4

Spare Parts, or, Caught Between Pop and a Historical Hard Place

1

Gerard Malanga wrote to Charles Henri Ford on 13 December 1963. Here’s a flavour of what this emerging poet, photographer, and Exploding Plastic Inevitable member had to say:

Ezra Pound is coming back to the States. Andy has hit The New American Cinema scene; is having a still from one of his movies on the next cover of FILM CULTURE, is making a short new film every week to be shown at the Gramercy Arts Theatre. You launched him and now he’s upset the entire scene with his pranks.¹

The ‘Andy’ referred to here is, of course, the one and only Andy Warhol. Malanga’s exuberant letter is useful as it gestures towards the role that Ford played in ‘launching’ Warhol’s career as an experimental filmmaker. Ford and Warhol met in New York in the early 1960s.² Warhol describes how he first ‘met the surrealist poet Charles Henri Ford at a party that his sister Ruth Ford, the actress, who was married to Zachary Scott, gave at her apartment in the Dakota on Central Park West and 72nd Street and Charles Henri and I began going around together to some of the underground movie screenings’.³ Warhol also recounts how Ford took him ‘to a party that Marie Menken and her husband Willard Mass, underground filmmakers and poets, gave at their place in Brooklyn Heights at the foot of Montague Street’.⁴ Warhol’s recollections chime with the version of events Ford subsequently presented to the photographer Allen Frame:

Well, I’m the one who took Warhol to the underground films, to see Jack Smith, etc. I gave Andy his first exposure to ‘underground film’. He immediately got turned on. He said, ‘What kind of camera should I buy?’ And I said, ‘Let’s go to Willoughby’s.’ So I told him what kind of camera to get. He took it back to his place and put film in it and started waving it around the room. That was his first film. He went on from there. I did a diary and took stills of a Marcel Carne film, ‘Terrain Vague’. I was on the set for thirteen weeks, taking photos and writing. I have all these stills.⁵

This response foregrounds the simple – yet significant – fact that Ford did indeed play a part in Warhol’s development as an artist. Ford’s passing reference to ‘underground film’ is pertinent in this regard. ‘To understand Underground Film’, Parker Tyler writes, ‘we must realize that it is an expression which, after 1960, gained much impetus as a group idea. It was part of the universal youth movement, and like a progressive school for modern children if felt (and feels) that nothing among outgoing emotions should be suppressed.’⁶ Underground film is thus, in Tyler’s estimation ‘the democratic ideal of free expression slanted specifically toward the indeterminately young and thus toward the relatively inexperienced and unproven’.⁷ There is, however, slightly more to matters than Tyler lets on. Jim Hoberman addresses precisely this point in his introduction to the 1995 edition of Tyler’s seminal Underground Film, which was published originally in 1969. He reminds us that this mode of film-making ‘was distinguishable from earlier modes of experimental cinema by its mixture of willful primitivism, taboo-breaking sexual explicitness – both hetero- and homosexual – and obsessive ambivalence regarding American popular culture’.⁸

Speaking to issues both provocative and popular as the movement did, it should come as no surprise to find that Ford was so interested in underground film. Truth be told though, this is not the primary reason why I quote at such length from Ford’s interview with Frame. Rather, this passage resonates with a number of the issues we will encounter when charting Ford’s artistic trajectory over the course of the 1960s. To this end, let us take a fresh look at Ford’s recollections, specifically those that follow his rather pithy assessment of Warhol’s meteoric rise to film-making prominence. Discussing the relationship between American experimental cinema and avant-garde poetry, the cultural critic Daniel Kane foregrounds the fact that, ‘beginning around 1964, Warhol would – after taking the art world by storm, as they say – go on to take the underground film world by storm’.⁹ Hence Ford’s rather perfunctory, verging on offhand: ‘He went on from there.’ Bearing this in mind, consider how Ford – with his occasional aspirations of a cinematic persuasion – moves to situate Warhol’s achievements in relation to his own: ‘I did a diary and took stills of a Marcel Carne film, “Terrain Vague.” I was on the set for thirteen weeks, taking photos and writing. I have all these stills.’¹⁰ An air of bathos clings to this statement. It all hinges on Ford’s comment about time spent working on the set of Terrain Vague. At first glance, it appears as if Ford is suggesting that he joined Carne and company in France not long after he pointed Warhol in the direction of the right camera. But this simply cannot be. Terrain Vague was, as the historical record shows, released in 1960. This was a fair while before Ford took Warhol to Willoughby’s. Our understanding of Ford’s remark changes when we recall this. It appears that Ford is trying here to deflect his interlocutor’s attention away from the subject of Warhol’s first forays into film-making. A passing comment that registered initially as almost totally innocuous, if it registered at all, now strikes us as curiously wary, defensive even.

Why might Ford want to deflect critical attention away from his friend? If anything, Warhol’s rise to cultural prominence should have been a source of quiet pride for Ford. After all, as Malanga intimated, Ford, in a certain sense, ‘launched’ Warhol.¹¹ What, moreover, are we to make of Ford’s defensiveness? Such questions speak to the larger concerns of this chapter. I want in particular to suggest that the answers to these questions have much to tell us about the seismic upheavals in the cultural landscape that took place during the 1960s. To begin with, I describe the various ways in which Ford sought to keep himself occupied in the decade that immediately preceded the 1960s. Moving forward chronologically, I then demonstrate how Ford’s dealings with Warhol reveal his occasionally anxious awareness of shifting trends in American aesthetic production: trends that signified an incremental move away from modernism into the historical realm of the more properly postmodern. Having thus discussed Ford’s initial visual responses to Pop, I then debate the critical significance of Ford’s major work of the 1960s, the tellingly entitled Spare Parts (1966). In this section, I consider how the unique Spare Parts acts as a critical poetic document and as a self-reflexive account of Ford’s status in the contemporary cultural sphere, and I discuss what this has to tell us about the artist’s understanding of aesthetics during this transitional period in his life and career. After that, I turn my critical attention to Ford’s other substantive poetic work of the 1960s: Silver Flower Coo (1968). In many senses a companion piece to the earlier Spare Parts, Silver Flower Coo documents Ford’s increasing ambivalence to the culturally prominent Pop, alongside his growing awareness that he does not fit easily into contemporary aesthetic circles or categories. In short, I argue that in the 1960s Ford at times appears to be on the verge of withdrawing into a world of near-nostalgic reminiscence. Strongly evident in Silver Flower Coo, this nostalgic bent stands in contrast to the aforementioned Spare Parts, in which Ford seeks, as we will see, to play a role approximating that of an aesthetic matchmaker between ostensibly antithetical modes of representation.

2

The 1950s weren’t all that kind to Charles Henri Ford. This, admittedly, seems like a slightly strange claim to make. It appears, upon first inspection, as if everything was finally going Ford’s way. He spent much of the 1950s journeying through Europe with his partner, the noted Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew. Inspired in large part by his artist-lover, Ford now began to draw and paint. He also sought to familiarize himself with the craft and art of photography while in Europe. Ford’s interest in these areas bore eventual fruit. A public exhibition of his photographs – ‘Thirty Images from Italy’ – was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1955. A year later, Ford exhibited a collection of his line drawings and paintings at the Galerie Marforen in Paris; Jean Cocteau authored a preface for the exhibition catalogue. So far, so good. Not long afterwards, however, personal tragedy struck when Tchelitchew had a heart attack and died on 31 July 1957 in Rome. A sudden end to twenty-three years of partnership, this was certainly traumatic for Ford, and the profound loss prompted him to take stock of his artistic achievements. Ford’s journals are useful for understanding his experience of the 1950s. As we have already established, Ford was, among other things, a remarkably keen and accomplished diarist. Portions of Ford’s journals were published in 2001. Featuring an introduction by the writer and critic Lynne Tillman, the published volume bore the title Water from a Bucket: A Diary, 1948-1957. ‘Not coincidentally’, Tillman writes, ‘Ford begins his diary a year after he stops View and ends it shortly after the death of Tchelitchew.’¹² As for the rationale underpinning this highly personal project? ‘Ford’s diary was written to examine himself and others’, Tillman continues, ‘and in a way, its self-consciousness is its raison d’être. Preciousness is stripped from its self-consciousness by Ford’s unflinching self-criticism – he’s regularly concerned with his character as well as [Tchelitchew’s].’¹³

In equal measure, however, as Tillman rightly points out, Ford is just as concerned with questions of aesthetics in his diary.¹⁴ Come to think of it, perhaps ‘concerned’ isn’t quite the right word to use when discussing Ford’s preoccupation with aesthetics – and the related topic of his own critical standing in the wider cultural field – in Water from a Bucket. If the latter part of the following entry is anything to go by, ‘anxious’ might, at least on certain occasions, be a slightly better fit:

‘Never marry’, Pavlik [Tchelitchew] tells me, ‘or you’ll be bound to the earth for thousands of years more’. He says he wants to be loved by someone and pounces on Bergson’s view of ‘laughter’ as being devoid of ‘emotion’ as characteristic of me: he says I laugh at everything.

I asked Parker (in a letter) if he thought posthumous fame is any fun and he replied that it might be to posterity.¹⁵

Observe how quickly carefree laughter gives way to anxiety about going unrecognized in one’s own lifetime here. Ford is referring specifically in this entry to a letter he wrote to Parker Tyler on 19 April 1951. The sense we get when reading through the many letters Ford sent to Tyler during the 1950s is one of uncharacteristic confusion and uncertainty on the former’s part, especially when it comes to matters of an aesthetic persuasion. Judging by the letter he wrote to Tyler on 17 November 1951, Ford seems to have been particularly sensitive about the prospect of expiring before receiving what he perceived as his proper critical due. ‘I admit that my poetry is a time-bomb’, Ford writes, ‘as far as audience disturbance on a grand scale is concerned. I do take some joy in knowing that one-day my name will be exalted; let those of contemporary fame rejoice, too. Your citing [of] Pound and Williams is not exciting – Pound leaves me cold and Williams, I say, is [like] that Chinese emperor – he’s unclothed (with greatness).’¹⁶

But the prospect of such ‘joy’ doesn’t seem to have been enough. Ford describes to Tyler on 7 May 1952 how he now feels absolutely ‘no urge to write anything – not even a diary. Not even a diary. Not even Great Examples in literature inspire me to emulation. What is it? A running up of Knowledge, or a running down of the libidinal creative fluid?’¹⁷ Soon after posing these rhetorical questions, Ford’s letter tips from orgiastic comedown into outright despondency:

At the same time I WANT to do something, create something. But imaginative literature, aside from the prose poem, bores me. Perhaps a movie camera will be the answer…. Co-incidence that you shd mention suicide in your last letter…. God or Suicide, I told Pavlik, might be a title for something…. And I’ve thought of how I shd be capable of suicide, if the time came when life had no more novelty. It would be novel to have a son. Or to have lots of money. Or fame through poetry or plays – or anything. The unbearable thing, I guess you’ve tasted it, is to go on being as you are when you’re dissatisfied.¹⁸

Frustrated and bored, Ford comes across as profoundly ‘dissatisfied’ in this peculiarly overwrought letter. He also appears uncharacteristically indecisive. This seems to have been a large part of Ford’s problem in the 1950s. He simply couldn’t bring himself to commit to any particular artistic programme.¹⁹ He also struggled to conceive of even bringing projects to completion. We get a sense of this in a letter Ford wrote to Tyler while based in Rome: ‘Ideas erupt here as the dead volcano must have ONCE (the Monte Cavo which I see from my room) – when will I ever finish any – or, what is even more remote, see them produced in book form?’²⁰ Yet, at other times, it seems that the ‘ideas’ simply refused to reveal themselves in the first place. Indeed, as Ford put it to Tyler on 26 January 1953: ‘I don’t write poetry anymore because I can’t imagine any poetry other than what I’ve already written.’²¹

How, we might ask, did it come to this? There is, I think, a clue contained in a slightly earlier letter that Ford sent to Tyler on 13 December 1952. This is how it begins:

I’m fascinated now with the short story as my ART FORM; but a special kind of short story – in the tradition of Hoffman, Poe, Gautier, Gérard de Nerval. All poets and storytellers. The theatre wasn’t my ‘it’; this is.

