Fillip

The Future is Not the Enemy
Lillian Doyle

“The Journeyman Sample Pack” was created in an effort to build the collaborative legacy and fulfill the prophetic wish of artist and designer Emil Antonucci (1929–2006). Antonucci was primarily a graphic designer, best known for his work with poet and mystic Robert Lax (1915–2000) and for his project Journeyman Press (1959–74).1 He was an incredible writer, painter, illustrator, and filmmaker. For the last two years, I have been researching and collecting Antonucci’s work, which is mostly housed in special archival collections at St. Bonaventure University and at The New School, New York. I have been fortunate to meet some of Antonucci’s family members as well as some of his closest friends, who have provided me with their knowledge of him in addition to certain works and materials that he kept in his day-to-day life.

In our present day—Antonucci’s future—much of his history is not commonly known. Since discovering his work by chance two years ago, I have been determined to create a cohesive history of his life and an archive that honours his particular practice and philosophies about art. As a result of the generosity of Antonucci’s communities, both institutional and personal, I have come across an abundance of materials that have revealed the details of his rich spiritual practice. Antonucci used many methods to document his own life: he kept journals, created books, wrote letters, took photographs, made films, and used a reel-to-reel tape recorder. In 2023, The New School Special Collections and Archives gave me permission to digitize some of Antonucci’s collection of reel-to-reel tapes, and I found four and a half hours of audio material that was captured during some of Antonucci’s most active years in New York City, I estimate from the late 1950s through the ’60s. He recorded radio shows, live music, monologues, and candid moments that allow the listener to experience his world.

This essay aims to provide historical context for the life and practice of Emil Antonucci as well as context for the audio that is found in “The Journeyman Sample Pack.” Throughout this brief history, I will use the ( * ) symbol to indicate a reference to corresponding or relevant audio in the Sample Pack. This essay also serves as an invitation for listeners to participate in the continuation of Antonucci’s legacy by listening to, sharing, and sampling audio.

The focus in Emil Antonucci’s art practice was never the final product, nor was the creation of something to be easily consumed. He focused instead on “creating worlds” for the audience to experience or inhabit.2 In 1993, Antonucci wrote an article titled “The Future is Not the Enemy” for CHURCH Magazine, where he predicted a future in which the relationship between the artist and their audience was a collaborative one: “A true communal art may developing, changing the passive art consumer into an active collaborator and thereby a more sophisticated audience.”3 “The Journeyman Sample Pack” is a digital archive containing one hundred tracks selected from Antonucci’s personal reel-to-reel collection, with the intent that it be explored, questioned, or sampled into the listener’s own work. By interacting with these audio tracks, we as the audience become active collaborators and have the opportunity to participate in what Antonucci thought “art was really about”: having the audience “participate in someone else’s mind.”4

Antonucci lived his entire life in New York City. He was born in Brooklyn to a family of Italian immigrants who came to the United States in the early twentieth century. His father came to Flatbush, Brooklyn, by way of a lottery system from the Village of Lipari, Sicily, at the age of fourteen. He became a tailor and opened his own shop, making men’s suits. However, during the Depression era, when Antonucci was a child, his family lost his childhood home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. His father also lost his tailoring business during this period, but found work by joining the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.5 Antonucci was raised Catholic, and his faith was an intrinsic element of his artwork throughout his life. He attended Catholic schools during his childhood and later attended The Cooper Union, New York. It was during this time that Antonucci began his involvement in the Catholic Worker movement, first submitting illustrations for their weekly editions of The Catholic Worker.6 The goals of the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933, were social justice, unifying workers, feeding and empowering the poor, and exercising the practice of pacifism.7 Antonucci’s participation in the cause caught the eye of Day, and she asked him to come to the headquarters of The Catholic Worker to speak on “the role of the artist” at one of their weekly Friday meetings.8 This topic, “the role of the artist,” would be a concept that Antonucci considered and wrote about for the rest of his life. Antonucci graduated from college just as the Korean War was taking place, and filed as a conscientious observer due to his pacifist principles. As a result of this, his employment prospects were limited, but his community at The Catholic Worker pointed him in the direction of the radical Catholic magazine Jubilee to find refuge. Antonucci was only in his early twenties when he started at Jubilee, and described himself then as “bookish” and intellectually serious. He must have been pleasantly surprised to find a lively and creative atmosphere at Jubilee.

