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Emmett Williams

Greenville, NC, 1925 - 2007, Berlin, Germany

BiographyNYTimes Obituary March 1, 2007
Emmett Williams, 81, Fluxus-Movement Poet, Dies
By ROJA HEYDARPOUR

Emmett Williams, an American poet whose transposition of words into visual art and performances made him one of the founding artists of Fluxus, a performance-oriented avant-garde art movement of the 1960s, died on Feb. 14 in Berlin. He was 81 and had lived in Berlin for many years.

His wife, Ann Noël, confirmed his death. Mr. Williams became a prominent part of the European faction of the Fluxus movement when its first performance festival took place in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1962. Fluxus sprang from a group of international artists, writers and musicians who began working together to stage happenings and performances. There was never an institutional base for Fluxus, and it never even defined itself as an art movement because it was anti-authoritarian in nature. Nevertheless, it helped give birth to video art, performance art and conceptual art.

Mr. Williams was living in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1962 when he began correspondence with George Maciunas, the originator of Fluxus. He joined Mr. Maciunas and several other artists, most of them European, in performing his poetry, which Fluxus artists would later refer to as a score.

In 1966 Mr. Williams took a job as editor in chief of The Something Else Press, a publishing house in New York City founded by Dick Higgins, another pioneer of Fluxus. By 1967 Mr. Williams had edited “The Anthology of Concrete Poetry” and written “Sweethearts,” two of his most widely recognized works. He went on to write many essays and musings on Fluxus.

“When I have exhibitions, I do not say I am a Fluxus artist, I say it is my work,” Mr. Williams said in an interview with Umbrella magazine in March 1998. “And that makes me very comfortable. And it’s nice to outlive descriptive titles like that.”

Emmett Williams was born in Greenville, N.C., and grew up in Newport News, Va. He joined the Army in 1943 and taught celestial navigation in Florida during World War II. He graduated from Kenyon College in 1949. Mr. Williams went to Paris that same year for his honeymoon and decided to live in France and later Switzerland. He eventually settled in Darmstadt, where he worked as the features editor of Stars and Stripes, the United States military newspaper.

After 14 years in the United States, Mr. Williams won a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service and in 1980 moved to Berlin, where he worked up until his death.

Mr. Williams taught at the California Institute of the Arts and Nova Scotia College of Art andDesign. He has been an artistin residence at Harvard and the University of Kentucky.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Williams is survived by his son Garry, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, from his marriage to Ms. Noël; and his children from a previous marriage, Eugene, of Honeydew, Calif., Laura, of Darmstadt, and Penelope, of Frankfurt, Germany.

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