The movie camera? Writing and painting will always be superior to the photograph, because of the metamorphosis, the alchemy. No matter how marvellous a photo (such as one by Cartier Bresson), it was there; the transmutation through word or paint is the superior art. I shall get a Leica, first, in any case.²²

Notice how Ford’s letter in turn makes mention of poets and storytellers, cinematic and photographic apparatuses, written words and visual artefacts. Then consider the way in which the letter concludes: ‘I wonder if I shall ever want to live in America again? The way I feel now, nothing short of war or revolution would chase me away [from Europe].’²³ Ford couldn’t be much clearer here; he appears to have turned his back on the country of his birth. Ford’s animosity towards America seems to have been building for a number of years. Consider the following diary entry of May 1949. This entry, which was written not long before Ford left for Europe, concerns a conversation between the New York City Ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein and Tchelitchew. Ford selected it for inclusion in Water from a Bucket: ‘Brooksie [Jackson] told [Tchelitchew] that Tanquil Le Clercq will be with us on the De Grasse. Lincoln told him, “You and Charlie hide yourselves because you do not surround yourselves with the right milieu.” There is no right milieu in America. P.: “Perhaps the academic world?” No!’²⁴ Ford’s reaction is both, as we can see, emphatic and unequivocal: ‘There is no right milieu in America.’²⁵ As to whether there might be a ‘right milieu’ to be found somewhere in Europe? Ford doesn’t express an opinion. In any case, the change seemed to do him some good, at least for a little while. As he put it in a journal entry of September 1949: ‘I told him [Tchelitchew] one reason I’m enjoying Europe so much is that I feel I’ve escaped from the prison of America, where I was confined ten years. Europe, America – poetry, prose.’²⁶

Ford’s stretch in the stifling confines of the ‘prison of America’ covers the period between 1939 and 1949. The inescapable sense we get from the journal entry above is that Ford’s dissatisfaction with all things ‘America’ at the turn of the 1950s is somehow linked in his mind with View, which ran – as we already know – between 1940 and 1947. Compare and contrast the following two exhibits. The first assumes the form of a letter that Ford sent to Tyler on 13 September 1940: ‘I’m glad View is talked about as being a “clique” organ – that’s its purpose! Eclectic organs never make an impression. All important movements have been cliques from the Sitwells, to the Surrealists to Auden-new verse to the [New] Apocalyptics. View [will] be representative of a view (more or less integrated) or nothing.’²⁷ Fast-forward a full seven years to our second exhibit. Here is an extract of a letter that Ford sent to Edith Sitwell on 5 November 1947: ‘How happy I shall be to get back to my poetry and plays – I am appalled when I think how long I’ve been bothered with the magazine.’²⁸ Hopeful enthusiasm has, as we can see, given way to an admixture of exhaustion and dismay. It is not difficult to understand why. The cultural ground underneath Ford’s feet had shifted dramatically. The primarily figural, aesthetically ‘integrated’ avant-garde ‘cliques’ promoted in the pages of View were now treated as outmoded and perceived as ideologically suspect by a number of leading critics and philosophers, certain of whom had previously appeared in Ford’s magazine.²⁹ To make matters even worse, Abstract Expressionism’s cultural star was well and truly in the critical ascendency. America was verily abuzz with talk of the work of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko.³⁰

By the time the 1950s rolled around the artistic tide in the United States had firmly turned. Ford was none too happy about this. Throughout the 1950s, Ford railed against what he considered the aesthetic deficiencies of the figures grouped together under the Abstract Expressionist banner. The New York-based Tyler bore the brunt of Ford’s ire.³¹ Consider the letter he sent from Rome on 14 December 1955: ‘Don’t tell me you’re an admirer of De Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Those People remind me of certain serio-deluded Drunks giving a street performance with a Crowd applauding from cafe tables (but the applause is au fond embarrassed and they’re laughing on the other sides of their faces).’³² One might think that our American exile couldn’t get much more emphatic. But that would be wrong. Ford was in fact only just getting started:

Have you run across a young painter named Robert D’Arista? I saw a reproduction of a painting of his (in the Pittsburgh Carnegie catalog) which I thought Stood Out (a table with bottles, etc., treated in abstract flat patterns). Not that Representational paintings always stand out in the company of the School of Emptiness (my name for the mass of abstractionists). All one has to do is go to the current Rome Quadrinalle to be more appalled at the Concretes than at the Non-Objectives (only good paintings among hundreds: two early Chiricos from the Mus. of Mod. Art, NY).

Enough of blabbing about Art; but we all love to air our opinions.³³

Yet it turns out that Ford was far from done airing his opinions about the ‘School of Emptiness’ and the attendant dangers of ‘mass’ abstractionism. This becomes clear when we turn our attention to a letter Ford addressed to Tyler on 25 November 1958:

Total abstraction, without a trace of human or animal suggestion, bores me – I find it merely decorative, and I prefer Plain walls and kitchen floors (all the Motherwell and Pollock stuff I’d throw out, for example). Same goes for Mark Tobey. (I’ve Always admired Abstractionist Calder however.)

In the end, everything is a question of personality; work & men are one. I’ve found this to be true with all the artists & writers I’ve known, beginning with Pavlik, going on to Dali & Berard, and not forgetting Djuna Barnes, E.E. Cummings & Parker Tyler. Bores are bores, in real life OR in their Art Efforts. Don’t you agree? (Beat Generation prob. no excep.)³⁴

Much might be made, reading this, of the manner in which Ford’s remarks about the ‘question of personality’ resonate when considered in relation to the preceding chapter’s discussion of poetic form and style. Changing tack somewhat, we should indeed be suspicious here that Ford is looking back into the past – and just a little too fondly at that. Without wishing to get too far ahead of ourselves, I mention this now as the issue of nostalgia is something that will come to the fore when we discuss Ford’s poetic output of the late 1960s. For the time being, however, notice how Ford continues to hark here on the topic of his aesthetic bête noire: ‘total’ non-representationality.

Ford’s attack on deficient ‘decorative’ abstraction carries over into the subsequent calendar year. On 6 July 1958 we find Ford demanding that Tyler now bring him: ‘One Person who can draw. Jackson Pollock couldn’t. (What you call Pollock’s “several figure phases” were pathetic.) Anyway, IT IS MORE EASY TO RECOGNIZE RESEMBLANCES THAN ORIGINALITY.’³⁵ Judging by the contents of another letter to Tyler, this one written on 31 March 1959, the notion of ‘originality’ – or ostensible lack thereof – seems to have been at the heart of the aesthetic matter for Ford:

The so-called N.Y. School does the Minimum with the Minimum – or else, slinging all pots and troweling it up or down, the Minimum with the Maximum (of effort). A quintessence will always be poetry, fear it who will. All that ’welding, carving, punching, swinging and TAKING UP SPACE’ as you put it … – the pathetic thing is they Still have nothing to Say – either before, during or after. And Who Does have anything to say? No one but a poet – the others shd Keep: Quiet, PLEASE.³⁶

Ford appears to have worn himself out with this particularly ill-tempered outburst: this is the last time he will deign to refer to the ‘New York School’ by name, at least in his correspondence with Tyler.³⁷ The sense we get is that Ford had grown weary of attacking the perceived shortcomings of others. Taking a more proactive stance, he now moved to bring himself up to speed with the various countercultural scenes that had begun to flourish on the other side of the Atlantic. We see this in a letter he sent to Tyler from the Old World on 7 July 1960:

I have no desire to lead the chic life – I’ve done all that. I got so used to the simplicity and poverty – which doesn’t matter – of the Athenians, I’m revolted by the bourgeois aspect of Rome –, all these women dressed up, etc. I’ve worn a tie once since getting back. Haven’t felt this Bohemian since Young & Evil days, I think the cycle has revolved. I’m back where I started – or almost. So tell me if anything is available around Beatdom.³⁸

The significance of this communiqué is its dawning self-awareness. Ford has realized, finally, that he has come full circle, arriving right back where he had started, or remarkably close to it. But this need not be read in the negative. Indeed, it is at precisely this moment that Ford finds himself actively willing the bare and bracing possibility of a fresh start. And though he doesn’t specify where such a fresh start might be garnered, what he does know concretely and with certainty is that it wasn’t going to happen for him in Europe. And so, in the wake of this epiphany, Ford would retrain his ambition on the country he had previously described as a penitentiary: America.

