Sinclair Beiles was born in Kampala, Uganda in 1930, the only child of Jewish South African parents of Russian descent. The family moved back to Johannesburg when young Sinclair was six years old. There he studied at Wits University before starting a wandering existence in the early 1950s. Beiles…
Les Champs Magnetiques was written long before any surrealist manifesto had been published, and is regarded as the birth of surrealism. The book is the first experiment with ‘écriture automatique’, a literary technique derived from free association in psychoanalysis. The result is an enchanting and evocative collection of prose and poetry. written as in…
Belgian artist Thierry De Cordier (1954) was once gifted a small book with the hand written title ‘Heracleitos’ on the cover. The booklet, barely eight pages, contained in Dutch texts by Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher whose original writings are lost and who is only known through the quotations of later authors. At the time, De Cordier read these ‘Fragments of Heraclitus’ superficially without…
Todd Tamanend Clark (1952) is a Native American outsider musician and composer from Pennsylvania who started to record music in 1975. Clark formed the band ‘The Eyes’ a couple of years later and released their psychedelic album ‘New Gods: Aardvark Through Zymurgy’ in 1977. The Eyes evolved into The Todd Clark Group, who released the album ‘We’re Not…
G.J. de Rook (1943) was co-founder of ‘Bloknoot'(1968-1982), a magazine for concrete and visual poetry and compiled the anthologies of visual poetry ‘xprmntl ptry’ in 1971 and ‘Anthologie Visuele Poëzie’ in 1975. In the 1970s he also put together a large number of exhibitions on visual poetry, mail art and stamp art for several museums and art…