Archie Rand and Lewis Warsh, Single Occupancy (Cuneiform Press, 2023)
On the pages of Single Occupancy, women collapse in the embrace of monsters, are saved by heroes, and threatened by villains. Thieves break in through sash windows, knock out residents, end up in bed, or on a lonely road. The light is always dark, the places abandoned, lonely, and neglected or under threat. Scenes are located out of the way of social norms or spying eyes. Feet hurt, shoes pinch, decisions made get made over and over again in a repetition disorder that penetrates daily routines. Nothing is quite right, though exactly what is wrong is unclear besides a constant sense of semi-violence and unease that permeates this world. Which world? The visual references are shifted out of phase from the present, into a vague past referenced through the iconography of noir film and period styles. Costumes and gender roles are retro and hard binaries shape bodies and actions. Single Occupancy seems a throwback to scenarios of shadows and trench coats, hats and revolvers.
The work is formatted as a sequence of panels, each containing a single scene accompanied by a caption. The informally handwritten texts scratch out their messages below the images. Each panel is discrete, disconnected from the next. They are as isolated as the figures within them and echo the “single occupancy” theme of the title. Each image/text combination exists in its own bounded unit of a page. Taken together, they become an aggregate, a montage of vignettes, rather than organizing into a sequence or overarching narrative. They are of a world, make a world, united by a consistent sensibility as well as style, and enact their incidental relations across the collection as a whole.
Artist Archie Rand and the late poet Lewis Warsh, the two collaborators on this project, both have outstanding pedigrees and established profiles. Both are very much of the New York milieu in its artistic and literary dimensions. Rand’s energetic pen and ink wash drawings are vigorous and the lines drawn with a practiced hand remain deliberately raw. The drawings are specific and explicit, immediately legible, but unfussy. For all of their completeness they are rough, intentionally sketchy. Something almost pugilistic shows in the rapid handling of the figures, the bold application of tones. Rand has a long history of dedication to figurative work. His facility is practiced and his inventory of images vast. One senses he can pull out any recognizable image or scene from his memory and make it appear immediately on the page. His paintings often have more a more playful tone than the dark statements in Single Occupancy. The images served as the inspiration for Warsh’s stark, vivid statements. The project echoes with associations, not only through its themes, but its format, recalling the dark humor of Gahan Wilson and cultural references in Raymond Pettibon.
A persistent masculinity is present throughout this work. Men grapple with wild animals and each other in ongoing agonistic engagement, as if in a leitmotif of old fashioned male identity. This quality is palpable as a general attitude of brusque, blunt, thrust-in-your-face presentation throughout the book. Would the images feel different with other captions? Texts read more gently placed with different images? They would change significantly with different pairings, but the rhetorical effect would probably remain given how strong it is throughout.
A distinct association with The New York School lurks in the background of this work. For many poets of my generation, born at mid-century, the phrase resonated with gravitas coupled with excitement. The New York School, a loosely associated group of writers and artists, achieved prominence within an emerging American Art and cultural movement in the immediate post-WWII era. They were hip, smart, creative, innovative artists whose work broke open possibilities for what poetry could be—and music, and visual art, and performance. The giants—Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery—along with James Schuyler and others—were contemporary with the rise of American Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement to gain international status within the mainstream global context. Some of the painters most closely associated through personal as well as professional ties to the poets and writers, Larry Rivers and Fairfield Porter, did figurative work that included scenes of American daily life and landscape as well as historical references and portraits. The point is that Warsh and Rand work within a lineage in which vernacular language and ordinary experience replaced the stuff of dreams, pursuit of archetypes, and symbolist-infused imagery of earlier avant-gardes. They both work from and with what is, though in the case of Single Occupancy, that includes the rich associative images from noir film scenes and pulp crime fiction.
