Paul Francis Buck

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Paul Francis Buck (born 10 August 1946) is a British poet, writer, translator and editor. He has been writing and publishing since the late Sixties with key titles that include Violations, Lust, Walking into Myself, Spread Wide, Performance, and A Public Intimacy. ‘His work is characterized by its sabotaging of the various forms in order to explore their overlaps and differences.’

Early life

Paul Buck was born in Woolwich, London, and spent his formative years in Sidcup: St Joseph’s Convent, then St Mary’s R.C. Grammar School, before proceeding to Chelsea College in 1964 to study Chemistry & Geology. He left before completion having been lured into the world of the Arts: the adjacent Chelsea Art School, the Royal Court Theatre and as music writer for the College newspaper, attending Ready Steady Go weekly to interview musicians.

Buck immersed himself in the late Sixties counter-culture, working as a bookseller at Better Books (with its underground theatre, film and poetry activities from the People Show, Filmmakers Coop, etc), working Friday nights at the legendary UFO club, then Middle Earth, as well as writing occasionally for International Times and working for the poetry publisher Fulcrum Press.

Work

Paul Buck has written around 70 books, including poetry, prose, fiction, performance books and non-fiction works. Titles include: Lust, Ulli's Room, Naming Names, The Halter of Passion, Violations, No Title, Damage, Where We Touch, and Walking into Myself. He also worked on a collaboration with the artist David Barton, that resulted in a series of books: Spoil, Hitch, Stills, Shifts, Shreds, Pull, Wrench, Slam, Stark, and Close.

He has contributed writings to magazines and books in Britain, America and Europe, particularly France, where he has been translated a number of times and has a crime novel, The Honeymoon Killers, in two versions with the Série Noire and Rivages/Noir. As a result of this novel, he became friends with Jean-Patrick Manchette and though he sought to find English-language publishers for Manchette’s novels, the French author’s time was yet to come outside France. They started writing a novel together called Tribunal, but it was never completed.

Buck contributed to and was involved with French and Belgian magazines including Change, Obliques, Exit, In'hui, Odradek, Donner à Voir, with translations by Bernard Noël, Jean-Pierre Faye, Jean Paris, Jacques Darras, and Christian Tarting.

In the 1970s, he edited (with the help and involvement of Glenda George) what became a seminal literary/arts magazine, Curtains, that presented contemporary French writing, particularly Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Bernard Noël, Jean-Pierre Faye, Jacques Derrida, Marcelin Pleynet, Edmond Jabès, Jacques Roubaud, Charles Juliet, Mitsou Ronat, Laure, Agnès Rouzier, Danielle Collobert, Jacqueline Risset, Jean Frémon, Roger Laporte, Jean Daive, Alain Veinstein, Eugène Savitzkaya, Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud, Michel Camus, Jacques Prevel, Roger Giroux, Pierre Dhainaut, Philippe Boyer, Jean Paris, and Roger Munier, and interwove the translations with British writers like Iain Sinclair, Allen Fisher, Ulli Freer, and Eric Mottram, and Americans like Robert Kelly, Paul Auster, Lydia Davis, Larry Eigner, and Clayton Eshleman, and artists like Susan Hiller, Vladimir Velickovic, Paul Neagu, Gina Pane, Brian Catling, Jean-Luc Parant, Henri Maccheroni, and Alison Wilding. He has always acknowledged that one of the pleasures of editing and translating is not only to discover oneself, but to publish and promote others whom he thinks should be read more widely.

In the process, he spent time in France, formed the group SET International with Jean Pierre Faye from the Change Collectif, and guest-edited various magazines and anthologies of English writings for various publishers.

Buck performed regularly in places like Centre Beaubourg, Museum of Modern Art (including as part of Un Certain Art Anglais), and Librarie Obliques, and often participated in conferences around English and French literature both in Paris and London. This was during a period that enabled him to explore vocalizations via Antonin Artaud, as well as the Lettrists, attracting the welcome attention and support of Henri Michaux.

