Ted Joans at one of our impromptu parties.

(There's a good story about this particular party, which I'll tell soon, along with more about Ted - including a couple of excellent unpublished videos).

Ted Joans in one of his "nests" - where I'd build his bed, desk and shelves - and then leave my jigsaw so he could make more art.

What an incredible man. Wherever he went, Ted always tried to make people happier by the time he left than he’d found them. He’d leave anxieties at the door and stir us up like puppies. For 17 years, he ate a meal a day with my family during the several months each year that he spent in France - in part because he felt that our lives provided endless entertainment, which he compared to a surrealist sitcom, and constancy in a shifting international community. He was our Uncle Ticklewickle and Dr. Rotapep - a member of our extended family, who knew he was always welcome to share our meals and newspapers, collect his mail from the spare mailbox that bore his name, and store his belongings anywhere from our closets to our cell in the basement - where I built a loft to protect his cadavres exquis from nocturnal beetles that travelers had inadvertently introduced from the Sahara.

Whenever Ted moved from one maid’s room (or "nest") to another, I’d salvage  lumber from his bed, desk and shelves and build new ones (while leaving a jigsaw so he could create new art) - in effect, building frames, which he filled and encrusted with the same sort of visual and conceptual puns that appear in his surrealist collages, but on a grander scale. As soon as I saw the first of these phantasmagoric projections of Ted's mind, history and passions, I was inspired to portray him in his shrine.    

But when I arrived at the appointed time to sketch him in his materialized memory palace, no one answered - even though I could hear him inside. When I realized that he wasn't even going to admit he was home, I left an aggrieved note and walked back down a long staircase. Luckily both Ted and I put that rocky start (when I'd interrupted an assignation) behind us, since our relationship deepened into one of the richest in my life.

For the moment, I will let these snapshots and essays about the following works take the place of the longer tribute that I plan to write soon:

1) "The surreality of the return in swarms" by Ted Joans. Berlin, Sept. 1983.

2) "CIA, You 'C' (See), You 'I' (Eye), You A ..." Ted Joans. Oct 1964.

3) "Unloved letter with no news" by Ted Joans. New York City, June 1977.

4) "You never knew why Timbuktu, did you?" by Ted Joans.

5) "My thing is Bigger than his Thing" by Ted Joans. Paris, 1990.

6) "I.D. Klar N. Joan, DunKing Nan C. Doughnut (Deluxe Duo) Tues. 29 Aug. 78 Paris" by Ted Joans in our copy of The Hipsters.

"The surreality of the return in swarms" by Ted Joans. Berlin, Sept. 1983. Caldwell collection.  

This is one of my favorite works by Ted! An owl's face topped with his hair watches us as we scrutinize the panic-stricken mob in the bird's belly. Both of the wattles below the face made out of an old German banknote contain the word "Gast" (guest) - which is a reminder of the "guest workers" who have kept German factories humming for much of the time since slave laborers staffed them during World War II, and of Ted's own status as an honored guest, when he composed this piece during his tenure as poet-in-residence at the University of Berlin. It's an ambiguous word, which can be extended in welcome, used as a euphemism, or hurled by racists.

But the German word also sounds the same as the English word "Gassed" - which makes it especially loaded because of the Nazi's gassing of millions of civilians. The scene in the oracular bird's belly reinforces these associations, since the threat is as invisible as gas or germs, and probably has nothing to do with wasps or bees (despite the presence of the word "swarm" in the title), since there's no sign of them - unless we see thumbtacks as stingers.

Regardless of whether the people are threatened with annihilation or have been seized by hysteria, the word "swarm" adds to the sense that this work is about racism both because of the way the word has been used to demonize immigrants and because of the fact that the terror-stricken mob looks like it's turning into a swarm itself. The fact that bees only swarm when they're desperately attacking or seeking a new home also adds to the sense that this is a scream involving aggression and displacements. The further fact that the panic-stricken people are in a train makes this even more chilling since Hitler used trains to transport millions of people to their death while equating the increased punctuality of German trains with Nazi superiority.

As we approach the egg-shaped porthole to scrutinize Ted's vision of people shielding themselves and their loved ones while men fight with snake-like sashes (which might be alarm cords), we have the uncanny feeling that we're being watched and realize that the thumbtacks are also spidery eyes. Whatever applies inside the bag, Ted and his eyes seem to imply, applies outside it. This a not just "a train wreck", as the saying goes, it's a scene from the end times, when plagues and displacements take place under omniscient surveillance. Although the scene has all the sensationalistic and histrionic hallmarks of pulp fiction, in Ted's hands it's a vision out of Hieronymus Bosch - the ultimate "train wreck" at the end of the world.  

The scene at the bottom, where one might expect the owl's genitals, mirrors the violence and mystery above. The first ambiguities in the frieze (which doubles as the work's title) concern two upside-down silhouettes that look like the outlines left after the removal of dead bodies, but on closer inspection turn out to be connected to tiny standing figures. Although the outline on the right is clearly an Indian brandishing a tomahawk (who looks like he's falling) the one on the left looks like a man aiming a gun - until one realizes that he may be holding the "gun" to his mouth like a flute. Who is this: a man killing an Indian or another character from Indian mythology - the musical trickster?  

To complicate matters, the silhouettes don't quite match the plastic figures. Although the outline of the Indian could be the shadow of the toy above it, the one of the marksman-trickster leads to the base of a missing figure, instead of the figure that apparently stood between the combatants - a sexy blonde, who never cast whatever the outlines referred to - whether that was a shadow, emanation or line around a corpse. Needless-to-say, I tried to resolve the mystery concerning the missing figure's identity (and intentions) by looking for it in the bottom of the bag, but couldn't find a body.

These mysteries are extended by another ambiguity in the frieze - this time involving the mirroring of the word "Return" both under a brown shape that looks like a giant muddy footprint relative to the figures standing by it, and, again, on either side of the shadow-outlines, where it mirrors Ted Joans' own signature like a matching sign. Who or what is returning - mass hysteria? Racism? Misogyny and the treatment of women as sex objects, who don't even cast shadows? The stamp of territorial expansion and oppression? Whatever it is, we've been warned by an oracle with a filmy mirror.    