I first came to understand this kind of approach to Catholicism when I attended a Catholic college. Most of my professors were nuns who entered the church around the same time period that Antonucci would have started at Jubilee, in the late 1950s and 1960s. The nuns I knew were passionate about civil rights and protested segregation and the Vietnam War. It did not matter to them that I was not Catholic; they embraced my curiosity and questioning in the classroom and even took me on a trip to one of their Convents in Arizona to serve immigrants that had crossed the US-Mexico border. These women were exceptionally kind and radically accepting. This type of Catholicism is human focused and anticapitalist. They believe that every person is formed by God, and therefore see God in every person. When I visited Patrick Jordan, a friend of Antonucci’s and former editor of the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, he reminded me that the word “Catholic” means “Universal.” The Catholic Worker movement’s mission was to emphasize the importance of serving human needs rather than imposing dogmatic morality, and they continue in this mission even in our present day.

Through Jubilee, Antonucci met people who would serve as a continued source of inspiration for him throughout his life. Music, laughter, and neck ties around waists instead of necks…The office dwellers of Jubilee were hardly known for their quiet piety.10(Journeyman_ Jubilee Chatter_Reel 1 Side 1)* For the staffers of Jubilee, Catholicism was what Buddhism was for Kerouac. They were divinely inspired to write and connect with the laity of the Catholic Church. Jubilee was a scene where workers could test their faith and receive modest pay. Antonucci contributed many illustrations to the magazine, as well as a sizable mural of the Magi for the office. An image of this mural was later used on one of Jubilee’s covers and was frequently used within the magazine.11 Amongst the jokers of the office, there were also some very serious thinkers (Journeyman_Jubilee Chatter 2_Reel1 Side 1).* Prolific writer Thomas Merton, author of the book The Seven Storey Mountain, was on staff. So was abstract painter Ad Reinhardt. Jubilee was a counterculture magazine during the age of censorship in the 1950s, and its existence emboldened the voices of Antonucci’s community. It thus created an environment where spiritual and humble artists could develop their skills. The staff of Jubilee used their faith to illuminate social issues that had been left in the dark, fulfilling the mission of the Catholic Worker movement in pursuing the “common good.”12

The person who most affected Antonucci’s life during his time at Jubilee was poet and mystic Robert Lax, who served as the magazine’s “Roving Editor.” By the time Lax met Antonucci, Lax had already lived many lives. He had joined the Cristiani Brothers Circus and had a short-lived career as a film critic for Life magazine.13 He had also created his own style of poetry inspired by the modern art movement. He used the tool of repetition to lure readers into a meditative and contemplative state.14 Lax’s poetic works followed the laws of gravity. By using one vertical line, each of his repeated words gains strength, like a water droplet travelling down a glass window, gaining weight and speed with each identical drop that it absorbs. Lax would also defy his own rules with the change of a word to add depth, or create significance by emphasizing a different syllable. He could make his poems dissipate like smoke off of the pages, leaving the reader with a deep sense of wonder. These poems moved Antonucci. He was fascinated by Lax’s abstract style, which they would both later refer to as “abstract poetry,” distinguishing it from the Concrete Poetry movement. Lax’s words hold density in their meaning, while concrete styles use words to build a visual arrangement.15 Lax’s creative approach was spiritual, and Antonucci served as his conduit for bringing his work into the material realm. When Lax met Antonucci, he was struggling to get these abstract poetic works out of his notebooks and into print. He was eager to publish a completed body of work. Lax showed Antonucci some of his poems for the first time in 1954. Antonucci claims that seeing Lax’s work for the first time was a crucial moment for him, and he took it upon himself to become Lax’s first publisher.16

Antonucci was a working-class artist, so all his art endeavours were dependent upon his own wages or on artists’ grants. In order to start publishing, he saved his money to buy a Washington hand press from the 1880s that he saw in a shop window near the Jubilee offices.17 The simplicity of this particular printing press allowed Antonucci to work with Lax’s minimalism, and also made room for him to personalize the design of each print. The first collaboration between Lax and Antonucci was their book Tree (1955), a three-by-eight-inch book printed on yellow rice paper and held together in a brown envelope. This project was made possible by a Fulbright scholarship that Antonucci received in 1955. Antonucci also used the Fulbright grant to travel to France, where he continued his study of the graphic arts (Journeyman_French Practice_Reel 3 Side 1).*18 Antonucci’s first printing endeavor, Hand Press, was named in reference to the hands-on work he put into the production of each book—hand-printing and creating woodblock etchings. Hand Press would continue through the early ’60s, publishing some of Lax’s other early works, such as A Problem in Design: a fable for the new year (1961) and one of Antonucci’s own poetic works, Prometheus Bound (1961).

