Guided by colours: Robert Roman speaks about Pascal Ulrich

Robert Roman (R) and Pascal Ulrich, Toulouse 2000

Artist and poet Pascal Ulrich was born in Strasbourg in 1964. He started writing poetry at the age of 16 and at 23 he created a small poetry magazine called Dada 64. When he was 25, after a suicide attempt and time spent in a psychiatric hospital, he was given a disability pension and was thereafter able to devote himself to writing and art. Having battled with depression and alcohol problems throughout his life, Ulrich committed suicide in 2009.

Robert Roman is a poet and artist who befriend Ulrich in 1994. After Ulrich’s death he published a biography of him, Pascal Ulrich –  The Lucid Dreamer,  plus several collections of Ulrich’s poems and drawings. In 2014 he formed  the BAKOU 98 association to preserve Ulrich’s work. He  also created a blog devoted to Ulrich’s poetry, art and life.

Painting 2005

When and how did you meet Pascal Ulrich? Had you been aware of his art or poetry before you met him?

Pascal Ulrich wrote me a first letter on June 16, 1994. I received it two days later, directly at my workplace. The letter came with a collage. In his letter, Pascal explained to me that he was contacting me following a request from Patrick Oustric, with whom he had been corresponding for several years. And it turns out that this Patrick Oustric, poet, and great lover of ancient letters, was one of my work colleagues! At that time I had not heard of Pascal Ulrich. I responded very quickly and that’s how our friendship began. We corresponded for fifteen years at the rate of at least one letter per week and we met eight times in Toulouse and once in Strasbourg.

Pascal’s art consisted of ink drawings, mail art, acrylic paintings, murals, and objects. Which did he prefer? I have seen only one or two collages of his – did collage not interest him?

His art has been guided above all by constant evolution and inspiration throughout his experiences and discoveries in his life as a man and as an artist. At first, it was just felt-tip pen drawings on simple sheets of paper or gouache paintings on Canson paper. Then in 1996, he started decorating his envelopes. His first attempts were clumsy because Pascal did not know how to draw. From 1997 his drawings with coloured markers became more beautiful and that is when he found his own style : shapes that snake around multiple heads. This is how his Postal Art began, which he then spread throughout the world.

Markers 2004

Pascal was interested in collage, but to my knowledge he practiced this art very little.

During the summer of 1998, with the multicultural workshop in the port of Kehl, on the French/German border, with a German metal sculptor, he discovered acrylic painting and, on this occasion, took the pseudonym Bakou.

But ultimately it was the technique of coloured felt-tip pens with which he felt truly comfortable. It prevailed through all of his work because Pascal had an innate sense for playing with colours, whether on envelopes or on sheets of different formats.

Pascal’s work could be classified as Art Brut. Did his consider his work as such, or did he not like his work being categorised?

Makers and coloured pencils 2002

Yes, I think that we can describe Pascal’s work as Art Brut Art even if he himself never formulated it that way. Pascal rejected many things : society, family, traditions, having children, celebrating Christmas or birthdays and even the constraints of art galleries. He refused to obey certain rules and therefore he did not appreciate being able to put a label on his back.

His art is figurative – it is always figures – not scenes or landscapes or still life. In that way his work reminds me of Gaston Chaissac – was he influenced by Chaissac at all?

Like Chaissac, Pascal was an autodidact. He had found his style on his own, even if Chaissac had been influenced by Picasso. I think that Pascal was not indifferent to the work of Chaissac, but he also loved Edvard Munch and Hans Arp, whose drawn shapes and colours can also be found in Pascal's drawings.

It seems Pascal did not give titles to his work – is that correct?

On several occasions Pascal gave a title to a drawing or painting, but he wrote the title directly on the work. He also sometimes did it on the envelopes he decorated. In general, though, it was more of a phrase or a sentence than a real title. But he rarely did this throughout his work.

Markers 2008

Pascal was also a very prolific poet. I believe Bukowski was a big influence. What other poets did he enjoy reading?

Pascal drew more than he wrote and perhaps his major fault as a poet was that he was satisfied with the first draft. In fact, Pascal rarely reworked his texts. He read a lot and Bukowski was in his library but he also appreciated Jules Mougin with whom he corresponded for some time, also Armand Olivennes, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Henri Michaux, Allen Ginsberg, Benjamin Péret, Baudelaire, etc.

Pascal was also a publisher, issuing small press books of his own work and others. I am interested in the small poetry journal he started in the late 1980s called Dada 64. Could you tell us something about his publications?

Indeed, in 1987, Pascal published Dada 64, a small poetry magazine, put together by himself and which ran for three issues. Inside, you can find his texts or drawings but also those of Marc Syren, Jacques Lucchesi, Gaston Criel, Marjan or Jacques Canut. Subsequently, with Dada 64 editions, he also published several poetry booklets.

Markers 2005

In 1991 he created Absurde Crépuscule and self-published three booklets.

In 1992, Pascal invented L’ours qui parle  (The Talking Bear), a simple sheet, single-sided, A4 format and photocopied, distributed by post and each time containing two or three poems of his own.