When you turn the piece over, you discover just what a trickster our owl could be - since the flip side couldn't be more different from the scene of white people tumbling over each other in terror or fury, although the two sides share the same atmosphere inside the bag. Whereas the front shows a scene right out of a horror film or pulp fiction, which has been torn and animated by signs flashing "jazz" in the red and green colors of the fight against Apartheid, the other shows musicians and dancers prancing beside a bird and goat like figures in a playful work by Matisse or Picasso.

It's all here in the cheap plastic frame - fear-mongering; cowering and flailing people shielding themselves from peril; the huge dirty footprint of Manifest Destiny or oppression; a world in a blister, whose dark side has broken out with tacks that threaten us with scratches or - if the tacks are a bird's eye view of warheads bursting out of the atmosphere - annihilation; a horror movie rising to a jazz crescendo; a hidden heaven behind hell: the whole polarized and ambiguous world with all its hopes and terrors: A masterpiece!

"Sexually crushed rhinoceros" "L'objet surrealiste" by Ted Joans. Apparently dated 1954 (unless the 5 is a crooked 6).

Caldwell collection.

This is one of Ted's works that I lent this to the Centre Pompidou, along with "Sure really I is, aren't you?", for its show entitled "Surréalisme/ Surrealism" (4 Sept. 2024 - 13 Jan. 2025). Both are illustrated on page 162 of the catalog.

Dedications

"To Duncan the unique man who creates while investigating what he does or doesn't fully understand. Ted Joans"

"To 'Dunancy' who created Sebastian (the son) and the great movement of art Clutterism

Paris 3 April 1986"

"Once or twice upon a time" with Sebastian ("Defense Absolue").

By Ted Joans, May 1995. Caldwell collection.

"CIA, You 'C' (See), You 'I' (Eye), You A ..." Ted Joans. Oct 1964.

Caldwell collection.

I can't stop singing the praises of this subversive work. To begin with, the mash-up of allusions reads as a cartoonish face with huge ears in the form of the toy phones, an aperture in the center that looks like a mouth - except that it turns out to be filled, upon closer inspection, with toothy nails - and a comical V-neck collar and bow-tie or mustache made of twine at the bottom. Another odd thing about the "mouth" behind a plastic bag, which mocks conventional ways of caging and valorizing art with frames, and a net, which looks like a gag or blindfold, is that it's just too high and might as well be a skull's sinus.

To a person as deeply versed in African art as Ted, the position of the toothy "mouth" would have recalled the fanged maws on the bestial bellies of Urhobo ivri statues. But the hardware around the box makes it an actual imitation of the boxes surrounded by nails on the stomachs of the most formidable statues from sub-Saharan Africa - the so-called "nail fetishes" of the BaKongo.*  As a Surrealist, who had a major collection of traditional art in Timbuctu (which he lost), Ted was inspired by the way such accretionary sculptures grew in significance and became community records as more and more petitioners asked their nganga or priest to add activating ingredients. As an intercessor in his own right, who often asked visionaries to add panels to his cadavres exquis, he would have known as much as anyone that the Congolese statues covered with hardware (which might as well be called exquisite corpses too!) and their boxes** were equally astonishing assemblies of associations, which he absorbed into his collage by cultural osmosis - just as the BaKongo have done since they encountered the Portuguese 500 years ago.

As a result, we can't hope to understand this work without prying open one of the boxes and finding out what Ted was alluding to.  

First of all, their murky covers, which are made of glass rather than plastic, represent the obscure and reflective interface between our lives and our next incarnations - the kalunga. The BaKongo make it hard to identify the activating contents of the boxes, which they think give the statues their supernatural powers, by smearing the glass kalunga with cemetery dirt. The kalunga is also symbolized by

- mirrors, which fill the eyes,

- watery surfaces and horizons, and

- a line in idiograms that were drawn on the ground in front of an nkondi when a person was expected to tell the truth, so he could swear to do so while standing between life and death in the presence of the supernatural.

In this case, that person is you - the viewer - seeing past first impressions and through obfuscations.

One of the reasons that the murky plastic is as charged with implications as the interface between dimensions on such judiciary statues is due to the word "CIA", which looks like a rising or setting sun, because of its yellow background.*** Although Ted was too much of a trickster and artist to tell anyone when to be furious, the letters spell out danger as effectively as a warning for a minefield. It's also right at the top, where one might expect a being's forehead or central intelligence. The warning practically screams that this playful face framed by toys (which reminds us of characters like Porky Pig and the way truth is lost when playing telephone) might be as deceptive as telegenic news announcers mitigating secrets and horrors. The plastic phones are such an obvious reference to wire-tapping (which opens the door to targeting and blackmail) that it's hardly surprising to discover that the playful features and veneer hide a toothy pit (which looks like a torture cell or grave) and a dangling eyeball gouged from a doll's head.  

Ted knew that all these references to secrecy, truth-telling, witch hunts, surveillance, and Congolese art were particularly relevant and haunting, since the CIA was implicated in the assassination of that country's leader, Patrice Lumumba, and the rise of his blood-thirsty successor, Mobutu.**** Once the historical context sinks in, the implications of the murky interface between the things we initially saw and their underlying truths become clearer: Porky Pig might as well be meat wrapped in a body bag with a grave-like mouth screaming through glistening mucus. I see you, Ted says, just as I see through pretty telegenic faces and their glib deceptions, mitigating and obfuscating horror.

But the film covering this work forces us to finally come-nose-to-nose with the plastic in an effort to identify the enigmas surrounding the box. The equivalent of the mooyo on the torso of an nkondi turns out to be composed of a Winston cigarette pack covering an American flag, which looks as withered as a leaf after being buried. The realization that a pack of the insidious killers - which American corporations were promoting around the world - is at the solar plexus is breath-taking (sorry, I couldn't help it) - especially when you consider that Ted posted "No Smoking" signs in such places as Beat poetry readings, where smokers felt especially free to poison the air.

