Angus and Hetty MacLise papers, 1950s-2010

Summary Information

Abstract

Angus MacLise was a musician, poet, artist, and countercultural figure who was a mainstay of the downtown New York arts scene in the 1960s, which included Fluxus alongside other avant-garde communities and scenes. Hetty MacLise was an English-born artist, poet, and multi-instrumentalist likewise associated with various overlapping movements and milieus within the 1960s and 70s avant-garde. This collection contains papers, documents, publications, ephemera, sound and video recordings, photographs, and artwork primarily created by, given to, or related to Angus MacLise and Hetty MacLise.

At a Glance

Call No.:
MS#1656
Bib ID:
10260984 View CLIO record
Creator(s):
MacLise, Angus; Maclise, Hetty, 1931-2011
Repository:
Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Physical Description:
15.5 linear feet (14 manuscript boxes; 1 half-size manuscript box; 5 record storage cartons (audio-visual material); 3 oversize boxes; 2 tube cases; 7 mapcase folders)
Language(s):
English .
Access:
You will need to make an appointment in advance to use this collection material in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room. You can schedule an appointment once you've submitted your request through your Special Collections Research Account.

This collection (other than the mapcase folders) is located off-site. You will need to request this material from the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at least three business days in advance to use the collection in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room.

This collection has no restrictions.

Description

Scope and Content

This collection contains papers, documents, publications, ephemera, sound and video recordings, photographs, and artwork primarily created by, given to, or related to Angus MacLise and Hetty MacLise.

The collection represents a rich resource for researchers with interests in the personalities, circumstances, events, and contradictions characteristic of the 1960s and 70s North American and expatriate countercultures, their engagements with the East, and the range of cultural forms and artistic practices that emerged and were developed therein––not only writing and visual art, but experimental cinema, theatre, multimedia experiments and other avant-garde collaborations, as well as group formations or communities including Beat poetry, minimalism and early Fluxus.

The collection includes a born-digital portion that remains unprocessed at this time. Please contact the repository for more information.

  • Series I: Angus MacLise, 1959-2010

    Series I: Angus MacLise includes writing, artwork, photography, correspondence, and audio-visual material produced by (or of) MacLise during his lifetime and relating to his activities as an artist, musician, poet, and editor or publisher in New York, San Francisco, and Nepal, as well as several other locations, before his death in 1979. The series also includes a number of posthumous materials that attend to, and have sought to shape, his legacy.

  • Series II: Hetty MacLise, 1950s-2010

    Series II: Hetty MacLise includes writing, artwork, and correspondence produced by, and legal documents, ephemera, and photographs of or belonging to, Hetty MacLise. The series covers her early life in England and then on the hippie trail, the span of her relationship with Angus (and the couple's adventures in various countercultural scenes and movements), and the three decades by which she survived him. Some material relating to Angus' and Hetty's son, Ossian, can also be found in this series.

  • Series III: Friends, Associates, and Other Material Not Directly Related to the MacLises, 1960s-2010

    This series gathers material by and related to figures who in many, though not all, cases do appear elsewhere in the archive, but where said material has little or no discernible connection to the MacLises. The bulk of this series concerns the photographer, poet, countercultural touchstone, and friend of the MacLises, Ira Cohen, whose own subseries includes writing (published and draft texts), art and design work, correspondence, interviews, legal documents, and ephemera. Of particular interest are his photographs, many of Cohen's then-partner Petra Vogt as well as of William S. Burroughs and his circle, but perhaps most notable are those from Cohen's famous "Mylar Chamber." The chamber was a small theatre in Cohen's loft in which he photographed and filmed the reflections of various sitters and performers in sheets of Mylar––a stretched silvery plastic developed in the 1950s––that were attached to hinged boards, producing quintessentially hallucinogenic images. Jimi Hendrix, who Cohen also photographed in this manner, observed of the effect: "Looking at your pictures is like looking through butterfly wings." (Mylar photographs by Cohen of Angus and Hetty MacLise can be found in their respective "Photographs" subseries.) Figures other than Cohen are grouped in Subseries III.2, and listed by name where that name is known. Some prominent and recurring figures include Petra Vogt, Vali Myers, Piero Heliczer, Jack Smith, Roberto Francisco Valenza, Adrian Brooks, and Dana Young. That subseries also includes a number of works, texts, and documents by unidentified artists, as well as ephemera related to other avant-garde communities, networks, and scenes.