Today he is on the ‘Comité de parrainage’ of Cahiers Laure, alongside Jean-Pierre Faye, Jean-Luc Froissart, Bernard Noël, and Jérôme Peignot. In Numéro 2, 2019, he contributed a long conversation between himself and Bernard Noël on Laure (Colette Peignot).

Through and since the 1970s, he has worked with various forms of performance, initially as part of London Calling with Tina Keane, Rose Finn-Kelcey, David Medalla, Paul Burwell, Carlyle Reedy, and Amikan Toren, in various venues like Acme Gallery, Air Gallery, ICA and other galleries around Britain and Europe.

His oral performance work also developed from research that owed to music sources (including Berio and Scelsi) as well as to ethnic and poetry traditions. His most notable performances were at The Institution of Rot, The Museum of Modern Art (Oxford) and at the ICA as part of the Artaud/Genet weekend along with a mix of artists like Peter Sellars, Alejandro Jodorowski, Patti Smith, and Pierre Guyotat, where he performed a collage of Artaud's texts, vocalizing in a manner derived from Artaud’s ideas as expressed in The Theatre and its Double. In 2015, he vocalized part of Artaud’s Fragmentations text that Colette Thomas had presented at the June 1946 Artaud benefit in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris for a special Cabinet Gallery evening at the Conway Hall, London.

In recent years, he has also been reading/performing for Frozen Tears launches; presenting papers at Art & Conference at ICA; Writing as Art Practice Conference at ICA; Courting Disaster at Writing in Literature & in Psychoanalysis Conference of Centre for Freudian Analysis & Research; Library: A Suitable Case for Treatment (on Richard Prince) at Serpentine Gallery; An Act of Editing: The Art of Escape in Existential Territories Series at Book Works; and editing/curating the exhibition Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder in The Apartment.

Working with film and video from time to time, including a two-hour feature on super 8 entitled Crowd Scenes, he started and developed an audio-visual department at Medway College of A&D (now part of the University for the Creative Arts) and taught there through the 80s and early 90s alongside musicians Andrew Poppy, Jack Hues and Geoff Warren. He has taught and lectured at various institutions in the Art school system, including as a visiting tutor in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College.

Since the 1980s, he has made 10 albums with others: Jacques and Absinthe with Marc Almond (with his translations of Jacques Brel, Juliette Gréco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Barbara, Leo Ferré, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire); Melinda Miel (writing two albums of torch songs), and initially, starting in the late 1970s, as co-founder of 48 Cameras (a Belgian art-music group) with Jean-Marie Mathoul, for which he wrote and performed texts for a number of albums until completing his involvement in 1994. His interest in ‘the internal rhythms’ within language is the reason he has given for this music research and involvement.

In September 1984, with Roger Ely, he staged a week-long Festival, Violent Silence, in celebration of Georges Bataille at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London. Each night began with a full stage production of My Mother, directed by Michael Eaton & Michele Frankel, featuring Ann Pennington, Neil Cunningham, Michele Wade, Judith Sharp, Frances Low and Phillip Dupuy, followed by a variety of performances by Cosey Fanni Tutti, Marc Almond, Bernard Noël, and Terence Sellers, and films by John Maybury, Derek Jarman, Steve Dwoskin, and Cerith Wyn Evans, as well as his own contributions.

Paul Buck’s textual work has spread onto canvas, glass, and other materials, and become part of documentation from performances over the years. It has also extended to exhibitions, as at the Cabinet Gallery in 1992 in which texts were directly worked on the walls in printed and handwritten form. In 2012 an exhibition ‘in the disappearing mist, the gift whispers’ at the Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, comprised of his own textual work, but also included a gallery of other artists he invited into the space from Britain, France, the US and Germany, including Kathy Acker, John Cussans, Tatjana Doll, Margarita Gluzsberg, Sophie von Hellerman, Susan Hiller, Liane Lang, Lucy McKenzie, Perle Petit, Richard Prince, Clunie Reid and Claude Royet-Journoud. Following the exhibition, he published Disappearing Curtains (a journal) as a way to summarize the show and capture his years of French participation by including other writers never included in his original Curtains series. Thus, additional writings appeared from Colette Thomas, Mathieu Bénézet, Diane Bataille, Joë Bousquet, and Pierre Guyotat.