Leaning in like divers determined to reach the bottom, we finally see that two buttons under the box, which we mistook for more doll eyes, are actually rusty Coca Cola caps and notice a tiny de-fleshed arm from an anatomical drawing sticking out from one of the saw-toothed caps as if it had been amputated. Knowing that this work contains references to the Congo, we suddenly realize that the severed limb is the most horrible one of all, since it's a reminder of all the people who were mutilated by King Leopold's henchmen after they failed to bring back enough rubber. If the horrors hidden behind this work's cheap packaging, bright colors, and toys have not hit us by now, they do when we see the arm waving or writhing like the flag buried under the Winston pack and realize that we might as well be seeing fossils on an early sea floor.  

Although there doesn't appear to be much more to see, our finds make us suspect that there might be more to a mysterious patch at the very bottom that looks like slime-mold, so we take a last look round and can barely make out what might be a decomposing or embryonic rhino with a dim red flame to its right, which resolves into a tiny rubbing of the Statue of Liberty. We've finally reached the dim bottom and discovered that it is as disturbing as a dream underlying reality.       

* The proper names for such "nail fetishes" are an nkisi nkondi or two or more minkondi.

** Such boxes are known as mooyo, which also means belly and life, and contained ‘medicines’ or ‘sacra’, which “tied” supernatural forces, such as an ancestor’s spirit, to a statue, giving it its power. (Thompson, Robert Farris. 1978. The Grand Detroit N’Kondi. Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 56, 4:207-221.) For further information, please see my article, The Magic Trumpeter: A Bakongo Nkisi Nkondi and its links with World War I, the Harlem Hellfighters, and Jazz.

*** The BaKongo reincarnation cycle is called "The four moments of the sun."

**** One of the many manuscripts by Ted that I own is a poem that he wrote about Lumumba. I plan to post a few of these documents on a related webpage soon.

Dr. Rotapep's Teducation in life, poetry, and totem animals: A show of previously un-exhibited Ted Joans collages and ephemera.

Curated by Duncan Caldwell. August 4, 2016.

Copyright Duncan Caldwell on all imagery & texts.

"Unloved letter with no news" by Ted Joans. New York City, June 1977. Caldwell collection.

You might think that this collage only contains one self-portrait - Ted's outagraph, where he's "replaced" his head with the shape of Africa while relaxing in a teeshirt bearing the flags and map of the continent. But the spidery offcut from a leather workshop is him too - running to the left with everything from his legs to six out-stretched arms and waving antenna as his spine leans into his stride and his human pecker swings from the waist.

But that's not all, since the black arthropod might as well have leapt off a cave wall where artists of the Dreamtime showed shape-shifting beings from multiple perspectives - one running full-tilt and the other spreading himself as frontally as a flasher or dancer exposing himself to an X-ray. And that's just the beginning of the ways Ted portrayed himself here, since the background also contains observations from different perspectives about the traites and habits of his totem animals, which were his menagerie of adopted identities.

The pseudo-scientific drawings emphasize both an aardvark's claws and burrow and show lateral and frontal views of pangolins as well as details of their snouts, scales, tails and posture. Although the drawings pay homage both to Ted's bestiary and the prints he loved, they're also a spoof of the notion that any life (let alone an aardvark's or Ted's) can be pegged with supposed objectivity.

The captions drive the point home, since they turn out to be the mind-bending ingredients of a recipe!

Here's the way to cook up the consummate shape-shifting, surrealist, black, Beat, web-weaving, chimeric collagist and jazz poet. Just keep in mind that an aardvark has "de forts sabots gratteurs" (has strong scratching hooves) and the "terrestrial" stipulation accompanying drawings of a pangolin and its snout while blending a priapic "Platypus erectus" (instead of Homo erectus) with a pinch of "aardvark armpit's pity", plus generous dollops of "tapir lace cracking steal beans", "Okapi hair fruit on dawn flame", "echidna anchors in gravy of mango", "pangolin pubis tissue", and, of course, a dash of "rhinoceros sweat fan" (aka tail), which you can use as a whisk before throwing it into the brew - and voila - there you have him: the perfect gentleman, taking such a deep bow that his formal salutation - "Avec ses compliments distinguées" - is upside-down!  

But Ted was above composing the hagiography that this winsome portrait might suggest, so there are a couple of elements that clash with the spontaneity of the dancer and cuteness of the animals (which, come to think of it, also look like illustrations in a children's book) - the package for an "Anti-baby condom" and little doll shirt. There is something so poignant and paradoxical about their juxtaposition, especially in light of the knowledge that Ted called condoms the greatest invention of all time, but fathered at least ten children, without doing much, if anything, most of the time to care for them, and knew his choices had left gaping wounds and voids.

Although I know that Ted probably found the frankness of the German condom's labeling a refreshing change from the way sexuality is treated in America, I can't help but think that he was confessing a disturbing paradox about himself when he contrasted the similarly sized and shaped package and garment and placed the empty shirt on the other side of his spine from the penis. I only met one of his children, Daline Jones, but saw how thrilled he was by her presence and daring (she'd just gone sky-diving for the first time and made our hearts ache with love songs) and also saw what a perfect (adoptive) uncle he was to my own children, but that's the point - an uncle gets to carouse with children, but walk away without being responsible for them. And, as the empty shirt attests, Ted knew it.  

But the tiny shirt attests to more than Ted's unconventional choices, surrogate families, and perhaps even his conscience, since it's placed among the endangered species that he loved just as much as children for the way they showed that life can be different from expectations. Ted was that way too, living in many ways as spontaneously and earnestly as his totem animals existing on their own terms.

