WILLIAM RAND
&
His Business With Rene Ricard
among other things__
RENE | WILLIAM RAND | NEW YORK DIARIES
Excerpt from Essay by Raymond Foye
~Writer, Editor, Curator, Publisher
Rene Ricard was one of those outrageous bohemian figures who had lived live on the edge every single day — like Gregory Corso or Harry Smith. Nobody can tell the future, but I don’t think figures like that are going to come our way again, I’m not sure why, and I hope I am wrong, but it’s just a feeling I have. People were different back then, I think it had to do with the way they were brought up and the things they saw happening in the world, whether it was the atomic bomb, the beat era of the 1950s or the counter culture revolution of the 1960s. These were one time events never to be repeated. Even at the time I was aware how unique so many of these characters were, like Rene Ricard, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg. For me they were truly gods who walked the earth.
I think the method that William Rand used to document these events was brilliant: just write a few lines down on a sheet of paper and throw it into a shoe box. I think something people don’t always realize is, if you do a little every day, years later it adds up to a lot. The poet James Schuyler once said to me:” The important thing about keeping a diary is not to get upset if you miss a day or a week or even a month. It’s only when you start missing entire years that you should begin to be concerned.”
What I love about this diary is while it focuses on Rene, it gives the reader all sorts of details about the New York downtown scene: The restaurants and bars, the transvestite clubs, gallery openings, passersby and random street crime, etc. There’s also a marvelous cast of supporting characters: Taylor Mead, Dame Margo Howard-Howard, Andy Warhol…
William Rand came to Sag Harbor and visited with Eric Fischl and myself, at The American Hotel.
PETER FRANK | THE TILES OF BABYLON | WILLIAM RAND
HE MADE HIS MARK IN NEW YORK AS A PAINTER OF BLACK-AND-WHITE
FORMS AND FIGURES – PAINTERLY, TO BE SURE, BUT SHADOWY AND ELUSIVE,
SEPULCHRAL AND CREPUSCULAR, NO MATTER HOW GLORIOUS OR GRIM THE SUBJECT.
AS THE LATE RENÉ RICARD WROTE OF RAND’S WORK —
“…THIS OEUVRE IS A MEDITATION ON DARKNESS, A PAINTING IN THE SHADE.”
Such unstinting allegiance to the tonality of soot stems from a meeting late in the 1970s, while still an art student at the Portland (ME) School of Art, with Fluxus artist Albert M. Fine. Fine took one look at Rand’s painting and advised he stanch his palette and work only in black and white. This was the first of many “covert Fluxus lessons,” as Rand brands them, from the eccentric intermedialist who became mentor to the young artist as he entered the New York art world. In fact, Fluxus, originally coincident with Pop, provided many in Rand’s generation with alternate ways of responding to the image-glut around them.
The preoccupation of Fluxus with mediated images, both as signs and as objects, permitted Rand and his contemporaries to grasp images as, potentially, agents in and of themselves – that the meaning of pictures is the responsibility not only of the artists who make (or, more to the point, find) them but the audiences that see them. Artistic authority is a matter of presentation at least as much as it is invention; how (two- and three-dimensional) images appropriated from vastly diverse sources are understood depends on a range of factors operating between artist and viewer. The artwork takes place in that range, making the viewer complicit in the work of art, according to Fluxus forerunner Marcel Duchamp.