The first of these reviews, John Yau's The Wild Children of William Blake, brings together a series of essays, articles and reviews, most from the past decade but with a few stretching back much further into the 1980s. Yau is a poet and critic who lives in New York City, whose collections of poetry include Forbidden Entries (1996) and Further Adventures in Monochrome (2012). Wild Children was published at the end of 2017 and comprises a series of pieces on the role of art, with articles that originally appeared mostly in Hyperallergic Weekend, which he co-edits as art critic.
The title of the book is taken from the final essay in the collection, a review of Raymond Foye's Dark Star: Abstraction and Cosmos that was published in Hyperallergic Weekend in 2016. Foye had brought brought together eight artists - some historical, such as Jordan Belson and Harry Smith - others contemporaries working in a variety of media. The link between them all was a re-examination of "non-objectivism" through the media of mysticism, psychedelics and meditation, and it was "strain of occult thinking" that, according to Yau, made them Blake's wild children. The contemporary artists, including Tamara Gonzales and Sally Webster, were more immediately linked by their interest in Smith and Belson, and behind those two figures the abstract, non-representational art of painters such as Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian.
The only explicit reference to Blake in the article is contained in the final paragraph:
Harry Smith’s “Untitled Drawing, October 19, 1951” (1951), which was done in ink, watercolor and tempera on a sheet of paper measuring 24 ½ x 18 ¾ inches, reminds me of a map of both earth’s inner core as well as an early version of the solar system. It brought to mind George Baxter’s prints of the cosmos that were specially made for the religious sect, the Muggletonians, of which the poet-artist William Blake was a member. The Muggletonians believed Copernicus, Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton had it all wrong. I don’t think you would be wrong if you get the feeling that some of the artists in this exhibition agree with Blake.
This shows off the strength of Yau's work (his knowledge of contemporary art) and his weakness (a relative lack of understanding of the historical contexts - Blake was no Muggletonian). Indeed, the book as a whole feels a little like a bait and switch in terms of its title: Blake is often no more than an interesting meme to riff along with. Perhaps the exception is the essay on "William Tillyer's Clouds", a revision of the original essay published alongside Tillyer's work in the catalogue William Tillyer: Against Nature. Although Blake is not directly invoked (unlike Constable), Tillyer did title one of his earlier exhibitions Fearful Symmetries in 1993. Overall, Yau's book is an excellent read on some of the most interesting contemporary art that strives against easy classification, although it offers little insight into the reception of Blake among those new artists.
The second piece reviewed here, Eric G. Wilson's Polaris Ghost, is much more profoundly Blakean. A collection of shorts tories, it offers itself as a combination of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Blue Velvet. One of Outpost19's "Short-ish" series, Wilson's previous works are non-fiction pieces that include Coleridge's Melancholia and My Business is to Create: Blake's Infinite Writing. The influence of Blake is strong from the very first page, beginning with an epigraph to James Basire, to whom Blake was presented. The stories can be read as a series of fragments, some of them dealing with Polaris who splits into two entities known as Otto and Ella, echoing Blake's vision of emanation and spectre. The flat, affectless style of the early chapters in particular evokes Lynch's work, as with the girl who will become Ella seeing a vision of a grey man threatening her while she bathes which her father later tells her was the smoke from a fire that had threatened to destroy them all.
Throughout most of Polaris Ghost, the pseudo-anonymous characters - husband, girl, boy - function as archetypes dissociated from the backgrounds of the worlds in which they live, and work almost as sinister fairy tales. In the final book (Book VIII), Wilson's prose almost reads as a retelling of "The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Boy Lost" from Songs of Innocence and of Experience. As a husband has night terrors that he is a boar, so it is only by becoming a boy again that he can master those fears:
He heard the sound again. It was a grunting sound. He saw a huge figure in his path. The creature was on all fours. He saw its eyes. They were blue. Under the eyes were two giant tusks. This was a boar. Its head was tilted towards the ground. It made the sound again. This was not a grunting sound. It was a whimpering sound. This boar was sick.
The husband as a boy was no longer afraid. The boar needed help. He stepped towards the boar, and saw that in the boar's mouth was his doll. The boar reached for the doll. The boar opened its mouth, and the doll fell out and hit the ground. The boy reached down to pick the doll up.
In between such deceptively simple psycho-dramas are meditations on Elvis and Bowie or Godzilla in the nuclear age. The whole is delightful - a kind of adult Maurice Sendak story (which, on one level, would be an apt description for some of David Lynch's movies). Polaris Ghost was my first encounter with Wilson's work, but demonstrates a subtle engagement with Blake that provides a series of sometimes troubling reflections on marriage, family relations and growing up that will certainly make me look out for more of his writing.
John Yau, The Wild Children of William Blake, Autonomedia, 2017. $15.00 Eric G. Wilson, Polaris Ghost, Outpost19, 2018. $14.00.