3

The timing of Charles Henri Ford’s return to the United States proved fortuitous in the extreme. In putting forward ‘The Case for Abstract Art’ (1959), Clement Greenberg had cause to argue ‘that representational painting is like literature, in that it tends to involve us in the interested as well as the disinterested by presenting us with the images of things that are inconceivable outside time and action’.³⁹ According to Greenberg, this was as true for portraits as it was for paintings of trees and flowers. As we established in the previous chapter, for Greenberg the truly successful work of modern art is one that ‘does not exhibit the illusion or semblance of things we are already familiar with in real life; it gives us no imaginary space through which to walk with the mind’s eye; no imaginary objects to desire or not to desire; no imaginary people to like or dislike’.⁴⁰ All things considered, Greenberg prefers canvases comprised solely of ‘shapes and colors. These may or may not remind us of real things; but if they do, they usually do so incidentally or accidentally – on our own responsibility as it were; and the genuine enjoyment of an abstract picture does not ordinarily depend on such resemblances’.⁴¹ Under these circumstances, Greenberg must have been horrified by the emerging trends in contemporary art in the early 1960s. Admittedly, on the surface of things everything would have seemed more or less normal – at least to the casual observer. To all intents and purposes, the movement Greenberg had spent so long championing in print appeared to have gone global at the start of the 1960s. No doubt he would have been cheered to hear of the ‘Exhibition of British Abstract Painting’ held at London’s Royal Society of British Artists Galleries in September 1960. Abstraction Expressionism all the while continued to flourish on the other side of the Atlantic. Large-scale exhibitions of Greenberg-vetted, non-representational painting were held at major New York galleries such as The Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1961.⁴²

Yet a decisive cultural change was most definitely on the cards. In May 1961, an early version of Claes Oldenburg’s ‘The Store’ installation opened at the ‘Environments, Situations, Spaces’ exhibition held at the New York-based Martha Jackson Gallery. In many senses indicative of what was soon to come, Oldenburg’s proto-Pop project arose in part out of a sense of dissatisfaction with certain aspects of contemporary American art. In a collection of written fragments first published together in 1967, Oldenburg describes how ‘lately I have begun to understand action painting that old thing in a new vital and peculiar sense – as corny as the scratches on a NY wall and by parodying its corn I have (miracle) come back to its authenticity!’⁴³ ‘I feel as if Pollock is sitting on my shoulder’, Oldenburg adds, ‘or rather crouching in my pants!’⁴⁴ The conceptual aim behind ‘The Store’ was to pose a number of serious questions about the relationship between art, commerce, and the mass-manufactured object. ‘Perhaps this can’t be done,’ Oldenburg concedes,

but why should I even want to create ‘art’ – that’s the notion I’ve got to get rid of. Assuming that I wanted to create some thing what would that thing be? Just a thing, an object. Art would not enter into it. I make a charged object (‘living’). An ‘artistic’ appearance or content is derived from the object’s reference, not from the object itself or me. These things are displayed in galleries, but that is not the place for them. A store would be better (Store – place full of objects). Museum in b[ourgeois]. concept equals store in mine.⁴⁵

Barbara Haskell notes that the original version of Oldenburg’s ‘place full of objects’ assumed ‘the form of brightly painted plaster reliefs of everyday commodities – shoes, foodstuffs, fragments of advertising signs’.⁴⁶ Reading this, one wonders what Greenberg – averse as he was to any sort of art that sought to capture an ‘illusion or semblance of things we are already familiar with in real life’ – might have made of such a display, replete as it was with replicas of instantly recognizable consumer objects and household items. I very much doubt that he would have approved. To his credit though, while he doesn’t refer to Oldenburg’s ‘Store’ in his essays of the 1960s, this one-time critic of Ford’s View did still grasp the fact that a profound and unstoppable cultural change was by now underway in North America.

We start to get a sense of this in ‘The “Crisis” of Abstract Art’ (1964). Greenberg takes aim at artists and critics alike in this revealingly entitled essay. ‘Why art writing happens to be as bad as it is can only be speculated on,’ he argues, ‘and I don’t want to do any speculating here.’⁴⁷ To this, Greenberg adds: ‘What concerns me much more at this moment is the art itself. The worst aspect of the present foolishness of art criticism in taking new art for non-art is that so much bad art gets shielded thereby from appropriate value judgments.’⁴⁸ As a result, in Greenberg’s reckoning, ‘a lot of banal art which ought to be called that gets garlanded instead with phrases about the pure act, action, the absolute, prayer, rites, the subconscious, gestures, and so on’.⁴⁹ So as to be absolutely clear, Greenberg is writing here about what he perceives to be the unmerited critical praise afforded much of the art produced during the second-wave of Abstract Expressionism – both in Europe and the United States. He continues: ‘Amid this palaver the degeneration of Informel and Abstract Expressionist art at the hands of the practitioners of the second generation has gone unnoticed. Some of the emptiest art ever created has been treated with the blindest respect.’⁵⁰ These are strong words – coming as they do from the foremost champion of the New York School. Having said that, we would do well to remember that Greenberg still had high hopes for the immediate future of abstract art, which he now began to rather surprisingly couch in terms of ‘its painterliness, and its painterliness limits it in the way any other defining characteristic would. It limits it particularly with regard to color, the purity and intensity of which are more or less abated by the light and dark accents that are inseparable from painterly handling’.⁵¹ In direct contrast to the ‘empty’ and ‘banal’ sorts of non-figurative art criticized elsewhere in Greenberg’s essay, ‘this newer abstract painting suggests possibilities of color for which there are no precedents in Western tradition. An unexplored realm of picture-making is being opened up – in a quarter where young apes cannot follow – that promises to be large enough to accommodate at least one more generation of major painters.’⁵² However, history tells us that the anonymous ‘young apes’ of this passage had little interest in following Greenberg’s lead. Nor, as will become clear, did mature primates such as Charles Henri Ford. In any case, it didn’t really matter. By now, to borrow a phrase coined by the art historian Arthur C. Danto, ‘the age of Warhol’ had arrived.⁵³

4

‘Art before Andy was radically different from the art that came after him’, Danto writes, ‘and through him.’⁵⁴ Danto also notes that Warhol ‘wanted to become very famous very quickly, and nothing could achieve that for him that did not attract media attention. He was a Pop artist before the meaning of the term was stabilized, but Pop in 1962 was what caused people to talk’.⁵⁵ And talk they most certainly did. In large part this was because Warhol’s early work, in Danto’s estimation, ‘raised the question of what was art in a way that could not be resisted’.⁵⁶ Danto is referring specifically to the work that Warhol exhibited at Irving Blum’s Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in July 1962.⁵⁷ This was the first time that Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans portraits had appeared in a public setting. The reason they caused such a stir was that the common conception of art was, to borrow from Danto once more, ‘of something spiritually rich that belonged in gold frames and that hung on museum walls, or in the mansions of the wealthy’.⁵⁸ Admittedly, the sort of people who continued to cleave to such a conventional view probably hadn’t seen Oldenburg’s ‘Store’ installation of the previous year. But Warhol clearly had.

This brings to mind something mentioned earlier. I am thinking here of Oldenburg’s notion of the ‘living’ or ‘charged’ object. Walter Benjamin famously suggests in the late 1930s that our understanding of artistic authenticity, of the unique aura appended to works of art, undergoes a profound transformation in what he designates as the era of technological reproducibility. Benjamin reminds us of the fact that, in theory at least, ‘the work of art has always has always been reproducible. Objects made by humans could always be copied by humans. Replicas were made by pupils in practising for their craft, by masters in disseminating their works, and, finally, by third parties in pursuit of profit’.⁵⁹ Yet these sorts of artistic practices were, for Benjamin, of a rather intermittent historical nature. Things don’t really change, in Benjamin’s analysis, until the emergence in the nineteenth century of technology-based art forms such as photography and cinema. With the advent of these filmic technologies, the very notion of auratic, handcrafted art is called into question. ‘For the first time’, Benjamin writes, ‘photography freed the hand from the most important artistic tasks in the process of pictorial reproduction – tasks that now devolved solely upon the eye looking into a lens. And since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was enormously accelerated, so that it could now keep pace with speech.’⁶⁰ As is well known, such processes of reproduction had a number of profound implications for the notion of artistic authenticity, which had up until this point been bound to concepts of uniqueness and permanence (and which might also be said to resonate when considered alongside the previously discussed hypothesis of the modernist imprimatur). From Benjamin’s perspective, ‘what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura’.⁶¹ But this is not all. The significance of this process of acceleration, in Benjamin’s eyes, ‘extends far beyond the realm of art. It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition’.⁶² Benjamin in this sense adds a crucial layer of critical nuance to our understanding of tradition, which, in turn, leads him back to questions of an aesthetic and historical persuasion. ‘Originally’, Benjamin posits ‘the embeddedness of an artwork in the context of tradition found expression in a cult. As we know that the earliest art works originated in the service of rituals – first magical, then religious kind. In other words: the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the source of its original use value.’⁶³

Benjamin’s groundbreaking account of the fate of auratic art in the era of technological reproducibility provides us with a useful theoretical means with which we might begin to approach some of the unresolved – and potentially unresolvable – ambiguities arising from the talk of ‘living’ and ‘charged’ objects contained in Oldenburg’s account of ‘The Store’ project. Like Benjamin, Oldenburg grasps the fact that a radical shift has occurred in the realm of artistic production. This is why Oldenburg has seemingly so little time for conventional approaches to and interpretations of art. Lest we forget, these are the sorts of things that one needs, in Oldenburg’s reckoning, ‘to get rid of’. Oldenburg also seeks to break away from traditionalist conceptions of artistic authenticity. He has precious little in the way of time for what he perceives as outmoded models of auratic production. ‘An “artistic” appearance or content is derived from the object’s reference’, Oldenburg insists, ‘not from the object itself or me.’⁶⁴ To put this in slightly different words, the value (if it can indeed be called that) of an artistic object or ‘thing’ is not, in Oldenburg’s final account, dependent on an antiquated idea of creative handicraft. Instead, an external frame of ‘reference’ determines the worth of an object. That is, the worth of an (art) object is determined solely by its relative position within a larger system of economic exchange that has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of intrinsic value that might have once affixed to the thing itself. Warhol perhaps puts it best: ‘Pop comes from the outside.’⁶⁵

Warhol’s well-documented interest in all things ‘outside’ has long fascinated literary critics, none more so than Fredric Jameson. We see this in Jameson’s diagrammatic account of the cultural logic of late capitalism. Jameson famously contrasts Van Gogh’s Pair of Boots (1887) and Warhol’s silk-screened Diamond Dust Shoes (1980) when discussing certain formal differences between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, and from these two artworks he unfolds the entirety of a historical absolute. He reasons that perhaps the ‘most evident’ characteristic of art produced in the latter period is ‘the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we will have occasion to return in a number of other contexts’.⁶⁶ For Jameson, the superficially flat, depthless, and mirror-like qualities of Warhol’s artworks epitomize the postmodern drift of cultural production in the second-half of the twentieth century. He asserts forcefully that Warholian Pop is concerned with the surface of things and nothing more. This typically postmodern focus on surface detail can also be opposed to, say, epistemological and hermeneutic ‘depth’ models associated with earlier modes of modernism. In Jameson’s bravura reading, artists such as Warhol are implicated in a wider project ‘of criticizing and discrediting this very hermeneutic model of the inside and outside and of stigmatizing such models as ideological and metaphysical’.⁶⁷ This makes a great deal of sense, especially when read in relation to what we have already established about Warhol’s self-professed fascination with externality. ‘Indeed’, Jameson posits, ‘there is a kind of return of the repressed in Diamond Dust Shoes, a strange, compensatory, decorative exhilaration, explicitly designated by the title itself, which is, of course, the glitter of gold dust, the spangling of gilt sand that seals the surface of the painting and yet continues to glint at us.’⁶⁸ I am particularly curious about the application of ‘the spangling of gilt sand’ that, according to Jameson, ‘continues to glint at us’. In a slightly roundabout fashion, Jameson is referring to the physical act of conferral with which Warhol, so to speak, seals the artistic deal when it comes to the subject of his Diamond Dust Shoes. The glinting ‘gilt sand’ that sparkles as if magically on the surface of this particular silk-screened canvas could only have been applied by hand – after the production of the print itself. How are we to interpret such an act of conferral? What we have here is, surely, a redoubling of sorts. Bound as his aesthetic was to the reference-establishing logic of the commodity-driven art market, it makes perfect sense that Warhol would choose to coat his canvas with the dust of this most precious of metals. Jameson knows this, of course. There is, however, another way to interpret Warhol’s curiously loaded gesture of value conferral. People tend to forget that Warhol was a devout, practising Ruthenian Rite Catholic. Keeping this in mind, if we now look more closely at the painting the sense we get is that Warhol just might be archly – if parodically – highlighting the role that quasi-auratic ritualism can continue to play in the otherwise absolutely commodified realm of technological reproducibility. It is possible that this is an approximation of a quasi-religious process of aesthetic transubstantiation.⁶⁹ Determined as Jameson is to pigeonhole Warhol as the affectless postmodern artist par excellence, this otherwise most mobile of critical thinkers simply cannot allow for the very real possibility that the good Catholic boy he is taking to task is in fact attempting to smuggle the remnants of auratic depth in through the back door of the late capitalist store.