Through the years, he has translated various books and texts from French, initially for his magazine Curtains, as well as for other publications, including other writers (than listed above) like Pascal Quignard, Jacques Sojcher, Pierre Bourgeade, Sylvie Nève, Eduardo de Gregorio, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Henri, Pierre Guyotat, and Emmanuel Hocquard. Books include: The Castle of Communion by Bernard Noël; Eugène Savitzkaya's play, Celebration of an improbable and unlimited marriage (for a production); Decadence of the Nude, essays by Pierre Klossowski and Maurice Blanchot; Pornocracy by Catherine Breillat; Alice the sausage by Sophie Jabès; In Pursuit of Treasure Island and The Wit of the Staircase, both by Raul Ruiz.

Since 1994, with his wife, Catherine Petit, they have also translated regularly for Dis Voir in Paris, including books of essays on Bruno Dumont and Kim Ki-duk, and Keep This Sex Out of My Sight, essays on the female sex in art; Black is a Color by Elvan Zabunyan; Narrativity: How Visual Arts, Cinema and Literature are telling the world today, essays; and the Encounters series of Coupland/Huyghe; Kac/Ronell; Briand/Foucard; and Senges/de Crécy.

They have translated two plays by Sophie Jabès, Camille, Camille, Camille and Asmahan 2. In recent years, they have been working on the writings of Alberto Giacometti for the Giacometti Foundation, as well as the catalogues for the Foundation’s own in-house exhibitions: Giacometti/Lindberg, Giacometti/Flora, Giacometti/Histoire de Corps, Giacometti/Sade, Giacometti/In Search of Lost Works, and Giacometti/Walking Man, as well as for other large Giacometti museum exhibitions staged outside Paris: Prague, Stockholm, and Copenhagen.

Since 2000, Buck has produced a labyrinth of works that interlink subjects, whether a book on the literary and cultural world of Lisbon in Cities of the Imagination (preface by Jean-Pierre Faye), or Spread Wide, an encounter with Kathy Acker generated from a correspondence between them in 1979/81, or A Public Intimacy, that draws on his cultural scrapbooks, dating back to 1964, plotting his involvement in art and cultural activities, particularly in relation to French literature.

Since autumn 2012, he has published: a detailed biography of the film Performance (Cammell/Roeg, 1970), a work that had been in progress for four decades; two collections of long essays, the first, Library: a suitable case for treatment, on Jacques Rivette, Abel Ferrara, Richard Prince, Paul Mayersberg and Clunie Reid, and the second, Street of Dreams on the Eiffel Tower and River Seine as seen in cinema, along with essays on Charing Cross Road (Street of Dreams), Lisbon during WW2, and Rome, his mother’s place of origin; Along the River Run, a novel, a psychological wrench set on the waterfront at Lisbon; and Indiscretions (& Nakedness), a set of three prose narratives.

In 2018/2019, he helped Martin McGeown at the Cabinet Gallery to select over sixty Cahiers and other documents from the Bibliothèque Nationale’s archives for a unique exhibition, Antonin Artaud, Cahiers de Rodez et d’Ivry, drawings and writing 1945-1948 at the Cabinet Gallery in London, accompanied by scores of pages translated by him and Catherine Petit from the Rodez and Ivry notebooks for folders displayed in the gallery to aid the audience.

In 2018/2019, he also co-wrote Laure Prouvost’s film for the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Deep Sea Blue Surrounding You, and the accompanying title song, released in autumn 2019.

His other ongoing main focus is the series, Vauxhall&Company, that he edits with Catherine Petit under the auspices of the Cabinet Gallery. To date they have published books by Pierre Klossowski, Colette Thomas, Pierre Guyotat, and Antonin Artaud.

