O for a muse of fire: the iconoclasm of Jonathan Williams and the Jargon Society

Afterimage, March-April, 1996 by Tom Patterson

Williams has also written a substantial amount of prose, mostly on commission for assorted periodicals, photography monographs and art exhibition catalogs. More than three dozen of his essays on a wide range of literary, artistic and musical topics are gathered in a 1982 collection titled The Magpie's Bagpipe, and a book of his more recent essays, Blackbird Dust, is due to appear next year.(21) In keeping with his habit of collecting words and phrases that he has overheard or seen in print, he maintains a constantly growing inventory of choice quotations from a myriad of sources, selections from which have been published in two books devoted to these borrowings: In the Azure Over the Squalor (1985) and Quote, Unquote (1989).(22)

Although he published his early work and some of his more recent poems under the Jargon imprint, the vast majority of Williams's prolific literary output has been issued by other publishers, from small independents such as the Kentucky-based Gnomon Press or French Broad to more established outfits such as the University of North Carolina Press (publisher of his 1969 collection, An Ear in Bartram's Tree), Duke University Press (which published an expanded version of Blues & Roots/Rue & Bluets in 1985) and the Berkeley-based Ten Speed Press (which published Quote, Unquote). Despite attempts by himself and others to generate interest in his writing, the major New York publishers evidently remain unconvinced of his work's value. Even his ambitious and entertaining survey of Southern self-taught artists - a subject that has fascinated many in recent years - has failed to capture the attention of New York publishers who have seen it in manuscript form since Williams first sent it out in 1990. Titled Walks to the Paradise Garden, this collection of essays, artist profiles and quick verbal sketches represents more than 15 years of work in a field that Williams began exploring long before "outsider art" became an art-world trend. His text is accompanied by a large selection of images by photographers Roger Manley and Guy Mendes, showing the artists in their working environments. Despite Williams's distinctive approach to the subject, and an impressive package of visuals, nary a publisher in New York or elsewhere seems interested in it.

Williams's own photography has taken something of a back seat to his other pursuits, at least from the standpoint of its availability to the public. For many years the only way to see Williams's photography was to attend one of his slide presentations, in which he shows and comments on dozens of his portrait photos of artists and writers, views of the graves of other arts figures and images of eccentric architecture shot during his travels on two continents - all in the format of large color slides taken with Rollieflex and Mamiyaflex cameras. In 1979, .Gnomon Press published 30 of his Portrait Photographs - images of Pound, Levertov, David Hockney, Ginsberg, Ian Hamilton Finlay, R. B. Kitaj and Minor White, among others - in a limited edition of 1800 copies. Probably the most widely seen of Williams's photographs are several informal portraits of his teachers and fellow students at Black Mountain College that he made in the 1950s that were reproduced in two historical studies of the college that have appeared since its closing - Martin Duberman's Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (1972), and Mary Emma Harris's The Arts at Black Mountain College (1987).(23) A number of these same images, together with others from the same period and later photographs of the same people, were featured in "Black Mountain College Portraits," Williams's exhibition in Asheville, which opened in late October 1995, in conjunction with an unprecedented "Black Mountain College Reunion" on the school's former campus some 15 miles to the east. The reunion and related events were organized by the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, a recently formed non-profit organization aiming to open a facility to house archival materials, art and historical displays pertaining to the college.(24) Installed at the Captain's Bookshelf - an Asheville bookshop that usually has rare, out-of-print Jargon titles in stock - Williams's exhibition included 30 prints in color or black and white, and among them were close-up "mug" shots of Siskind and Callahan; several portraits of Olson; an image of young Gablik "near Whitman's grave" in 1956; a photo of Creeley and Rice playing on a children's swing set at Black Mountain; a 1986 portrait of Oppenheimer looking solemn next to an old car bearing a McGovern bumper sticker and a license plate imprinted with the word "GRUMPE"; and a lovely 1969 shot of du Plessix Gray posed with a black abstract iron sculpture in a Connecticut field under a clear blue sky.