Markers 2006

In 1996 he reintroduced Absurde Crépuscule. This poetic entity was a publishing house until 1998, then a poetry magazine of the same name from 1997, which stopped after three issues.

Finally, at the beginning of 2008, he published Epitaphes, a series of 105 aphorisms and the final collection at Absurde Crépuscule.

Markers 2003

Pascal also loved music, ranging from classical to rock. He was a great lover of bands such as Soft Machine and musicians such as Nick Drake. In one of his final letters, to Bruno Sourdin, he chatted about Syd Barrett. Did he listen to music while he worked? Did he find it inspirational?

Pascal  was an insomniac. In the evening, while his partner slept, he listened to all kinds of music while writing letters or decorating envelopes. This could last most of the night, but he always got up quite early. Pascal had great sensitivity and the music he listened to for hours guided his hand on the paper.

Markers 2000

At one point Pascal was trying to create an arts centre, similar to Warhol’s Factory, but it collapsed. What happened? 

The multicultural workshop in the port of Kehl, in Germany, from July to December 1998, was a great artistic and human experience for Pascal, a great expectation but also a great disappointment. I never knew the end of the story but according to his letters of December 1998 and January 1999, his “associate”, the German metal sculptor, turned out to be a complete bastard. Pascal, being wholly uncompromising and libertarian, could not bear it and therefore immediately abandoned six months of work and hope.

Markers 2001

Pascal did manage to have a few exhibitions outside France – how did those come about?

Pascal exhibited in Cuba, Great Britain, Mexico, Germany, and Brazil, between 1996 and 1999. Apart from the Kehl exhibition in December 1998, where he was present, Pascal never visited the countries where he exhibited. In fact, I know very little about these exhibitions. Concerning the exhibition in Mexico in 1998, I think he was able to participate thanks to Ana, a Mexican violinist friend whom he had met in Strasbourg at the end of 1997 and who had to take some works with her in her suitcase. For the rest, I imagine that his epistolary relationships and the numerous contacts with foreign artists, authors and publishers made his participation in these exhibitions possible.

Pascal had an alcohol problem throughout his life. It started when he was a teenager and  towards the end of his short life he started drinking again, and could become violent when drunk. But how was he like when he was sober?

When I met Pascal for the first time in August 1997, he no longer drank a drop of alcohol following acute pancreatitis contracted in October of the previous year. We then saw each other eight times, and apart from his last visit in May 2008, which ended badly because he was drunk, I was lucky to only know him completely sober. So, most of the time I knew an intelligent, charming, calm, and generous man, curious about everything, mischievous and who had a lot of humour.

Mail art 2001

Since Pascal died, you have been trying to get art museums to take his work, but this has not been successful. Why are museums not interested in his work?

In 2014, I created the BAKOU 98 association whose goal is to make Pascal’s written and pictorial work known and continue. The association’s first action was to try to respect Pascal’s last wishes. Indeed, in his will, he wanted his drawings, paintings, and sculptures to be donated to the city of Strasbourg. Unfortunately, after months of procedures and discussions with the City Hall, they were  not willing to take the Ulrich archive. The reasons given by the cultural director were that it was impossible to follow up on our proposal given the orientations of the municipal collections and the numerous requests made to the city museums.

Mail art 2000

Following this first failure, the association contacted various museums presenting Art Brut. The first was La Collection de l’Art Brut de Lausanne in Switzerland, which very quickly declined our proposal, citing a restricted budget and a limitation of their reserve spaces, forcing them to be very selective regarding the acquisition of new pieces. Second failure.

Mail art 2001

Subsequently, La Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris informed me that it could not accept our donation because it did not have a collection (?). The Musée de la Création Franche in Bègles tells me that it will close its doors for work for at least four years. The Musée d’Art Brut de Montpellier told me that it is in demand from all sides and that due to lack of space it cannot consider the offers proposed to it. However, two years later, the museum accepted a donation of envelopes decorated by Pascal, which they would eventually present during a Postal Art exhibition. That’s it! Pascal Ulrich entered a museum through his Postal Art, but won't his envelopes stay at the bottom of a drawer ?

All the other museums contacted in France: La Fabuloserie in Dicy, the Musée Art et Déchirure in Rouen, the LAM near Lille, the Musée des Abattoirs in Toulouse and the MIAM in Sète, none of which responded to my emails and messages reminders.

Mail art 1999

You have published a few books of Pascal’s work posthumously. Could you tell us something about it, plus the biography of him that you published?

The first book that I published in my small poetry editions, five years after Pascal's death, was a 360-page colour book dedicated to the man, the poet, and the artist that he was. This biography was published in October 2014 and is entitled Pascal Ulrich – The Lucid Dreamer. We can follow his entire journey from his birth to his death and beyond. The book is embellished with numerous poems, letters, photos, drawings, and paintings, as well as testimonies from people who knew him.

Mail art 1997

Five other books were then published between 2015 and 2022. The first four were collections of poems and aphorisms written by Pascal in 1992, 1995, 1996, 2006 and 2007, in which  urgency, dazzlement, despair, revolt and death coexist, but also passion and love.

