17 facts about Emmett Williams

Emmett Williams (4 April 1925 – 14 February 2007) was an American poet and visual artist. He was married to British visual performer Ann Nöel.

Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, grew stirring in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1949 to 1966. Williams studied poetry subsequent to John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, anthropology at the University of Paris, and worked as an assistant to the ethnologist Paul Radin in Switzerland.

As an artiste and poet, Emmett Williams collaborated subsequently Daniel Spoerri and German poet Claus Bremer in the Darmstadt circle of concrete poetry from 1957 to 1959. One of his notable pieces from this epoch is “Four-Directional Song of Doubt for Five Voices” (1957), in which five performers are each assigned one word of the phrase “You just never quite know”, and tell their word according to a grid on a card, keeping together when the stress of a metronome: when a black circle appears upon the grid, the artist speaks the word, and past no circle appears they say nothing. In the resulting performance, the core phrase “you never quite know” is overshadowed by further combinations of words, such as “you know” and “quite just”.

In the 1960s, Williams was the European coordinator of Fluxus and worked next door to with French artist Robert Filliou, and a founding member of the Domaine Poetique in Paris, France. Williams was contacts with Václav Havel during his dissident years’ he translated some of Havel’s perform into English. Williams was a guest player in domicile teaching at Mount Holyoke College from September 1975 to June 1976.

Williams’ theater essays appeared in Das Neue Forum, Berner Blatter, Ulmer Theater, and supplementary European magazines. He translated Daniel Spoerri’s Topographie Anecdotee du Hasard (An Anecdoted Topography of Chance), collaborated past Claes Oldenburg on Store Days, and edited An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, all published by the Something Else Press, which was owned and managed by fellow Fluxus artist Dick Higgins. From the mid-1960s through the upfront 1970s Williams was Editor in Chief of the Something Else Press.

In 1991, Williams published an autobiography, My Life in Fluxus – And Vice Versa, published by Edition Hansjörg Mayer, Stuttgart, and reprinted the neighboring year by Thames and Hudson.

In 1996, he was honored for his life pretense with the Hannah-Höch-Preis. He died in Berlin in 2007.

In 2014, Edition Zédélé published a reprint of SOLDIER (Reprint Collection, curated by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and Clive Phillpot), first published in A Valentine for Noel (1973) by Something Else Press and Hansjörg Mayer.

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