The collaboration between Antonucci and Lax would result in the creation of a style that was rooted deeply in their spiritual beliefs. Lax, who was fifteen years Antonucci’s senior, was very much influenced by the modern era and sought the purity that could be found in abstraction. Antonucci, who was born into an era of readymades and harsh geometric styles, was much more inspired by Romantic styles that emphasized human form and natural beauty. He expressed that the poetic and artistic forms of the modern era had been “exhausted” by the time he was beginning Journeyman.19 Antonucci was interested in emphasis and personal touches. He created “softness” through the use of traditional woodblock printing and hand-drawn illustrations. Working with Lax’s minimalistic line form, Antonucci used hand-drawn lines to create visual translations of the poetry with his illustrations, intentionally creating a space for the reader to inhabit the minimalistic purity of the form. They attempted to cultivate this “purity” in an effort to remove the “sentimentality” of the earthly experience, bringing their audience’s focus to the sacred simplicity of their creations and allowing the audience to experience unity in the poems and illustrations. Antonucci once wrote about this philosophy, stating, “Everything we can say about God is at best an analogy. We deal constantly with the contrarieties of appearance and reality. The artist’s strategy is to create STRUCTURES THAT MEANING CAN INHABIT, knowing full well that the meanings are tentative.”20 And as all of this potential was growing in Antonucci’s life, his reels were turning, capturing the sounds that filled this era of creative activity (Journeyman_Say Something Clever Reel 4 Side 1).*

The collaboration between Lax and Antonucci flourished in 1959 when Antonucci received a Guggenheim Fellowship, providing him with $3,600 to begin his most fruitful project: Journeyman Press.21 Lax’s poetry developed, becoming even more minimal with time, and Antonucci continued his method of creating illustrations that served as vessels in which the reader’s soul and perspective could merge, while utilizing attractive modern typefaces and even his own handwriting as a personalizing touch: “I see the way art works as an analogy for God’s presence in the world.”22 Journeyman’s first publication was Lax’s book Circus of the Sun (1959). This was also the first project that Antonucci had commercially printed.23 Despite the spiritual intentions behind Antonucci’s artwork, he didn’t want to create books that were considered “sacred.” He wanted to be able to share Lax’s work with the world, and envisioned their paperback works being carried around by readers and incorporated into the lives of everyday people. The name “Journeyman” was a reference to Antonucci’s printmaking phase; “Journeyman” is a term used to refer to a printer who has finished their apprenticeship and is free to practice their skills at other print shops.24 Jubilee and Hand Press served as his apprenticeship during the 1950s, but in the 1960s, Antonucci’s world expanded tenfold, and he no longer had time to print each publication by hand. Journeyman Press produced some of Lax’s most celebrated works, such as New Poems (1962), Black & White (1966), Fables (1970), and Red Circle (1971). Journeyman would develop throughout the ’60s with the support of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. During this time, Antonucci designed and illustrated Original Child Bomb: Points for Meditation to be Scratched on the Walls of a Cave by Thomas Merton (New Directions, 1962), and Journeyman Press was featured in an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.25 Antonucci and Lax started making short films under the name Journeyman Films, using Lax’s poetry. Antonucci produced and directed shorts such as The Lion and The Unicorn, The Man with the Big General Notions, and Some Short Films (all in 1970). As their projects became more ambitious, Journeyman Press grew to include artists such as R.C. Kenedy, Judy Emery, Ruth Cullen, Michael Lastnight and Robert “Wolf” Kachnowski (Reel Six).*

Journeyman’s group collaboration came to a peak in the mid-70s when Antonucci received an invitation to the artists’ residency program called Art Park. The Journeyman Press participants were invited to join the inaugural class of this summer residency in 1974 in Upstate New York near Niagara Falls. According to Judy Emery, Antonucci filled his small vehicle, a Renault, with paper and wedged in a hand press to bring to the residency. Antonucci recalled that the first year they attended, the program was still in its early stages, but that Lax, who was usually quite stoic, was thrilled. I have often wondered if Antonucci also packed his reel-to-reel machine to use at Art Park. Journeyman’s intention at Art Park was to “use contemporary offset printing techniques to make its production widely available at a low cost, free from dependence on any art or printing establishment.”26 Antonucci says that he began to “feel like a machine” during the years of the collaborative residency, his printer constantly flowing with pages of poetry from the Journeyman crew and other artists, bringing hundreds of copies of poems from the spiritual realm into the physical.