The latest collection contains only a series of black and white drawings executed with a felt-tip pen in 2004.

I am a frozen shadow

whose charm is in the fruit

of the melancholy twilight

*

Hello, what a pleasure

Goodbye, what a relief

Farewell, what a fatality

Pascal Ulrich, 1964―2009

Pascal Ulrich in Toulouse, 2005

This interview was first published in The Odd Magazine, in English and French.

Paul Warren: You’re absorbing the images through mass media, so how can they not filter into your work?

Paul Warren is an artist and illustrator with an interest in surrealism and abstract art. He works in a variety of different mediums, including collage. Paul's work has been published by Dumpster Fire Press, The Odd Magazine and Word Vomit Zine.  He has online galleries at Deviant Art and Instagram. He lives in Daventry, England.

You live in the town of Daventry, Northamptonshire, in England. What is the art scene like in England these days? What is the support for visual art? Is there a fair bit of regionalism?

I think the art scene in England is pretty staid these days. It only exist in most people’s lives when Banksy sprays something on a wall somewhere.  All of the big exhibitions are London-based, with a corporate sponsor. From time to time something interesting will pop up in an independent gallery away from the capital. I usually find out about these after the event. National media focus only on the big exhibitions: Monet or Hockney, for example. Living here these things easily pass you by! So yes, I think there is some regionalism. There have been attempts to revive the Art Lab idea in some areas, including Northampton. There are people creating art locally but few opportunities.

Thankfully I have a day job. I would never make a living out of art, wouldn’t want to, it’s far too precarious. I also have the freedom to produce what I want.

When did you first start making art? What artists inspired you when you started out, and what artists inspire you now?

I started making art as a child, drawing mainly. I do remember being obsessed with the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album artwork. I spent virtually an entire school holiday producing Sgt Pepper-inspired drawings and paintings. It was the colour that amazed me. This was the late 70s, early 80s, in Northamptonshire ‒ there didn’t seem to be a lot of colour about then ! At about this time my eyes were opened to abstract art. The art teacher at my high school, I’d have been about 14 , sent me into a storeroom to collect some paintbrushes. On the wall there was a print of ‘Cossacks’ by Kandinsky. That blew me away. I didn’t know art could be like that. The most modern thing I’d seen up until then was a print of Seurat’s ‘Bathers at Asniéres’.

The Catch

My intention upon leaving school was to study art, but this didn’t work out and I became disillusioned with art and stopped painting and drawing as I didn’t see the point.

When I was about 19, though, I discovered a copy of Patrick Waldberg’s Surrealism. This had a massive impact on me. This led to discovering Dalí. Dalí was to me, then, the greatest artist ever. I couldn’t get enough of his work.

I started painting surreal landscapes featuring faceless ballerinas, elongated tables, jugglers on stilts, human faces buried in walls, mannequins and of course cypress trees.

This led to me collecting anything I could find on Surrealism. I was also taking an interest in Futurism and Impressionism at that time.

Another chance discovery was Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. I couldn’t believe that book, staggering, full of these images that just threw themselves at you, written by someone who seemingly didn’t care. Major influence. Forty or fifty books in and he’s still having the same impact.  The cut-ups were a revelation. He was a genius with that. There is a richness and beauty to the prose that a lot of people just don’t get.

Through Burroughs I came to the work of Brion Gysin. Incredible talent and who’s heard of him, compared with Burroughs? Very few people.

Another artist whose work means a lot to me is Emmy Bridgwater, the British surrealist. She didn’t produce a huge amount of work but what she did produce was mesmerising. Her painting ‘Night work is about to commence’ is astounding.

Innocence Lost

An artist whom I’ve returned to recently is Stanley Donwood, best known for his work with Radiohead. The work he produced with Thom Yorke in the early 2000s is very inspiring.  It has a questioning, almost anarchic, edge to it. Very powerful work.

I’ve always been influenced by writers. A passage from a book or a lyric from a song often triggers something. Lately this has become more apparent.  For instance I’ve been collaborating with the writer Stephen Michael Whitter, producing the artwork for a new edition of his book Tales Deceptively Honest. The artwork combines images of mainly derelict buildings with Stephen’s text, incorporating drawings, collage and digital artwork.

The book is due to be published by Dumpster Fire Press in November.

And of course I’ve made a couple of pieces based on your work. One of these, ‘Each step backward erases each step taken’, was interesting as it led me on to do a small series of astronaut-based pictures. One of them, ‘Astronaut on a deserted Street’, was used by Ryan Quinn Flanagan for the cover of his recent book Fowler’s Revenge.

I produced a series of paintings heavily influenced by this period under a pseudonym The Watchman. I’d read the Djuna Barnes novel Nightwood and I got the name from the ‘Watchman, what of the night ?’ section of the book. The British surrealist artist Conroy Maddox also used that title for one of his most famous collages, which I later discovered.

The Watchman artwork had titles like ‘Mannequin Genocide’, ‘The Last museum’, ‘The Great Illusion’, ‘Radio Nudes’, ‘The Forgotten season’, and ‘Blood sports in the morning’. The choice of title was very important to me at that time.