Personal life

In the 1970s, Paul Buck lived with the writer Glenda George. They have one son, Daniel. Though Paul Buck moved away from Sidcup at the end of the 1960s to live variously in London, Maidstone and just outside Hebden Bridge, he has been living once more in Sidcup for over thirty years with his wife Catherine Petit and, for their growing years, their daughters Elise and Perle.

Select bibliography

Fiction and prose

• Pimot (1968)
• The Honeymoon Killers (1970)
• not fit for the queen (1972)
• lust/lust to write/to write out of lust (1976)
• Walking into Myself (1995)
• Spoil (with David Barton) (1995)
• Wrench (with David Barton) (1998)
• Close (with David Barton) (2000)
• To End It All (2015)
• Along the River Run (2020)
• Indiscretions (& Nakedness) (2020)

Poetry and textual

• Time is (1975)
• re/qui/re(qui)re (1975)
• :The Table (with Ulli McCarthy) (1977)
• Violations (1979)
• xxxx 5 (1980)
• improvisations (1980)
• No lettuces for Miss Lush (1981)
• where we touch (with David Barton) (1985)
• the muddy edge of what is necessary (with David Barton) (1986)
• naming names (1988)
• untold damage (with David Barton) (1988)
• the halter of passion (with David Barton) (1989)
• no title (1991)
• xxxx 7 (1992)
• Recollection & Misunderstanding (2018)
• Towards infinity (with Ulli Freer) (2019)
• The Pleasures of the City (2020)

Essays and variants

• Studies towards a portrait (1978)
• rites but for affection (1987)
• Lisbon (2002)
• Spread Wide (with Kathy Acker) (2004)
• The E-List (2008), republished as Prison Break (2012)
• A Public Intimacy (a life through scrapbooks) (2011)
• Performance (2012)
• Disappearing Curtains (a journal) (2016)
• Library: a suitable case for treatment (2018)
• Street of Dreams (2020)
• Talking of Curtains (2021)
• In the bag (Bricks from the Kiln, 2023)

Plays & performance

• Sentence. And would be superfluous. (1976)
• tide of availability (feed (1978)
• Ulli’s Room (1981)
• Turkish Delight (1982)

Translations (Further selected)

• Georges Bataille – My Mother, adapted as a play, performed in London 1983 at Riverside Studios, and in 1984 as part of Violent Silence, a week-long Bataille Festival, Bloomsbury Theatre, London.
• Bernard Noël – The Castle of Communion (1993 – trans. with Glenda George)
• Spectacular Diseases: Bernard Noël issue (trans. with Glenda George)

(With Catherine Petit)

