RB Kitaj
, The Gay Science (1965)
The fifteen screenprints which comprise ‘Mahler Becomes Politics, Beisbol’ are contained in a portfolio. Printed by Kelpra Studios on various papers the edition was published by Marlborough Fine Art Ltd London 1967. RB Kitaj said that the initial impulse to make this series of prints came from his friendship with Jonathan Williams and from Williams's Mahler poems. The book, Mahler by Jonathan Williams (included in the portfolio) 44 pages long and published in 1966, is a book of poems which are, in the author's words, ‘exercises in spontaneous composition to the movements of all the Mahler symphonies’. The title of the series, deliberately echoing a title such as Mourning becomes Electra indicates, by referring to factors which are polar in their contrast, the range of involvement and association which became part of the originally simple concept. ‘Beisbol’ is a phonetic rendering of the pronunciation south of the United States border of ‘baseball’.
Titles: ‘What is a comparison?’; ‘Republic of the Southern Cross’; The Gay Science’’ ‘Hellebore for Georg Trakl’; His Every Poor, Defeated, loser’s Hopeless Move, Loser, Buried (Ed Dorn)’; Go And get Killed Comrade-We Need a Byron In The Movement’; ‘The Cultural Value of Fear And Hypochondria’; Let Us Call it Arden/& live in it’; ‘Heart’; I’ve Balled Every Waitress In This Club’; ‘In His Forthcoming Book on Relative Deprivation (Loneliness)’; ‘Glue-Words’; ‘For Fear’; ‘Nerves, Massage, Defeat, heart’; The Flood of Laymen’