You tend to work in collage, but what other mediums do you use? What is your approach to making art?

I am working mainly in collage at the moment, both hand cut and digital. It’s a time-constraint thing as well. For the work I’m producing at the moment collage is the only way to get these ideas out. It’s also allowing me to incorporate text into the artwork, something I’d been trying to do for years.

The purpose of luxury

I have a technique for layering the collages, which combines hand cutting and digital montage, which seems to work well.

I prefer to paint if I have the time. I use acrylic, watercolour, oil, as well as pastels and pencils. When I paint I use very traditional techniques. The ideas tend to come quick, so I tend to work quite fast. I rarely work from sketches, so what you see is, generally, the first idea put down. Not ideal, but I can’t do it any other way.

Some of your artworks comment on political issues, such as the invasion of Ukraine, or on UK politics. What do you see as the role of the artist in today’s society?

This is a fairly recent thing for me. I was appalled by the Ukraine war and initially produced an image of Putin with a clowns nose and hair, with something offensive written across his forehead in Russian. A few people liked this, so I had it made into a T-shirt design and tried to sell it through an online site. The intention was that anything I made would be donated to the Ukraine appeal. I sold a handful of these, then the site took them down. They were inappropriate, apparently.

Rouge

I posted about this on my Facebook page and Mike Zone, who is the editor for Dumpster Fire Press, got in touch. He’d brought one of these T-shirts and was shocked by the site’s action.

He was in the process of putting together a new anthology titled World on Fire and offered to use my Putin artwork. This opened the floodgates for me and I sent Mike god knows how much Putin/Ukraine/anti-monarchy/anti-capitalist artwork.

Most of which appears in the book. The book later became World on Fire: Propagandie ,with proceeds going to the Ukraine appeal. So, a big thanks to Mike for that.

I would hope that any artist is touched by world events such as the war in Ukraine. From my point of view, you’re absorbing the images through mass media, so how can they not filter into your work?

The big figures from the years of punk have either passed on or have gone very quiet. Do you think punk it still relevant today, if not more relevant than ever?

Yes, I think it is still relevant. The ability to shock has largely gone, owing to the fact the world moves on and we’ve seen it all before. But the punk attitude and aesthetic lives on. The music is very relevant, particularly in Britain at the moment. There is a Liverpool-based poetry zine called Word Vomit, which carries on the punk aesthetic. Kate Floss who runs it has been kind enough to accept some of my text-based work. It’s DIY publishing ‒ I love that sort of thing.

Unncessary Atrocities

They do a lot of open-mic nights too. It’s the punk thing of just getting out there and doing it.

The punk aesthetic is something that I looked to last summer, for a series of alternative Queen’s Jubilee ‘stamp’ designs. These were based on a portrait of the Queen, satirical in nature and incorporated cut-up text made from media coverage, song lyrics and TS Eliot, as well as a bit of social comment on my part!

Jamie Reid was the big influence for the idea. Also David King, who did a lot of the artwork for Crass.

I was impressed with your series about the murdered actress Sharon Tate. In a way it reminded me of Warhol’s Monroe portraits, as well as his Death and Disaster series. Was Warhol in any way an influence?

They do share some similarities, not intended though. I’ve been looking at a lot of Eastern European collage and photomontage, notably the Polish artist Janusz Maria Brzeski and his ‘Birth of a Robot’ series. I didn’t realise until I started researching Sharon Tate how iconic her image could be. I say ‘could be’, as it’s been overshadowed by Manson. He took that from her. The series was intended to redress that , to take back her image. There were meant to be 10 or 12 images in the series, but it’s spiralled a bit and at the last count I had 45 pieces.

What is your opinion of outsider art? I admire outsider art tremendously, but I can’t help but feel it is becoming a sort of style.

It’s becoming big business. The Tate had a big outsider art exhibition a while back. Scottie Wilson,  the surrealist, is a good example of an outsider being brought into the mainstream, setting him up with an exhibition in a gallery and while the show was going on he was selling his artwork outside a pub around the corner for the price of a pint! Wilson had been selling his art from the back of a van before that.

Roland Penrose tried to bring him into the surrealist fold, but Wilson was treading his own path. That’s often the case with outsider art ‒ by its nature it’s different, often idiosyncratic, and generally has little commercial appeal, well, at least at the time it’s being produced.

Awkward Continents

I believe you are working with Mike Zone on a collaborative novel. Can you tell us a bit about this?

Yes, it’s to be called Dead Star: Control.  The initial inspiration was the Sharon Tate artwork we discussed earlier.  Obviously I can’t say too much at this point about the plot except that it’s a Burroughsian /Philip K Dick sci-fi thing that explores a lot of the themes surrounding the Tate murder. Mk Ultra, conspiracy theories, that sort of thing. Some of the Tate artwork will be in the book. It’s interesting, as when this idea developed, the artwork was influenced by the plot and vice versa. That’s what I find exciting ‒ the role chance plays in the process. Having a loose idea and just seeing where it leads.

Dead Star should see the light of day later this year or 2024.

