Patrick Webb: The Lightness of Existence

Seduction: Queer Visions of Masculinity

Witnessing “Survival AIDS” Event

Witnessing “Survival AIDS”
An evening symposium, with performance by Hunter Reynolds

Saturday May 7, 2011  7 PM - midnight
Symposium 7:30 - 9:30 PM / Performance to follow
gallery hours extended until midnight
 
Visual AIDS presents Witnessing “Survival AIDS” a symposium which examines how HIV/AIDS reconfigured/reconfigures queer identify formation and contemporary visual and performance art. Presentations by David Deitcher, Nathan Lee, Virginia Solomon, and Anthony Viti.

About the panelists:

Born in Montreal, Canada, David Deitcher is a New York-based writer, art historian, critic and independent curator whose essays have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Parkett, the Village Voice, and other periodicals, as well as in numerous anthologies and monographs on such artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Isaac Julien, and Wolfgang Tillmans. He is the author of Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918 and curator of the exhibition of the same name that appeared at the International Center of Photography in New York. He has been core faculty at the International Center of Photography/Bard College Program in Advanced Photographic Studies since its inception in 2003, and core faculty as well at the Vermont College of Fine Arts /Visual Arts Department since 1997. Deitcher was recently awarded a Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Program grant to assist him in writing Once More, with Feeling, a book about the emergence of art during the mid-to-late 1980s within the context of the AIDS crisis that, without resorting to expressionist rhetoric, evokes emotion, rather than masking it.

Nathan Lee will present “Hold My Bones: Curating a Viral Genealogy”. Presenting documentation of the 2011 exhibition "Break My Body, Hold My Bones”,  Lee discusses the transmission of ideas, forms, and affects across several generations with radically different experiences of HIV/AIDS. The exhibition, a commissioned installation of Malcolm Lomax and Daniel Wickerham (DUOX), began with Lee’s invitation to respond to Derek Jarman's BLUE. Nathan Lee is critic and curator based in New York. A former film critic for the New York Times, Village Voice, and NPR, he is a contributing editor of Film Comment. Recent curatorial projects include CLAP (Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson), Without Me....You (Yama, Istanbul) and Buddy List (Space 414, Brooklyn). Lee is a Program Associate at SALT (Istanbul) and a masters candidate at the Center For Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Virginia Solomon will be presenting “Portraits without People, Politics without Policies - Queer Art and Efficacy.”  Virginia Solomon advanced to Ph.D. candidacy in December of 2009. She specializes in  modern and contemporary art, culture, and politics. Her dissertation,  tentatively titled 'Modeling Queer Methods: General Idea's Art and  Politics, 1969-1994,' considers the work of Canadian artist group  General Idea. She places the group's practice in the context of an expanded and evolving conversation concerning the relationship  between art and politics, and argues that its incorporation of sexuality enabled it to reconfigure what constituted both political and artistic activity. Other interests include feminist theory, cultural studies, and  visual studies. Solomon was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney  Independent Study Program for the 2007/2008 academic year. She was a  2009/2010 Canadian Art Research Fellow at the National Gallery of Canada, and is the 2010/2011 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the  Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She graduated from  Stanford University in 2004 with a B.A. in studio art and feminist  studies.

Anthony Viti will present “Bottoms Up”, a selections from his work as an artist and as an activist while contemplating the shifting popular attitudes and visual representations of HIV/AIDS, HIV-prevention, and AIDS advocacy. Anthony Viti is an artist and arts educator living and working in Brooklyn, NY. His work over the last 25 years has been formed by AIDS activism and personal history. He has had solo exhibitions at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and Deven Golden Fine Arts in New York and participated in group exhibitions at the Cobra Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Ratio 3 Gallery, San Francisco; White Columns, NY. Anthony has been a grant recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The Elizabeth Foundation, Penny McCall Foundation, Art Matters, and has twice been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  His work is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and he holds an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. 

Moderated by Amy Sadao, Visual AIDS.

**The symposium will precede a mummification performance by Hunter Reynolds.  Witnessing "Survival AIDS" is being presented in conjunction with Survival AIDS, a major solo exhibition by Hunter Reynolds.

