Rozz Williams.

Rozz Williams is in this archive in two files. The first file is the music: Premature Ejaculation, the F·07 power-electronics-and-ritual-noise project that ran across the 1981 to 1998 working life, with the music catalogue (Christian Death, Shadow Project, Daucus Karota, Heltir, EXP) covered in passing context there. The present file is the second one. It covers the visual practice.

Roger Alan Painter was born 6 November 1963 in Pomona, California, the youngest of four siblings in a strict Southern Baptist family. The visual practice begins in the late 1970s and runs across the entire working life until Williams's death on 1 April 1998 in his West Hollywood apartment, by aged 34. The practice covers collage as the central method, with painting, photography, assemblage, and stage-prop construction as the secondary media; poetry runs alongside as a third discipline, anchored posthumously by And What About the Bells? (compiled and edited by Ryan Wildstar, 2010).

The lineage Williams names across the long-running of interviews is Dada and Surrealism. Salvador Dali, Man Ray, and Andre Breton are the cited figures; Marcel Duchamp and Rene Magritte are the second-tier anchors. The literary anchors are Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Genet, and Lautréamont; Williams stayed in France during portions of the early 1980s and named these literary figures as the reasons. Christian Death's 1984 album Catastrophe Ballet was dedicated to Breton; the same dedicatory gesture runs through the visual catalogue. The critical reception, mainly Andi Harriman writing for Lethal Amounts and the Bedlam Files reviewer responding to the 1999 monograph, places the visual practice in the Dali-Man Ray-Surrealism arc rather than in the contemporary American outsider-art arc the dark-art galleries placed it in during the gallery showings.

The work divides cleanly into two periods. The early period (the 1980s, overlapping the Christian Death early years working life) consists of sparse black-and-white collages. Recurring imagery: guns, swastikas used as parody of fascism (a point Williams was direct about in interviews), skulls, disembodied limbs. The compositions are spare, with more negative space than later work and fewer source elements per piece. The early collages circulated through the Christian Death and Los Angeles deathrock visual identity; some are reproduced in the 1999 monograph in their original-period context. The later period (the 1990s, overlapping the Premature Ejaculation post-1985 catalogue and the solo-and-collaborative working life) shifts to full-color collage. The compositions become denser and more elaborate. Recurring imagery: spiders, squids, eggs, anatomical charts, monasteries, nighttime landscapes, an atomic blast. The Bedlam Files reviewer describes the late collages as "full color blasts of pure insanity, with spiders, squids, eggs and anatomical charts set over monasteries, nighttime landscapes and an atomic blast." The 1997 collage Above the Clouds, later printed in 2005 as a 13 x 18 inch Iris-on-Velvet edition of 20, is the late-period work in continuing circulation through the Estate.

The subject matter across both periods moves between the macabre, the erotic, the religious-uncanny, and the political. The macabre vein handles medical abnormality, mortuary imagery, and the wounded body. The erotic idiom handles nudity in distorted or fragmented form; the body is both object and threat. The religious-uncanny manner handles Southern Baptist iconography subverted, Satanic and occult imagery (Williams stated in interviews with Ellenberger that he had practiced Satanism and magic in the privacy of his home; he also stated, late in his life, that he had developed a personal relationship with God), and the figure of the saint as horror. The political palette handles Nazi and fascist imagery as parody and critique, as Williams was direct about in interviews; the same Nazi-imagery-as-parody position is registered across the post-punk and post-industrial cluster, where it has been read carefully or carelessly depending on the reader.

The first-period gallery showings ran through Williams's friend Snow Elizabeth, who arranged dark-art shows in Los Angeles and Atlanta across the 1980s and 1990s. These were small-scale, subcultural, and outside the contemporary-art gallery system; the work circulated through the dark-art and outsider-art networks rather than through fine-art channels. The practice did not, in Williams's lifetime, reach the major fine-art gallery context. The posthumous gallery context that emerged later is Lethal Amounts Gallery in Los Angeles (operated by Danny Fuentes), which has held two major tribute exhibits across the post-2010 period: on 1 April 2013, marking the fifteenth anniversary of Williams's death, and on 1 April 2018, marking the twentieth. The 2013 exhibit gathered Williams's monkey-fur stage outfit (hand-sewn by Williams and worn with Shadow Project), photo-shoot dresses dating to 1981, the original artwork for the Only Theatre of Pain sleeve (donated by Lisa Fancher of Frontier Records), jewelry, stage props, and instruments. The 2018 exhibit added original collages on loan from John Charles (Rebellion and Truth) and Edward Colver photography prints. Earlier and smaller posthumous shows include the 2010 Hyaena Gallery Necessary Discomforts tribute curated by A Raven Above Press and the January 2017 La Luz de Jesus Gallery exhibit on Hollywood Boulevard timed to the Cult Epics book re-issue.

The documentary anchor is The Art of Rozz Williams: From Christian Death to Death. Edited by Nico B, Williams's friend, the co-director of the 1998 film Pig, and the founder of Cult Epics distribution. Originally published by Last Gasp in 1999, the year after Williams's death. Re-issued in hardcover by Cult Epics in 2017 (with later printings) with eight additional pages, an updated discography, additional art images, and a foreword by Rikk Agnew (Christian Death's original guitarist). 256 pages, over 200 images, edition of 1000 in the re-issue. The book is the documentary record of the visual practice, the poetry, the lyrics, the multi-project music catalogue, and the Pig film together as one body of work. The 2018 Cult Epics box-set commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Pig (edition of 25, each numbered with one of the few remaining VHS copies of the film, an exclusive t-shirt, a postcard, lobby cards, a limited-edition print of one of Williams's collages, a commemorative pin, and a portion of the original 8mm film strip, signed and dated by Nico B) is the post-2017 collector-edition record.

The post-1998 fine-art print catalogue is operated by the Estate of Rozz Williams, mainly in collaboration with Gitane Demone, Williams's long-running musical collaborator and friend who continued to live and work in the Williams network. Editions are Iris-print fine-art reproductions of selected late-period collages, co-signed by the Estate and by Demone. The Estate's position is custodial rather than expansive: the visual catalogue is the catalogue Williams left in 1998, and the post-1998 work is curatorial-and-archival rather than continuing the practice.

The Bureau's reading. The Williams visual practice belongs in this archive at the visual department's -tier level. The lineage runs through Dali, Man Ray, the Surrealists, and the Dada movement; the literary anchors are Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Genet, and Lautréamont. The visual catalogue is, in scale, modest (a few hundred works across the working life); the documentary anchor is the 2017 Cult Epics hardcover edition of The Art of Rozz Williams: From Christian Death to Death; the gallery context is mainly Lethal Amounts in Los Angeles; the print-edition catalogue is operated by the Estate of Rozz Williams with Gitane Demone. The musical catalogue is filed separately at premature-ejaculation.html; the 1998 film is filed separately at pig.html. The present file is the visual work.

Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Late Stone Age · last revised c. the Elizabethan era