Bedfellow Degrees of Separation: Basil King

Basil King’s work makes such a whole that to tell about it at all seems to begin by tearing out pieces  and missing the relationships that are happening in between (& all around) the lines: there’s always more there than what’s there.

This is poetry.  But not continuous.  There are stories.  pause. Vignettes.  pause.  Crisscrossed. Intercut.  pause.  Some …  pause.  … though  …  pause.  … is pure song.  pause.  Some essay. Even.  pause.  One poem may unceremoniously walk right into another and pass on,  pause.  walk right on through …  pause.   & go on its way.  pause.  An Olmec head in his back yard just won’t stop talking.  pause.  Whole passages repeat repeat intact as if they’ve never been said, have never been heard been heard, are always being heard.  pause.  Ever.  Never.  …  pause.  Before.  pause.  And elsewhere again.  pause.

Basil King is a painter, but he’s always been around poets.  Robert Creely.  John Weiners.  LeRoi Jones. Frank O’Hara.  Martha Winston King.  Charles Olson.  Amiri Baraka. Robert Duncan.  Many of Basil’s friends have been poets.  Basil King was born in England.  William Blake was born in England.   William Blake wrote poetry.  William Blake was a visual artist.

King’s work is personal.  There are no abstract generalizations disembodied from specific people.  He doesn’t separate experience, or context (or how both weave among a person’s options and decisions), from the person living it, or from how these might associate with that person’s memories, desires,  confusions, predicaments or accumulated habits of reaction.

What one does isn’t separate from one’s actual life. Real things happen.  People get hungry, and they can really be dogged by these things.  Life gets complicated and people contradict themselves, sometimes interminably, and sometimes only intensifying their entanglements.  He refuses to oversimplify by forcing pat coherence through omission.  He once even wrote that it’s violent to be personal, to allow oneself— or anyone else — one’s full, indeterminate complexity, messy as that truly is.

Because the work is personal, it’s also always about Basil King, not because of any narcissism, but because the observer can’t be separated from the observed. What the observer (in this case, King) notices (picks out, picks up on, chooses to mention) is as constituent as anything else.  The web of will and event draws out story.

Who am I?  What’s happening to me?  What do I want?   Why do I want it?  What’s happened to me?  Where am I looking?  Who’s done what I’m doing?  Who’s from where I’m from?  Who’s been where I’ve been, and what stories are there?

As a teenager, Basil King attended Black Mountain College.  He went to San Francisco.  He went to New York.  While working as Adolf Gottlieb’s assistant, he noticed how Gottlieb continually recycled the sawdust used for cleaning the studio floor because he couldn’t forget having lived with so little for so long.

Basil King hung out at the Cedar Tavern.  Talking with Franz Kline: “Pollock. Pollock. Pollock…”

“Fuck Pollock.  Let’s go see him.”

Out on the Island, Basil King walks along the beach with Jackson Pollock, not in the least the testosterone overcharged bull in the china shop of yore; instead, a thoughtful, reflective person who liked to talk about poetry.

Basil King was talented.  Lots of people thought so.  Maybe even the next enfant terrible.

In conversation, King has pointed out that Cezanne’s vision and strengths grew in concert with his not being talented and that one of Picasso’s most serious limitations was that he was never able to abandon his talent.

Basil King was recruited by a major gatekeeper early in the game and given assignments.  He was disinclined to comply.  At some point, he destroyed much of his work and drew circles for a couple of years. Something else started to happen.

Fashion in visual art (not necessarily everyone everywhere in the culture by any means — for example, James Baldwin wasn’t exactly hiding under a rock during the 60s) was starting to move elsewhere.  Slick, if somewhat rote, depictions of consumer goods and movie stars recommended going corporate and becoming rich, famous, glamourous.

Minimalism, with its transcendental materialism, operates through elimination — and the personal is no less minimized.  Minimalism can be pure.  The personal can never be so pure.

King found himself out of step.  The prevailing  trends were treading paths that worked their way around the concerns to which he was paying attention.  Frank O”Hara, a friend who loved what Basil was doing, died before he could do much about it.  Doors closed.