Finally, there are two references to letters, which make his self-portrait composed of endangered species and the flattened shirt all the more poignant - the one in the title, "Unloved letter with no news", which might refer to the lack of communication between Ted and most of his children, even after he composed both sent and unsent messages to them, and the "French letter" in the corner. A condom is the ultimate cul-de-sac, of course - a deadend which can be construed as leading to the non-existence of beings - in effect, shirts that will never be filled; and the consummate paradox, since it makes intercourse possible without regrets, and yet often ends up filled with them.

If this piece was inspired by an unused sheathe that Ted would have preferred to have donned in the company of a femmoiselle, then the references to letters in the title and package are part of an even bigger package - one contained in an envelope swarming with testimony, pride, confessions and paradoxes - since they are finally one and the same - a love letter full of one brilliant man's longing and braggadocio, courting us all.

And then there's the fact that the collage contains two shirts, which, when you think about it, are not only similar in size, but are both acephalic outagraphs - the sleeveless Teeshirt that Theodore africanus is wearing and the pressed white one that a child on his best behavior might have worn to Sunday school. The spider figure is bounding away from that little straitjacket, which, in this light, seems to stand for society's (whitened) expectations when Ted was a boy, towards the relaxed black adult flaunting new identities. They're both Ted, changing his shape again!

Finally, as in so many pieces, this one has both an official title that Ted taped to the outside of the bag with an arrow indicating the way up and a different one inside, which shifts our perception. This time the internal title is a sign stretching from shirt to shirt behind the black penis and spine which says "MY TOTEM ANIMALS" in huge block letters. The only problem is that the most vivid letters in the piece refer to an animal - the cat - which was certainly not one of Ted's seven totems (the rhino, okapi, tapir, aardvark, pangolin, echidna and platypus). The black letters on the ticket for the leather-working shop where Ted probably obtained the spidery scrap both announce its name, "CAT'S PAW", and take on new meaning in this time line, because the ticket is on the same side of the figure running away from society's expectations and Ted's childhood as the dingy doll shirt, and because a "cat's paw" is an idiom drawn from La Fontaine's fable "The Monkey and the Cat", which means "a dupe or unwitting tool." That was one thing Ted refused to be as he flaunted his freedom as flamboyantly as Baron Munchausen, whose tales he gave my son.

Before leaving Ted's self-portrait, we should look him in the face, as it were, and see if he has anything else to say. And, of course, it turns out he's brimming with a continent's worth of revelations, but, as his scribe, who once got him past the writer's block that was preventing him from completing the autobiography which he'd begun while visiting fossil sites at Olduvai, I will let him tell the rest, after saying just one thing about African portraits that seems relevant to his work. As Jean Borgatti observed in her book about them,* they are often accretionary and emblematic, rather than figurative. That is as true of the BaKongo nkisi nkondi** that stands beside Ted's sculpture "My thing is bigger than his thing" (and even has two of his attributes - a penis amulet and trumpet) as it is of this image. When you get into Ted's head - or rather Africa (which, come to think of it, looks like a Homo erectus skull on his shoulders), and think about how he crisscrossed that world (and others), you realize that this is much more than a self-portrait - it's a love letter to the continent which gave birth to some of the most wonderful animals in existence - including the ones that Ted loved most of all, Mankind.  

* Jean M. Borgatti and Richard Brilliant. 1990. Likeness and Beyond: Portraits from Africa and the World. The Center for African Art, New York.

** Duncan Caldwell. 2018. The Magic Trumpeter: A Bakongo Nkisi Nkondi and its links with World War I, the Harlem Hellfighters, and Jazz. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, RES 69-70. University of Chicago Press & Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology & Art Museum, Harvard. Inside & outside covers, explanatory cover page, and pp. 269-293.    

A diptych

Top left: "The tapir's cousins are the rhino and horse" by Ted Joans. Berlin, 1983. Caldwell collection.

Top right: "The Icelandic puffin birds as a pangolin scale" by Ted Joans, Berlin, 1983. Caldwell collection.

Left: "The black positive power of Jazz"

by Ted Joans. Berlin, 1983. Caldwell collection.

After finding a souvenir of Bavaria or Austria, Ted slit the top of the deep frame and jammed broken scissors into the scene of a church and mountains behind dried alpine flowers like forked lightning and pasted the mask and sign on the glass. While the fanged mask recalls the mob psychology and frenzy of vampire stories and is a reminder of the Black trickster himself, the dissonant sign disrupts the enclosed world of nostalgic kitsch with the improvisational power of "JAZZ!" The silver blades are equally ambiguous since they've ripped open the sallow mottled sky, dragging in hints of clean blue, while reminding us of the rockets that have blazed through the sky since World War II.

"Un-DOMESTICATED BLACK U.S. MALE" modified U.S. Mail bag by Ted Joans with a cross on the reverse formed by Ted's name mirrored on either side of a vertical formed by the word Timbuctu surmounted by the Taureg southern cross.

"25000 Coups de foudre". By Ted Joans, 11 June 1992. Caldwell collection.

Caged rhinos ... "I love you but I do not own you" ... "La semaine des 25 000 coups de foudre" (The week of 25,000 love bolts) ... I'll expand upon this soon!

Ted Joans in one of his succession of "Nests". I took these photos while preparing to paint and sculpt a panoramic view of the nest with Ted posing in several places in his memory palace. I particularly like the pictures of Ted spying upon us with binoculars and peephole glasses and holding the issue of Passion Magazine with him on the cover.

More Dedications

Ted Joans with Nancy and Duncan Caldwell.

Ted Joans with Olivia in a princess dress & Sebastian in costume armor & then napping under fluffy animals, including one of my own totems, the mandrill!

Ted Joans in one of his Parisian nids (nests)

Olivia, Nancy and Sebastian with our dear friend, Ted Joans

Sleeping Dogs!

One of the protagonists in my novel, Sleeping Dogs - Manny Skidmore - was largely inspired by Ted Joans. You can read a couple of chapters by clicking here - or even contact me, if you want to publish it, by emailing me at caldwellnd (at) aol.com

More tributes to Ted Joans!