We’ve collaborated before on Mike’s chapbook Fuck You: A Fucking Poetry Chap. That was great fun. The illustrations weaved around Mike’s text. It seemed to work quite well.

I also provided the Cover artwork for Mike’s latest book, Wonderful Turbulence.

Another book project that I worked on was a collaboration with both Mike and the poet Shannon Lynette, titled Razorville.

It was really interesting to see how the words and images ‘collided’ as the book developed: text influencing artwork, artwork influencing text.

Razorville was published earlier this year by Dumpster Fire Press.

Milk and Honey

What do you see as the future of art in England?

Interesting question. I’m not seeing anything inspiring coming out of the mainstream art world. The problem is it’s all about sales and profit. Everything I see that is inspiring, a little bit different, is online. There are a lot of people like myself who need to create art ‒ it’s about searching for something different. I don’t really take an interest in contemporary art anymore. Everything is too commercial, too safe, too nice.

Where’s the fun in that?

This interview originally appeared in The Odd Magazine.

Armando Fragale: Completely autonomous

Armando Fragale is a multifaceted artist born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1985. He is a painter, illustrator, filmmaker, actor, musician, writer, poet, designer, and producer who works in various mediums. He developed the artistic technique called Drivage and founded the art movement Openism. He has shown his work all over the world and has also collaborated with a wide array of artists in various art forms. Notable exhibitions he has been involved in have been Cosmic Unity: Occult Art and Music in Latin America in New York, International Surrealism Exhibition in Cairo/Saint-Cirq-Lapopie and The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus: The Liminal and the Marvellous, in Dublin. He also runs a record label Wraith Productions, which he started in 2005.

DH: I believe you were already drawing when you were a child. Do you remember when you first started? Have you had any formal art training?

AF: It all came about so early on as a child, and it all started with drawing from the moment I picked up a pencil. I’ve had formal art training at university, but I chose my own path in all of this with what I do, so I consider myself a self-taught artist.

Astral Connection, 2013

You have a strong interest in pre-Colombian art, but I have also detected a similarity of imagery in your work to that of Voodoo glyphs. Do you feel an affinity with the idea of the artist as shaman?

These all come through in the imagery as an atavistic channel in my work, it gets pulled in from that state and is manifested. I have a real interest in the cultures you mention, including ancient Egypt, ancient Sumer, and so many other civilizations. I knew from day one that the artist works as a shaman.

Surrealism also seems to be an influence in your work, but more Mexican surrealism than European – particularly Leonora Carrington. Why does her work appeal to you?

I’ve been very much fond of Mexican Surrealism but it all started for me in the beginning with my introduction to European surrealism mostly, artists and visionary thinkers such as André Breton and Philippe Soupault, as well as Eileen Agar and Meret Oppenheim. Since the day I discovered her work, Leonora has been an inspiration to me. I constantly felt the energy transcending through her work and it magnetized me. This is something I also experienced at an early age when meeting Eartha Kitt.

Beyond the veil, 2020

Do you get inspiration from the natural world – such as rock or tree formations?

I especially find inspiration through the frequencies in the natural world. And my belief is it all works together, is interconnected whether it is a rock, a tree, a spring, the formations gathered, a complete morphology and it plays into the world of my work.

What medium do you generally work in? Your work tends to be either black and white, or coloured acrylics on black cardboard. What is your process when making art?

To manifest, I utilize anything and everything at the fingertips. It can be a pencil on canvas or paint on glass, I have free rein in the sense of what route I will take with the work. The black and white drawings were earlier incarnations that spanned through my whole career. The coloured acrylics on black cardboard are sort of a series of works called The Black Period. My process is completely autonomous. I am in a channelled state when I work and what is meant to come through will and gets manifested. It all gets pulled from an atavistic point and is alchemically aligned and by how that will be orchestrated to the voyeur.

You said you created a movement called Openism – please tell us about this.

Openism is based on the creative process and by how we manifest art through the mind and the spirit, how to keep everything open in every function of the creative processes and to have no limits or restraints on the one who the creator of that vision, it is totally a boundless way to create. And essentially, to never have a beautifully dreamed-up vision to be tainted by any means. 

Expanse of the amalgam, 2021

A good reference would be to think of Surrealism and how the Surrealists embraced the subconscious, how it was very free and open in the creational aspects for all the artists involved and how it opened doors and new views. One thought that always stuck with me was that Man Ray wanted to see artists take Surrealism but not follow it, but to understand it and opened new doors to take it further. I found that most inspirational and I believe he was right, we need more of these doors to open up in the arts and to take it to new heights. I also developed an artistic technique called Drivage, which is to create a work of art while the human body is in motion. To get a visual picture of its under-workings, think of someone attached to a car while they are holding a canvas and a paintbrush, wet with red paint, directly touching the canvas, as they move in motion with the force of the vehicle ‒ that is the magic of Drivage.

You also have a deep interest in experimental cinema, with filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren. But you also like off-beat horror movies, such as those by Mexican film maker Juan López Moctezuma. Is it the magical or surrealist aspect of such movies that appeal to you? Have you yourself made films?