Arrangement

The collection has been arranged into three series, by primary subject or creator of material. Series I primarily concerns Angus MacLise; Series II concerns Hetty MacLise; and Series III concerns Ira Cohen as well as other friends and collaborators, where said material is not directly related to either MacLise. Subseries and headings have been added to break down those series into discrete activities, projects, and formats.

Using the Collection

Restrictions on Access

You will need to make an appointment in advance to use this collection material in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room. You can schedule an appointment once you've submitted your request through your Special Collections Research Account.

This collection (other than the mapcase folders) is located off-site. You will need to request this material from the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at least three business days in advance to use the collection in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library reading room.

This collection has no restrictions.

Terms Governing Use and Reproduction

Reproductions may be made for research purposes. The RBML maintains ownership of the physical material only. Copyright remains with the creator and his/her heirs. The responsibility to secure copyright permission rests with the patron.

Preferred Citation

Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Angus and Hetty MacLise Papers; Box and Folder; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries.

Related Materials

Related archival collections include the Ira Cohen Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/resources/5353) and the Piero Heliczer and Dead Language Press Archive collection, Princeton University Library Special Collections.

Writing and scholarship on the MacLise's includes Liechty, Mark, Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal (Chicago University Press, 2017); Nickelson, Patrick, The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute (University of Michigan University Press, 2023), includes chapter on the Theatre of Eternal Music and Angus MacLise's role; Graubard, Allan (ed.), Ira Cohen: Into the Mylar Chamber (Fulgur Press, 2019); and Cohen, Allen, "The San Francisco Oracle: A Brief History" in Ken Wachsberger (ed.), Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 1 (Michigan State University Press, 2011)––chapter on the history of the Oracle, written by its editor, Allen Cohen. Includes reminiscences by Cohen of Hetty MacLise, albeit researches might note that some that of the details about her (including where she was from) appear to be factually inaccurate.

Online resources include Marty Topp/Boo-Hooray Gallery, "Jefferson Street – New York" (includes rare footage of Angus MacLise): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWI74s2is08 ; CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite (December 31st 1965), "The Making of an Underground Film," segment on Piero Heliczer, underground cinema, and the Velvet Underground: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX2LRvyM0cE

Information on the history and significance of East Village Other, for whom Hetty worked as an illustrator: NYU Journalism Project in collaboration with the New York Times (including text and documentation of an exhibition and panel discussion) https://nyujournalismprojects.org/eastvillageother/ ; digitized versions of issues of the EVO are available as part of JSTOR's "Independent Voices" digital collection: https://www.jstor.org/site/reveal-digital/independent-voices/theeastvillageother-27953879/ ; and information on Aspen magazine (including fully digitised versions of every issue of the periodical) at Ubu, including the Angus and Hetty MacLise-edited "Psychedelic Issue" (no. 9): https://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen9/index.html

Custodial History

The collection began as the Angus MacLise papers. Much of the material in this collection was given by Hetty MacLise to composer LaMonte Young in 1980, and remained in a suitcase in Young's possession until it was acquired by Manhattan's Boo Hooray Gallery which used the material as the core of an exhibition on MacLise. Young had held the materials for safekeeping after MacLise's death. Other important materials in the archive came from photographer and multimedia artist Don Snyder, who also played a significant role in the preservation of MacLise's archival material. Further materials came from filmmaker Jonas Mekas, bookseller John McWhinnie, and poet and photographer Ira Cohen. Adam Davis, of Division Leap, sold further materials by Angus but also many by Hetty––including from the periods either side of her marriage to Angus––to Columbia in 2014, which were initially processed into the Angus MacLise papers. Drafts and manuscripts of Angus' publication Year and a copy of his The Subliminal Report were sold to the RBML by Kenneth Mallory and Glenn Horowitz respectively in 2017.

A new cache of material related only to Hetty MacLise––all from her early life, predating her meeting Angus––was purchased from MC Kinniburgh, dealer with Granary Books, in 2022, and was initially planned as a standalone collection. According to the accession files: "Hetty brought these materials to the United States with her when she moved to San Francisco in the mid-1960s. She stowed them with her friend, photographer Lisa Law where they remained for several decades. Hetty had discussed these materials with her friend Rachel Marco-Havens, and several years after Hetty's passing in 2011, Law transferred the materials to Marco-Havens as their owner." To help preserve a trace of this complicated chain of custody, different accession numbers have been noted on each individual folder.

