Another great Beat artist passes on.
Marc Olmsted remembers the remarkable Robert Branaman:
Said artist Bob Branaman/ “Do you want/ to catch/ the light?’/Pointing to the switch/on the way out the door (Marc Olmsted)
Right after his 90th birthday celebration, January 9, 2024, artist Robert Branaman left the planet, leaving only poet Charles Plymell as the last living member of the Wichita Vortex group.
Allen Ginsberg wrote his Vietnam poem-critique “Wichita Vortex Sutra” in 1966, a collage of conversation and radio snippets from a portable tape recorder Bob Dylan gave him. Less known is that the term “Wichita Vortex” was a phrase Ginsberg heard from his friends Michael McClure, Bruce Conner, Charles Plymell and Robert Branaman, all who migrated to East and/or West Coasts from this strange Kansas center of America. For the most part, these figures also experimented outside of both the poetic and artistic disciplines they were often pigeon-holed in. Film, collage, stage plays, and photography exploded through the shifting paradigm of the 1950s/’60s Beat phenomenon.
In the late 1940s, Lee Streiff, a high school pal of Michael McClure and poet-printer David Haselwood, first transmitted this Vortex to the Beats. (Filmmaker Bruce Conner joined the Wichita High School East group in 12th grade.)
Streiff repeated a “Martian history” of some of Wichita’s “secret alien inhabitants,” which unsurprisingly included Streiff, his older brother and his friends, including a “vortex” that Allapparently pulled spacecraft to shipwrecked disaster. This idea was passed to McClure and McClure passed it to best friend Bruce Conner. They brought the mythos with them when they left Wichita behind, and in 1966, the Vortex was further hammered home in Wichita when Moody Connell’s Skidrow Beanery briefly became the Magic Theatre-Vortex Art Gallery. Branaman’s pal, writer Charles Plymell claimed he could actually feel the Vortex there! Weirdly, it even crops up in Native American legends of the area.
In 1987, Conner himself presented perhaps the first major documents of the movement’s history in a letter to Robert Melton at the Special Collections department of the University of Kansas library. Conner gets it mostly right, except he didn’t know the Exile of the Martians origin began much earlier than 1951 (1937, in fact—in a newsletter of Wichita’s high school sci-fi geeks), ending his letter with: “As Dorothy said – That’s the Vortex in Toto.”
As for Branaman…
“I came to SF in the Spring and then again in the Summer of 1959…Charley (Plymell) came a few years later. Charley went to New York long before me…”
Branaman’s numerous contributions and collaborations with William Burroughs, McClure, and Ginsberg now seem to be finally getting the cultural and historical place they deserve, helping to examine the larger multi-media aspect of the Wichita Vortex in its filtering of the American mind—deconstructing and reassembling its artifacts in ways that are now part of mainstream media culture. Ginsberg’s poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra” also can be seen as an extension of this same approach.
The nova of Robert Branaman’s serigraphed text, paintings, and assemblages continued up to the every end of his life, this man Allen Ginsberg called “one of the most exquisite visionary artists in America.” Branaman’s energy was exceptionally cheerful. He practiced the Chinese energy work Qi Gong and was a longtime practitioner of Arica (Oscar Ichazo’s mystery school – see John Lilly’s Center of the Cyclone for a good account) as well as a follower of Garchen Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist master of high regard. This all likely contributed to the longevity of someone who had formerly lived a life of major self-immolation. Bob was clean and sober since 1983.
Branaman’s stories would begin and they were uniformly hilarious. I filmed him talking about Neal Cassady and couldn’t help my own laugher offscreen.
According to An Introduction to the American Underground Film by Sheldon Renan (Dutton, 1967), Branaman’s film work started in 1958 with 8mm color rolls before he left Wichita. He continued in San Francisco with Super-8 movies like the untitled print that PFA partially screened (most of his Super-8 work is untitled…good luck, filmographers!). After some projects made with Bruce Conner, he then considered 16mm and larger concepts.
Alas, one film lost was called “Allen Ginsberg.”
Goodnight, Bob. Gone, gone, completely gone, absolutely completely gone, wakened mind, so be it.
More Marc Olmsted on Robert Branaman – here – and here
The Rusty Truck Interview – here
and, similarly, from 2012, Michael Limnios interviews him for Blues.Gr – here
John Coplans on Robert Branaman in Artforum
Mat Gleason interviews Bob Branaman in 2017
and more of his artwork – here
Remembering an unforgettable figure!
Big Bob had a terrific memory , and a rich history ! Bob illustrated the covers for many of those Beat poets . Around 1996 Bob came to my printmaking studio where he was making etchings and asked if I wanted to publish Art work that he was collaborating with Allen Ginsberg . We began making plates from his images when suddenly Ginsberg died and that was the end of the project . I ended up publishing a series of beautiful etchings . You could see those works at josephinepress.com ! RIP Big Bob.
John Greco
Thank you Marc!!
I was always drawn to the Beats. I had no idea why until I found out Bob was my father…I was given up for adoption by my mother Susan’s parents. Thanks to DNA testing, I found Bob and my siblings 6 years ago. I’m so blessed I got to know him, his big heart, and my siblings. He was a larger than life person and his legacy of light and love lives on in his work.