For me these artists were paving the way and creating very rich works of cinema, very realistic because they did what they purely wanted and didn’t follow anything else. They will forever inspire everyone who takes an interest in film or wants to be a filmmaker or even an artist in a general sense.

Still from the short from, 'Time', 2018

 For me both the magical and the surrealist aspects call me to those filmmakers and their works. I have made films, mostly shorts, I have a new short film in editing at the moment called Veiled Vision, which is based in shadows and features the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. There is also a feature film I am working on, based on a series of dreams I had and visions that came to me.

You also have a music production business – is this your ‘bread and butter’? For how long have you had the business and what kind of music do you produce?

I have been working in the music industry for over a decade now as one of my main gigs, so to say, yes, but it’s always been my passion and love, like cinema and art. I also run my own record label, Wraith Productions, which has seen a wide array of eclectic artists, and I’ve produced and collaborated with all these artists as well. Producing bands and also playing in them throughout the years has been a very fun and rewarding experience. Most of the music ranges from metal to rock to electronic and even hip-hop, and now I am dabbling in original motion picture soundtrack projects and have been working closely with an amazing Argentinian band called Farmacia.

You participated in an exhibition recently that was organised by The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus, called The Luminal and the Marvellous. There were some big names in that exhibition, such as Carrington, Toyen, Friedrich Schröder Sonnenstern and that curious occult artist, Austin Osman Spare. What was the response to the exhibition?

The response to that show was absolutely incredible! It’s monumental every time Dolorosa de la Cruz envisions and does one of them with The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus. I was truly honoured to be a part of it this year. One of the best exhibitions you’ll ever see not only for the esoteric or dark arts but for art’s sake as a whole.

The igneous one, 2021

Where do you see your work fitting in with contemporary US art as whole, or is it something you never think about?

I follow my own path in what I do, and it fits as it already is, it is never something that crosses my mind. What I do appreciate about the contemporary art realm as a whole is that it is so vast and wide open to the voyeur, you’ll find all kinds of art and artists that lie within it, and I’m referring to worldwide, not just in the US. My work is there for all the masses to experience.

What projects are you busy with at the moment?

My feature film is the largest project I am currently undertaking. I am also going to return to my Mirror and Astral series in a new way, I’m still exploring the realms of the Black Period as it goes. I have exhibitions of my works and screenings of my films planned throughout 2023. I am also working on a book collaboration with the artist Giorgia Pavlidou, so keep an eye out for that one. 

The voyeur, 2015

There’s been some meshing of worlds in the form of collaborations I’ve been doing over the last few years with other artists in painting and drawing, some of these will get published. One of the first notable ones is with the artist Brian Lucas, and I will be doing many more of these collaborations. I’ve been writing a concept on Surrealists for the modern day that entails the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Fernando Arrabal, Pedro Freideberg, Kenneth Anger, Aube Elléouët Breton, Penelope Rosemont, Françoise Gilot, among others, the next stage would be to make it a documentary feature film at some point. 

The multifaceted artist P. Emerson Williams and I will be collaborating on some things in music and film, first will come the music projects and then he will be acting in my feature film, he is a visionary and I am looking forward to working closely with him. I’ve also been designing clothes and will soon launch my fashion clothing line which will feature my work.

I'm working on the first volume of a series of books called ATOM. It will be a monumental literary project once it's completed. It will feature creative minds of all forms within. It will truly be the first of its kind. There is also a project I am working on with the amazing artist jennifer jazz, who was a sister to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Finally, a book of my writings will be published soon. 

This interview originally appeared in The Odd Magazine 24. 

Richard Fox: Engaging with language

Richard Fox was born in Cape Town in 1975. He lives in Johannesburg and runs the T-shirt company T-Shirt Terrorist. His first collection of poems, 876, was published in 2007, and his second collection, otherwise you well?, was published by deep south in 2021. He has had poems published in journals such as New Coin, Ons Klyntji, Carapace and donga, and in the anthologies it all begins and glass jars among trees.

otherwise you well? is your second collection. Your first, 876, came out in 2007. I remember you had stopped writing for a while, and it was around 2013 that you started up again. Was there any reason for that period of silence?

I did take a hiatus; I think it was around 2002 though, and it lasted until 2006/2007, just before the release of 876. This was a difficult period for me. I was ‘going through changes’. The poetry in 876 was written between 1997 and 2001, most of that body in the last six months of 2001. This was the year I cancelled my corporate subscription with the world – I resigned from my job and holed out in a garden cottage at the back on my parent’s property, stayed up late, did all kinds of weird stuff, and wrote.

And after that, 2002, the real world kind of caught up with me, and I got a new job, albeit in a calmer, more creatively sustaining environment – a bookshop. I moved in with my future wife, and things took me away from writing for a while. Being away from writing, I felt I couldn’t rightly publish 876, so I backburned that project. Creatively I went through something of a transformation, and it was a painful process; one I both embraced and fought against – I founded the online T-shirt company, T-Shirt Terrorist, which was later to become my full-time profession and focal creative outlet, but I kept hacking away at poetry, none of it really working, until somehow, in 2007, something in me calmed or shifted, and I found I was able to balance my focus between T-shirt design and poetry.