All of which is to say: things aren’t quite as simple as they might seem when it comes to distinguishing between high modern and postmodern models of cultural production. Charles Henri Ford was quick to grasp such complexity when it came to this specific queer kindred spirit, this glitter-crowned prince of postmodern Pop. Warhol was, in Ford’s somewhat more measured estimation, ‘another manifestation of the surrealists, and very close to Duchamp who was definitely a surrealist after being a dadaist’.⁷⁰ Regardless of whether we choose to agree wholeheartedly with such a statement, it isn’t all that difficult to appreciate why Ford might want to forge this particular conceptual link. Having spent the best part of a decade stuck on the cultural sidelines listening to nothing but news about the advances of American abstractionists who, generally speaking, sought to distance themselves from surrealistically inflected aesthetic practices Ford held dear, our man from Mississippi was especially receptive to the work of ambitious young artists who had clearly no trouble acknowledging the worth of such things.⁷¹ Further to this, Ford would have been absolutely delighted to discover that, in the words of Cécile Whiting,

Warhol’s persona challenged the artistic identity of a previous generation of Abstract Expressionists, who presented themselves as profoundly tortured, solitary, and private individuals. The negation of the private, individual self in both Warhol’s portraits and his own public persona not only subverted assumptions cherished in the 1950s about the self, but also, paradoxically, served as one means through which a new generation of consumers defined its identity in the swinging sixties.⁷²

Our first point of interest here pertains not to Warhol, but rather to a certain number of the things we have already established about our man Ford. Do we not hear the faintest echo of Ford’s circular approach to the question of poetics in this particular account of Warhol’s creative identity, of the attempted ‘negation of the private, individual self’ to be found in his work? We would, at the very least, do well to consider the possibility. If nothing else, it might be offered up as a potential reason as to why Ford responded so positively to Warhol’s work. In any case, the second point of interest contained in this passage speaks more directly to Warhol. Specifically, it speaks to the issue of Warhol’s public persona. In the minds of many, Warhol’s artistic persona was linked to the New York-based studio space that became better known as the Factory.⁷³ Famously permissive, the ‘piss-glamorous’ social scene associated with the Factory became an emblem for much of that which deviated from the societal norm during the 1960s.⁷⁴ It is, however, important to note that entry into the communal fringe space of the Factory came for something of a price for the young, the beautiful, and the lost. ‘At the center of it all was Warhol’, Danto writes, ‘himself anything but beautiful, whose personality was that of a workaholic, producing art, setting the direction, and using the misfits that found their way to the Factory as sources of inspiration in exchange for being allowed to watch them do what they wanted to do.’⁷⁵ Entry into the permissive world of the Factory could thus only be gained by submitting to the force of Warhol’s passive – yet equally provocative – personality.⁷⁶

Danto also gets it right when he writes of Warhol’s ability to set the ‘direction’ of activity undertaken in the Factory. Stephen Koch makes a similar point when discussing the manner in which Warhol proved unerringly capable of creating ‘a kind of space around himself, the way an object creates a space around itself, and, within that space, his every action seemed in some obscure way to signify’.⁷⁷ Juan A. Suárez concurs with Koch on this subject. In his critical reckoning, Warhol’s ‘was a universe saturated with meaning and without gaps, residue, or gratuitousness: everything Warhol did had a place in the orbits of media circulation and market exchange, where it acquired its value, its meaning. This frenzy of signification, which allowed for no loss, turned Warhol into a near magical decoder or bestower of meaning’.⁷⁸ There are, I think, two very different things worth emphasizing here. For one, this account of Warhol’s unique and enviable status as a ‘bestower of meaning’ resonates when considered in relation to our discussion of Diamond Dust Shoes.⁷⁹ For another, it helps us better understand just what it was about Warhol as an artist that so impressed Ford. To begin, I want in particular to suggest that Ford appreciated the manner in which this arch bestower of signification had succeeded in creating a networked space – the physical fringe space of the Factory – capable of fostering the conditions in which collective and alternative non-normative sensibilities could circulate and flourish. In addition, I propose that Ford had a high opinion of the ease with which Warhol effortlessly managed both to expose and manipulate the conceptual mechanisms underpinning in the circulation of social and cultural capital, while simultaneously benefiting from the exposure afforded him by those same such systems of circulation and exchange. At the same time, however, I want also to suggest that Warhol’s seemingly instantaneous success in the cultural field provoked what can only be described as an envious emotional reaction in Ford.

That is to say, Ford, who had always wanted to be famous, was in some senses acutely jealous of Warhol. This comes to the fore in an interview John Wilcock conducted with Ford in 1971. In this interview, which was published in The Autography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, Ford acknowledges his friend’s ‘flair for picking out things that are bound to congeal in the future. Andy is a combination of flair, luck and publicity. Without one of those elements he wouldn’t exist’.⁸⁰ Elsewhere in the same interview, Ford praises Warhol’s aesthetic receptiveness. He puts it to Wilcock like this: ‘Andy has always been a receiving station of one form or another.’⁸¹ But notice how Ford becomes noticeably cagier when the topic of Warhol’s influence is broached: ‘His influence hasn’t been that great. He takes influences much more than he influences.’⁸² It seems as if something has riled Ford. When read alongside some of the observations he subsequently proffered to Allen Frame, it certainly seems like Ford’s early love for all things Warholian and Pop was by no means unconditional:

I remember sitting at one of Andy’s gatherings one day, and I wasn’t that amused by all these people coming in so I said to Gregory Markopoulos, ‘Do you think all these people are amusing?’ and he said, ‘Yes!’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m not amused.’ On amphetamines and talking like open faucets. Ondine non-stop. I was not turned on. Gerard Malanga said, ‘Go with the flow.’ Well, he went with the flow, but I just looked at it. I already had my seaside mansion and the flow went by.⁸³

These remarks are, among other things, wryly amusing, patronizing, and revealing. They are also unintentionally ironic, coming as they do from a man who celebrated logorrheic chatter in Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms and bohemian excess in The Young and Evil. Ford’s frank admission that he ‘was not turned on’ by the ‘flow’ of the Factory is especially revealing. Coming from a forward-thinking figure who was always, in the words of Lynne Tillman, ‘insistent on what was new and what was happening’,⁸⁴ these comments are remarkable. They also appear to be perfectly clear. I want, however, to suggest that these comments need to be taken with more than a mere pinch of salt. As we will now see, Ford was in fact ‘turned on’ by Pop to such a degree that his responses to the emergent aesthetic movement took on a decidedly Warholian sheen.

5

Upon returning to the United States in 1962, Charles Henri Ford strove to resituate himself in the cultural fabric of American aesthetic life. Ford also wanted to announce his presence and assert some degree of individual aesthetic authority in contemporary cultural circles. His first major undertaking of the decade was an exhibition held in 1965 at the New York-based Cordier Ekstrom Gallery. Ford evidently thought highly of the work he produced for this exhibition. He made that much clear to the art gallery owner Parmenia Ekstrom on 10 February 1965. ‘I worked for over a year on the creation of these poster poems’, Ford insists, ‘and they should climax many years of thought and creativity.’⁸⁵ The ‘poster poem’ project was informed in equal measure by the Mississippian’s interest in the infinite possibilities afforded by the written word and the mechanical processes of photographic reproduction. Ford would begin by selecting a photograph of a ‘public or private’ personality or celebrity, such as W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, or Jayne Mansfield.⁸⁶ Ford would then carefully fashion poems out of blocks of written text culled from newspapers and magazines. These poster – or ‘paste-up’ – poems would then be positioned on the surface of the photographic print, which would in turn be subjected to a silk-screening process.⁸⁷ The resultant poster-poems – or ‘Fordographs’ – were brash, bold, brightly coloured, and above all else, delightfully lewd. In the words of their creator, the poster-poems sought to proffer a ribald and irreverent ‘Guide to the Grandeur of Vice’.⁸⁸ We need only glance at the textual component of ‘Ginsberg Behind the Scenes’ to get a clear sense of this:

All power to the unexpected

Although Young Drunk Demons never sleep in a Telephone

it’s vital for Everyman to get a jolt

AMERICA Meet one of the world’s GIANT ‘QUEENS’⁸⁹

Ford aims in these lines to gain – or ‘jolt’ – the attention of an unsuspecting and complacent American populous. We might well say that, much as he did in the pages of The Young of Evil, Ford seeks with this particular poster-poem to foreground notions of queerness. This is something, as we will soon see, that comes to the fore in the other of Ford’s major projects of the 1960s.

Before we get to these ventures, however, it behoves us to say a little bit more about the form of the poster-poems. Maria Fusco argues that the Fordographs should ‘be understood to be as much about the communication of information as about the information they communicate. Their scrappy surfaces appear perforated rather than consolidated by glued-on letters and words cut out from newspapers and magazines, in the style of presentation that is usually reserved for death threats and poison pen letters’.⁹⁰ Building on Fusco’s lead, I want to emphasize the manner in which these luminescent posters ‘transport us as viewers/readers into the spreading power, the speed of turnover, [and] the divine dissolution of the cut-up technique, demonstrating that significance and beauty can be excised from even the most workaday printed matters’.⁹¹ To be sure, the Fordographs – awash as they are in the popular imagery and indebted to the countercultural parlance of the 1960s – were very much products of the Warholian Age. Indeed, the art critic Roberta Smith has gone as far as to suggest that Ford was most likely directly ‘operating under the influence of Andy Warhol’ when it came to this project, which she characterizes as a ‘particularly visual and outrageous form of concrete poetry’.⁹² Parker Tyler makes a similar, if somewhat more specific point in an unpublished manuscript most likely written at Ford’s prompting. Tyler’s ‘Charles Henri Ford: From Poet to Graphipoet’ heralded the arrival of his friend’s first book-length edition of poster-poems, Spare Parts (1966).⁹³ ‘Around richly haunting, often haunted, photographic images (sometimes taken by his own camera)’, Tyler reasons,

Ford has evoked the old magic of a poetry that was fresh with him and native to him. Obviously linked to the colloquialism of Cummings, he was more interested in preserving the chosen phrase almost unconverted, stark, in a naked sort of birth. Ford was writing pop-ballad poems when Allen Ginsberg – or, for that matter, Andy Warhol – was wondering what in the world to do with life and Bob Dylan was not yet.⁹⁴

Notice how, on the one hand, Tyler moves in this passage to position Ford in relation to major post-war creative figures such as Dylan, Ginsberg, and Warhol. On the other, consider the manner in which Tyler specifically equates Ford’s desire to preserve ‘the chosen phrase almost unconverted’ with a canonical pre-war poetic favourite, Cummings. At the risk of sounding a touch reductive, what we have here is a useful account of the way in which Ford’s output of the 1960s sits astride the historical divide between two ostensibly antithetical modes of cultural production, stretching between the modern and the postmodern.