Hunter Reynolds: Survival AIDS is a new series of works that incorporate elements spanning 25 years of image making, and constructed around Hunters' experience as a gay man living in the age of AIDS. Survival AIDS will combine three modalities that he has used in various ways in his work over the years: the Blood Spot series, Mummification Performance Skins, and Photo Weavings.  Read more here.  May 1 – June 5, 2011 
 
Exhibition and events are free and open to the public

Participant Inc.
253 East Houston, NYC

Sex in an Epidemic

via Film Society Lincoln Center

To mark the 30th anniversary of HIV/AIDS, Outcast Films is launching the outreach campaign HIV@30: Looking Back, Moving Forward. The Film Society is proud to kick off this initiative with a special Independents Night screening of Sex in an Epidemic directed by Jean Carlomusto. Focusing on the need for comprehensive sex education and drawing on archival footage from the earliest days of the AIDS panic, this engaging documentary provides a sociocultural perspective on the history of the epidemic in the U.S. and its ongoing impact on the most affected populations including the gay, African-American and Latino communities. The screening will be followed by Q&A and a reception.

VISION IS ELASTIC. THOUGHT IS ELASTIC

VISION IS ELASTIC. THOUGHT IS ELASTIC.
curated by Moyra Davey & Zoe Leonard

21 April — 4 June 2011
opening Thursday, 21 April, 6 — 8pm 
   
Murray Guy
453 West 17 St NYC

“A photograph could also be described as a quotation, making a book of photographs like a book of quotations.” - Susan Sontag

Murray Guy is very pleased to present "Vision is Elastic. Thought is Elastic," curated by Moyra Davey and Zoe Leonard. Exploring various intersections between photography and writing, the exhibition is presented alongside the release of Blind Spot magazine No. 43, which has been jointly edited by Davey and Leonard. The show brings together works by Josh Brand, Roy Colmer, Pradeep Dalal, Shannon Ebner, Joy Episalla, William Gedney, Roni Horn, Katherine Hubbard, Babette Mangolte, Mark Morrisroe, Adrian Piper, Claire Pentecost, James Welling, and David Wojnarowicz.

Taking as its title a line from the journals of David Wojnarowicz, the exhibition proposes a closeness of camera and notebook, assembling works that embody a range of relationships between photography and activities of reading, writing, and note-taking. In contrast to a certain iconoclastic tradition often associated with conceptual art—one which pairs texts with photographs in order to fragment or unhinge the image, to point to its insufficiency or artificiality—the affiliations here could best be described as symbiotic. (Symbiosis: the intimate living together of two dissimilar organisms in a mutually beneficial relationship.) Many of the assembled works propose an interchangeability or fluency between image and text that seems at once to anticipate (in the case of the older works) and to respond to (for those more recent) today’s proliferating digital interfaces, in which images are increasingly embedded within texts, and texts inscribed within the spaces of an image.

Many of the artists in the exhibition, for instance Wojnarowicz, Roni Horn, or Mark Morrisroe, write on the image or in the margins of the image, taking the photographic surface for a notepad, while others, such as James Welling and Shannon Ebner, photograph notebooks themselves (both full and empty, written upon and held in potential.) Artists such as William Gedney, Roy Colmer, and Pradeep Dalal treat photographs as though they were entries in a journal (photographing, perhaps, as a mode of keeping a diary), while Babette Mangolte and Joy Episalla photograph bookshelves, which give external form to internalized activities of reading and writing. Many of these artists (for example Josh Brand) use the camera itself as though it were a writing instrument, evoking the original sense of photography: writing with light.

image: James Welling

Peter Wyman at UNC Chapel Hill

 Peter Wyman's paintings included at the HIV treatment seminar on University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Fedex Global Health Center
Sunday, May 1, 2011

Visual AIDS presents What Comes Next?

What Comes Next?  Mark Morrisroe, David Wojnarowicz, Marc Lida, Andreas Senser, Bern Boyle, Arnold Fern, and contemporaries.