• Vanessa Duries – The Tie that Binds (Titan, 1995)
• Alain Carrazé & Jean-Luc Putheaud – The Avengers Companion (Titan, 1997)
• The Landscape Approach of Bernard Lassus (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998)
• Eugène Savitzkaya – Celebration of an Improbable and Limitless Marriage – theatre piece
• Coen Brothers (Plexus, 2000)
• Bruno Dumont (Dis Voir, 2001)
• Pierre Klossowski/Maurice Blanchot – Decadence of the Nude (Black Dog Publications, 2003)
• Keep This Sex Out of My Sight (Dis Voir, 2003)
• Philippe Brenot – In Praise of Masturbation (Marion Boyars, 2005)
• Philippe Beaussant – Rendez-vous in Venice (Pushkin Press, 2005)
• Elvan Zabunyan – Black is a Color (Dis Voir, 2005)
• Kim Ki-duk (Dis Voir, 2006)
• Contemporary French Erotica (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006)
• Narrativity: How Visual Arts, Cinema and Literature are telling the world today (Dis Voir, 2007)
• Sophie Jabès – Alice the sausage (Dedalus Press, 2007)
• Pierre Klossowski – Gulliver (Cabinet Gallery, 2008)
• Catherine Breillat – Pornocracy (Jovian Books, 2006; Semiotext(e), 2008)
• Raul Ruiz – In Pursuit of Treasure Island (Dis Voir, 2008)
• Eduardo Kac & Avital Ronnel – Life Extreme (Dis Voir, 2007)
• Matthieu Briand & Daniel Foucard – Ubïq: A Mental Odyssey (Dis Voir, 2008)
• Denis Baron – The Mutant Flesh (Dis Voir, 2009)
• Jean-Yves Leloup – Digital Magma (Sternberg Press, 2010)
• Pierre Senges & Nicolas de Crécy – The Adventures of Percival (Dis Voir, 2009)
• Elvan Zabunyan – From Him to Us: Sarkis (YKY, 2010)
• Nicolas Ancion & Patrice Killoffer – The Man Who Refused to Die (Dis Voir, 2010)
• Raul Ruiz – The Wit of the Staircase (Dis Voir, 2012)
• Pierre Klossowski – The Immortal Adolescent (Vauxhall&Co, 2014)
• Colette Thomas – The Testament of the dead Daughter (Vauxhall&Co, 2015)
• Albert Giacometti – Why I am a sculptor (Hermann, 2017)
• Henry Moore (Fonds Leclerc, 2018)
• Cabinets of Curiosities (Fonds Leclerc, 2019)
• Cruel objects of desire: Giacometti/Sade (Institute Giacometti, 2019)
• Antonin Artaud – Van Gogh, the man suicided by society (Vauxhall&Co, 2019)
• Alberto Giacometti: Giacometti/Beckett (Fondation Giacometti/Fage, 2020)
• Raul Ruiz – A Nine-Year Old Aviator (Dis Voir, 2020)
• Alberto Giacometti – I certainly practise painting… (Giacometti/Hermann, 2021)
• Alberto Giacometti – Notes on the copies (Giacometti/Hermann, 2021)
• Alberto Giacometti – The Dream, the Sphinx, and the Death of T. (Giacometti/Hermann, 2021)
• Alberto Giacometti – Marvellous Reality (Grimaldi Forum/Skira, 2021)
• Alberto Giacometti / André Breton – Amitiés Surréalistes (Giacometti/Fage, 2022)
• Ernest Pignon-Ernest (Fonds Leclerc, 2022)
• Alberto Giacometti / André Breton (Giacometti/Fage, 2021)
• Alberto Giacometti – A tree as a woman, a stone as a head (Giacometti/Fage, 2022)
• Corps à corps (Centre Pompidou, 2023)
• Henri Cartier-Bresson (Fonds Leclerc, 2024)

Music

• 48 Cameras – B-Sides Are For Lovers (139 K’s Records, 1985)
• 48 Cameras – Third Imitation of Christ (139 K’s Records, 1987)
• 48 Cameras – Third & Last Imitation of Christ (Besides Records, 1992)
• 48 Cameras – Easter, November & a Year (Les Disques du Soleil et de L’Acier, 1993)
• 48 Cameras – Me, my Youth & a Bass Drum (Besides/Big Bang Music, 1996)
• Marc Almond – Jacques (Some Bizzare, 1989)
• Marc Almond – Absinthe (Some Bizzare, 1993)
• Melinda Miel – The Law of the Dream (Normal, 1992)
• Melinda Miel – A Kiss on a Tear (Normal, 1994)

Editings

• Snow, 1968
• Curtains 1-21, 1971-1978
• Twisted Wrist 1-10, 1977-1983
• Fête 1-7, 1979-1981
• Odradek 23-24, 1977
• Words Worth 1:2, 1978
• Change 36, 1978 – section
• Voix-Off / Angleterre, 1980
• New Directions 41, 1980 – French section
• Spectacular Diseases 5, 1980 – Bernard Noël issue
• Spectacular Diseases 8, 1985 – Sexuality and the argument of art
• Spectacular Diseases 7, 1984 – Latin American issue
• Shoestring, 1983
• Violent Silence celebrating Georges Bataille, 1984
• Matières d’Angleterre: Anthologie bilingue de la Nouvelle Poésie Anglaise. Amiens, France: Les Trois Cailloux, 1984 – with Pierre Joris
• Temblor: Contemporary Poets 1, 1985 – section
• Frozen Tears 2, 2004 – section
• Paul Buck’s Pressed Curtains Tape Project, 2015
• Disappearing Curtains, 2016

References

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