By the same token, Tyler also makes it clear that he is of the opinion that Ford does not blindly subscribe to the precepts of Pop. Couching his argument in terminology that will strike a chord with readers of Peter Bürger’s seminal Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974),⁹⁵ Tyler insists that Ford’s ‘graphipoems are too refined to be more than clubbed roughly, by commentators, with the current fanciness of neo-Dada’.⁹⁶ In this respect, we need to be careful when attempting to situate Ford’s poster-poem project in relation to similar works created around the same time, be they works created by artists associated with Neo-Dada such as Jasper Johns, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg – or pieces produced by post-war Pop artists and members of the Beat Generation. In Tyler’s estimation,

Ford does not, like Kenneth Patchen, write a poem and illustrate or decorate it (or vice versa); nor, like Apollinaire and other poets of vers-figures, does he put his words in imitative shapes. The pasted-up, then imprinted, lines are plastic elements plastically fused with the dominant optical image of the photograph. More or less overall textures (sometimes an actual wallpaper pattern) are superimposed to knit together functionally, like brushstrokes, the scattered register of the verbal poem and the dense register of the optical poem: the original photographic element.⁹⁷

‘By combining and recombining colors, literary images and optical images in a total visual ensemble’, Tyler continues, ‘Ford has arrived at an art to read, a poem to look at; whether the graphipoem is simply to be looked at, or also read, there is no violation of a wholly unified art.’⁹⁸ In the end, then, it is up to the viewer/reader to decide how best to approach any given Fordograph. ‘Still’, Tyler adds, ‘the point is that if the graphipoem is left unread, one has arbitrarily discarded the main cachet.’⁹⁹ One needs to, in Tyler’s reckoning, ‘shift from image to text and back to verify the frisson to be gained from the basic style of Ford’s counterpoint’.¹⁰⁰

Tyler’s point needs to be borne in mind at all times when approaching Spare Parts. Karen L. Rood asserts that the first published edition of Ford’s poster-poems ‘was largely ignored by mainstream reviews. No one seemed sure what it was’.¹⁰¹ But it turns out that wasn’t entirely true. Consider Allen Ginsberg’s contemporaneous account of Spare Parts. In a passage worth quoting at some length, this most prominent of countercultural icon describes

diction so common it’s cut out of mass print, then shuffled on the table and recomposed according to Ford’s private significances. Spare Parts is genitals. Awareness of the implicit bias and camp of marketplace yatter emerges after decades of unconscious commerce. What’s further odd is the surreal charm of the phrasal juxtapositions; eccentric orthography of multitudinous type-fonts accentuates the charm: Ford is a practiced old connoisseur of XX Century ready-made speech. Everything from rosejoint to King Lear’s unforgettable cry.¹⁰²

Invoking as it does the ‘ready-made speech’ act and the apparently campy ‘yatter’ of the stock-market floor, the depersonalized global system of industrial ‘commerce’ and the ‘practiced’ art of connoisseurship, the ‘phrasal’ pleasure afforded by the incongruous ‘surreal charm’ and the ‘unforgettable cry’ that rends the air in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, there is certainly much that might be said about Ginsberg’s account of the interplay between the surreal, the commercial, and the sexual in the pages of Spare Parts. Perhaps he had the following passage from ‘Comic Strip’ in mind when it came time to gather his thoughts about Ford’s first printed collection of paste-up poems:

Find Adventure

Get rid of your CHERRY without cutting off light

IF YOU HAVE AN INSTINCT FOR QUALITY … CORNING*WARE®

Brightens a FUCK

A useful feat is to let go WITH DRIVE!¹⁰³

Printed on the left-hand side of the page, this passage, yoking together as it does sexual innuendo and a reference to popular brand of thermal shock resistant glass-ceramic kitchenware, is in keeping with the largely exuberant tonal quality on display in the rest of Spare Parts. But there is slightly more to the matter than this. There is, in the top right-hand corner of the opposite page, an image of a hand clutching what looks suspiciously like a can of Campbell’s soup. However, where one would logically expect to find the iconic Campbell logo, one discovers instead a serving of ‘EXTRA unconscious’ – and a fairly generous helping at that.

Be that as it may, I want first to hone in on the particular manner in which these diverse materials are, in Ginsberg’s formulation, ‘shuffled on the table and recomposed according to Ford’s private significances’. In one sense, the stress that Ginsberg places on the notion of ‘private’ significance chimes with what we previously established about Ford’s penchant for personality-driven poetics. In another sense, this emphasis on the private and the personal chimes with the aesthetic stance championed by another post-war artist involved in the creation of Spare Parts: Stan Brakhage. This prominent independent filmmaker designed the cover of Spare Parts. Given Brakhage’s lifelong interest in modernism, it is not at all difficult to deduce why he would have agreed to undertake such work in the first place.¹⁰⁴ It is just as easy to see why the old Surrealist in Ford would have felt an affinity with this arch-romantic, self-proclaimed mystic,¹⁰⁵ and firm believer in ‘the need to get something internal exteriorized’.¹⁰⁶ Brakhage’s privileging of inner truth aligns him with the ‘depth models’ that Jameson associates with modernist cultural production. It also placed him at odds with Warhol, the man in question in Jameson’s aforementioned account of the logic of postmodern cultural production. In David E. James’s estimation, ‘the careers of Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol are the prototypical instances of the two opposite routes taken by the avant-garde in the 1960s’.¹⁰⁷ James argues that Brakhage’s ‘entirely personal cinema … developed into the most ecstatic alternative to industrial narrative film style’.¹⁰⁸ In complete contrast, Warhol quickly rejected the implications of the personal style of film-making privileged by Brakhage. ‘After directing a series of remarkable films critically interrogating the mass media’, James reminds us, Warhol ‘became a producer of feature films and eventually merchandised his celebrity as a brand name for productions conceived and directed by other people.’¹⁰⁹ Suffice to say, Brakhage didn’t think all that much of Warhol’s approach to film-making. In the words of Annette Michelson, ‘Brakhage saw in Warhol’s work an elimination of subjectivity. Brakhage had insisted on a pre-eminence of subjectivity that required a radical assault upon the space of representation, upon the radical separation of signifier and signified.’¹¹⁰

Knowledgeable as he was about the American independent film scene of the 1960s, Ford would have been well aware of the conflicting aesthetic opinions and divergent career trajectories of both Brakhage and Warhol. Why, then, would he choose to adorn his first volume of overtly Pop-inflected paste-up poems and repetitive patterns with a cover designed by an artist so staunchly opposed to the surface-bound visual pleasures propagated by Warhol? I want to suggest that Ford is striving here to establish new patterns of equivalence between what are two seemingly antithetical aesthetic approaches. Ford’s fondness for establishing points of aesthetic equivalence also carries over into the text of Spare Parts, replete as it with multiple references to postmodern ‘NEW/POP-TARTS’ and allusions to the sort of auratic ‘Magical Mystical Miracle’ more usually associated with modern cultural modes.¹¹¹ But we also find moments of quiet reflection in the midst of Ford’s texts of rapid-fire syntactical disjunction. These moments are important as they cast a self-reflexive light on Ford’s position in the contemporary cultural sphere. They also provide us with a better sense of Ford’s inquisitive attitude towards emergent aesthetic trends. We see this in the text that I take to be the focal point of Spare Parts. The tellingly entitled ‘Poems wanted NOW’ functions as a forum in which Ford debates the cultural significance of Warhol:

Red the brain

PRINCE OF Self-Homage among

the police

began with The aesthetics of MATTA

al THE HINGE Gets a Lift from

THE TASTE OF JUST-PICKED Japanese generators.

How important is Andy?

Everybody’s Taken ‘in’

What’s the wrong reason

NO

ONE

EVER

NOTICES

groggy butterflies beneath the snow.¹¹²

Ford comes across as conflicted in this particularly disjunctive and ambiguous text. Consider the line suggesting that ‘Everybody’s Taken “in”’ by Warhol. On the one hand, this remark might be said to refer back to our earlier discussion of the broadly welcoming environment fostered in the physical fringe space more commonly known as the Factory. Read in such a way, Ford’s assertion can be interpreted as a tribute to Warhol’s commitment to the cultivation of an inclusive, non-normative sense of collectivism. On the other hand, Ford might be said to be expressing doubts about Warhol’s apparently ubiquitous position in the contemporary cultural sphere, doing so via those ironizing scare quotes. That is to say, when read in a certain way, Ford seems in this poem to be casting aspersions on his young friend’s ability to pull the wool over the eyes of an unsuspecting aesthetic public.

But, in the end, Ford is far more interested in situating Warhol in relation to what can be described as a pre-existing nexus of avant-garde production. What we have in ‘Poems wanted NOW’ is an example of Ford’s desire to play conceptual cupid. This is where Tyler’s account of the ‘frisson’ generated by ‘counterpoint’ in Ford’s ‘total’ verbal and visual ‘ensemble’ moves to the fore. The charge produced in ‘Poems wanted NOW’ has much to do with establishing potential patterns of aesthetic association between distinctive modern and postmodern practitioners. The first indication of this comes with the mention of ‘The aesthetics of MATTA’ contained in the fourth line of the poem. Ford is, of course, referring here to the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta.¹¹³ This needs to be kept in mind as we turn our attention to the visual component of the poem. The composite image upon which the text of ‘Poems wanted NOW’ has been affixed gestures to the work of two of Matta’s avant-garde peers. On the left-hand side of the page, partially obscured by a silhouette of two indeterminate figures, we can see a photographic reproduction of a fingernail attached to a human toe. Directly across from this image, on the right-hand side, we find another photograph: this time of what appears to be a porcelain basin, or perhaps a ceramic washbowl. Looking at these two photographs, one cannot help but be struck by the pronounced similarities between Ford’s chosen images and ones that have long been associated with Georges Bataille and Marcel Duchamp. The left-hand image is an incontrovertible echo of the sort of ‘prehensile toe’ often displayed in the pages of Documents (1929–30). In the image on the right, there is an undeniable allusion to Duchamp’s notorious urinal. Orchestrating what might be described as an avant-garde ménage-a-trois, Ford, in a roundabout fashion, demonstrates his flair as matchmaker, as the party planner extraordinaire. In this integrated image-text, Duchampian conceptuality thus mingles with the visceral base materialism of Bataille; in turn Bataille (the renegade Surrealist) sidles up to Matta (the Breton-approved, orthodox Surrealist).¹¹⁴ Completing the triangle, Duchamp’s anti-retinal aesthetic practice is forced into conversation with the painterly, retinal imagery privileged by Matta. Having thus forged an alliance between these uneasy bedfellows, our sociable host goes on to introduce his Duchamp-inspired friend – the budding conceptual artist he regarded as ‘another manifestation of the surrealists’ – into the aesthetic mix. In so doing, Ford gently reminds us of his firmly held belief that that there is a clear point of aesthetic continuity linking these seemingly disparate figures, a shared avant-garde heritage that some might fail to grasp, or choose to overlook – obscured as they are under a thick layer of frosted water vapour.