1) Let’s get TEDucated! Tribute to Ted Joans. By Yuko Otomo

2) Ted Joans Lives! Tribute: Harry Nudel

3) Ted Lives. By Walker Mimms in The New York Review of Books.  

4) A tribute by Justin Desmangles: Remembering Ted Joans: Black Beat Surrealist

5) Here's an article called "A Sentimental Teducation" by my friend, Jake Lamar, in the Centre Pompidou's magazine about his own friendship with Ted Joans. And here's the same article in French!

Books:

1) La rive noire - De Harlem à la Seine : Les ecrivains noirs americains a Paris, 1830-1995 (Collection La rive noire). By our friend, Michel Fabre.

2) Black Surrealist: The Legend of Ted Joans. By Steven Belletto. I'm not sure how thorough this account is when it comes to the period between 1975 and 1999, when Ted spent so much time with us in Paris, since the author never contacted me.

3) All Around Ted Joans. By Marion Kalter.

Jazz is my religion!

Ted making drinks as I was preparing my panoramic painting of his room.

A detail of the bottom of "The surreality of the return in swarms" by Ted Joans, showing plastic toys representing a sexy blonde and tomahawk-wielding Indian beside the stump of a third figure, which apparently stood with them between the huge footprint-shaped form and the upside-down outlines or shadows of the Indian and missing figure, who was either a rifleman or musician playing a flute.

"My thing is Bigger than his Thing" by Ted Joans. Paris, 1990.

Caldwell collection. A photo of this piece appears on page 16 of the catalog of an exhibition called After Duchamp, which took place at the Musée de Saint-Lo from June 15 to Oct. 13, 1991, where the sculpture was listed as being No 108 and was lent by Gallerie 1900-2000 in Paris.

When Ted spotted this bottle-rack on a Parisian sidewalk, he knew exactly what it was - it was bigger then HIS thing: the rack that Marcel Duchamp's had turned into a ready-made sculpture! Ted's homage to Duchamp's phallus, proto-skyscraper, and bristling warhead would multiply the original's references to industrialization and the shape-shifting taking place as beliefs crumbled, armies mechanized, hordes migrated, and movement became a milling blur. Ted's version was so big that it would tower above the original rack. It would be a spoof of the strutting of machismo men. And it would add layers to Duchamp's tour-de-force (sorry for the pun) by making the rack (which recalled the machinery that was beginning to chew up everyone from farm-workers to Chaplin's tramp in meshing gears) into an outright cage containing things Ted held sacred. Just as BaKongo priests put powerful things in the hidden compartments of spiky statues, Ted placed three of his sacra - sexuality, fabulous creatures, and colorful jazz riffs - at the core of his creation.

And what a creation! Just as Duchamp turned a urinal into a cowled head, which metaphorically spilled its contents on the viewer's shoes and assumptions, Ted transformed Duchamp's ready-made into something new and bigger that is both parody and homage, both a bottle-shaped celebration of Bacchanalian vitality and an iron maiden - that simultaneously protects and imprisons his sacra like our culture, which so often puts sex and nature behind conventions and bars.

The ambiguities don't stop there, since his "outagraph" (of extinction, when it comes to such marvels as rhinos) has been stamped with the spiky Gothic lettering that the Nazis fetishized in their instrumentalization of nostalgia and campaign to make Germany "great" again. It has even been plastered with goddollar himself, although the hundred dollar note is so tattered, it looks like a fallen leaf.

There's also something Christmasy about the combination of the bottle-tree's tapering form and the red and green markings on the box-like gift that Ted has jammed under its branches, although he knew the equivalents of such racks - African American bottle-trees - were meant to catch malevolent spirits and traced their roots to Africa.  

Although all the green leaves have fallen from his bristling tree, Ted has turned it into a cell or shrine. We might as well be voyeurs trying to get a better view of a peepshow as we stoop and crane in our effort to peer past the spokes at the humping rhinos and word "Estrus", which is displayed as prominently inside the vaginal chamber of this phallic form as signs flashing "Sex" and "Eve". With a trickster's exuberance, Ted has transformed his herrison, as the French call bottle-racks in a comic allusion to hedgehogs, into the skeleton of a lighthouse. He has concocted a Fresnel lens of shifting perspectives and positive and negative spaces around a beacon flashing warnings - the spines! - and invitations in the form of signage and small print as he crows (as he really did) "I can create better rhinos than the great Dürer" and my thing is even bigger than his - crowing like Chanticleer that he's king of the dung heap now!

So there!

"My thing is Bigger than his Thing" by Ted Joans. 1990.

Caldwell collection.

"You never knew why Timbuktu, did you?" by Ted Joans.

Caldwell collection.

My first impressions of this piece clashed since the words led me to read it from left to right while the skull and slave shackles, which I took for a jokester's reference to Groucho's glasses, stared at me from the center and the dangling sheathe and gory hand dragged me downwards. The presence of so many directional signals and references makes "You never knew why Timbuktu, did you?" an explosive combination of simultaneous perceptions. Reading it in every direction at once, the black and white news clippings of the black man falling to his knees and then to his stomach while clutching his face are reflected in a strange equation by black and white invitations of modern art museums on the right - one of which is covered with an ace of spades while another is hidden behind the Halloween prop. It's like looking at a graphic statement in which every detail is loaded and linked.

Starting on the left, the captions about the wounded man have been censored with dismissive red scribbles, which simultaneously reminded me of a teacher's corrections, bureaucratic red ink, and the fake blood on the rubber appendage. Moving right, a pair of round mirrors also seems to be several things at once - starting with the silver balls of a huge black dong, the owlish eyes of a long black torso (whose clasp reads as a metallic belly button), and Mickey Mouse ears giving away their owner's hiding place inside the tube. As my mind filled with the ricocheting jokes, I realized how similar the mirrors also were to those on African hunters' jackets, which are meant to hide stalkers from their prey and bush spirits by turning their gazes back on themselves - just like ours, for that matter, when we look at Ted's work.