The prolific Journeyman period occurred in tandem with Antonucci’s growing professional career as he began taking on more commercial work. Architect Philip Johnson, a friend of Lax, noticed Antonucci’s special style and hired him to redesign the logo for the Four Seasons hotel in 1959.27 Antonucci then also began his long career at Paulist Press, designing books and book covers, as well as teaching at Parsons School of Design, New York, where he would work for forty years. He formed a long-lasting friendship with artist Nicola Wood at Parsons, who also participated in the making of Journeyman Films (Journeyman_British Voice_Reel 5 Side 1).* Antonucci was very passionate about teaching. In one of his syllabi, he states that the class will provide instruction on where to find work and how to pursue it: “The GOAL of the class is the creation of a personal identity.”28 One of Antonucci’s requirements of his students was to have them make a list of twenty-five to fifty places where they would like to work. Antonucci understood the struggle of the working-class artist and made an effort to solidify the potential in his students: “If the purpose of life is creation, it is a constantly evolving creation, increasingly more complex so that our task is to keep doing it better, improving our performance.”29 His radical Catholic perspective also caused him to view labour as something holy, the forming of an identity, of a world.

Through the 1960s, despite his constant flow of work, Antonucci remained steadfast in his dedication to radical Catholic publications and began working at the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, redesigning their logo in 1965.30 Antonucci provided their cover art, created illustrations, and wrote articles until 1998. Lax, during the 1960s, had moved to Europe permanently, where he eventually settled on the remote island of Patmos, Greece, and developed a reputation as a mystic, attracting visitors from all around the world. The circulation of Journeyman Press titles in the United States and Europe had solidified Lax as a poet in the avant-garde art world. Antonucci often saved up money to visit Lax in Europe; however, most of their Journeyman collaborations during this time were communicated by mail, with letters containing manuscripts, film ideas, grant information, ideas for shows, travel plans, and life updates. Their letters were frequently about Journeyman and often used tongue-in-cheek humour, replacing each other’s names with the names of characters or nicknames. Antonucci wrote an especially personal letter to Lax in 1971:

“Doctor [Lax] – Don’t want to embarrass you or make you itchy, just that it’s 3 o’clock in the morning – [I] spent the week in feverish bookmaking activity, reading through all the mess, writing notes for an intro for a big book, I got the latest batch of poems with Cowboy Hank, Leipos Shore, etc. and I stopped for a minute – more stunned than ever. How do you do it?!! What great fantastic stuff. What simply great poetry. Hits me in waves every once in a while, too timid to actually come out and say it, don’t want to break the rules of easy communication, but you are, and everyone is going to know it soon, [the] best poet of the Century. There, I know it, really know it. Had to tell you. – Sam [Antonucci]31

In later letters, Antonucci expressed sorrow. The sentiments of life were beginning to weigh on him. In the 1980s, funding became more scarce. Antonucci lamented to Lax: “Old Ronnie Reagan, as you no doubt heard, is chopping the National Endowment for the Arts budget to 50%! Everybody is running around in sackcloth.”32 Through this era, however, Antonucci continued developing his own writing, recording his thoughts on the consumerist nature of the art world and on the potential artistic developments of the future. Antonucci could sense that communication was rapidly transforming, and through his essays in Commonweal and CHURCH Magazine, he was able to express his ideas. Antonucci was passionate about collaboration because he believed in the spiritual power of unity.

In his article “The Future is Not the Enemy,” Antonucci claims that it is the duty of spiritual artists to create and inspire new forms of art; “not to evangelize” but to inspire: “The visions of those artists [in the past] were vertical, reaching up to the God in heavens. Our vision ought to now be horizontal, reaching out to include and unify, to connect us all to each other, to the past and the future, and to the earth, in which God’s presence is ever immanent.”33

“The Journeyman Sample Pack” is an invitation to us, the audience in the future, to connect with Antonucci in the past. To listen and decode, to recognize and imagine: “If we can live and love a work of art whose original purpose is obscured or forgotten, we can reconcile ourselves to living in the world, whose PURPOSE we don’t understand.”34 There is still so much about Antonucci’s life in boxes, work that is yet to be widely shared. I hope that anyone curious about this endeavour accepts the invitation to explore and create with “The Journeyman Sample Pack.” For more information on this archival endeavour, or to share information discovered or samples created from this small audio library, please contact journeyman@fillip.ca.