That being said, it occasionally seems as if Ford isn’t entirely sure what to make of all this – of existing in a cultural realm where, as he puts it elsewhere in the volume, ‘Enchantment’ is now most definitely up ‘for sale’.¹¹⁵ He is clearly aware of the fact that ‘word power!’ has become inextricably linked to the global circulation of capital and systems of economic exchange where, in his formulation, ‘partners depend on a bad case/Of top performance and the international rates are so reasonable, too’.¹¹⁶ Further to this, as the very title of his collection of ‘poster-poems’ suggests, Ford is acutely aware of the fact that he is himself implicated in the workings of a cultural and historical realm defined by industrial and international processes of technological reproducibility. This comes to the fore nowhere more prominently than in the manner that Ford quite deliberately and dramatically toys with notions of authorial self-presentation in Spare Parts. Many decades before, fed up with people asking him if he was in fact related to his industrialist namesake Henry Ford, Charles changed the spelling of his middle name from Henry to Henri. Knowing this, it comes as something of a surprise to find the famous Ford company logo prominently displayed on the cover-spine of Spare Parts. All the more, given that it occupies the very space where we would expect to find the author’s name. Why, then, would Ford now choose, after so many years, to align himself to this particular captain of American industry, why choose to foreground exactly that which he once tried to avoid? In short: this only half-ironic choice of moniker stands to amplify Ford’s conscious immersion in an industrialist milieu in which names and signatures can easily become, as he puts it in Spare Parts, ‘Rechargeable Emblems/LIKE/new Ford Pickups’.¹¹⁷ Ford is, in other words, foregrounding the fact that the imprimatur – the traditional guarantee of aesthetic uniqueness and sincerity – has become inextricably linked with the impersonal processes of mechanical reproduction in the age of Warhol.

However, despite demonstrating his acute awareness of the shifting conditions of aesthetic production, the fact remains that Ford’s position within the cultural sphere he so accurately describes remains open to debate. Hence those anxious lines in ‘Poems wanted NOW’ about frozen ‘butterflies’ going unnoticed. The sheer number of contradictory, self-referential remarks contained in Spare Parts attest to the fact that Ford was deeply preoccupied with the question of his poetic and aesthetic standing during the 1960s. Some of these self-referential remarks are self-aggrandizing and draw attention to ‘the/velvet authority of Ford’s competition-bred performance’.¹²⁰ Some try to convince both author and reader alike that ‘Ford’s miracle crew… Carries/More weight than MISSISSIPPI’.¹²¹ And some are defiant and faintly risqué:

‘FLIGHT COAT’ fun now pulsing

AMERICA’S hidden chain

what is best for my Fourth Necessity

your life

Charles HOLD YOUR HEART STICK JUST

ENOUGH¹²²

It almost seems as if Ford is imploring himself to stay the course in this passage, as if he is trying to convince himself that his uncredited role in ‘AMERICA’S hidden chain’ (or assembly line) of avant-garde cultural production will one day be properly acknowledged. Surrounded as he was by a number of seemingly receptive queer kindred avant-garde spirits, Ford may well have thought that his time had finally arrived. Yet there are also a number of moments in Spare Parts where Ford’s confidence and self-referential bravado appears to fall away. A more honest assessment of Ford’s ‘velvet authority’ can be said to emerge during such moments:

TRUE TRADE roves

…then when we sail no place

our changing GOVERNOR

finds himself

outgrown.¹²³

Outgrown? Possibly. Unnoticed? Arguably. Something of a spare part? Just maybe. In any case, unsure of and aggrieved at his position on the cultural margins, this roving ‘GOVERNER’s’ attitude towards all that surrounds him now becomes somewhat more ambivalent: this is something that really comes to the fore in his second book-length edition of Fordographs.

We might, however, be forgiven for thinking otherwise – at least initially. Even more so than Spare Parts, Silver Flower Coo appears in many ways absolutely indebted to the models of Pop promulgated in New York City throughout the second half of the 1960s. Consider the title of the collection. Silver Flower Coo alludes to two of the major projects that Warhol undertook during the decade currently in question. I have in mind here his silk-screened Flowers (1964) and inflatable Silver Clouds (1966). And it goes almost without saying, of course, that the title Ford lighted on for this collection conjures up mental images of the various tin foils and silver strips with which Warhol decorated the first Factory. Indeed, featuring as it does a black and white cover photo taken by the Pop-affiliate Peter Fink at the Union Square Factory on 7 March 1968, a case suggesting that Silver Flower Coo need itself be thought of as a product of the Warholian production line doesn’t seem entirely out of the question.¹²⁴ For one thing, the silvery sheen of the collection’s cover brings to mind the sort of glacial coolness one tends to associate with Warhol. This is unquestionably the sense we get when we turn our attention to the contents of Silver Flower Coo. In marked contrast to the colourful vibrancy of its immediate predecessor, the paste-up poems of this volume are all in basic black and white. They are also largely image-free. The collection in this respect appears almost minimalistic when compared to the earlier Spare Parts. In equal measure, however, despite cosmetic differences such as this, it is clear that Ford conceived of Silver Flower Coo as the companion piece to Spare Parts. He emphasizes this in a letter he sent to Tyler on 2 September 1966: ‘I believe my book looks, and is, unbelievable. I’ve more than halfway thru poem paste-ups for a 160-page sequel – but I may not incorporate images or color – Poems in Black & White was my first working title, now I’ve switched to OBSESSION AVENUE. (Like?).’¹²⁵

While there is no record of what Tyler made of the working titles that Ford mentions in his letter, it is clear that some of the topics that preoccupied his friend in 1966 continued to do so, obsessively some might say, in 1968. For instance, the fifth Coo – ‘C H SPEAKS UP’ – opens with the following acknowledgement:

The new artists

for the new era

are now appearing Balanced 6 times longer¹²⁶

Ford goes on to clarify elsewhere in the volume that these ‘new artists’ are ones whose aesthetic sensibilities are geared towards all things Pop:

Up with Pop poetry, THE GAME

ChangesWHEN

mass delivery Brings on A

DREAMtreat it MEANS ‘THE IMAGE’ rolls with holes.¹²⁷

Ford clearly recognizes the ‘GAME’ changing cultural and aesthetic impact of Pop. As in Spare Parts, Ford strives in Silver Flower Coo to remind the reader of the changes in modes of aesthetic production brought about by an aesthetic that is structured around ideas of ‘mass delivery’ and potentially endless means of reproducibility. Given all this, it comes as no surprise to find that Warhol is at the forefront of Ford’s mind in Silver Flower Coo:

Complexity blooms are no longer a

GambleWHAT WENT WRONG

Even a Jet-Set child WITH brush-on Burp

HAS a lot of tacky loot A

Grocery bill DYED BLACK Monroe’s americana

Rock AND rage in the UTTER

But how

can you get A playground For

yourself OnlyWe don’t know Either.¹²⁸

I think it is safe to say that Warhol – the producer of all those instantly recognizable, ‘brushed-on’ silkscreens – is the unnamed subject of these lines.¹²⁹ Warhol had achieved iconic status by the time Ford published Silver Flower Coo. He was – as Ford suggests – a fully fledged member of the international art world. Consider, however, the wider context of Ford’s acknowledgement of Warhol’s ensconced position at the head of contemporary aesthetic affairs. He seems to be suggesting that something has gone ‘WRONG’ if a jet-setting ‘child’ like Warhol can perform such dazzling aesthetic feats. In marked contrast to the entirely positive appraisal of all things ‘Andy’ that we encountered in the central poem of Spare Parts, Ford now appears to be on the verge of denouncing the Pop master as a complexity-free, ‘loot’-accumulating aesthetic trickster. Significantly, the emphasis that Ford places on Warhol’s acquired ‘loot’ stands in contrast to the evaluation of his own hoardings of cultural stock. In the forty-ninth Coo – ‘Enrichment for Sale’ – he declares:

Yes, Christ Gave Us BUILT-IN eek

and the sons of night Get more

thanks to the SADISTIC French

I SAW The Face of STEIN

It’s real.¹³⁰

This is a significant moment within Silver Flower Coo as it draws attention to an aspect of Ford’s writing that may easily be overlooked amid all the syntactical disjunction on display. Whereas in his previous collection of poster-poems Ford moved to situate Warhol in relation to earlier cultural producers such as Duchamp, he now seeks to position himself in relation to long-gone modernist writers like Gertrude Stein. Something similar occurs at the end of Ford’s forty-first Coo:

if you were born in 1933…

Cummings’ always-summer field of gold

WILL NEVER LOSE ITS RIPPLE.¹³¹

How best to account for the nostalgic, rosy-tinted hue through which Ford has inexplicably, it seems, begun to view the world? We have, in a certain fashion, come full circle. Recall here our discussion of Ford’s interview with the photographer Allen Frame. Recall, specifically, the strangely defensive comments that Ford made about the time he spent on the set of Marcel Carne’s Terrain Vague. We had cause at that juncture to suggest that Ford was trying in some fashion to deflect attention away from his famous friend. We also suggested that Ford did this in order to shore up his own sense of achievement. I want now to suggest that slightly more attention need be paid to the manner in which Ford has to cast his mind back into the past in order to be able to do this.