It was strange, both processes come from the same core, it seems, and I had to complete the build of the new form before being able to return to the previous, but once done I was then able to access both with the required intensity to produce decent work.

I don’t see any major change in the poetry contained in the two volumes – do you feel it has been a continuous flow? With 876, you dropped your first name, but with your new collection you have used it.

I build pieces around voice, and perhaps, despite the break in linear continuity between the two volumes, I’m still looking to address similar issues. I look within and without, and my voice is contemplative. I’m concerned on an emotional level with the poetic, artistic identity that forms around an expressive voice, constructing a cohesive simulacrum, a seeker of profundities, or even absurdities, but never generalisations. I want to know more about the person who writes. I don’t know entirely who that is yet. I think the person who writes creates himself anew with each word placed in arrangement, in collusion or in opposition to other words in the vicinity. So internally, poetry is a search for truth. Externally, poetry is a perhaps a search for beauty, and in opposition to that, in tension to that, is the world in which we live where beauty is often hard to find. I think I may take issue with our modern predicament, on this level, modes and modules of society that stand in the way of us achieving beauty. And by beauty I don’t mean a physical beauty, I’m referring to an outcome of consciousness – a desire to make sense and understand the reality we find ourselves immersed within, purposefully. I like the notion of Truth and Beauty as poetic absolutes and writing as a means of uncovering varied ways towards them. A philosophical hole that I am digging myself into, no doubt.

When I wrote 876 I was performing regularly, and I had a stage persona – Fox, which was whittled down from my full name, which is Richard Foxcroft. I also enjoyed the way the title and name thus became patterned and entwined. When I published my earlier work, I dropped the ‘croft’ to create a simple pseudonym – Richard Fox, which I have since kept. It has a nice ring to it, and hankers back to my performance days, my summer years, as it were.

I remember seeing you at a few poetry performances, and you performed at the Grahamstown Arts Festival on occasions. Did you start writing poetry with a view to ‘stage’ as opposed to ‘page’ poetry? Has your view on poetry performance changed since then?

Performance has always been core to my work – spoken word as focal intent, and yet my poetic voice only really works, comes alive, when the work presents itself accurately on the page at first, a written recipe. There is a very definite balance here. A performative piece needs to be perfectly presented on the page. I don’t simply string words together all over the place because they sound good in front of the mic, they sound good in front of the mic because the effort has been made to structure them on the page, so there’s that, that dualism as it were. I’m not sure how I feel about performance currently. I did some slam work, toured some fests and in Newtown, inner-city Johannesburg, I hooked up with some young poets and hip-hop artists, rap artists, and enjoyed the experience, and then I moved on. Now, I’m rusty, and I seldom hit the lights and when I do, I am reminded of how age creeps in from the shadows, how you slow over time, how your work becomes calmer perhaps, less intent to roar and shake the foundations. My performance was based soundly on how, when the poem is written as perfectly as you can manage it, the words come easily in front of the mic, and that is still the case, where I have recorded recent work for otherwise you well?. The best poems are easily vocalised because the voice is sure and true, but I don’t think I’ll be performing much moving forward – too much on my plate currently, but this is still how I write, as if I am addressing people, personally and collectively.

Your approach to language – written language – can be quite idiosyncratic: playing on words or joining words together, using title case in places where one would expect sentence case. It is as if your approach to language is irreverent – an assault on language?

There is an element of contention in my work often – a dynamic that comes from working with language to create novel forms. I don’t think too much about it when I write, but language, the physical presentation of words on a page, can be very patterned and I see relationships on a number of different levels, from the way stanzas arrange in relation to themselves, the poem as a single element on a page or across pages, down to the arrangement of letters in certain words, and those arrangements, across lines and linkages, between certain words in different parts of the poem. While I am using voice to construct meaning, I feel that I am using language in a physical construction to create concrete pieces, and when a poem ’works’ for me, when it comes together, and you know intrinsically that it has and that it does, that is when both the meaning and the physical construction of a poem align. I don’t set out to achieve this, but the outcomes work on numerous levels, where a poem, to go back to performance, hits a certain level of competency because of a series of interchangeable elements, which when correctly stacked effect a complete piece. Still, there is something to irreverence, isn’t there? To conduct your craft in a slightly different manner, and make the words perform in ways that aren’t expected of them. When you get it right, it looks good, feels good. It’s an instinctive drive, process, that creates poetry for me, and I enjoy working with language. Over the years this has developed in a certain way, I wouldn’t necessarily call it formulaic, but you set out from familiar ground as you seek to encounter new places in your work, with your craft, your art. Messing with words is a starting point for me, and when they mess back, well, that’s communion, isn’t it? That’s how we engage with language and evolve as writers, artists.

For the virtual launch of otherwise you well? you had organised two videos of you reading your poetry – is this a new way of presenting your poetry, and do you intend to explore video presentation further?

