6 Comments for “The Avant-Garde. Priceless.”

1. (click to show comment)

   Could that unidentified man be none other than Ted Berrigan?

   

   Posted By: Raphael on June 26, 2007 at 9:08 am

2. (click to show comment)

   Speaking of Berrigan and the 60s: Bruce Andrews recently told me that in the early 80s, he introduced Dick Higgins to Ted Berrigan. According to Bruce, they had never met before. Hard to believe, no? So I asked Alison Knowles who said, yes, in fact that was entirely possible. Even though the Downtown scene was tiny, the various circles all kept very much to themselves.
   But Berrigan was hanging out at the Factory — he was the subject of a Screen Test, as was Padgett & Brainard. But never Higgins or Mac Low. I once asked Jackson what he thought about Warhol & The Factory. He sneered and called them a bunch of no-good junkie degenerates!

   

   Posted By: Kenneth Goldsmith on June 26, 2007 at 9:17 am

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   on closer inspection I take back that possible idenitification. I was thinking the “unidentified man” was the barely visible figure to the left of Panna Grady, not the one with the beard next to Jack Smith, who is obviously not Berrigan.

   

   Posted By: Raphael on June 26, 2007 at 9:19 am

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   Reminds me somewhat of Charles Bernstein’s Yellow Pages ad with Lovitz. I’ve heard a few reasonable explanations for that one, but I still can’t quite wrap my head around it.

   

   Posted By: Das Krapital on June 26, 2007 at 9:40 am

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   Jack Smith would puke his guts out laughing and crying seeing this. He must be spinning in his grave. Not the guy to sell “the good life” and a big bucks lifestyle. He died of AIDS in 1989, penniless and homeless.

   

   Posted By: owen on August 24, 2007 at 1:01 pm

6. (click to show comment)

   But what’s “unbelievable” about it? All part of the spectacle. By saying “unbelievable” (instead of something slightly tepid like “remarkable”), are you insinuating that line of speculation that produces treatises on why Warhol would have loved and/or hated being represented in such a way? I’m tempted to speculate that he would have found it boring, but liked it as such.
   Burroughs did a Nike ad, but it was far more nonsensical than Bernstein’s yellow pages ads. The latter make a lot of sense if you know his work of the period (very slapstick from within a certain avant garde idiom).
   Hilariously, elsewhere on this blog, one commentator has declared that the language poets “are retired” and thus we may finally dispense with issues of “commodification.” Why is there not more conversation between the contributing writers?

   

   Posted By: Patrick on August 29, 2007 at 2:14 am

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