There is, in one sense, nothing unusual about such a gesture. Ford was, after all, an old man when he sat down with Frame in 1997.¹³² There is, however, something slightly unusual about the sentimental tone that, for the first time, begins to creep into poetry that Ford was producing at the end of the 1960s. We are talking, after all, about a resolutely forward-thinking man who was, at the start of the decade, demanding that his close friend keep him in the loop about potential developments in cutting-edge contemporary culture. We are, to take another example, talking here of a man who was perfectly willing to stand up for what he believed in when it came to the issue of contemporary aesthetics. This is something that we see in a long-running exchange he conducted with Tyler through the latter half of 1964 and the first few months of 1965. On 13 August 1964, Tyler told Ford: ‘Your allegiance to Pop, of course, irritates me since I would regard anything so undiscriminating as your tone a great weakness in anyone.’¹³³ Ford appears on this occasion, somewhat uncharacteristically, to have been willing to bite his tongue. Perhaps this is why Tyler continued to goad him. ‘Ah’, Tyler wrote on 3 December, ‘what is worse than the wrong sort of “divinity”? Page it in Pop Art: it’ll answer with the tongues of a thousand dumbdoras. As if I hadn’t defined the heart and the limits of dumbdora sublimity as long ago as the H[ollywood] H[allucination], that constantly cited classic… . Who wants the comicstrip blueandpinkprints? Flabby art-poshes.’¹³⁴ This time, Ford did take the bait. ‘Honey’, he replied, ‘you can’t put down Pop Art – don’t keep trying – it’s like trying to put down a WHOLE EPOCH (I already told you, man). Everybody doesn’t HAVE to be HIP, of course – nobody’s FORCING you xxx.’¹³⁵ Having thus warmed to his task, Ford delivered the final word on the matter on 6 February 1965: ‘I saw the value of Pop Art in 1962; people who were sticking up their noses then are some of them the same people who’re sticking their noses in now.’¹³⁶

How best then to account for the profound changes that seem to have occurred in Ford’s thinking in the relatively short span of time stretching between 1965 and 1968? Appropriately enough, the answer, which has everything to do with the notion of Ford’s understanding of his position in contemporary artistic circles, is contained in Silver Flower Coo:

A prescription KISS IS ENOUGH

Dawn still has a future It’s More Brilliant

Than a [sic]

accidentkeep in touch.¹³⁷

How best to read these formally and syntactically disjunctive lines? To begin with, we might say a few words about the manner in which this passage appears to find its creator trying his hardest to ‘keep in touch’ with all of the cultural developments unfurling around him. Indeed, this desire to ‘keep in touch’ is of particular significance: it effectively confirms that for Ford it is all there is left for him to do in Silver Flower Coo. This is because even before the publication of that volume, Ford’s close friends and associates had begun to re-evaluate his aesthetic standing.¹³⁸ Gerard Malanga, for example, had already begun to refer to him as ‘Dear Charlie Pop Candy Pop’ in 1964.¹³⁹ Malanga’s term of endearment can be read in one of two ways. On the one hand, this kind of recognition defers to Ford’s desired position as an established older artist, and positions him as precursor and in direct relation to Pop. At the same time, the decidedly playful tone undercuts any sense of paternalistic authority and gravitas that may be attached to such a standing, emphasizing the gulf between Ford and his young interlocutor. We find something similar in the ambiguous poetic character-study of ‘Charlie Pop’ contained in Malanga and Warhol’s co-authored Screen Tests/A Diary (1967):

Genitals are flashing by and then colors.

In the next year summer will be

good to you with the young

friends beside you. The fact of

the matter is the dream that guides you into a life

time of sunlight over your head.

And relations get younger.

Rain has begun to fall and tears, also.

What are you thinking about?

They were lined

up at the boardwalk

and the sound of the sea

shore colliding with waves.

You do not withdraw from the tear

drop-out. What’s beyond

the horizon is not visible at high tide.¹⁴⁰

As well as reminding us of the colourful and visually vibrant aspect of the Fordographs, Malanga’s suggestion that ‘Genitals are flashing by and then colors’ foregrounds the role that sexuality plays in Ford’s prose and poetry. Malanga’s closing suggestion that ‘What’s beyond/the horizon is not visible at high tide’ is similarly significant as it adds to the impression that a tipping point – a sort of ‘high tide’ – has been reached in Ford’s career. Malanga seeks, on the one hand, to reassure his friend that there are many more summers to come. On the other, Malanga emphasizes the gulf between Ford and ‘the young/friends’ that he continues to gather around him. In this sense, then, while Malanga’s diary entry acts as a mark of respect, it also serves to situate an ageing Ford against an increasingly melancholic poetic backdrop in which artistic friends and ‘relations’ only ever seem to get ‘younger’.

Written two years later, ‘Malanga’s Life of Ford’ suggests that the gulf separating Charles Henri and his younger relations had continued to widen. Malanga debates Ford’s position in the annals of cultural history in this poem:

but whether his life merely circulated as a hot foot

note in the business

world of poetry i don’t know

for that he should go around

with the aura evolving about him

stories passed along as a hearing aid

whisper among strangers and friends

he is like the night of jupiter and lives in that fashion¹⁴¹

Malanga’s suggestively worded account of the ‘aura evolving around’ his friend and mentor is certainly well intentioned. Having said that, the connotations of physical decrepitude that come attached to a ‘hearing aid whisper’ are hardly likely to have assuaged any anxieties Ford might have had during this period about his standing in contemporary cultural circles. In moments such as this, dearest ‘Charlie Pop’ comes across less, as he most surely must have known, as a vital creative presence – or even a benevolent father figure – than he does a significantly diminished historical relic, a ‘groggy’ yet sociable butterfly, if you will, caught betwixt and between the frozen plates of the modern and the postmodern.

Notes

1 Gerard Malanga to Charles Henri Ford, 13 December 1963, series 2, box 14, folder 3, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

2 Ford introduced Malanga to Warhol in the fall of 1962. Malanga subsequently became Warhol’s silk-screening assistant.

3 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism (London: Penguin, 2010), 32.

4 Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 32.

5 Quoted in Allen Frame, ‘Charles Henri Ford’.

6 Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo Press, [1969] 1995), 24–5.

7 Tyler, Underground Film, 25.

8 Jim Hoberman, ‘Introduction’, in Underground Film: A Critical History, ed. Parker Tyler (New York: Da Capo Press, [1969] 1995), v.

9 Daniel Kane, We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2009), 9.

10 As well as having long-established links with the noted film critic Parker Tyler, Ford appeared in Jack Smith’s Underground Film, No President (1968). Ford also made his own experimental films: Poem Posters (1968) and Johnny Minotaur (1971).

11 Warhol was not the only prominent Pop artist who made a lasting impression on Ford. He was also impressed with and influenced by the work of James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg.

12 Tillman, ‘Cut up Life’, ix.

13 Ibid., xii.

14 In his diary, Tillman notes, ‘Ford is unself-conscious about his devotion to the cause of aesthetics and the examined life.’ Ibid.

15 Ford, Water from a Bucket, 117.

16 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 17 November 1951, container 8, folder 5, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

17 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 7 March 1952, container 8, folder 5, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

18 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 7 March 1952, HRC.

19 As mentioned previously, Ford tried his hand at a number of different artistic pursuits in the late 1940s and 1950s. For a number of years he conceived of himself as something of a playwright. (Ford also wrote the libretto for an opera entitled Denmark Vesey.) Before renouncing the craft in 1951, Ford wrote a number of plays, including ‘Alexander’, ‘Let’s Get Out of Here’, ‘The Labyrinth’, and ‘The Poet’ (which was based on a short story by Isak Dinesen). Copies of these plays can be found in Ford’s archive at the Harry Ransom Center. However, not all of Ford’s friends were particularly impressed with the results. Consider, for instance, Parker Tyler’s rather withering assessment of Ford’s turn to theatrical matters: ‘You’d much rather influence than be influenced. As for me, I am modest in wanting to communicate. As it happens, Lionel [Abel] (with whom I’ve renewed familiarity in a vague way) sides with you. He wants to influence. It seems to be typical of people who want to write plays. The basic theatrical drive is doubtless a form of personal exhibitionism: the actor is a proxy, the playwright is aware of a physical gaze. Oh, Narcissus, how various thy forms! In your case, the drive seems largely to be a reaction against your (self-estimated) failure to produce a considerable effect on the poetry-reading audience. You want the audience-reaction and you want it loud. Personally, I prefer Pound’s old esteem and Williams’ lone paean to Pulitzer Prizes, constant salvos from reviewers, and solicitations from publishers. I can’t deny my emotion when Margaret Marshall accepted my sonnet on Socrates for The Nation. But my normal irony rapidly adjusts such injuries done to the proper equilibrium.’ Parker Tyler to Charles Henri Ford [n.d.], series 1, box 4, folder 2, Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler Papers, NYPL Archives & Manuscripts, New York Public Library.

20 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 26 December 1952, container 8, folder 5, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

21 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 26 January 1953, container 8, folder 5, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

22 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 13 December 1952, container 8, folder 5, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

23 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 13 December 1952, HRC.

24 Ford, Water from a Bucket, 47.

25 Ford’s outburst does not occur in isolation, as an earlier journal entry of October 1948 confirms: ‘Ice-cream cones, hot dogs, soda pop in bottles – all of these are identified with America – and symbolic of what we like in sex too.’ Ibid., 13.

26 Ibid., 67.

27 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 13 September 1940, container 8, folder 4, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

28 Charles Henri Ford to Edith Sitwell, 5 November 1947, series 2, box, 14, folder 3, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

29 Consider Jean-Paul Sartre’s highly influential ‘What is Literature?’ (1947). Published originally as a six-part essay in the journal Les Temps modernes, Sartre’s text was highly critical of Surrealism. In Sartre’s estimation, André Breton and the Surrealists ‘lived in a comfortable and lavish period when despair was still a luxury. They condemned their country because they were still insolent with victory; they denounced war because the peace would be a long one. They were all victims of the disaster of 1940: the reason is that the moment for action had come and that none of them were armed for it. Some killed themselves, others are in exile; those who have returned are exiled among us. They were the proclaimers of catastrophe in the time of the fat cows; in the time of the lean cows they have nothing more to say’. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Classics, [1948, 1950] 2011), 152. A translation of Sartre’s ‘The Nationalization of Literature’ also appeared in the ‘Paris’ edition of View 7, nos. 2–3 (1946).

30 Jackson Pollock held his fourth solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s ‘Art of This Century’ in February 1947. Mark Rothko’s first one-man show opened at the Betty Parsons Gallery in March. Not long after this, in May, Robert Motherwell exhibited at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery. During the summer of 1947, Clyfford Still held a solo exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

31 Tyler’s stance when it came to the question of Abstract Expressionism was not nearly as clear-cut as his friend’s. In 1945 Tyler argued that Jackson Pollock’s ‘may hide a protest against the cool architectural objectivity of the abstractionist mode as it makes its subjective statement. Pollock does not seem to be especially talented, there being too much of an air of baked macaroni about some of his patterns, as though they were scrambled baroque designs. But he has a strong feeling for matière and on occasion is an interesting colourist’. Parker Tyler, ‘Nature and Madness Among the Younger Painters’, View 5, no. 2 (1945): 30. Tyler’s opinion of Pollock softened considerably over time. In 1950 he had cause to describe Pollock’s ‘subtle patterns of pure form’. Parker Tyler, ‘Jackson Pollock: The Infinite Labyrinth’, Magazine of Art 43, no. 3 (1950): 93.

32 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 14 December 1955, container 8, folder 5, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

33 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 14 December 1955, HRC.

34 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 25 November 1958, container 8, folder 6, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

35 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 6 July 1958, container 8, folder 6, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

36 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 31 March 1959, container 8, folder 6, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

37 Ford does, however, refer to a broad spectrum of cultural groupings in a letter dated 31 October 1960: ‘My pictures are non-representational (except that what is “represented” is invented, so to speak), non-descriptive, but they do not belong to the abstract-expressionist, or “action” or “tachiste” schools. Someone might label them “abstract surrealist” – and my poetry too, by the way.’ Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 31 October 1960, container 9, folder 1, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

38 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 7 July 1960, container 9, folder 1, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

39 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4, 78.

40 Ibid., 80.

41 Ibid.

42 Mark Rothko’s work was on public display at MOMA between January and March 1961. The ‘American Abstract Expressionist and Imagists’ exhibition opened at the Guggenheim in October and ran until December 1961.

43 Claes Oldenburg, ‘Selected Writings on The Store and the Ray Gun Theatre’, in Claes Oldenburg (October Files), ed. Nadja Rottner (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 86.