Below the mirrors, Ted has laid an invitation sideways behind the bar dividing the field, making it read like a mathematical sign. From there, we move to the right side of the  equation, which starts with the shooting in America and ends with allusions to Africa. These include the monkey skull, scraps of Ted's kinky hair, and the shackles' pun combining references to slavery and the gallow's humor of a well-hung man whose father was lynched. The combo is as loaded with historical intimations and memories as grief, as personal as a locket containing heirlooms, and as wry as a joker making his chain gang laugh.

Finally, on the far right in everything but politics, the spade has filled the space taken up by an invitation's photo - redefining both the art scene and racist terminology with the stamp of a African American artist staking a claim. On the one (I'm tempted to say "rubber") hand, the contrasting references to black males seems to refer to Ted's own escape from the world of violence and racism on the left by forcing his way into the art world, and, on the other, suggests that the industry shares the same biases and exploitation that produced the gunshot victim, shackles, and severed appendage, which is a flagrant reminder of the way Belgian colonists amputated people's hands to enforce rubber quotas.

Once you realize what's going on, you see that Ted was playing with the dissonance between a ghoulish prop and the real thing to make a shocking point stick. Although he was a prankster, who turned everything from invitations to toys into shape-shifting variables in surrealist formulas, he was as deadly serious as the author of the Devine Comedy as he wove the force fields of racism, colonial violence, blacksploitation, commercialization, the arts, and personal experience into reverberating mythograms.

Once I recognized what a tour-de-force of Teducation this was - encompassing, as it does, the polarities of black ghettos and the art world, the historical and personal, brutality and sexuality, death and comedy - I stepped back in awe. And that's when the power and poignancy of the title hit me. This "equation" is Ted's graphic explanation of why he left a land which he associated with lynchings and gun cults to embark on a life-affirming pilgrimage that would repeatedly take him to two cities of light - Paris, which he associated with beauty, appreciation of artists and intellectuals, and less racism (at least towards African Americans) than he'd experienced in the US, and Timbuctu, which the world thinks of as the mysterious heart of Africa. Although Ted embodied the American right to roam and express oneself freely, and even advertised his connection to his country by saying he was born on Independence Day, he took his birthright to mean that there was nothing to stop him from going from Cairo, Illinois, to Cairo, Egypt, or from the Louisville to cities where he could be in touch with his artistic roots and feel grounded, as he always did upon reaching the center of his ancestral continent, after approaching it in some new way, in time to be cleansed on New Year's day.

Although he was seen by people all over the world as one of our country's consummate ambassadors, he carried the flag like a scout, singing out warnings, encouragements, and jokes as he blazed a trial out of the weeds that threaten to overrun America and turn it into a mean claustrophic place. He was the Beat explorer and black Orpheus singing bridges between worlds, and Nancy and I were privileged to hear him speak in tongues by giving us a hundred reasons why we should step right up and buy Paris (by which he meant life) -  warts and all - while he was still selling the whole package at a price anyone could afford.  

Oh Ted, my fellow American in the city of light, how I miss your vitality, mirth, unbridled imagination, and bravura. But I still hear you here - loud and clear!  

"You never knew why Timbuktu, did you?" by Ted Joans.

The censored caption, which Ted canceled with the red ink of bureaucracy and blood, reads: "Crossfire: Caught in a duel...

... between a sniper and police..."

Here, for comparison, is "Ted States of Me" "For Sebastian and Garrett A. Morgan who did in 1923 invent the ultimate public safety device, The traffic light" by Ted Joans, 4 Jan. 1993. Caldwell collection.

Although this playful work - which is an adult joke concerning the invention that Ted really thought had been the greatest public safety device, the condom - resembles "CIA, You 'C' (See), You 'I' (Eye), You A ..." in it's coloration, structure and use of toys, it couldn't be more different thematically - showing Ted's extraordinary range.

And, once again - just because I think they're important,

"Unloved letter with no news" by Ted Joans (New York City, June 1977),

"The surreality of the return in swarms" by Ted Joans (Berlin, Sept. 1983),

"You never knew why Timbuktu, did you?" by Ted Joans.

and

"CIA, You 'C' (See), You 'I' (Eye), You A ..." Ted Joans (Oct 1964).

Caldwell collection.

"Some serious sand raised up from Timbuctoo" Ted Joans, 1982.

Caldwell collection.

This beautiful love letter memorializes one of Ted's trips to Timbuctoo with Alicia Fritchle, aka "Alicia Africanus".

My friend, Ted Joans,

through some of his works.

The following text appeared on an explanatory poster during  

"Dr. Rotapep's Teducation in life, poetry, and totem animals: A show of previously un-exhibited Ted Joans collages and ephemera"

- which I curated at the Oak Bluffs Public Library in August 2016.

OUR LIFE WITH TED JOANS

Although Ted Joans is mainly known as a poet who published over twenty books filled with poems and graphic art and was Poet-in-Residence at Harvard, Berkeley and the University of Berlin, he has also been acclaimed as a sculptor and collagist, whose works are owned by the Whitney, MOMA and de Young Museum in San Francisco.

The collages in this exhibition are among the purest demonstrations of his mantra: “Jazz is my religion and surrealism is my point of view”. They also bear witness to his Dadaist refusal to be constrained by anyone’s frames or conventions - and his scorn for “God-dollar” and the art market. The plastic bags are an intentional part of the pieces and comment on the pretentions of galleries.

Their murky gloss is also intentional, since it can be taken two ways: either giving a superficial observer an excuse for passing on without delving into the strange associations of the dreams within or drawing the observer through the skin. But that trip is perilous, since the associations made within these plastic organisms are often savage commentaries on our society with such vignettes as a black man shot in a shootout with police sinking onto the pavement beside an ironic peon to “Modern Art” and the spectacles of Big Brother.

