Partners

Stephen Housewright

ISBN 10: 1953691048 / ISBN 13: 9781953691040

Published by Blank Forms Editions, US, 2021

About this Item

In Partners, writer, librarian, and teacher Stephen Housewright paints an intimate portrait of a lifetime spent with Jerry Hunt (1943-1993), a Texas-born artist and musician with an astonishing mind and a mystifying practice. Hunt was a singular figure in the world of new music, and one of the most radically unorthodox artists of his generation. His remarkable yet underknown work incorporated motion- and sensor-activated technologies, readymade props, eccentric choreographies, and sixteenth-century astrology into performance and composition. While he orbited avant-garde worlds in the United States and Europe, his personal life, spent largely on a ranch in rural Texas, remained elusive. In this memoir-cum-biography, Housewright narrates a life spent together, beginning in high school as a closeted couple in East Texas and ending with Hunt's battle with cancer and his eventual suicide in 1993, the subject of one of his most harrowing works on video, How to Kill Yourself Using the Inhalation of Carbon Monoxide (1993). Including private correspondence with, and thrilling anecdotes about, Hunt's friends, family, and art world peers, Partners is an essential introduction to Jerry Hunt, and one that only Housewright could share. Self-published online in 1995, and now printed for the first time by Blank Forms Editions with a new introduction by Hunt's close collaborator Karen Finley, Partners is the first installment of Blank Forms's extensive program dedicated to Jerry Hunt. This program includes the first-ever exhibition surveying the artist's career, Jerry Hunt: Transmissions from the Pleroma, opening at Blank Forms in early 2022; a deluxe LP boxed set and reader; the first vinyl pressing of Hunt's final record, Ground: Five Mechanic Convention Streams (1992); and the special anthology Blank Forms 08: Transmissions from the Pleroma.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781953691040

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Partners
• Publisher: Blank Forms Editions, US
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1953691048
• ISBN 13: 9781953691040
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 363 grams

About this title

Synopsis

The amazing life of Jerry Hunt, Texan avant-garde composer, occultist and artist, with appearances from Pauline Oliveros, Karen Finlay and others

Jerry Hunt (1943–93) was among the most eccentric figures in the word of new music. A frenetic orator, occultist and engineering consultant, his works from the 1970s through the early ’90s made use of readymade sculptures, medical technology, arcane talismans and all manner of homemade electronic implements to form confrontational recordings and enigmatic, powerful performances.
Tracing Hunt’s life across his home state’s major cities to a self-built house in rural Van Zandt County, this memoir-cum-biography by Stephen Housewright, Hunt’s partner of 35 years, offers illuminating depictions of Hunt’s important installations and performances across North America and Europe. Housewright narrates a lifetime spent together, beginning in high school as a closeted couple in East Texas and ending with Hunt’s battle with cancer and his eventual suicide, the subject of one of his most harrowing works of video art. This highly readable narrative contains many private correspondences with, and thrilling anecdotes about, Hunt’s friends, family and collaborators, including Joseph Celli, Arnold Dreyblatt, Michael Galbreth, Karen Finley, James and Mary Fulkerson, Guy Klucevsek, Pauline Oliveros, Paul Panhuysen, Annea Lockwood and the S.E.M. Ensemble. This publication accompanies reissues of seven albums from Hunt’s record label, Irida.