I wish to explore different mediums; in the same way I have explored T-shirt design as an expression of my creative drive. The video performance was a way in which I could use the performance aspect of my work to present sections of the book. And it was fun. I hadn’t recorded before, not purposefully, professionally, besides the odd video camera set-up at readings. I hired a production company, and we went to Fordsburg, downtown Johannesburg, this aging building refurbished as studios for artists and creatives, with a chicken rotisserie on the ground floor, and I performed a few of the pieces from the book. Then we went out on the streets and took long shots and footage of people and the general urban activity on a Sunday afternoon. Pigeons. I’m hoping to get a decent 15-minute film from the project, we’ll have to see, but yes, I would like to do this again. I am also exploring vocal recordings with several artists, musicians. I feel there may be a more pronounced spoken word angle somewhere and it might be the right time to see where this may take me.

In 876 there is a long poem about a train journey, and in your new collection there is a long poem about a road trip. Is travel – journeying, or movement, perhaps energy force – a focus? Are you concerned with the movement of language – of poetic language – itself?

When we move outside of our element, our comfort zones, it excites and activates a certain response in ourselves. I’d not want to think I am alone in this. When I travel my poet piques and I am willingly if not always easily inspired to write about my experiences. The energy here is change energy, isn’t it? Transformative, in the literate sense. Poetry comes from experience and what better way than to experience the world. It’s one thing to contemplate endlessly in a closed room late at night, in front of your PC, all the regular arrangements in place, but this can only take you so far. At some stage you’re going to have to feed the beast and what better way to do it than through travel. For me, even the simple notion of seeing different places, different settings, not to mention the interpersonal experiences, cross-cultural exposures, sets off a reaction and I can feel poetry coming on. So, I take notes, mentally, mostly. Of this, and of that. Feelings. And then I sit down, once I have returned, let it juice then, when the time is right, let it flow. If it does it’s beautiful, that search for beauty in extremity, so my travel pieces are sometimes longer than my other pieces. Epics? Not quite, but certainly different to my other work.

Several of your poems deal with sustainability issues around the environment, our dependence on technology, corporate capitalism and the obsession with status These issues are global, but at the same time your poetry is deeply rooted in  the South African experience.

There is an element to my work which transcends the local. An attempt at achieving an expression sounded in the collective unconscious, the prevailing Zeitgeist. I don’t always get here, I often fall very short, and such pieces come across as pretentious (I won’t publish these) but to hit on a nerve that jolts people, across spatial and geographic divides, as poets we’re speaking on issues that affect all of us, or none of us, surely. In this regard you wish to take your work to a level where it reflects the spirit and the transactions of the age. How you do this is up to the individual artist. It’s often best to keep it simple, root your voice in the immediate and the local, but if you want you can also ideate and fixate on real global concerns, or the metaphysical and transcendent. I like to concentrate on some of the issues we’re facing collectively as a society, because they mean something to me, personally. I take an interest, as a poet. I feel I can do something, something real and meaningful, even if it is only to highlight and expose the problems we’re facing as we evolve as an industrial civilisation.  

Do you think that poetry – or a poet – can change things? Can poetry change the world? Are poets unacknowledged legislators of the world, as Shelley thought?

Yes. But it’s complicated. And dangerous ‒ for the mind and the soul. You create the world, if not only in the constant of your image, then too through the collection and culmination of thoughts that spring from, grow and govern your consciousness, your single universal expression. Poets are often overlooked, we’re regarded as archaic, relegated to the side lines of commercial enterprise. With poetry I seldom write, I often create, and I feel that that creation moves out in waves, dynamic ripples that are not bound in linear motion and do not abide by temporal and spatial rules. But it is a slippery slope. Once you convince yourself of the power of your own metaphysical incantations, your magnanimous import, suzerain of all you behold, there is nothing that you cannot achieve, and nothing that you can. Your reality becomes guided by nuance, confluence and mounting synchronicity, the face of God in the clouds. Reality will bend to your will, but it will bounce back somewhere else, for someone else. What do we know of any of these things, really? I would advise caution, argue for temperance and balance, in all things poetic, as with all pursuits both intellectual and physical.

What is your opinion of South African poetry at the moment? Do you think we have enough publication outlets Do we have enough readers in South Africa?

There is no market for poetry in South Africa and this is reflected in the limited outlets for young and established poets to seek recognition and an audience for their work. Perhaps this is an outcome of education or policy, or an indication of wider issues. Either way, as a poet, when you publish in South Africa you realise that very few people will interact with your work on a local level. That is a bit disheartening, but you do it for other reasons too, if not only the poetry itself then for yourself; sometimes the sheer compulsion of it all. I applaud those individuals and institutions that still cater to and advance poetry in our society and I’m cautiously optimistic that the situation will maintain its present trajectory, and hopefully expand in the future, although it is likely to remain limited and niche.

 Richard Fox’s book, otherwise you well?, is available from Deep South via their distributor Blue Weaver in Southern Africa, and international distributor African Books Collective in all countries. The book can also be purchased or ordered in South Africa from all bookstores that sell poetry. An ebook version is available from African Books Collective.

This interview first appeared in The Odd Magazine 23.