Sixty-Seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints
Photographer
Book Genre
Photograph Title
Horse Bet (Jack Micheline) 1980
Notes
Somewhere back in the fog of the mid-1970s I attended a party of local artists in upstate New York. The host, a photographer cum arts administrator with a passion for photobooks, pulled me aside to show me two of his recent acquisitions: One was Mike Mandel's Myself: Timed Self-Portraits, and the other a book called Family, Fun and Friends by someone with the improbable sounding name of Ramon Muxter.
Being in my early 20s, I was more than a little inebriated on this occasion and remember finding both books quite funny and irreverent. Several days later, I went back to look at the books again, this time cold sober. They were still funny and irreverent, and I eventually bought copies of each.
Timed Self-Portraits became somewhat of a classic in the small world of offset-printed artists photography books, and Mandel went on to publish, in collaboration with Larry Sultan, the book Evidence, generally considered to be one of the more seminal and important photobooks of the 20th century. Muxter, on the other hand, seemed to drop out of sight. I kept an eye out for his work, but aside from a few self-portraits mugging with celebrities very little turned up. So it was with some surprise and, ok I admit it, personal satisfaction that I came upon this collection of poems and a few drawings by Jack Micheline, one of the lesser-known Beat poets.
Micheline was a contrarian with a stubborn streak and a mortal fear of becoming a sellout. It seems somehow fitting that Muxter, who himself appears to have a curious love-hate relationship with fame and celebrity, should provide the image for the cover of Micheline's book. Entitled Horse Bet, it is both existential and theatrical in atmosphere, and depicts the poet as a cross between Peter Falk in a Cassavetes film and a character out of Beckett. The gold ink color of the cover text doesn't win any awards for design elegance but does relate conceptually to the pile of money Micheline is counting. As we all know, the internet now gives us the ability to find someone with relative ease, and that includes Ramon Muxter. Probably the most comprehensive collection of his work can be found at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. While the overall quality is uneven and many of the pictures may be justifiably considered adolescent, sexist and frankly offensive in tone, there is also a disarming spontaneity to them, and a curiosity about a part of life that most consider too grimy, tasteless or trivial to document.
Being in my early 20s, I was more than a little inebriated on this occasion and remember finding both books quite funny and irreverent. Several days later, I went back to look at the books again, this time cold sober. They were still funny and irreverent, and I eventually bought copies of each.
Timed Self-Portraits became somewhat of a classic in the small world of offset-printed artists photography books, and Mandel went on to publish, in collaboration with Larry Sultan, the book Evidence, generally considered to be one of the more seminal and important photobooks of the 20th century. Muxter, on the other hand, seemed to drop out of sight. I kept an eye out for his work, but aside from a few self-portraits mugging with celebrities very little turned up. So it was with some surprise and, ok I admit it, personal satisfaction that I came upon this collection of poems and a few drawings by Jack Micheline, one of the lesser-known Beat poets.
Micheline was a contrarian with a stubborn streak and a mortal fear of becoming a sellout. It seems somehow fitting that Muxter, who himself appears to have a curious love-hate relationship with fame and celebrity, should provide the image for the cover of Micheline's book. Entitled Horse Bet, it is both existential and theatrical in atmosphere, and depicts the poet as a cross between Peter Falk in a Cassavetes film and a character out of Beckett. The gold ink color of the cover text doesn't win any awards for design elegance but does relate conceptually to the pile of money Micheline is counting. As we all know, the internet now gives us the ability to find someone with relative ease, and that includes Ramon Muxter. Probably the most comprehensive collection of his work can be found at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. While the overall quality is uneven and many of the pictures may be justifiably considered adolescent, sexist and frankly offensive in tone, there is also a disarming spontaneity to them, and a curiosity about a part of life that most consider too grimy, tasteless or trivial to document.
Photo Genre
Collection
Citation
“Sixty-Seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints,” Covering Photography, accessed November 21, 2024, https://coveringphotography.bc.edu/items/show/6325.
