[inter/meta/trans] Fwd: R.I.P. Emmett Williams

[adam overton]

Emmett Williams on Ubu.com:
the last french-fried potato and other poems: http://www.ubu.com/ 
historical/gb/williams_last.pdf
recordings: http://www.ubu.com/sound/williams_e.html


from David Cotner's Actions. list:


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/obituaries/01williams.html
(thanks to Michael Simmons for this)

“Emmett Williams, an American poet whose transposition of words into  
visual art and performances made him one of the founding artists of  
Fluxus, a performance-oriented avant-garde art movement of the 1960s,  
died on Feb. 14 in Berlin. He was 81 and had lived in Berlin for many  
years.

His wife, Ann Noël, confirmed his death. Mr. Williams became a  
prominent part of the European faction of the Fluxus movement when  
its first performance festival took place in Wiesbaden, Germany, in  
1962. Fluxus sprang from a group of international artists, writers  
and musicians who began working together to stage happenings and  
performances. There was never an institutional base for Fluxus, and  
it never even defined itself as an art movement because it was anti- 
authoritarian in nature. Nevertheless, it helped give birth to video  
art, performance art and conceptual art.

Mr. Williams was living in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1962 when he began  
correspondence with George Maciunas, the originator of Fluxus. He  
joined Mr. Maciunas and several other artists, most of them European,  
in performing his poetry, which Fluxus artists would later refer to  
as a score. In 1966 Mr. Williams took a job as editor in chief of The  
Something Else Press, a publishing house in New York City founded by  
Dick Higgins, another pioneer of Fluxus. By 1967 Mr. Williams had  
edited “The Anthology of Concrete Poetry” and written “Sweethearts,”  
two of his most widely recognized works. He went on to write many  
essays and musings on Fluxus.

“When I have exhibitions, I do not say I am a Fluxus artist, I say it  
is my work,” Mr. Williams said in an interview with Umbrella magazine  
in March 1998. “And that makes me very comfortable. And it’s nice to  
outlive descriptive titles like that.”

Emmett Williams was born in Greenville, N.C., and grew up in Newport  
News, Va. He joined the Army in 1943 and taught celestial navigation  
in Florida during World War II. He graduated from Kenyon College in  
1949. Mr. Williams went to Paris that same year for his honeymoon and  
decided to live in France and later Switzerland. He eventually  
settled in Darmstadt, where he worked as the features editor of Stars  
and Stripes, the United States military newspaper. After 14 years in  
the United States, Mr. Williams won a grant from the German Academic  
Exchange Service and in 1980 moved to Berlin, where he worked up  
until his death.

Mr. Williams taught at the California Institute of the Arts and Nova  
Scotia College of Art and Design. He has been an artistin residence  
at Harvard and the University of Kentucky. In addition to his wife,  
Mr. Williams is survived by his son Garry, of Halifax, Nova Scotia,  
from his marriage to Ms. Noël; and his children from a previous  
marriage, Eugene, of Honeydew, Calif., Laura, of Darmstadt, and  
Penelope, of Frankfurt, Germany.”