Artists — as people needing housing, food, workspace, attention, & sometimes even each other — were being meanwhile conscripted into the avant garde of  neoliberal colonialism.  For example, with Mayor John Lindsay’s encouragement, light manufacturing was moving to Jersey, and what’s now called SoHo was left empty.  Artists moved into cheap spaces that nobody wanted, often at the risk of surprise immediate eviction.  Ornette Coleman set up Artists House on Prince Street.  A few galleries eventually followed artists there, so did Jill Clayburgh and the New York Times.  Property values skyrocketed and SoHo became safe for shopping malls and millionaires.

Then a bankruptcy prone, abusively opportunistic real estate developer, with the financial collaboration of Russian mobsters, built a giant luxury hotel in the neighborhood and went on to become the chief executive of the largest empire in human history.

Chastened (or abandoned, or assaulted) by Reaganomics, some museums themselves started jumping out of the frying pan right through the theme park hoop, where one may now count how many selfies get shot in front of a Jackson Pollock painting per day.

Adolf Hitler wanted to be a painter but settled for exterminating Jews & Roma.  Basil’s grandparents emigrated from Poland & Russia, respectively, to England.  As a child, Basil lived though the blitz of London before his family emigrated to Detroit.  A degree of childhood malnutrition had kept his father from growing as tall as he could have, but the British practice of feeding spoonfuls of malt & cod liver oil to schoolchildren during the 40s seemed to have much more positive health effects for his son.

Basil King has followed the lives & works of many painters.  His book 77 Beasts, Basil King’s Beastiary is made up of one  poem for each of 77 different painters.  He gets behind their eyeballs and ruminates on the reflections each beholds.  They are his peers & compatriots.  He knows what they’ve been through.  He knows about dropouts like Rembrandt & Goya.  He’s known what could happen to him.

In the 80s, after Douglas Crimp and many others had so confidently pronounced painting dead, regulators reversed themselves and decided that painting was okay after all.  Basquiat, for one, had apparently skipped the part of art history class that proscribed what could be painted, and ignored, if not leapt, the barricades.  He wasn’t alone either.  King also began to see some indications of thaw regarding the reception of his own work.  There was some confidential excitement brewing, even a few promises on the table.

The tipping point disappointment and disillusionment of that visit lead him more fully into a practice of poetry.

In Victorian Times and After,  King ruminates on the after-ripples of political reform and the impoverished options women faced in 19th century England, an inquiry graced suddenly, via Whistler, with a luminescent visit to Robert Ryman by way of Emily Dickinson’s independence couture — all as a way to comprehend the top down, pay to play, media circused, 2016 U.S. presidential election, where positions barely more liberal than Eisenhower could be construed to be “posing as revolutionary.”

Always alert to contradictions and real life consequences, King contrasts the more daring noblesse oblige progressive domestic legislation achieved by arch-imperialist Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative Party relative to William Gladstone’s Liberal Party.  Gladstone, who wanted to get England’s boot off the neck of the Irish, never succeeded, and after his initiatives were once again defeated during his 4th term as prime minister, he resigned and retired from public life.

Great Britain’s latter 20th century Conservative prime minister, the “There is no Alternative” Iron Lady, always willing to pick a fight with anyone less than half her size — & Ronald Reagan’s key neoliberal teammate in a quest to monetize every possible human activity — Margaret Thatcher, famously referred to the Irish as pigs.  But, going beyond Jonathan Swift’s estimations of pork prices, what’s called “Conservative” plays heir to those who invented the British working class itself through “enclosures” of commons & the dispossessing of farmers so as to allow a special, select few to realize far more lucrative profits from wool exports.

“We came. We saw.  He died.” gloated Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her best Walmart Pig Latin after the U.S. drone assisted murder of Muammar Gaddafi.  Jihadists, already strengthened by decades of joint U.S./Saudi sponsorship and, now unimpeded in Libya, invaded northern Mali — cities like Timbuktu & Gao, imposed Sharia law and outlawed even music.  Musicians now face death in northern Mali or flee south to Bamako.  And there isn’t even oil here to steal. This is Mali, the living grandmother of what we call Blues music.

King is interested in the intersection between personal needs and political responsibility.  He considers that socialism might require a personal embrace of altruism, a one way street that depletes the giver on behalf of the receiver,  and hints that that may be more than most people may be able to do.  The relationship of this to the United States, where most socializing of costs favors corporations and the very wealthy rather than vice versa, is more unclear.

