Emily Post-Avant: A Letter from Poet and Art Critic John Yau
Dear Emily Post-Avant,
When the artist Bruce Conner turned 65, he retired. The drawings he made after that were done by (did you know this?) Emily Feather and others, each of whom had a particular character. It drove his dealers crazy. He also did an exhibition, “Dennis Hopper’s First One Person Show,” or something like that, claiming that Hopper made all the work.
Bruce, of course, did all the works “by Hopper.” They were good friends.
He refused to sign a loyalty oath, so one of his printmakers (June Wayne at Tamarind) got him to make a print of his thumbprint and sent it in, so he could teach.
He had a number of nom de plumes — one of which was Emily. And he would talk about them, as in — Well, Emily does not feel like working these days.
Actually, Conner concocted various strategies to undermine the cult of personality forming around him. He began to sign his pieces “Anonymous,” “Anon,” and “Unsigned” — or did not sign them at all. He presented his work under various pseudonyms: Emily Feather, Anonymouse, and Justin Kase, among others. THUMB PRINT’s prankish blankness is consistent with these attempts at concealment. The extravagant detail of his drawings and assemblages is absent. There is little to indicate his authorship other than these fingerprints, which lithographers conventionally deem printer’s errors. Conner committed this mistake on purpose, reducing his work to what many considered an artless blemish.
We had many odd conversations. I think Bruce would have admired your anarchic spirit.
Best,
—John Yau
Dear John Yau,
Thank you for writing. It has brightened my spirit, considerably.
No, I did not know that Bruce Conner (long a favorite of my assemblage/collage-artist son, whom you’ve published at Hyperallergic) went by “Emily” late in his career. Life is strange.
Your letter arrived three days back, on the day my dear cat, Morrie, left this dimension. He appeared on my deck, in Illinois, over 20 years ago, a tiny kitten. Noble, brave, loving… What a world that was, then. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them? The oddness of that question has always confounded me, and yet I hold it close to myself. My dog, Ben Jonson, Morrie’s best friend, paces about the premises, looking, looking… My sister wrote that, in a text. She has been taking care of them for the past month. I have been in eastern Washington, trying to find a small-town place for the three of us. Now it will be a place for me and Ben.
What is strangest is this: You once wrote pointedly, with others, about Araki Yasusada, answering an essay Marjorie Perloff had written. I remember reading some work by Yasusada, in an issue of Grand Street, back in the 90s. I had never heard of him nor of Kent Johnson, the “caretaker”; much less could I have imagined that more than twenty years later, I would write a column for a magazine the latter co-edited — a column I was never paid for, despite a firm agreement! I hope these young editors at Caesura will be a bit more trustworthy.
That was quite a journal, wasn’t it, that Grand Street, and it had a lot of art and color in it. The cover of that issue was a painting by Julian Schnabel, I’m pretty sure, of a little blonde girl in a red dress with a black bar across her eyes. This was long ago. It may be I am not remembering precisely. I am the same age right now as Bruce Conner was when he retired, and the old nut just doesn’t click along like it once did. Truth be told, I am getting a bit worried.
Last photo of Morrie, with his dear friend, Ben Jonson.
Julian Schnabel, Veramente Bestia V (Girl With No Eyes), 1988. Artist’s website.
But for sure — and this I recall clearly — there was a weird feature about Dennis Hopper in that issue, too, with photos of him playing golf. And there were some photos in there of “Hopper’s art.” Which must have been by Conner, I presume. Who knows, maybe Conner had something to do with the feature, creating it as an installation, of sorts! The Editors then were Deborah Treisman and Jean Stein, who had an affair with William Faulkner, while she was interviewing him for the CIA-funded Paris Review. Who knows why I remember these minor details and not more meaningful ones, like where is my facemask.
I don’t have that issue of the journal any longer, so I can’t look back. I sold/gave away most of my books in a yard sale, after I was evicted last year. That was hard, let me tell you.
Did anyone in the Art world, do you know, go after Conner and Hopper for their forgery like they went after Araki Yasusada and the cheapskate Kent Johnson, shortly after that issue of Grand Street came out? It doesn’t seem like it. Granted, I know the implied comparison might not be exact. Poetry has always been at least fifty years behind art, after all. Funny how the guy who said that was named Bruce, too. Bruce Gysin. (Or was that Byron Gysin? See what I mean?)
I have been a longtime admirer of your work and of Hyperallergic, though I can only view the magazine now on mammoth provincial-library PCs from ca. 2003.
Dennis Hopper golfing, BBC.
Bruce Conner, Dennis Hopper One Man Show, Vol III., Image III., 1972. Crown Point Press.
I write from the public library, in fact, in quietly-ruined Metaline Falls, Washington, where the immortal dystopian movie, The Postman, starring the dreamboat Kevin Costner — with gills in his neck — and also Dennis Hopper as the cruel Emperor of the sea world, was partly filmed. I am hoping to sign a lease tomorrow in a low-income complex, if they don’t first figure out that I’m an old, socially anxious girl, who was once a young man full of panache and promise.
My best wishes to you, even as the world, with all of its innocent beings, slowly falls away,
—Emily Post-Avant
Still from The Postman, 1997. IMDb.
