Emmett Williams (1925–2007)

Schemes & Variations was published on the occasion of a one-man exhibition of Williams’s serial work at the Gemeente Museum, The Hague. It includes “13 Variations on 6 Words of Gertrude Stein,” 10 Autobiographical Sketches,” “Berlin, Berlin,” among others, along with a list of Williams’s books, a short biography, and a list of recent exhibitions.

Williams was a poet and an artist who embraced a variety of visual art forms, from printmaking and painting to conceptual and performance art. He was an important contributor to the concrete poetry movement and he was a member of Fluxus, the avant-garde group of artists founded in the early 1960s by George Maciunas. Williams was the author of many books, such as Sweethearts (1967) and An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967), he was a professor and visiting artist at several colleges and universities, and he served as editor of Something Else Press from 1966-1970. He had a significant influence on Pop artists such as Richard Hamilton, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg. While born in the U.S., Williams spent much of his life in Europe; he died in Berlin in 2007. His archive was acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 2020.… (meer)

A founding member of Fluxus and the concrete poetry movement, Emmett Williams (1925-2007) made several performances and poems that stand today as defining gems of those genres. Among them is the book-length concrete poem Sweethearts, first published by Something Else Press (where Williams was editor in chief) in 1968, and back in print for the first time, still sporting its classic cover by Marcel Duchamp. Sweethearts is an anagrammatic erotic encounter between a "he" and a "she," whose entire vocabulary is derived from the word "sweethearts." The letters maintain the same spacing in every word on each page, lending the volume a flipbook dimension that Williams enhances by organizing the text to read backwards, so that the reader can flip the book with her or his left hand (thus the front cover is on the back, and vice versa). Richard Hamilton described Sweethearts as being "to concrete poetry as Wuthering Heights is to the English novel... compelling in its emotional scope, readable, a sweetly heartfelt, jokey, crying, laughing, tender expression of love."… (meer)