About the Finding Aid / Processing Information

Columbia University Libraries, Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Processing Information

Following a comprehensive review of the newly acquired material and the old Angus MacLise papers, in the summer of 2023 Columbia's the RBML took the decision to combine and expand these collections into its present state, renaming it the Angus and Hetty MacLise Papers better to reflect Hetty's contributions, to demonstrate that her work and life existed not only in relation to her husband's (that is, to the extent that it should simply be absorbed by it), and to encourage use by researchers who might otherwise not be cognisant of the scope and depth of Hetty material held by Columbia that was previously somewhat buried in the Angus MacLise papers. The new arrangement and description aims to highlight just that, and to have the enmeshed work and lives of these two figures repose together, while retaining their individuality. A concordance of old box/folder numbers and a a list of missing and deaccessioned items is available in the repository. This reprocessing was completed by Matthew Johnston, GSAS '25 as part of the Primary Source Graduate Student Internship in summer 2023.

Revision Description

2013-06-28 File created.

2019-05-20 EAD was imported spring 2019 as part of the ArchivesSpace Phase II migration.

2021-03-29 Source information for Condon, Jim. ”Filmographies: NICO and ANGUS MacLISE” updated by CCR based upon correspondence from the magazine's publisher.

2023-08-29 Finding aid completely revamped as part of reprocessing. kws

Biographical / Historical

Angus MacLise was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1938, the son of a book dealer. MacLise's lifework included music, calligraphy, performance art, poetry (both the writing and publishing thereof), drawings, plays, and limited edition artists' books, all of which feature in the collection. He studied music and dance before moving to Paris as a young man in the late 1950s. In 1958 in Paris, he and his high school friend, avant-garde filmmaker Piero Heliczer, started the Dead Language Press. The press specialized in poetry and letterpress published early books and broadsides by Beat-adjacent poets such as Gregory Corso and Jack Smith. MacLise also published several of his own poems and manuscripts through the press, including Year, a shamanic calendar-poem that renamed all 365 days of the year––a convention that MacLise and many of his friends continued to use in dating correspondence or titling artworks.

MacLise and Heliczer moved back to the United States in the early 1960s, settling in New York City and bringing the press with them. In New York, MacLise continued his publishing efforts, while also pursuing music and becoming involved in avant-garde theatrics and performance art pieces. He was a regular participant in Fluxus and Theatre of the Ridiculous events in New York City and appeared in many experimental films being made by his friends in the downtown arts scene at the time, notably Heliczer and Ira Cohen. MacLise was an early member of the highly influential Theatre of Eternal Music, started and organized by composer LaMonte Young and featuring John Cale, Terry Riley, Billy Name, Tony Conrad, and Marian Zazeela, who experimented with durational forms and sustained tones, and often performed what they called their "Dream Music" for hours on end at lofts, galleries, and other Lower East Side spaces and happenings. Says Conrad, "[t]he music was formless, expostulatory, meandering; vaguely modal, arrhythmic, and very unusual; I found it exquisite." Most famously, MacLise was a founding member of the Velvet Underground—he was introduced to the band through his roommate John Cale and became the band''s first drummer. Though he helped to found the band, and may have even given it its name, his time with the Velvet Underground was brief owing––according to several sources including Lou Reed himself––to MacLise's rejection of creating art for profit or on a schedule dictated by anything other than his own inspiration. He quit left the band before they played their first paid show in late 1965, was replaced as the drummer by Maureen "Mo" Tucker, and does not appear on any of the band's official recordings. Still, his early percussive influence in terms of the hissing, buzzing, rhythmic, distorted, raga- or drone-like style that he brought can be heard on the band's first album onwards and beyond, including on tracks such as "European Son," "Venus in Furs," and "Black Angel Death Song." When Reed was hospitalised in 1966, MacLise rejoined the band for their series of Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows in Chicago, but his erratic timekeeping and behaviour ensured that this was only a temporary return.

