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Johanna Drucker's essay on the work of Gelett Burgess.

Le Petit Journal des Réfusées-- buy from Rice University Press. image -->

In 1896, artistic activity in San Francisco was hardly attracting the same attention as that of the cosmopolitan capitals of Europe and England. Yet there was abundant communication among artistic circles through print sources, and graphic materials were a primary conduit for the exchange of aesthetic ideas and forms. So when Frank Gelett Burgess conceived and designed an unusual sixteen-page pamphlet, printed on wallpaper, trimmed to a trapezoidal shape, and full of parodic references, he was making a critical argument about cultural networks and industries as well as making an original and unique piece of humor. Le Petit Journal des Refusées purported to be a publication consisting of works rejected by at least three other journals. The piece was really the work of Burgess and a few of his friends. Gelett Burgess, Bayside Bohemia: Fin de siècle San Francisco and its Little Magazines. (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1954) for the best overview of Burgess’s activities and those of his friends. Also, Gelett Burgess&the Hyde Street Grip , Introduction (San Francisco: Printed for Joseph M. Bransten, for members of The Roxburghe Club of San Francisco, by Grabhorn Steam Press, 1959). For further evidence of his viability as a journalist, see Gelett Burgess, “The Wild Men of Paris,” The Architectural Record 1910. The result of a late-night marathon of drawing, cutting, pasting and high-spirited play, Le Petit Journal still commands attention through its unusual graphics and design. Burgess was a humorist, an artist and writer who became an active voice in the San Francisco Bohemian scene. But the amusing pamphlet would provide only passing interest if it were not for the remarkable degree of self-consciousness with which it exposed the social nature of aesthetic production. Le Petit Journal is indisputably an artifact of late nineteenth-century international cosmopolitan culture, with references mainly Anglo-European and American. But the publication is at once parodic and original, an expression that recognizes that artistic creation begins in the social sphere. This conception shows in the graphic and literary texture of the work. This idea that a literary publication could be simultaneously a milieu for publication and an exposé of the inter-dependence of literary life and social scene is central to its composition as well as its themes and imagery.

What are we to make of this peculiar artifact? 1896, after all, was a year of unusual work. With the monumental Kelmscott Press edition of William Chaucer as one landmark and Stéphane Mallarmé’s vision of a spatialized, constellationary poem, Un coup de dés as another, the little Petit Journal has some serious contemporaries with which to be compared. While it will inevitably, and correctly, end up as the lightweight in such hefty company, the piece is at least equally self-conscious about the complexities and contradictions in experimental publications. It may even have a greater degree of self-consciousness about the social life of aesthetic practices.

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Source:  OpenStax, Le petit journal des refusées. OpenStax CNX. Jun 03, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10709/1.1
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