Wednesday April 20, 2011
6:30 – 8:30 PM

A symposium about artists, estates, archivist, and what comes next to guide an artist's legacy forward, with Sur Rodney (Sur), Rafael Sanchez, Amy Scholder and Jonathan Weinberg.  Moderated by Dean Daderko

Since circa 1980, New York City has lost untold numbers of artists to AIDS.  Bern Boyle (1951-1992), Arnold Fern (1952-1993), Marc Lida (1957-1992), Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989), Andreas Senser (1942-1989), and David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) are among them. The popular discourse on HIV/AIDS remains unresolved. The stigma is still very much alive and, while pushed underground, HIV-phobia is resurfacing. Discussions surrounding the censorship of David Wojnarowicz’s work by the National Portrait Gallery have drawn our history nearer in recent months.
 
Visual AIDS and the Fales Library present a symposium considering these artists’ responses to living with, and dying from complications due to AIDS. What is the role of those that survive them: the witness, the archivist, the estate, the presenter? How does the foreknowledge of impending death affect the artist's ouvre, in practice, and what are the conversations and relationships that need to occur to guide the artist's legacy forward?
 
Fales Library and Special Collections
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, Third Floor
70 Washington Square South
Free and open to the public
Seats are limited - please RSVP at 212-992-7050 or by email

images (clockwise): David Wojnarowicz, Bern Boyle, Andreas Senser, Arnold Fern, Marc Lida, and Mark Morrisroe. 

Mark Morrisroe panel at Artists Space

Mark Morrisroe: Photographic Process and Psychic Structure

Saturday, April 16, 7pm

Artists Space
38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor, NYC

Within the constraints of the photographic medium, Mark Morrisroe explored a range of techniques and processes, from gum prints to Polaroid, 'sandwich' prints to photograms. His innovative approach often emphasized the material characteristics of photography – the chemical processes, the surface imperfections and the potential for the manipulation and augmentation of the negative and its image. Through methods of collage and layering, he sought to transform original and found photographic imagery into saturated neo-romantic fantasies, and abstract patterns of exposed bodies. In the words of writer Elisabeth Lebovici, Morrisroe "'cooked up' the tremble that often occurs between the body of the image and the body in the image: reddened, nude buttocks or a nipple with a scarified spider web find their extension and echo in the scratches, scrapes, and 'hand jobs' Morrisroe brings on in his images."

This symposium addresses the significance of Morrisroe’s experimentation with photographic processes, and the relationship formed between such materiality and the projection of selfhood and sexuality within his images. Equally the discussion will look to consider how such a practice impacts on our contemporary understanding of image production and dissemination.

The event will include presentations by David Joselit, Elisabeth Lebovici and Collier Schorr, followed by a discussion between the three participants.


Mark Morrisroe, Untitled,1981
© The Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection) at Fotomuseum Winterthur

The Garden

April 8 - May 8, 2011

Allan/Nederpelt Gallery

60 Freeman Street, Brooklyn

The exhibition will include works by Donald Baechler, Michael Bilsborough, Ross Bleckner, Dianne Blell, Meghan Boody, Jeff Britton, Michael Combs, E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler, Peter Dayton, Michael Dweck, Rebecca Frankfurt-Nadler, Steve Galloway, John Gauld, Monica Gripman, Judith Hudson, Scott Hunt, Bill Jacobson, Sunny Khalsa, Charlotte Kidd, David LaChapelle, Matthew Magee, Randy Polumbo, David Rittinger, Alexis Rockman, Matthew Stone, Michelle Stuart, Donald Sultan, Nick Weber, and Darius Yektai, among others.

VAVA VOOM: Honoring Geoffrey Hendricks, Brent Sikkema and Richard Renaldi

VAVA VOOM
The 6th Annual Visual AIDS Vanguard Awards & Spring Benefit

Monday May 16, 2011
6:00 – 9:00 PM

Honoring
Geoffrey Hendricks presented by William Pope.L
Brent Sikkema presented by Hilton Als
Richard Renaldi presented by Lesley A. Martin

Geoffrey Hendricks is the Board President of Visual AIDS, Professor Emeritus at Mason Gross School of the Arts Rutgers University, where he taught from 1956-2003, and a Fluxus artist, most renowned for his work with intermedia, clouds, headstands, and cooking delicious macrobiotic meals. Dubbed "cloudsmith" for his extensive work with sky imagery in paintings, on objects, and his installations and performances, his signature sky works were first exhibited at the Bianchini Gallery in New York (1966). He continues to exhibit and perform internationally. He holds the estates of several artists who were lost to AIDS, and co-curated the AIDS related exhibitions “A Living Testament of the Blood Fairies” and “Arts Communities/AIDS Communities: Realizing the Archive Project.” He lives and works in New York City and Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada together with his partner, and at times artistic collaborator, Sur Rodney (Sur).

