gave me two things: a crutch to hide behind, but also a level of humour that made everything easier. I’ve always loved being near water, whether its canals or the sea, and back in Ghana my Dad’s whole family live right next to the largest man-made lake in Africa. But I have this real fear of it as well – I can swim, but I get nervous when I’m actually in open water. So subliminally there must be a part of me that compares the open water of the ocean to love: home and comfort, sure, but also terror. The Titanic sums all of that up for me.”

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Although the symbolism of the distressed ship is one that has been used by poets throughout history – Horace’s ‘The Ship of State in Troubled Waters’, Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau Ivre (The Drunken Ship)’, Bridget guides this metaphor firmly into modernity by using popular song lyrics in her transitions between poems, and colloquial language. The overall effect is ground-breaking…or should we say ice-breaking?

Brainchild festival. Image by Hollie Fernando

Not just a poet however, Bridget has her fingers in all of the creative pies; she has worked with the National Theatre, the Royal Opera House, represented the UK at the International Biennale in Rome and has even masterminded an incredible music and arts festival, Brainchild. And through her journalism she tackles burning issues that many are afraid to speak out about – for example the concept in fashion of the colour ‘nude’ and the unrecognised problem that it causes for women of colour who just want to find a pair of skin-coloured tights – something which should be guaranteed for all women.

Furthermore, her writing invariably leans towards promoting those who are in need of a spotlight, for example she champions the (long overdue) rise of black female DJs, such as Jordanne of GCDJ (Girls Can’t DJ). This is also where her Brainchild Festival comes in. Because instead of just talking about change, Bridget does. “The answer lies in visibility,” she wrote in a piece for ‘The Debrief‘, and at Brainchild each July, Bridget provides the vital visibility that up-and-coming music, poetry and dance stars need.

Bridget was one of the founders of Brainchild, a quirky festival in the United Kingdom – it is very literally her brainchild. Nestled among the grounds of the Bentley Motor Museum in rural East Sussex, the chilled out setting comes with a surreal wildfowl park and miniature railway in tow. In addition to running it, Bridget took to the Brainchild stage this year to perform her poetry, as well as run a discussion about the housing crisis in Britain – and this combination of acts acutely captures the feel of the entire festival; subtle, cerebral and important, the achievement is a melange of conference and intellectual discussion in addition to the vibrant festivities.

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Brainchild is volunteer-run, and yet endlessly inventive, even more so than the giants of festival Britain like Glastonbury and Reading which are simply too crowded to be truly intimate or different. In contrast, there seems to be no end to what Brainchild puts on, from silent discos made hot by the cutting edge GCDJ group, to the on-site art installations which also created a centre of gravity this year, such as the out-of-this-world geometric playgrounds of Kristi Minchin. There was even an act called 5 encounters on a site called Craigslist featured on the line-up this year. When asked about her vision for Brainchild, Bridget discussed how it evolves with each run: “Each year it’s got easier to know what our vision is—these days, I’m pretty sure we all want to create an inclusive space for as many people as possible, a place that’s fun but also engaging enough to make you think. But also fun. Retaining the intimacy is probably the next most important thing, as it’s something we’re really conscious of the larger we get.”

A yoga class at Brainchild. Image by Jerome Toole

Bridget Minamore’s work with Brainchild is a testament to her talents. Playing on the word ‘brain’, the festival describes itself as ‘a meeting of minds’, a network and safe haven for people in the arts to push their talents to the forefront of the stage – and it is because of Bridget that this creative network has become so strong. It can sometimes seem that the options available for young people to forge a career from artistic abilities are diminishing every day in Britain, due to lack of funding and the troubling expectation that they will work for free. However, Bridget’s work demonstrates how this is not necessarily true. I will be looking out for more of her presence in the future, as I am sure that the name Bridget Minamore will continue to be trailblazing, taste-making and trendsetting in the poetry world; she shows us how it can be done.

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