Hetty MacLise was born Mary Catherine Scholten in either 1929 or 1931, and owing to a combination of her three marriages and her proclivity for self-reinvention, MacLise appears in the archive under a variety of names: Mary Scholten, Mary Burton, Mary McGee, Hetty McGee, Hettie MacLise and Hetty MacLise, to say nothing of the many fond pet- and nicknames given to her by various friends. In a sense this seems appropriate, capturing something of the fundamental multifariousness that characterised her personal and professional lives; MacLise was constantly refusing and dissolving boundaries: between different forms of art, between religions, between East and West, between bohemia and domesticity. A 2018 article in which she is mentioned quotes friends who remember her as "a wild woman who danced with ribbons and lace" but who also "brewed tea the prim English way, in a porcelain pot."

Her background sheds light on that apparent dichotomy. According to a diary found in the collection, Hetty was born to a wealthy family in Kensington, London. "We were rich," she writes, "but I was not spoiled." Her father was a stockbroker at a "well established firm" who also held a valuable collection of Chinese art that went to the Tate when he died. She describes a childhood of private dancing, singing, painting and tennis lessons that passed "in a glorious haze of golden security" (even if it did "little… equip [her] for the kind of life [she] was to lead later"), but one that was also marked by a particularly English upper-class form of childhood loneliness; she was primarily raised by a nanny, saw her mother for only one hour a day during pre-arranged appointments in the family's drawing room, and was sent off to boarding school at a young age. During and after finishing school, Hetty began, unbeknownst to her parents, secretly attending jazz clubs and drawing classes in London at which she met various musicians, poets, and artists, including Billy Kaye: "I became a radical cockney who violently repudiated her upper-class drawer from then on," as she puts it. In still another diary, she clarifies: "I did not dislike my home with my parents, it was the world they represented that I longed to flee from…" What she refers to as her "big breakaway" from said world culminated first in her attending art school in London, admission into which required that she lie about her age, and where she was proximate to the Bacon and Freud set, and then in her nomadic existence in the 1950s and 1960s. Scrapbooks, diaries and hundreds of photographs in the collection document Hetty's roving during this time on her version of the "hippie trail," from Andalusia to Antalya and featuring various Greek islands as well as Marrakech, Tangiers, and other locations in southern Europe and Central Asia, where she stayed with friends, made art and cared for her young son (with her second husband, from whom she was already estranged, Tom McGee), Jason. Her travels eventually led her to the San Francisco Bay Area where she lived with members of the Grateful Dead and worked as a staff illustrator for the vanguard alternative publication the San Francisco Oracle. There, she also joined the experimental street theatre troupe known as the Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company; Angus MacLise had briefly moved to Berkeley in 1967 and met Hetty through his own involvement with this ensemble.

Shortly thereafter, Mary/Hetty McGee married Angus MacLise in Golden Gate Park, in a ceremony officiated by Timothy Leary. The couple initially moved (back, in Angus' case) to New York City, where they further fell in with Andy Warhol's Factory crowd, especially Gerard Malanga––Hetty claims they were present when Warhol was shot by Valeriea Solanas––especially Gerard Malanga, and also collaborated with Ira Cohen, respectively scoring and appearing in Cohen'swhose experimental film The Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda Angus scored. Both were involved, too, with Cohen's Universal Mutant Repertory Company. Hetty continued her career as an illustrator with the East Village Other and other publications, and appeared in the Arlo Guthrie film Alice's Restaurant. They also travelled extensively in the North-eastern United States and beyond, living in rural Massachusetts, in Woodstock, NY, and in Aspen, Colorado, where editor Phyllis Johnson asked them to guest-edit the ninth instalment of Aspen magazine, the famous avant-garde periodical each of issue of which came in a customised box filled with assembled booklets, phonograph recordings, posters, postcards, and other media. (The collection includes a rare complete edition of Aspen no. 9.)

In 1968, the MacLises, with singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, were arrested on drug charges following a traffic stop in Oklahoma City. Allegedly they were in possession of a matchbox-sized quantity of marijuana. While Wainwright was able to use his father's connections to secure both bail and less severe charges, Angus and Hetty spent a month in county jail and pleaded guilty. The couple were spared prison––partly because Hetty was almost six months pregnant with their son Ossian, after having had two miscarriages in the previous year––but incurred great legal expenses and were handed a three-year suspended sentence. This they served without incident, mostly from Woodstock, but the situation cast a long shadow and made enormously challenging the prospect of continuing to live and work in the U.S. for the non-citizen Hetty, who could no longer easily apply for a green card. Documents related to this incident and its fallout even decades later are included in the collection.