Brent Sikkema began his gallery work in 1971 as Director of Exhibitions at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. He opened his first gallery in 1976 in Boston, MA, specializing in photography. After moving to New York, Sikkema opened a contemporary gallery in Soho called Wooster Gardens in 1991. In 1999 the gallery moved to Chelsea and was renamed Brent Sikkema Gallery. After extensive renovations and with the promotion of Michael Jenkins to Senior Partner the gallery was again renamed Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in 2005.  Sikkema has been a longtime supporter of Visual AIDS, hosting Postcards from the Edge benefits in 2004 and 2006, while quietly supporting LGBT and AIDS related organizations and projects.

Richard Renaldi is a photographer, publisher and Visual AIDS artist member.  Through his intimate photographs and portraits, he’s created powerful projects such as “Long Term Survivors,” “Gay & Lesbian Elderly,” and “Housing is Healthcare,”.  Exhibitions of his photographs have been mounted in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe, including the House of Photography in Stockholm; The Robert Morat Gallery in Hamburg; The Nicolaysen Museum in Casper, Wyoming; the Gallery at Hermès and Yossi Milo Gallery in New York.  In 2006 Renaldi's first monograph, Figure and Ground, was published by the Aperture Foundation. His second monograph, Fall River Boys, was released in 2009 by Charles Lane Press. Renaldi is the founder and publisher of Charles Lane Press.

Plus A Night of Cabaret
Justin Vivian Bond with Nath Ann Carrera
Phoebe Legere 
Hosted by John Fugelsang
DJ Senti-mental
and "Fair & Honest Appraisals of Your Appearance" by The Bumbys

The Park
118 Tenth Avenue NYC

TICKETS
(Seating is limited.  Get your tickets today!)
• $4,000 Table for 8 + eight raffle tickets
• $2,000 Table for 4 + four raffle tickets
• $500 Patron includes preferred seating + one raffle ticket
• $250 Early Bird* Friend general seating (*$275 after May 2)
• $175 Artist or HIV+ Friend limited (Sponsored by HUGO BOSS)

For details or to purchase tickets Click HERE or contact Visual AIDS (212) 627-9855

Frederick Weston at Rankin Art Gallery

Connecting the Dots

 

Connecting the Dots
Curation is Communications Design

By John Chaich

As both a designer who curates and a curator who designs, I embrace an interconnected practice that allows me to author and style similar ideas—love, loss, identity, materiality, and community—through not only creating my own work but also presenting others’.

Curating is a way of connecting the dots of questions, inspirations, and delineations that intrigue me. Like design, curating frames, navigates, and communicates in a space.

Chaich will also be curating Visual AIDS's Mixed Messages: A(I)DS, Art + Words exhibition at LaMaMa la Galleria NYC in June 2011. Mixed Messages will present text-based work by both fine and graphic artists reflecting the contexts in which AIDS awareness messages have been created and are received, historically and today. 

SlutForArt / Ambiguous Ambassador

A special screening of Muna Tseng's BESSIE award-winning solo performance piece on the life and work of her late brother, Tseng Kwong Chi (1950-1990).

SlutForArt / Ambiguous Ambassador:
A Dance-Theater Work Captured On Video

Friday, April 8, 2011
6:00PM- 8:00PM

The Bronx Museum of the Arts
1040 Grand Concourse at 165th Street

A Q&A follows the screening with the collaborators:
Muna Tseng (Choreographer-dancer) and Ping Chong (Director), and Alexandra Chang (A/P/A Institute) and Sergio Bessa (Bronx Museum of the Arts, Director of Programs).

Free and open to the public.