The thumbtacks poking at us through the skin of “The Surreality of the Return in Swarms” are not only a reminder of the separations which are used to antisepticize art via conventions like frames and glass, but that we must not read this art - or anyone - skin-deep. The 3D face, whose ears are formed by phones listening in on either side on the huge impersonal eyes formed by the letters “CIA” and a “nose” made up of nails (with their reference to the aggression of Congolese “nail fetishes”), is typical of this trickster’s subversive art, which needs time to digest – especially when we consider the CIA’s role at the time in supporting Mobutu and allowing him to get away with the killing of the democratically elected leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba.

My family had the pleasure of Ted’s company almost every day, whenever he was in Paris, which could be for 6 to 9 months at a stretch, for 17 years. He would usually have a meal a day with us during his Paris stays, since he also came by to pick up his mail. His presence made every one of those meals into a party, since he did everything he could to make people happier when he left, than when he’d arrived. Just thinking of them and our long friendship fills me with gratitude.

Finally, I have put three of my own paintings on the wall to show one of the many things that connected us, since Ted gave a lecture on my art while he was poet-in-residence at Harvard. In his typically playful fashion, he called me the “Father of Clutterism”. I’m only too glad that Ted spent so much time amid our clutter, filling the inside of our cave with his firelight and dancing imagery.

Ted lives!                              Thank you.

Duncan Caldwell

July 2016

"They rode hyenas during the night" original drawings & a manuscript of a poem by Ted Joans

(one of many, in the collection). 30 Dec. 1977, 2 hours at sea from Marseilles.

Caldwell collection.

"A few Jazz Poems. Ted Joans.

Le Pouvoir Noir est une vérité noir: Jazz

Black Power is a black truth: Jazz"

An original manuscript page (recto-reverso) with stunning drawings, including a self-portrait. Ted Joans. 1966, Paris.

Caldwell collection.

A picture of Ted Joans' work "My thing is bigger than his thing" appears on page 16 of the catalog for an exhibition called "After Duchamp" put on my Marcel Fleiss at Galerie 1900-2000 from April 24-June 1, 1991.

The document above was the receipt that M. Fleiss gave me when I retrieved the sculpture after it was shown at the Musée de Saint-Lo from June 15 to Oct. 13, 1991.

Above: The dedication on the back of the drawing reads "I.D. Klar N. Joan, DunKing Nan C. Doughnut (Deluxe Duo) Tues. 29 Aug. 78 Paris".

Below: "Haggis" by Ted Joans, which he "hid" behind the collage that he taped inside our copy of The Hipsters. I assume that he slipped the drawing into the nook   because of my Scottish ancestry and love of everything from pachyderms to ithyphallic petroglyphs and the compound eyes of our insect kin.

I particularly treasure this dedication by Ted Joans of his book SURE REALLY I IS, which he inscribed "for one of my good friends and wise collector Duncan avec amitiés 23 Oct 91 Paris", before playfully crowing that "I can create better Rhinos than the great Dürer  He never saw a rhinoceros" at bottom left and adding a bigger rhino around Dürer's and the purple ghost of a bottle rack at bottom right.

Needless-to-say, the rack refers to the other thing Ted created which was 'bigger" than its equivalent by another artist - "My thing is bigger than his thing", which is so much bigger than Duchamp's readymade, and is just as filled with rhino imagery as this dedication, even though they're caged.  

But the references don't stop there, since the book and the following collage, "Sure really I is, aren't you?", share almost the same title.

Ted Joans added this dedication to the beautiful antique copy of Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, which he gave Sebastian.  

Coming soon... A trove of memories about Ted and some of the women he loved, including his widow - Laura Corsiglia, and his earlier femmoiselles, Solveig and Alicia "Africanus" Fritchle.

"Fanatic surrealist painters have invaded New York again...

UNCONSTITUTIONAL IS WHAT THE CEDAR BAR PEOPLE IN THE ...

CONTINGENCY IS THE BY-WORD ...

KILLING IS A WOMANS BUSINESS..."

An original collaged manuscript page for Ted Joans' book The Hipsters.

Caldwell collection.

"ILS OUBLIENT TROP VITE" A poetic homage to Charlie Parker.

By Ted Joans, 1959, NYC.

An original manuscript page in the Caldwell collection.

The Hipsters

Above right: Original of a collage in The Hipsters, which was published in 1961. Ted Joans, Dated 1951. Caldwell collection.

Bottom left: The pair of caryatids in the collage that Ted added to our copy of The Hipsters share the same frank fraternal stance as Ted and his friend, Nicolai Welsh.    

The collage that Ted added to our copy of The Hipsters is many things at once, starting with its provocative use of a scene from a pornographic comic as the head of a Siamese pair of musclemen and the jarring fact that the man getting a blow job is still wearing a hat and suit while speaking on the phone. I have to hand it to you, Ted - that shocking scene grabbed our attention and made us grin when we realized that it was an allusion to the fact that we’d found our treasure in a store with an aisle for porn and another for books, whose covers had been torn off to prevent them from being sold before they were pulped.

Nancy and I had been so famished for intellectual nourishment in one of America’s cultural deserts that we’d entered the seedy shop because of the promise of cheap second-hand books and had worked our way down the shelves of bare spines, spot-checking the contents of one vandalized volume after another in our search for signs of beauty or thought while a man swiveled behind the cash register in a raised barbershop chair, monitoring us with a jaundiced eye. You couldn’t have found a more unpromising or dissolute place.

And yet that’s where we found you - beaming jauntily from the one book that still had its cover. The fact that the only author whose work had survived the massacre was one of our best friends and an artistic guerrilla fighting against the trashing of life embodied by that store seemed like a double miracle and proof that we could even find gems and relief in a wasteland. You were the needle in the haystack!

When I think back to that dump and see how your colorful collage plays off the black-and-white title page, I can’t help but wonder whether the face-off reflects the one between the gaudy flesh mags and stark spines. But this is far more than a whimsical book dedication or in-joke concerning the spot where we made our find, since the collage’s hieratic composition is freighted with so many parodies, instructions, dualities, and allusions that it begs to be deciphered.