Warsh was part of the younger generation of poets in New York, and came of age in the counter-culture era. A photograph of him with his then-partner Anne Waldman in the 1960s, as they were founding the now-legendary Angel Hair Press, shows them both in youthful glory, hair long, skin clear, gazes focused with determination on an unfolding future. The richness of the milieu and their publishing ventures is well-documented by Warsh and others, including an issue of the literary periodical, Jacket2, focused on the Press with an introduction by each of the two.[1] Warsh notes in his essay how his own formation as a poet had been influenced by the Black Mountain writers as well as many in San Francisco. In that period of the 1960s, when Angel Hair was founded (as a journal and a press), the distinctions among these geographical locations was clearly legible. In the San Francisco Renaissance, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer drew more on Surrealism and Dada than O’Hara or Ashbery. As for Black Mountain, it was a fertile crucible where John Cage collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg, the monumental Charles Olson proposed a new form for poetic expression as an “open field,” and where Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov and others created a national network within which American poetics flourished. While other connections continued, the fading Beat scene was replaced by a vigorous new vernacular approach even as the crucial 1960 anthology edited by Donald Allen, The New American Poetry 1945-1960, codified various “schools” that became known by his designations.
The New York School had a profound effect on art, poetry, performance and music through work of John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and others. Their appropriation of ordinary materials into images, silence into music, speech into poetry, and quotidian motion into dance and other practices changed modern art. What, they posed as a question, was the material of art making? Humble objects and scenes have a long history in still life and genre painting. The inclusion of industrial materials was a signature of early 20th century collage work beginning with the commercially printed paper in Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning of 1912. But Rauschenberg’s assemblages and Jasper Johns’s stencil numbers, maps, and cast beer cans wrought a wholly different transformation through appropriation of artifacts that seemed to deliberately shift the definition of fine art. The crucial mid-century figure was John Cage. Movements like Fluxus, Happenings, then Conceptual Art as well as Arte Povera were all committed to dissolving the line between art and life, rather than continuing fine art practices from early traditions of studio work.
The central question posed by all of these artists was: What is the material of art? This remains vital, crucial, central in the current moment. Even as the place occupied by poetry and literary work, like that of fine art imagery is increasingly overwhelmed by the behemoth of mass culture, entertainment, and commercial products, the role it plays continues, as per a work like Single Occupancy, to be distinct from that of other cultural practices. The work of an artist is to call some things to attention and not others, to give us pause, make reflective use of attention. Do women really collapse in the arms of monsters? Maybe not any more, maybe never, but without this work, how would I know to ask? Poetry is the language art, of course, as well as the art that calls language to attention. The once-evident association of specific practices with scenes, groups, and locations has been washed out of the current academic creative writing networks. These emphasize the professionalization in that strange concept of a “poetry career” now often associated with graduate programs, residencies, and reading circuits. The New York School, San Francisco Renaissance, and Black Mountain all existed before these concepts had come to the fore, when the networks were less institutional. Rand and Warsh, like many of us, knew each other through the readings, openings, publications, and above all, the work. Warsh, a charismatic man, died two years ago. Rand continues to produce a steady output with his turbine energies.
They were of their time and place, inevitably. As location ceases to be so strong a formative force, generational identity remains. The poets of video games and social media, unimaginable a few decades ago, already replace those steeped in the language of film and pulp fiction as well as classical and classic references. Where does poetry find its language sources? The answer reflects the many changes over time. Lines from Homer, Shakespeare, Keats and others no longer drop casually into conversation or citation, but the tropes of popular culture are often conspicuous and immediately recognizable. What will the late work of the current generation be like, forty years from now? Will it recall an entire scene, a network of professional connections and relations in which loyalties and rivalries spurred deep attachments and fertile collaborations? Or will the dialogue be with the materials of a commercial industry, an output marketed and branded, echoing Call of Duty and other long-running franchises under the banner of Grand Theft, Super Mario, and Minecraft. Single Occupancy feels nostalgic and post-nostalgic, already a remnant of an era vanished with its practitioners moving off-stage, leaving the scene of action, even departing this world. The very references that make its imagery resonant will lose their legibility, even as they remain preserved in the vivid panels of this work. And so the paradox of writing is dramatically clear in this work, publishing is an act of preservation that demonstrates how quickly a work becomes ephemeral.
[1] Jacket2, Angel Hair issue, John Tranter, ed. October 18, 2021. https://jacket2.org/commentary/angel-hair-magazine