Winter Solstice, 4:21 AM, ET

The Strawbs/The Winter Long

 

 

 

Lorraine O'Grady -American Artist & Writer. Sept. 21, 1934 - Dec.13, 2024

Lorraine was my Foundation Year Humanities teacher at School of Visual Arts in 1980. The following year, in the Fall semester of 1981, I took her Surrealist Literature class. Event since I was a teaanager I'd prayed such a thing existed. SVA made such things possible. We immediately hit it off. In my first year at SVA I often sat to her immediate right and exchanged small talk with her. She took a natural interest in what I was reading - Jim Carroll, Ted Berrigan, Rimbaud, Baudelaire and any other strange art related books I'd pick up real cheap at a shoebox of a book store on 23rd Street between Madison and Park Avenue South (Lorraine's class was held in a small room at 222 Park Ave. South, not far from Max's Kansas City - where she once waitressed). Once, when the entire class had failed to do the reading assignment, including me, Lorraine scolded us all. I apologized and Lorraine said, in not so many words, "Forget it! I don't worry about you." Lorraine, like Bernadette Mayer, treated me like a real artist - before I ever did.

(Lorraine reminded me of an Egyptian hieroglyphic come to life. Her hair was cut that particular style reminiscent of the women you see depicted on frescoes,  on tombs.)

Surrealist Literature was a dream come true. Lorraine apologized for having to use an awful, wooden Anthology of Surrealist poetry edited by Academic poet Mark Strand. It did suck. She also had photocopied an entire book on Dada & Surrealist Art for us all. To this day I don't know we didn't use Artist Robert Motherwell's definitive text on the subject -The Dada Poets and Painters. The summer before taking the class I had already begun preparing by reading Tristan Tzara & Andre Breton. I became fascinated by Dada. It was about anarchy, chaos and combining disparate elements to rearrange consciousness by any means necessary. And provoking action. Performances were chaotic, violent affairs  that went on simultaneously incorporating different disciplines, costumes, action, music, poetry, sound and all the five senses. Its participants were acting out in relation to the insanity WWI - it was a reaction to war's horrors and the established norms and values of the day. Dada sought to amplify the absurdity of life (Frank Zappa understood Dada). We all had to select a class project from a list of possibilities Loraine supplied and mine was Cabaret Voltaire, a Dada event. I created an environment, with a classmate and the poet Phil Good, that included strobe lights, music, poetry read from sheets crumpled & tossed forcibly at class mates...there was the shredding of fabric, guttural screams, confetti, water guns, spit, projectiles, nonsense words, oblique sounds, drums and chanting. It built to an almost painful, airless intensity then abruptly ended on a dime. When it was over Lorraine said "Boy! Am I stoned!, Bill, you get an A for the semester!" My performance occurred the day Anwar Sadat was assassinated - October 6, 1981 -  which only added to the intensity. At semester's end, for a final project,  I submitted a surreal photo I'd done for my Multiple Imagery class with Abe Rezny (see above), along with some amphetamine driven prose. Lorraine stole the (better copy of) the photo, leaving me a note in her mail box that said she loved it too much and that I'd never get it back. No one had wanted anything I'd ever done that badly before! Not until then and certainly not at all after.

Lorraine and I would run into each other around SVA, sometimes outside SVA. Once, when I was driving down East Houston Street,  I saw her helping her elderly mother into a cab. I beeped and yelled to her.  "I have a show on East 2nd Street!" she yelled  back with a smile & wave, shocked and awed at our chance meeting.

About, maybe not even, ten years ago I emailed Lorraine out of the blue - I'd been writing about her in my journal. She got back to me right away and told me my photo was now in her archive at Wesleyan University after spending a small an eternity on her desk. She encouraged me to keep up with my journal writing - a daily practice I have had for many years.

Lorraine lived a full, varied life, like many of the people I admire so much. She worked for the Government in DC, for the Post Office, as a waitress at Max's and as a rock n' roll journalist getting close to Johnny Winter. She came to art late in life and was passionate. Her art was deeply personal - built on a rich dream life & fearless introspection. It was so personal that it became cutting edge political. I loved it for that, there was nothing affected about it, it was genuine - hardly any Performance Art is. Lorraine was pretty much apolitical in class (at least when I studied with her). She made it to age 90 - how great! She made a huge impression on me at SVA and as an artist. I can definitely say she was my favorite teacher there as well as an influence on my art. I salute her on her passing. Read the obits, Google her.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/15/arts/lorraine-ogrady-dead.html

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/lorraine-ogrady-artist-dead-1234727149/

https://lorraineogrady.com/

 

 

Have You Seen the Saucers?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

December 8, 1980.

 

 

 

John Giorno, American Poet & Performer - December 4, 1936 - October 11, 2019

John Giorno in The Poetry Loft at 222 Bowery, NYC. March 2003.

(Two portraits of John Giorno. Mixed media/Board. 2010. 5" X 7")

My friend the Poet Phil Good once said that to visit John Giorno in his loft at 222 Bowery was to get a vitamin shot. He was right. John was ball of passionate energy. When I interviewed him at his spacious top floor loft on December 7, 2002 I felt as though I was in the presence of a very pure forcefield. John's work as a poet, record producer, conceptualist, visual artist and Aids Activist are only part of the story. He was also a performer and a healer (something I experienced first hand at the end of our interview). John was compassion in action, an accomplished Tibetan Buddhist practitioner & meditator since the early seventies, he used his vocation as poet/performer to ease human suffering the best he could, a true Bhodhisattva. When the tidal wave of AIDS hit in the 1980's John devoted much of his energy to his AIDs Treatment Project which raised cash for endless gay men who needed everything from rent & food money to someone being there at the moment of death (John personally presided over the deaths of many AIDS victims, often holding their hand as they made their transition). When AIDs crested in the early 90's, John raised money for artists  & writers at times of dire need such as a health crisis. The thing about it is that John did this on his own - corralling Tibetan doctors, rock musicians, painters, sculptors and wealthy arts patrons to contribute assistance with a sense of urgency - and love. There was no middle man. When someone needed something John gave it to them directly. And quickly. Meditation in action - John was enlightened, of that I am sure.

The photos above were taken in John's Poetry Loft at 222 Bowery in NYC in March 2003 as we edited our interview. A somewhat smaller space than his top floor loft, it was filled with his bold face poetry posters and a small tondo of violet & sky blue by his husband Artist Udo Rondinone. I asked John if I could take some photos and he gladly agreed, falling into a series of relaxed poses. Our interview would be published in The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation Journal later that year - in its entirety. John and I both retained copyright and I was happy to see the interview translated into several languages and be cited in Brion Gysin's biography and a book about The Chelsea Hotel, making me proud. You can access the interview on this blog, linked below.  John died Friday October 11, 2019. I didn't find out until the following Monday when his obit was made public by The NY Times. On Saturday October 12, 2019 one of my portraits of John was in an exhibition at Volition Gallery in Orangeburg, NY.  The best group show I was ever in.  And it sold! (It's the ghost image of John on the right, above). 

When asked by The New York Times what his most prized possession was - John said a gold, gilded statue of Guru Rinpoche in yab yum with his consort, noting that he had a family heirloom (a diamond from his mother) inserted into Guru Rinpoche's crown.  He also loved Saga Dawa - the day celebrated as Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death. "I love that day!" John said to me. And I could tell that he did.

http://www.billdenoyelles.com/2008/

https://giornopoetrysystems.org/

https://www.instagram.com/giorno_poetry_systems/reel/CwDoZiNqJ46/