44 Oldenburg, ‘Selected Writings’, 86.

45 Ibid.

46 Barbara Haskell, Blam! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance: 1958–1964 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), 69–70.

47 Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4, 178.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 181.

52 Ibid.

53 Arthur C. Danto, Andy Warhol (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 46.

54 Danto, Andy Warhol, 46.

55 Ibid., 32.

56 Ibid., 36.

57 An exhibition of Warhol’s work subsequently opened at the New York-based Stable Gallery in November 1962. This was quickly followed by ‘The New Realists’ exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery. Three pieces by Warhol were selected for inclusion in the show.

58 Danto, Andy Warhol, 36.

59 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (Third Version) (1939), Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 252.

60 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, 253.

61 Ibid., 254.

62 Ibid., Original emphasis.

63 Ibid., 256. Original emphasis.

64 Notice the revealing manner in which Oldenburg uses scare quotes when referring to the topic of artistic creation.

65 Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 20.

66 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 9.

67 Jameson, Postmodernism, 12.

68 Ibid., 10.

69 My reference to the Catholic rite of transubstantiation echoes Arthur C. Danto’s appropriation of religious terminology in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981). Danto’s account of the transfiguration of the commonplace begins with Marcel Duchamp. Danto points out that it was Duchamp ‘who first performed the subtle miracle of transforming, into works of art, objects from the Lebenswelt of commonplace existence: a grooming comb, a bottle rack, a bicycle wheel, a urinal’. Significantly, Danto also argues that Warhol should be viewed as a successor to Duchamp. In Warhol’s art, however, his ‘transfigured objects were so sunk in banality that their potentiality for aesthetic contemplation remained beneath scrutiny even after metamorphosis. This way the question of what made them artworks could be broached without bringing aesthetic considerations in at all’. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), vi.

70 Quoted in Ira Cohen, ‘Charles Henri Ford’, in Gay Sunshine Interviews, ed. Winston Leyland (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1984), 58.

71 Consider the title of the magazine that Warhol founded with the British journalist John Wilcock in 1969: inter/View. It is a commonly accepted fact that with this act of naming Warhol was acknowledging the enduring importance of Ford’s View.

72 Cécile Whiting, A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 146.

73 The original ‘Silver’ Factory studio opened in 1962 and was located at 231 East Forty-seventh Street in Manhattan. The second Factory opened in 1968 and was situated at 22 Union Square West. The final Factory opened in 1973 at 860 Broadway and closed in 1984.

74 ‘The people who found their way to the Factory were typically beautiful but also lost, so that what they possessed was at most a kind of “piss glamour,” to use an epithet once bestowed on Edie Sedgwick, Warhol’s paradigm Superstar. In many cases they were destroyed by the Factory’s permissiveness, whether of sex or substance.’ Danto, Warhol, 49.

75 Ibid.

76 Simon Watney reminds us of the fact that ‘Warhol was provocatively passive and always able to initiate the most intense rivalries between his acolytes, lovers, friends, and family. Everyone had to compete for his attention’. Simon Watney, ‘Queer Andy’, in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, ed. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 25.

77 Stephen Koch, Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films (London: Calder & Boyars Ltd, 1973), 25. Original emphasis.

78 Juan A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, & Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 247.

79 We might say that Suárez’s stance, yoking together as it does talk of ‘media circulation’ and ‘near magical’ decoding, sits somewhere between the two positions outlined above.

80 Quoted in John Wilcock, The Autography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol (New York: Trela Media LLC, [1971] 2010), 71.

81 Quoted in Wilcock, The Autography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, 55.

82 Ibid., 61.

83 Quoted in Allen Frame, ‘Charles Henri Ford’.

84 Lynne Tillman, telephone interview with the author, 24 November 2010.

85 Charles Henri Ford to Parmenia Ekstrom, 10 February 1965, series 2, box 7, folder 6, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

86 Charles Henri Ford to Arne Ekstrom, 10 February 1965, series 2, box 7, folder 6, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

87 Vassily Papachrysanthou worked as Ford’s printing assistant on Spare Parts.

88 Charles Henri Ford, ‘“I WOULD LIKE TO CHANGE MY SEX AS I CHANGE MY SHIRT” – ANDRE BRETON (a poem for Philip Lamantia)’, series 1, box 4, folder 8, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

89 Charles Henri Ford, ‘Ginsberg Behind the Scenes’, series 1, box 4, folder 8, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

90 Maria Fusco, ‘Charles Henri Ford’, Frieze Magazine (112, 2008, Online Edition): http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/charles_henri_ford (accessed 10 May 2016).

91 Fusco, ‘Charles Henri Ford’.

92 Roberta Smith, ‘Charles Henri Ford, “Printed Matter 1929-1969,”’ New York Times (25 June 1999, Online Edition): http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/25/arts/art-in-review-charles-henri-ford-printed-matter-1929-1969.html?src=pm (accessed 5 May 2016).

93 Ford also spent a significant portion of time in the 1960s in Greece. This is where Spare Parts was printed and published.

94 Parker Tyler, ‘Charles Henri Ford: From Poet to Graphipoet’ (1966), series 3, box, 18, folder 4, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 7.

95 Cleaving to a properly Duchampian notion of cultural production, Bürger takes a famously dim view of Warholian Pop: ‘What Adorno calls “mimetic adaptation to the hardened and alienated” has probably been realized by Warhol: the painting of 100 Campbell soup cans contains resistance to the commodity society only for the person who wants to see it there …. The Neo-avant-garde, which stages for a second time the avant-gardiste break with tradition, becomes a manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the positing of any meaning whatsoever.’ Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, [1974], 1984), 61.

96 Tyler, ‘Charles Henri Ford: From Poet to Graphipoet’, 2.

97 Ibid., 8.

98 Ibid., 8–9.

99 Ibid., 9.

100 Ibid., 10.

101 Karen L. Rood, ‘Charles Henri Ford’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 48: American Poets, 1880-1945, ed. Peter Quartermain (Detroit: A Broccoli Clark Book, 1986), 200.

102 Allen Ginsberg, ‘Spare Parts (Advertisement)’, [n.d.], series 1, box 4, folder 10, Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler Papers, NYPL Archives & Manuscripts, New York Public Library, n.pag. Where possible I have attempted to preserve ‘eccentric orthography of multitudinous type-fonts’ when citing from Spare Parts.

103 Charles Henri Ford, Spare Parts (Athens, Greece: A New View Book, 1966), n.pag.

104 P. Adam Sitney’s recent critical account of Brakhage is worth quoting here: ‘Stan Brakhage began to make films in 1952 as a precocious teenager. His encounter with modernist poetry was immediate and eccentric. But it made so forceful an impression on him that the modernism of the American avant-garde cinema has been largely defined and molded by his achievements. He quickly assimilated the modernist dimensions of the avant-garde filmmakers who were at work when he entered the field. His passion for poetry and his eagerness to incorporate the advanced work in both practice and theory, of composers and painters of his time as well, accelerated his meteoric development and influence.’ P. Adams Sitney, The Cinema of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 149.

105 In ‘Make Place for the Artist’ (1955), Brakhage declares: ‘I believe in magic. I am learning to cast spells. My profession is transforming.’ Stan Brakhage, Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking (New York: Documentext, 2001), 74.

106 This phrase is taken from Brakhage’s ‘The Seen’ (1974). We get a clearer sense of Brakhage’s deep-seated, quasi-Blakean commitment to inner truth in this particular essay: ‘I have seen – as Kirlian photography almost touches on now, any maybe does – I have seen leaves spark or emit a spark-like emanation at their edges that are offshoots directly of the veins within that leaf, and therefore as that leaf grows, do create a metaphor previous to the extension of these veins. These things I have seen, one, because I have been involved with seeing all my life and I’m really open to seeing all there is when I’m well.’ Brakhage, Essential Brakhage, 157.

107 David E. James, ‘Amateurs in the Industry Town: Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol in Los Angeles’, in Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker, ed. David E. James (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 64.

108 James, ‘Amateurs in the Industry Town’, 74.

109 Ibid., 64.

110 Annette Michelson, ‘“Where Is Your Rupture?” Mass Culture and the Gesamtkunstwerk’, in Andy Warhol (October Files), ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 106.

111 Ford, Spare Parts, n.pag.

112 Ibid.

113 Roberto Matta designed the cover for Ford’s The Overturned Lake (1941). In this sense the line can also be read in self-referential terms.

114 André Breton was an early supporter of Matta, who joined the Surrealist movement in 1937. His stock in Surrealist circles continued to rise until 1947 (when Breton publicly expelled him from the group).

115 Ford, Spare Parts, n.pag.

116 Ibid.

117 Ibid.

118 Ibid.

119 Ibid.

120 Ibid.

121 Ibid.

122 Ibid.

123 Ibid.

124 Jack Smith, Taylor Mead, Viva, and Charles Henri Ford are some of the people pictured on the collaged cover of Silver Flower Coo.

125 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 2 September 1966, container 9, folder 2, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

126 Charles Henri Ford, Silver Flower Coo (New York: Kulchur Press, 1968), n.pag. Due to limitations of space, I have not been able recreate the exact typography of the poems in this volume, though all original punctuation and capitalization has been preserved.

127 Ford, Silver Flower Coo, n.pag.

128 Ibid.

129 Ford also alludes to Robert Rauschenberg in this Coo. Specifically, the description of ‘A/Grocery bill DYED BLACK’ evokes Rauschenberg’s Combines of the 1950s and 1960s. Ford knew that Rauschenberg had influenced Warhol. When asked whether Rauschenberg was the artist who influenced Warhol the most, Ford replied: ‘Probably, because Andy took over the silkscreen and made it his own thing.’ Quoted in Wilcock, The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, 55.

130 Ford, Silver Flower Coo, n.pag.

131 Ibid.

132 Ford’s interview with Allen Frame is undated. However, given that, in 1997, Frame and Ford mounted a joint photography exhibition at the Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, New York, it is reasonable to assume the interview’s provenance can be attributed to this time.

133 Parker Tyler to Charles Henri Ford, 13 August 1964, container 4, folder 4, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

134 Parker Tyler to Charles Henri Ford, 3 December 1964, container 4, folder 4, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

135 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 10 December 1964, series 2, box, 9, folder 2, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

136 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 6 February 1965, series 2, box, 9, folder 2, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

137 Ford, Silver Flower Coo, n.pag.

138 The Factory filmmaker Paul Morrissey suggests that Ford was perceived as a ‘real historical character’ by the time that Pop exploded onto the scene in the 1960s. Quoted in James Dowell and John Kolomvakis (dirs.), Sleep in a Nest of Flames (2000).

139 Gerard Malanga to Charles Henri Ford, 24 April 1964, series 2, box, 14, folder 3, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

140 Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol, Screen Tests/A Diary (New York: Kulchur Press, 1967), 17.

141 Gerard Malanga, 10 Poems for 10 Poets (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1970), 29. Malanga is alluding in this extract to a collection of short stories that Ford edited: The Night of Jupiter and Other Fantastic Stories (New York: View Editions, 1945).