Dan Fishback: thirtynothing

thirtynothing
A Solo Performance by Dan Fishback

April 8th – 10th, 2011
Friday & Saturday @ 8:00 pm  |  Sunday @ 6:00 pm

 

Brooklyn Arts Exchange 421 Fifth Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11215 

Dan Fishback’s thirtynothing is a multi-media solo performance exploring the generation gap between gay men who died during the early years of AIDS and gay men who were born during those same years. A sort of “performance zine,” the show will incorporate images of work by lost gay artists, images and drawings from Fishback’s own childhood, and stories from the lives of various gay men who lived, died, and grew up during the 80s and early 90s. Fishback underscores this monologue-based piece using small instruments like casios and ukuleles to paint an intimate, mournful and quirky portrait of gay life during and after a catastrophe. Marking both the 30th anniversary of AIDS and Fishback’s 30th birthday, thirtynothing memorializes the fallen while posing critical questions to all who survive.

Click HERE for more information on Dan Fishback.

Click HERE for tickets and more info

Web Gallery: The Architecture of Loss - Mark Morrisroe 1959-1989, curated by Rafael Sánchez

The Architecture of Loss
Mark Morrisroe, 1959-1989

Curated by Rafael Sánchez

Every month, Visual AIDS invites guest curators, drawn from both the arts and AIDS communities, to select works from the Frank Moore Archive Project. This month, Rafael Sánchez curates a special exhibition of rarely seen paintings, drawings and photographs by his late friend, Archive Member Artist Mark Morrisroe.

From Rafael Sánchez's interview with Sur Rodney (Sur): 
 ...Painting was a considerable aspect of Mark's mind-set and that there has been scant evidence of this in the way that his work has been presented up until very recently. In part this may be due to the intensity of Mark's biography that is evident as subject matter in much of his work. The main thing to keep in mind in this regard is that ultimately for Mark the chemistry and processes of photography were his painterly tools and that meaning was penultimate as techniques and explorations met with his primary subject, his life. (read more)

About the Curator:
Rafael Sánchez is a Cuban born visual artist, performer, filmmaker and coeditor with his life partner, the artist Kathleen White, of alLuPiNiT, the New York City environmental magazine. His projects have been presented localy at Participant Inc., Thread Waxing Space and the legendary nightspot Jackie 60. A great percentage of his work has been presented abroad (London, Paris, Mexico City) often with a stream of collaborators that include performer/writer Jim Fletcher, artist/musician Neke Carson, photo artist Gail Thacker and film/video artist Glen Fogel. He has also participated on projects with New York City Players, localy and abroad. Currently his collaborative work with Kathleen White, TABLE project and Some-what Portable Dolmen will be included here in New York City in this year's S Files bienial at El Museo del Barrio. His essay Panorama With Hood Ornament about Morrisroe was published for the exhibition catalog, "Boston School", Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1995.

More on Morrisroe:
Mark Morrisroe: From This Moment On  Artists Space  38 Greene Street 3rd Floor, NYC, March 9 - May 1, 2011

Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989)  ClampArt  521-531 West 25th Street  Ground Floor, NYC,  March 24 - April 30, 2011 

What Comes Next? Mark Morrisroe, David Wojnarowicz, Marc Lida, Andreas Senser, Bern Boyle, and contemporaries.  A Visual AIDS symposium with Rafael Sanchez, Amy Scholder, Sur Rodney (Sur), Jonathan Weinberg and moderated by Dean Daderko.  Hosted by The Fales Library at New York University on Wednesday April 20 from 6:30 – 8:30 PM

Panorama with Hood Ornament

Panorama with Hood Ornament

by Rafael Sánchez

Jersey City, 1995
[Originally published for the exhibition catalog, "Boston School", Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1995, Lia Gangitano, Editor]

Never knew I what calm was in the soul,

Although I have seen the elements still'd

-Byron, Cain

Once… you and I… out on a ledge… floor eleven I think, of that haunted place. We hold on and your fingers pierce. The eyes of your face, deep, serene pools of horror, assure me of the gravity below. Beckoning. A step stirs and we spiral.

Nicéphore Niepce, The World's First Photograph, 1826.

Courtesy The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

The hospital is pale and fluorescent; a reminder of the taunting buzz we might find in limbo. I am a stray herald beside your bed, and you a solitary bridegroom, crushed by your very sustenance, stained in white. We try our best to decorate the moments. Yet between tropical shakes, a Balinese shadow dance, and Sade, we know that it is soon and sure that you will go. Now it seems so far away that a little black box of ashes has broken my heart. So I raise a heavy pen to Mnemosyne aflame and send you a long lost letter… since I never quite got your new address.

