The Natsoulas Gallery Does It AgainJack Foley--Ted Joans Under the guidance of art dealer John Natsoulas and his Gallery Director, the indefatigable Nancy Resler, the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis, California has been operating for over twenty years, dedicating itself to art history, art education, and the exhibition of both recognized and unrecognized California artists. The gallery began in the late 1970s and held major exhibitions of Beat Generation art, Funk art, Bay Area Figurative and Abstract Expressionist art. John Natsoulas himself has curated over one thousand exhibitions. John Natsoulas Press has published monographs, catalogs and definitive retrospectives featuring the work of artists such as Robert Arneson, Clayton Bailey, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Arthur Gonzales, David Hollowell, Marilyn Levine, Gladys Nilsson, Emmy Lou Packard, Roland Petersen, Hassel Smith, and Barbara Spring. The press has also published histories of the Six Gallery, the Batman, and the Spatsa as well as a general history of Beat Generation galleries and artists. In October, 2002--a date deliberately echoing the date of the famous October, 1955 Six Gallery reading at which Allen Ginsberg introduced “Howl”--the Natsoulas Gallery staged the first of its annual Beat Generation & Beyond conferences. The event was a great success. The second such conference was put on in early October, 2003; the event was once again a fascinating mixture of elements--art, performance, film, poetry, even argument (art critic Donald Kuspit attacked the Beats in terms eerily reminiscent of the kinds of charges made against them fifty years ago). It was like a “condensation”--in the sense of the old Reader’s Digest “condensations” of books--of the entire experience of Beatdom. In “Beat Assemblage,” a paper written for last year’s “Beat and Beyond” conference, critic and curator Susan Landauer wrote, [T]his is not a discrete group or even a discrete coterie but what I would describe as a series of pods comprised of like and unlike individuals that mingle, clash, and disperse, not necessarily in that order. The best-known figures, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, were an after-fact for most West Coast artists...[M]uch wonderful art and the people who made it has gotten lost in the shuffle of styles, sales, and curatorial records...“Beat art” encompasses poetry, painting, sculpture, printmaking, book arts, photography, film, theater, dance, music--and hybrids of all of the above. Collaboration and cross-pollination were guiding forces of the time....Often “the Beat Generation” becomes a story primarily involving Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and a few “minor characters” (to use the title of Joyce Johnson’s 1983 book about her affair with Jack Kerouac). John Natsoulas and his associates understand the Beat period in a far deeper, more generous way than that and, like Landauer, they realize that the phenomenon was “not a discrete group or even a discrete coterie” but rather that it encompassed an extraordinarily wide range of responses and people. The Conference began with actor/director Paul Mazursky, whose films include Next Stop: Greenwich Village; I Love You, Alice B. Toklas; and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Mazursky’s new memoir, Show Me the Magic, was on sale, and he had many stories to tell. Mazursky also participated in a panel discussion, moderated by Douglas Kahn, of “Bohemians on Film”; other members of the panel included filmmakers Mary Kerr--whose still unfinished film, Swinging in the Shadows, was one of the highlights of the Conference--and Craig Baldwin, who showed some wonderful films by underground filmmakers such as Bruce Conner. After the films, my wife Adelle and I presented a lecture/performance whose transformative aspects I tried to summarize with quotations from Rilke and Heidegger: “You must change your life” (Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”) and “Being must be experienced anew” (Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics). One of the pieces I read from insisted that For the first time in history, the young are being conditioned by what Father Walter J. Ong has called “the new orality” of the electronic media. For the first time in history, intelligent young people have grown impatient with the silence of books-whatever the status of books as receptacles of information and experience. The silence of writing-which had been perceived as one of its strengths-seems to have begun to work towards its own undoing. Our performance was followed by a showing of Mary Kerr’s wonderful, still-in-process documentary on Northern and Southern California Beat experience, Swinging in the Shadows. Earlier, art critic Donald Kuspit presented a searing, dense, not-altogether-convincing attack on Allen Ginsberg and on the Beats in general, whom he labeled as “adolescent.” As someone familiar with the period, I found Kuspit’s grasp of the facts at times a little shaky and his paraphrases of famous quotations often rather awkward and self-serving. (Better to paraphrase--that is, remake something so that it is in line with your own prejudices--than to actually quote.) In the evening, performance artist Carolee Schneemann gave us “Eros, Outrage & the Toothless Pixel.” Schneemann’s performance was somewhat marred by technical difficulties and her repeated whining complaint, “This isn’t fun anymore”--but something of her genuine power and imagination came through in any case as she mixed both personal and political commentary with slides and films. After Schneemann’s performance, people gathered at the gallery itself, where artist Michael Bowen spontaneously and delightfully created a jazz painting while a band gave out with hot licks and authors signed books. The next morning, the great artist and performer George Herms continued his assault on dullness with a marvelously imaginative presentation which included slides of his work along with his great adventure with Mylar, swinging it round and round on a pole while colored lights bounced off the Mylar’s surface and some very fine jazz--Ellington?--swung in the background. It was as though Herms were displaying, not an American flag, but a flag of the Imagination. At another point, madly clutching the middle of Venetian blind slats which he whirled and rattled, Herms was running up and down the aisles, out of the theater and then back into it. Finally, he created a sculpture, but the sculpture he created was not meant as an “eternal monument”: like a jazz musician’s solo, it was created at this moment out of materials ready-to-hand--including the Mylar. (Later, Herms dedicated the sculpture to poet/artist Kenneth Patchen.) Herms’ performance was followed by an interesting panel discussion made up of visual artists Michael Bowen, Manuel Neri, Carolee Schneemann, and Herms himself. The panel was moderated by John Natsoulas. At one somewhat heated moment, Michael Bowen said to George Herms, “Let’s argue!” Natsoulas redirected the discussion. Sunday afternoon gave us a tribute to the now-somewhat-forgotten poet/artist Kenneth Patchen. A film on Patchen’s life was shown: we heard the poet reading as well as interesting commentary on his life and work. (Al Young remarked that Patchen’s work was particularly appealing to the adolescent; this seemed a fine thing in Young’s opinion. Donald Kuspit, on the other hand, used the undeniable appeal of Beat work to the adolescent as a whip with which to flog them.) After the film and a reading of some of Patchen’s poetry by D.R. Wagner (a poet and close friend of Patchen’s), Andy Jones led a charming group of beatnik-black-clad freshman students from U.C. Davis in a reading, not of Patchen’s poetry but of criticism about Patchen. Though I have attended many poetry readings, this was the first criticism reading I have ever experienced. San Francisco is a tourist town. An indication of one of its primary tourist attractions can be found in the city’s constant assertions that despite the fact that figures such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs are dying off with alarming regularity, the “Beat Generation” nevertheless continues unabated. Articles, often bearing the title, “The Beat Goes On,” appear regularly in the local press. But San Francisco, like all cities, has undergone major changes over the past fifty years. Dana Gioia for one has noted the decline of the city as a literary region. Who would have thought to see the very spirit of the Beat Generation flashing out with such vitality, not in San Francisco but in the small, charming, quiet town of Davis, California? “Oh, yes, the Natsoulas Gallery,” someone said to my wife Adelle during our visit. “We use that as a landmark--you know, three blocks past the Natsoulas Gallery, go to the Natsoulas Gallery and turn left. It’s great!” You can find the Natsoulas Gallery at
521 First Street
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Jack Foley