작품 상세

EMMETT WILLIAMS (USA, 1925 - 2007). "Some things to do your thing with", 2005. Silkscreen and collage, copy 20/99. Signed and justified by hand. Measurements: 59 x 40 cm. Emmett Williams was an American poet and visual artist. Studied poetry with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, anthropology at the University of Paris, and worked as an assistant to the ethnologist Paul Radin in Switzerland. Collaborated with Daniel Spoerri and German poet Claus Bremer in the Darmstadt circle of concrete poetry. One of his notable pieces from this period is "Four-Directional Song of Doubt for Five Voices" (1957), in which five performers are each assigned one word of the phrase "You just never quite know", and say their word according to a grid on a card, keeping together with the beat of a metronome: when a black circle appears on the grid. In the resulting performance, the core phrase "you never quite know" is overshadowed by other combinations of words, such as "you know" and "quite just". In the 1960s, Williams was the European coordinator of Fluxus and worked closely with French artist Robert Filliou. In 1991, published an autobiography, My Life in Fluxus - And Vice Versa, published by Edition Hansjörg Mayer, Stuttgart, and reprinted the next year by Thames and Hudson. In 1996, he was honored for his life work with the Hannah-Höch-Preis. He died in Berlin in 2007. In 2014, Edition Zédélé published a reprint of SOLDIER (Reprint Collection, curated by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and Clive Phillpot), first published in A Valentine for Noel (1973) by Something Else Press and Hansjörg Mayer.