Even before we get into the details, it’s obvious that the work portrays a chimeric being with a domed head packed with wet dreams and potent flames burning between its legs. It’s equally obvious that the powerful entity is a fusion of interactive parts and attributes. Like the statue of a Benin king with mudfish legs, the social realist caryatids stand on feet filled with the raw strength of rhino and aardvark paws. The shins of the fraternal pair, whose frontal stance reflects that of African statuary and Ted and his friend on the cover, hide black tendons, muscle, and bones, which turn out to be the word “technique”. The groins of Charles Atlas and his conjoined twin are hung with signs announcing the presence of slippery monotremes and ovulating okapis hiding between bow-legged thighs, which are spread like a cowboy’s around the phallic shapes of missing horses. And there in the middle, between statues of liberty that are either burning bright or turning to ashes, is an ambiguous shape that looks like a dong or newborn with all the trappings and coding of afterbirth.  

“Aller… Aller!” (Go … Go!) encourage tickets with arrows authorizing movement across lines and language barriers, since the writing shifts from French to Arabic, as a pair of flexing figures follow their own cycle of arrows at the bottom in perpetual interaction. The fully licensed duo might as well be coming out of Dogon statues of the primordial couple or the original Atlas squatting beneath the weight of the world or even shamans, since the caryatids look like they’re gripping the ends of a rainbow serpent. The hoop frames the livid dream of this statuesque outagraph like a halo surrounded with words dictated from above: “La practique affections. Les techniques Afrodesia du système nerveux.” The divine recipe for deluxe duos picks up on the references below to African couples, frank eroticism, and even the word “technique” in the legs, with its links to sex and the arts.

And then there’s the testimonial on the back, where Ted himself interprets this work by stating “I.D. Klar N. Joan, DunKing Nan C. Doughnut (Deluxe Duo) Tues. 29 Aug. 78 Paris” - for this being is none other than his chimeric eminence - Ted himself.

Finally, our find reminded him of the time when he’d found a copy of this volume at a rare book fair in New York and had been on the point of offering to dedicate it, when the white owner had snapped “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d prefer it if you put that book down, since it’s valuable.” Ted had walked away without telling the racist snob that he would have gladly increased the value for free. When I compare that incident to the relationships that led to this dedication, I realize what a treasure this is both as a work of art and as a marriage license signed by a witness who could truly testify that Nancy and I formed a deluxe duo.

Thank you.

Below: Ted used the same rubbing of a muscular man in his dedications of both The Hipsters and "Old and New Duck Butter Poems, which was published by our friend Jim Haynes' Hand Shake Editions in 1980.

Teducation Films!

This is Ted Joans's two-page manifesto for his series of films, which he showed all over the world, including on such occasions as Langston Hughes's birthday, which we celebrated for many years at 18 rue Rambuteau.

Caldwell collection.

Paysages par Henry Miller / Landscapes by Henry Miller

Translated by Ted Joans

These two pages are among several hundred extraordinary examples of Ted's creativity in our archives. I particularly love Ted's drawing of Henry Miller leaving Provins for the south in the form of a train emitting a surrealist labyrinth.

A small sampling of Ted's works in public museums:

1) Works by Ted Joans at the Metropolitan Museum.

2) Ted Joans at the Tate Modern.

3) Ted Joans at the Pompidou Center (two of several links):

A) https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/media/pZrxELM

B) https://www.spectacles-selection.com/archives/expositions/fiche_expo_S/surrealisme-V/surrealisme-P.html

4) Ted Joans at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA).

Ted Joans exhibitions at Gwenolee Zurcher's galleries in New York & Paris:

A) https://www.galeriezurcher.com/ted-joans

B) https://www.galeriezurcher.com/september-12-october-29-2024-ted-joans-jazz-is-my-religion

TED JOANS EXHIBITIONS 2024-2025

Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940

Curated by Maria Elena Ortiz, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX

March 10 - July 28, 2024

Ted Joans: Land of the Rhinoceri

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

June 1 - November 17, 2024

Ted Joans, Dirty Rainbow (1981). Curated by Gwenolee Zürcher

Galerie Pixi, 95 rue de Seine, Paris

September 2 - October 9, 2024

Surréalisme

Centre Pompidou, Paris

September 3, 2024 - January 13, 2025

Ted Joans, Jazz is my Religion,

Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker St, New York

September 12 - October 29, 2024

Ted Joans, Bill Dixon, Oliver Lake

Zürcher Gallery, Outsider Paris, Le Molière, Paris

October 14 - 20, 2024

But live here? No thanks: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism

Lenbachhaus, Kunstbau, Munich

October 14, 2024 - March 2, 2025

Vital Signs, Artists and the Body. Curated by Lanka Tattersall

MoMA, New York

November 3, 2024 - February 22, 2025

Paris Noir

Centre Pompidou, Paris

March 19 - June 30, 2025

The following details from "Sure really I is, aren't you?" by Ted Joans show

- a Vietnam War era helicopter hovering with black zigzags above Charlie Parker, who is playing his saxophone amid floral imagery between "money shots", which frame him like a vice (talk about puns!),

- another photo of Charlie, who Ted lived with and memorialized with the graffiti "Bird Lives!", in the middle of a palm-fiber bag, where Parker is again framed - this time by the same kind of cowries that Africans use to adorn things of transcendent value,  

- a black-fronted duiker skull, which turns this funereal memorial into a wondrous look at some of the vital disturbing things behind our veils and skin, and  

- a wooden sole marked "Hahari", which I associate with the quests of such indefatigable pilgrims as Ted and his friend Nicolai Welsh, who posed together on the eve of their departures for Africa and the Orient.  

The full work can be seen (in its murky plastic bag) both above and on page 162 of the catalog for the Centre Pompidou's show "Surréalisme/ Surrealism" (4 Sept. 2024 - 13 Jan. 2025).