Late Start For Mardi Gras

A Max Blagg Collaboration With 21 Artists

ISBN: 979-8-3507-2967-2
By: Blagg, Max

ABOUT THE BOOK

This collection of poetry and artwork collaborations is part of a project that includes a 7 volume series of booklets featuring word and image collaborations between Max Blagg and 21 other visual artists, entitled Late Start For Mardi Gras. Late Start began in 2019 with a 200 hundred page printout of one of Blagg’s poetry manuscripts, that his wife randomly began sewing onto canvases and tacking to his studio walls. This resourceful tool made the words visible and tangible to the writer, facilitating their further edit and redaction, while he convalesced from a tick-borne illness. These ‘text-canvases’, stitched by hand and machine, range in size from 12”x 60” to 48”x 72”, each comprising anywhere from 4 to 16 pages of text. Late Start’s development was also spontaneous. With a couple dozen of these canvases on hand, Blagg invited artists to collaborate. They chose their ‘ready-made’ by title or text, working directly on the canvas or creating an entirely new piece. This compilation of 21 poems and collaborative artworks is preserved as it appears in the booklet series, featuring the work of these artists: Golnar Adili, Ellen Berkenblit, Ernesto Caivano, Michael Combs, Peter Dayton, Sally Egbert, Eric Fischl, James Gilroy, Nan Goldin, Michael Halsband, Curtis Kulig, Justen Ladda, Ruth Marten, Jamie Nares, Walter Robinson, Nick Rule, Will Ryman, Ken Tisa, Walter Schrank, Ryan Wallace and Lucy Winton.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Max Blagg

Max Blagg, born in England, has lived in NYC since 1971. Long recognized as a highly respected poet, visual artist and performer on the New York art & literary scene, he has appeared at innumerable venues including Tin Pan Alley, Jackie 60, Kitchen, Guggenheim Museum, Parrish Museum, St. Marks Church, The National Arts Club & Bowery Poetry Club. Blagg’s artworks have been exhibited in several galleries & museums, including MOMA, The Parrish Museum, Luring Augustine, Exhibition A, and have been collected by artists Richard Prince, Larry Clark, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen and others. Blagg has published several volumes of poetry & prose internationally & in the U.S. with Carpe Diem Press, Paradigm Press, and Shallow Books. His writing appears regularly in magazines, and he's a Contributing Editor at 10 Magazine. Blagg co-founded and co-edited, with Glenn O’Brien, the art and literature magazine BALD EGO. He lives in New York City, where he continues to write, 'put the Word in your ear', liberating it from the pages of books and also onto walls, making it more visible, accessible. Blagg's 'poetry readings' and performances began in the 1970's NYC, and garnered a large cult following. Small press chapbooks and broadsheets of his early work by Aloes Press, London include From Here To Maternity, 1979, and Nine Years In A Wind Tunnel with drawings by Ken Tisa, 1979 (reprint 2020); Licking The Fun Up, with the cover by Jamie Nares, 1991. These readings were often collaborative performances or exhibitions with notables like Ethyl Eichelberger, Jim Farmer, Nan Goldin. Blagg xeroxed collages of image and text for his announcements, and 4 of these "flyers" from 1984 were included in the Nan Goldin “Ballad of Sexually Dependency’ exhibition, MOMA, NYC, 2016.