Systemic adjustments along the lines of FDR’s Four Freedoms (from want, from fear; of speech & religion), wouldn’t exactly pass a died-in-the-wool socialist’s definition of  “socialism.” Taking politics back from a predatory financial sector isn’t total state ownership of industry. Economic democracy doesn’t necessarily involve going hungry just so one’s neighbor can eat too.

Notably, the most vocal presidential proponent of altruism in the last half century was Ronald Reagan, who, claiming that the collective public action that government is purported to be is itself the problem, insisted that volunteerism would solve all political and social problems for all those secondary persons who aren’t wealthy.

70 years ago, in 1947, the same year a young Basil King arrived with his parents under the open blue skies of Boston from the U.K., Harry Truman (Henry Wallace having already been disposed of in a manner worthy of Podesta & Wasserman-Shultz), that same dangerous radical who bequeathed us the cold war, nuclear proliferation, the NSA, the military industrial complex and the red scare, proposed a national, single payer health system (Roosevelt had previously backed off from a 1939 initiative) that was defeated by Dixiecrats mortified by the prospect of desegregated hospitals.  The South of the United States, however, has always been much more than Dixiecrats, Klansmen & Confederates, despite their overly long shadow and abiding fondness for terrorism.  Basil’s wife, the poet & prose writer Martha Winston King, comes from the South, as do Loretta Lynn, Eudora Welty, Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali & Johnny Cash.

Cash, Lynn & Ali each risked aspects of their careers to publicly denounce the Vietnam war.  Presley grew up for some years in a black neighborhood of Tupelo Mississippi.  Years later, he, on the spot, bought the Cadillac of her choice, for an African American woman who just happened to be looking through a showroom window.  Eudora Welty plumbed the mind of Medgar Evers’ murderer in Where is the Voice Coming From?  One of Martha’s earlier American ancestors, William Davis, was  a non-conformist, pacifist Quaker and one of the founders of Lynchburg, Virginia, while other ancestors, not all, profited comfortably from the nation’s “peculiar institution” that was one of the means by which British people in North America became transformed into “white people.”

One evening, Basil & Martha leave a bar and turn on to 6th Avenue.  They are astonished by the unexpected figure of a magnificent Muhammad Ali strolling with a companion.

American conservatives often like to harken back to the enlightened gentry who deliberated the United States Constitution.  After centuries of the king’s this, the king’s that, private property, was, at the time, equated with freedom & political autonomy (options reserved exclusively, of course, for white, male property owners).  When in debt, James Madison, broke up families by selling off members to different slaveholders in order to maintain his acreage.

Madison’s real estate holdings were a bonanza acquired through the clash of civilizations where superior British guns, germs, steel, terror & ruthlessness had cornered remaining indigenous peoples into privatizing land even before General 20-dollar-bill-face kicked off his Trail of Tears.  It had never occurred to native people (who had been maintaining coherent, sustainable societies) before this that the sources of life could be turned into private property, held as hostage and sold to the highest bidder.  And, curiously enough, American conservatives do tend to show minimal interest in conserving clean air or water, arable land or forests.

Language pulls a slight of hand here.  Humans grow from the Earth, not vice versa.  There’s no real way in which a person can “own” land.  The land long predates and outlives us.  What shifts is not the land’s identity but the permissions and prohibitions that are enforced among people; and everyone, somehow, wants to be on the inside and safe sometime.  Everyone needs, at the least, biological security.  Most everyone wants, in some way, private & personal spaces, freedom of movement & association, personal autonomy, some kind of coherent give & take between inner & outer.

Basil King knows that the outsider has to take charge of her own biography because nobody else will.  He carries the burden of the mirror, well acquainted with the sentence of silence that’s apportioned to the invisible and refuses to shut up.

Since 1997, Basil King has seen 10 books published: The Complete Miniatures; Devotions; The Poet; Identity; Warp Spasm; mirage: a poem in 22 sections; 77 Beasts, Basil King’s Beastiary; Learning to Draw/A History; The Spoken Word/The Painted Hand; and this one, History Now. There have also been 3 solo exhibitions of his paintings after a significantly long gap:  two in 2016 at St. Andrews University & Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center and in 2017 at the John Malloy Gallery in NYC.

Issac Rosenberg and Samuel Greenberg were 2 Jewish working class Britishers who lived difficult, short lives during the early 20th century.  Both wrote poetry.  Rosenberg went AWOL during the European world war and, for a period of time, Basil King’s father’s family took him in and hid him.