Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Why is Carl Jung dancing in the Streets of Death? Because one of his favorites among the living--artist James Magee, the creator of the colossal desert stonework, The Hill, and "the alleged" anima incarnate of the mysterious artist Annabel Livermore--has concocted this brew of poems and letters from the lands of Ordinary and Surreal. The poems flutter like butterflies from his imagination as he creates large steel assemblages. Weirdly, "Letters to Goya" are found pieces from 1955, from the rickety typewriter of the Duchess of Alba, who in (sur)real life is an old lady who wheel-chairs around the Waikiki Trailer Park in Sweetwater, Texas. Are the letters real? Well, yes. And no
Tonight a cold rain falls in Tucson.
Under an overpass I see you standing stark-naked,
Juan,
headlights streaming by,
you toweling off with a wing of a blue and yellow bird
found moments ago near a storm sewer,
as if water were confessing of white tile,
a room without walls, really
where earlier you had imagined yourself as a bearded ancient,
a Mesopotamian Lord kneeling down in the wet grass near the freeway
to sing to an open field.
James Magee and his partner, actress Camilla Carr, live in El Paso, Texas, in the home of Annabel Livermore.
Kerry Doyle is the Director and Curator of the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts (University of Texas at El Paso), and a widely published scholar and respected curator of Latin-American and United States/Mexico Border arts.
Synopsis
Internationally acclaimed artist James Magee (alleged doppelganger of equally acclaimed artist Annabel Livermore) reinvents himself one more time as poet.
This book presents two bodies of writing by James Magee. The first is Letters to Goya, a collection of twenty-three typo-filled letters written on a manual typewriter from the Waikiki Trailer Park in Sweetwater, Texas. Turning the book around, you will find a second collection, a selected compilation of titles from Jim's artwork, representing decades of both writing and performance by the artist and his multiple selves. Reading this book is not unlike the act of trying to understand Jim's life. It requires twisting, turning, reorienting. You can enter at any point and find the story changing and growing as Jim plays conductor to a symphony of voices familiar and strange. -- from the Middleword by Kerry Doyle
The first section of this utterly unique book of art, poetry, and poetic prose is made up of letters are written by a woman referred to as The Duchess, from a trailer park in a small town in Texas, to her lover the 19th-Century artist Francisco Goya. As surreal as the premise of the letters is, the letters themselves are simply the funny, poignant, and introspective thoughts of a lonely woman growing old. The Duchess shares wise and insightful thoughts like, I think clarity is a matter of grace, like strength, given forth from the earth from which you were born, along with mundane stories from her world with a touch of humor, like: Anyway, to get to the point, Henry is dying and wants to be cremated and he asked Mary to climb up the Big Spring water tower to spread his a-shes sic] over the city at sunset...Henry, whether he was dying or not, was out of line, what with Mary8s arthritus sic] and the prospect of her trying to climb to the top of the water tower at dusk.
The second section features poems which title some of the metal sculptures Jim has made over the past several decades, accompanied by photographs of some of these impressive sculptures. Though told from a wide array of perspectives, the poems are connected to the letters of The Duchess by a Both sections are tied together by a sense of awe and a deep longing for connection. Through whatever medium he chooses, James Magee's work is always beautifully unusual to experience. Magee has previously explored architectural stonework with The Hill, scrap metal sculpture, and painting (through his alter ego, Annabel Livermore).