March 9, 2010 at the Sue Scott Gallery, One Rivington St., The Bowery, NYC

I want to welcome everyone that came tonight to this gathering in memory of Jon Gams.

Firstly I want to thank Sue Scott and the gallery staff on behalf of Hard Press Editions
For hosting the Memorial Gathering for Jon Gams

Hi I am Anne Bei Golden.

Besides having been in the arts publishing business together for over 17 years, Jon and I have been very close friends for over 20 years. And being faced with trying to synopsize that or articulate my experience of Jon Gams for his memorial gathering is something I never anticipated having to do. One thing that has really come to my attention during these few months since his passing is how many people feel such a deep and close connection with Jon, how many people cherished his friendship.  Jon was a truthful and down to earth person with a lot of charm and wit.  He was well liked and cared for by so many people both in his personal life and his art business life.

In case anyone is not quite clear as what exactly happened–Jon Gams died in his sleep on November 7, 2009, sometime in the late afternoon exactly one month before his 58th birthday.  For those of you that might be wondering how he slipped away, Jon had not been feeling well for several weeks.  About a year ago he was diagnosed with diabetes and was having some trouble managing his medication.  Just several months prior to his death, when it seemed he’d had his sugar under control, he began to have problems sleeping and we think that he had a virus that he just couldn’t kick and the combination of things caused a heart attack.   I know what a shock this news has been to so many of you who saw him just days before he died at the Jerry Saltz book signing.

When I met Jon in 1989, he was working with a small computer software company in the Berkshires, writing scripts for IBM computer technological presentations, commuting back and forth to New York. He was the primary caregiver to his five year old daughter, Ayla. On the side, he wrote and produced music for his own band as well as managing a singer for the band and recording his music at a Brielle studio in New York. He had just ended a position where he free-lanced as a video producer for ad presentations and for traveling shows for pharmaceutical companies.

Jon and I connected over some computer work that he did for me and we quickly made friends. We were both writing poetry at the time.  It was over the next several years that Jon’s vision for Hard Press solidified.  Jon connected with an old friend, Susan Levin, who was also writing poetry.  By way of Jon’s direction and through the efforts of the initial group of us, including Michael Gizzi, Barbieo Barros Gizzi, Susan Levin and myself, we established Hard Press as a non profit arts publisher. Hard Press’ mission statement was to publish art with a particular focus on up and coming artists and it featured collaboration between artists and art on a cross media platform.  When we launched Lingo magazine in 1993, it was the perfect platform for this–a biannual publication with no ads, solely funded by charitable contributions.  Published  from 1993 to its eighth issue in 1999, it was a beautiful publication whose focus was primarily poetry.  Lingo really worked as it mingled the arts and up and coming artists with well respected artists, writers, musicians, poets, sculptors.   Hard Press and Lingo brought together artists for poetry readings and other events also that were hosted by the company.

I would say that Lingo was Jon’s initial stronghold in the art publishing business but that Jon was born an artist and his intuition and upbringing really set the stage for his uncanny ability in the world with art.  He wrote poetry, he wrote and recorded his own music and managed a band from sometime in his early teens.  He landed jobs working with artists in their studios also at a young age and his band played quite regularly at the Bitter End.  When I met him he had already published a small poetry journal with a group of friends.

During these initial stages, Hard Press also published poetry and art books.  The numerous titles and artists are on the board.

In 1999, the Press printed its last Lingo magazine, the Pulp Poetry issue.  The expenses for printing and publishing the magazine were growing and after some struggle to keep funding alive and amidst managing the publication of several monographs which were keeping the press going, that year we began to launch a new company vision called Cultureport.  This idea for Cultureport was conjured and hatched by Jon and he connected it up with the right people and funding.  The new company was a for profit with a cutting edge business plan to produce an internet site offering complete art source center, featuring artists work, the books, collectors information and sales features, a site similar to what we see evolving on the internet today.  Jon’s vision again included the up and coming artists and the idea of pairing them with a wider platform.  The expanded plan for the site was to even to link fashion art. Cultureport was well on its way into reality with a large first phase funding from a group of traders and a very large commitment for following phases when the big bust came for the .com.

Hard Press financially struggled through this time and Jon remained dedicated, struggling within it.  He kept the Press publishing with his own financial resources. We went from working in a nice office, from five employees, to just Jon and I, working out of his home.  Jon continued to utilize his connections and editorial skills to attract artist monographs and Hard Press published some very beautiful custom art books during this time.  Jon’s ideas and support became the spine of every publication we made.  His unswerving dedication to Hard Press was truly admirable.

About 2002, Jon Gams met Dan Farrell and Dan became a partner in Hard Press.  They became friends as well as business partners and this took some of the pressure off the Press, giving Jon the space and support to really begin implementing more of his vision and ideas for the Critical Series.  Jon understood how important establishing a platform for the connective tissue in the art publishing world is to the artists and the need to engage and link Hard Press to the publication of this underlying content.  I think this is an example of Jon’s ability to see the bigger picture.

With Dan as a partner, we became Hard Press Editions and Jon still running the business and to this day we are still producing art books with a firm plan to continue to do so.  Hard Press Editions intends to continue publsihing the Art Critical Series as well as art books.

Jon’s contribution to the publication of art and to the art world is immeasurable when you look at how many artists and publications his dedication, generosity of spirit, and loving hand has given rise to.   I personally witnessed Jon’s genius throughout the years. Jon was an artist of the artists and this genius, his vision, his caring, support leaves a strong legacy. Always on the cutting edge, he was a guy who never accumulated much material stuff.  His stock was intelligence, caring attention peppered with a creative drive which he gave freely.