Upon completion of their sentence, Angus and Hetty began travelling internationally again, spending time in Canada, France, Greece, and the legendary ashram Auroville in Pondicherry, India, before eventually settling in the third location (along with downtown New York and the Bay Area) with which they have become most associated: Kathmandu, Nepal. There they became pillars of a countercultural expatriate scene of artists and fellow travellers that included Ira Cohen and which gathered around the Spirit Catcher Bookshop on so-called Freak Street, the hub of this small but growing Anglophone community. Angus MacLise and Cohen worked out of Spirit Catcher to develop Bardo Matrix, a dynamic imprint for publishing their own writing as well as that of their friends and colleagues. This resulted in a series of beautifully produced pamphlets, prints, books, and broadsides, printed in limited editions on local handmade craft paper, including Ting Pa, a literary journal edited by Angus and sometimes Hetty, and the Starstreams series, under which book-length works by Angus, Cohen, Diane di Prima, Paul Bowles, Charles Henri Ford, Gregory Corso, and others all appeared between 1974 and 1979. These unusual publications on handmade paper tended also to be illustrated with woodcuts that scrambled together religious imagery and pop cultural symbolism, including comic books. During this time Angus was particularly interested in calligraphic art and works on paper. Much of his own work from his time in Nepal includes calligraphic illustrations in a made-up script. He also worked on establishing a handmade paper company, Himalayan Paper Inc. Cohen's term for their copious activities undertaken during this period, including their close collaborations with local craftsmen, was "the great rice paper adventure." In Nepal Hetty and Angus were also involved with spiritual communities, with Dzogchens and other religious leaders at communes and monasteries, one of which, the Swayambu Buddhist Monastery, pronounced the now seven-year-old Ossian to be a Tulku (a reincarnation of a high Tibetan lama), which briefly attracted a burst of Western tabloid interest.

Angus died in Kathmandu, aged only forty-one, on June 21st 1979, the summer solstice. Indeed, this did mark a transition or the closing of a chapter for that scene. As Cohen remarks, "the cycle seemed to be over. The great rice paper adventure drew to a close as most of us left Nepal and moved on." After Angus' death, Hetty did remainremained in Nepal for the better part of a decade, despite having lost enthusiasm for it and the lights having long been turned up on the hippie expatriate party, primarily to stay nearby to Ossian and his spiritual duties (or "destiny") at the monastery. In the late 1980s she returned to Woodstock and ultimately London, where she continued to write and make art until her own death in 2011.

As individual artists and as a couple, the MacLises straddled the ostensible late 1960s opposition of the seedy New York underground––with its iconographies of sadomasochism, hard drugs, avant-garde drone music, dark sunglasses and shiny boots of leather––and the tie-dye, psychedelia-tinged, turn-on-tune-in-drop-out euphoria of San Francisco's corresponding and equally mythologized hippie scene, with all of its imagined and actual attachments to Eastern spirituality and religion. And in neither of these were Angus and Hetty mere hangers-on, far from it; rather they were active, central, formative participants who helped shape those aesthetic sensibilities from the ground up. Equally so in the expatriate scene that they joined in Nepal, where their DIY ethos, openness, and resourcefulness inspired countless people who crossed into their orbit. They were driven by true vanguard impulses––always to innovate, to collaborate, to fundamentally change the syntax and grammar of established forms, never to be hemmed in by convention custom or fashion. Their restless, unceasingly creative and unconventional lives and work might finally best be captured by a line from one of Angus' untitled poems: "You are not limited to one room, there are many rooms."

Subject Headings

The subject headings listed below are found in this collection. Links below allow searches for other collections at Columbia University, through CLIO, the catalog for Columbia University Libraries, and through ArchiveGRID, a catalog that allows users to search the holdings of multiple research libraries and archives.

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Genre/Form
Calligraphy (visual works) CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
Correspondence CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
Drawings (visual works) CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
Photographs CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
Sound recordings CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
Name
Bardo Matrix (Firm) CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
Cohen, Ira CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
MacLise, Angus CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
Malanga, Gerard CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
Place
Nepal -- Description and travel CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
Subject
American literature -- 20th century CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
Counterculture -- United States -- History -- 20th century CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
Poets, American -- 20th century CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID
Small presses -- United States CLIO Catalog ArchiveGRID