We were so young and poised the night I came down to see your pictures for the first time and the only light we knew was on us and the deep red of your vinyl sofa. It's funny how thinking of you feels like traveling through the atmosphere of your photographs. Maybe they always had this at their core… a way of staging a pretext for memory. You handed me a print that seemed to have a distant origin, like some early photo experiment from a hundred years ago. But lonely Bird was instantly more than this. Through its haze I imagined that we may have inherited a derailed photographic past. The horizon splits the world in two equal parts, earth and sky. The bird belongs to both but rests momentarily on our ledge, triumphant, like a weathered biblical messenger, or a beacon perched before eternity. A view from a leap into the void.

Mark Morrisroe, Untitled, undated, collage, spray paint, tape, acrylic on glass.

(Courtesy Rafael Sánchez, New York and The Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection) at Fotomuseum Winterthur

I drift there as you recall surviving an intentional overdose in a lonely room in the city of light. Your voice is lapsed and there's all this scrawling around the picture. "This is my ode to Diane Arbus," emerges as I weed through the lines. The scene falls into place and dissolves again. How many suicides were there anyway, Mark? This one was supposed to be your Westbeth… your "last supper." Then the world came back with the morning on its wings and even Paris looked pretty good.

How many birds flew by Niepce's primitive lens when he managed to take the world's first photograph? How many were absorbed by the eight hour exposure? Initial proof, you might say, of how photographs lie. As in Atget's ancien regime. The sun rises beyond a cloudy dream… a ray of hope as an inverted cry.

Life has a funny way of bringing fate to your doorstep. We first met when you came up one day to borrow a neighborly cup of sugar. It was the beginning of a conversation that continued, with many twists and turns, through your last four years. I admit that during some of my early visits to your place, I'd hesitate by the doorway when greeted by the monumental odor inside. "The strange grossness" of your habits somehow paralleled your inspired ambition. At the time it amazed me how hard you'd work at making a good impression against such a fetid backdrop.

Plastic bags blocked our the window of the kitchen, which doubled as a darkroom. It was a sticky, stinky, greasy, gritty, boozy, cat pissy hair ball, roach infested ordeal. Nice try, but lacing the air with Saint Anne Spray only coronated the stench.

Mark Morrisroe, Lonely Bird, 1985,

Negative sandwich / C-print, photo dyes, ink, 20" x 16",

(Courtesy Brian Clamp, New York and The Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Ringier Collection) at Fotomuseum Winterthur

 

Eventually I came to appreciate your little atrocities as features of your cave. Classically, caves are places of wonder, mystery and majestic beauty where poets and alchemists associate with the muses. Nature boy in a darkroom cavern, you played freely and beyond the possibilities of your medium. Despite a ranting desire for celebrity, you were always the true alchemist whose work towards The Work* is a consequence of deeper spiritual journey.

Aubrey Beardsley once said, "I am nothing if not grotesque." Like Beardsley you relish the grotto, giving prominence to your distortions; mannering them with love and awe. The dusty, brailled complexion of your photographs radiates as light rubbing up against the surface of your life.

Aubrey Beardsley, Hermaphrodite Among Roses,

from Le morte d'Arthur, by Thomas Malory, Sir (15th century) first published with Beardsley's illustrations by J.M. Dent & Co., London, (1893-1894), Gramarcy Books, New York, Avenel, 1995

You've left us many gifts… broken souvenirs from a hard, fast drive. A bawdy panorama tattered and silently mystic.

So, in honor of your reeling gait and a pile of worn-out shoes, I champion our vain talks on prolonged strolls to the check cashing place and to the A&P. Here's to broken tea cups and bouquets in the sink. To Lili Marlene, Bruce Willis and crackling Liberace records… and yes… Thanks for the memories.

 Footnote:

*Here the wording of: whose Work towards the Elixir, as it appeared in the original draft, is changed to: whose work towards The Work as it has always bothered the author since its original publication. The phrasing, however, remains interchangeable.