Jon was a great communicator and nurturer of people, of artists, of his friends, a giver. He had a great intuitive talent for the people and artists he worked with……I remember very early on in our relationship noticing his ability while watching him work with two singers.  These two women were studio recording something he’d written and it was not working so well.  His ability to bring them around was entertaining and impressive.  He had a way of leading people to the door and through to their own best stuff without them even knowing what was really going on.

Jon loved beauty, children, animals, plants and teens and young people loved Jon because even with and throughout his constant bantering, he always had his hand on the pulse and they knew it.
Jon’s struggle for lack of basics in his own upbringing never seemed to affect his ability to care and appreciate those who cared for him. He is truly one of the most caring loving people, that I have ever met and actually ever expect to meet in humankind.

Now, some two decades later, those things I saw Jon exert his loving care to are here:  the company, the artists; his beautiful daughter, Ayla, is an artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area.  She’s 25 and teaches art to children in an East Bay recreational center.  I know she would love to be here celebrating her father’s life with us.

So many of us have benefited by his life.
Maybe Jon’s life was shorter than expected but I see it as full and complete.  I will forever miss this man for whom I have an indelible amount of respect.

I’m very sorry that a teaching commitment in Houston prevents me from attending this memorial.

Jon Gams was a continual, irreplaceable presence in my life, as both a publisher and friend, for more than 15 years. I took it for granted that he would always be there, that I would always have him to call when I had an idea for a new book, that our ongoing projects would continue, that we would keep trading notes on fatherhood (this consisted mostly of Jon giving me sage advice and calm reassurance), that our best meetings would conclude with Jon delivering his ultimate term of praise (“rock-and-roll” used as an adjective). I still can’t believe he’s gone.

Like nearly every other small, independent publisher, Jon was engaged in a constant struggle to keep his business afloat. It wasn’t easy to keep Hard Press going, through its several different phases, and across ups and downs in the larger economy, but what makes his achievement truly impressive is that he never stepped back from his commitment as a publisher. Jon’s genius was his ability to balance the need to generate enough money to keep Hard Press alive with his profound desire to contribute to contemporary culture through his books. Like those old-fashioned gentlemen publishers, he didn’t hesitate to use well-funded projects to subsidize books that had little or no prospect of making money.

It may take time, but one day the contribution that Jon made to contemporary culture will be more widely recognized. In the mid 1990s, his magazine Lingo brought together the worlds of visual and poetry at a scale, and with an unencumbered point of view, that no other journal came close to. There soon followed two hugely important, and beautifully produced, poetry collections: Jim Brodey’s Heart of the Breath and Frank Lima’s Inventory. Hard Press single-handedly brought the work of these two major American poets back into public view. With his Hard Press monographs, Jon continued his campaign to fill in some glaring gaps on artworld bookshelves. During the last big project we worked on together, Irving Sandler’s Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience, Jon spoke repeatedly about his pride in the book, telling me that what he ultimately cared about was influencing the culture around him. It is all the more tragic that Jon died at a moment when Hard Press was producing its most substantial, ambitious volumes ever.

Personally, I owe so much to Jon. Without him, my life as a poet and art critic would have been very different, maybe even unviable. It was in Lingo that I first got a chance to write about artists such as Stanley Whitney and Roland Flexner; and it was for Lingo that I first translated texts by Marcel Cohen. Hard Press published my first collection of poetry. When it came time to do a second book, Jon urged me to put together a collection of experimental prose pieces rather than poetry. In both of these books, and with every other project Jon and I did together, he applied only the gentlest of editorial hands, but he had an unerring eye for spotting the unnecessary.  He also had a gift for titles. A few years ago we were working long and hard on an anthology of art criticism I was editing for Hard Press. As the book neared completion, I kept suggesting titles to Jon, none of them any good. Then, out of the blue, at the last minute, he produced a daring title that perfectly summed up the aims of the anthology, Critical Mess.

Although Hard Press moved away from poetry after 2000, Jon didn’t lose his ear and eye for verse.  Late one night last year, I finished a poem in which Keith Richards, John Wieners and Jim Brodey all made appearances and I immediately emailed to Jon. His reply the next day zeroed in on the weak lines in the poem. I cut them without a second thought, because I knew Jon was right. One line in this poem goes “The wager of poetry, lost & won.” All his life, Jon placed rash bets on poetry and art. The bets that involved actual money didn’t always pan out, but it was a different story when it came to the greater wager, on the survival and nurturing of creativity, on the vision Jon had of a holistic, non-elitist creative community.

Raphael Rubinstein

Jon Gams FaceBook Page

Jon Gams – Q+A from 2008 by Liz Riviere

We need to focus on the art world now because it is in flux. It has a
way of communicating below the radar to a society that really needs to rediscover its soul. The resources Hard Press has are thrown at the
most sensitive and prescient projects. In art publishing we really don’t see anybody doing exactly what we are doing.

ACC recognized that they did not have a strong presence in Contemporary art and Art Criticism and a partnership was formed. So, we are giving a wide audience an opportunity to experience and relate the same qualities that they see in Classical Arts, on the level of skill and technique, to Modern Art.

This is a direct connection to the audience we care about and want to
serve. It’s very exciting to have a partner to work with to find new
ways of getting contemporary artists and writers the exposure that
they deserve.

We have broken the connection between artist/public/society. We need to get back to the artist’s studio, a return to art that identifies with the individual not with what a gallery or collector sees as merely a commercial opportunity. I think there’s a good chance that the
pendulum will swing back. Look at the music industry-we can make
our own records now and reach an audience on the web. Art will go
that way and we will have a new Avant-garde. It has gone so far in the
other direction it has to come back.