AvantGarde Fashion Photography

ISSUE 4 : KURT VONNEGUT JR.

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."

- Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was a legendary American Novelist, humanist, graphic artist, smoker and editor. He is known for works blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction. He is acknowledged as a major voice in world literature and applauded for his pungent satirical depictions of modern society.

Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of a successful architect. After attending Cornell University, where he majored in chemistry and biology, he enlisted in the United States Army, serving in the Second World War and eventually being taken prisoner by the German Army. Following the war, Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and subsequently moved to Schenectady, New York, to work as a publicist for the General Electric Corporation. During this period, he also began submitting short stories to various journals, and in 1951, he resigned his position at General Electric to devote his time solely to writing.

Vonnegut has typically used science fiction to characterize the world and the nature of existence as he experiences them. His chaotic fictional universe abounds in wonder, coincidence, randomness and irrationality. Science fiction helps lend form to the presentation of this world view without imposing a falsifying causality upon it. In his vision, the fantastic offers perception into the quotidian, rather than escape from it. Science fiction is also technically useful, he has said, in providing a distance perspective, "moving the camera out into space," as it were. And unusually for this form, Vonnegut's science fiction is frequently comic, not just in the "black humor" mode with which he has been tagged so often, but in being simply funny.

Less generally familiar than the fiction, however, are Vonnegut's creations in the graphic arts. These reveal the same postmodern heterogeneity of mode and subject found in the fiction-realism and abstraction, the fantastic and the mundane, sentiment and irony, humor and melancholy.

Vonnegut's vision of the fantastic in daily life surely must have been influenced by some of the extraordinary events that occurred while he was still a young man, such as the suicide of his mother on Mother's Day 1944 while he was home on leave; his surviving as a prisoner of war the Allied firebombing that destroyed Dresden; the death of his sister Alice from cancer within hours of her husband's death in a train crash. His fiction struggles to cope with a world of tragi-comic disparities, a universe that defies causality, whose absurdity lends the fantastic equal plausibility with the mundane. Much the same outlook pervades the graphic artworks that have increasingly occupied Vonnegut in recent years.

More formalized drawings, similar in style but composed to a much larger scale on parchment, followed. Some thirty of these were exhibited in a one-man show at the Margo Fiden Gallery in Greenwich Village, opening on October 15, 1983. Vonnegut also experimented with smaller etchings, whose subjects were often self portraits, usually profiles with bushy hair and drooping cigarette, roughly similar to the one that appears at the end of Breakfast of Champions.

On January 31, 2000, a fire destroyed the top story of his home. Vonnegut suffered smoke inhalation and was hospitalized in critical condition for four days. He survived, but his personal archives were destroyed.

Vonnegut died at the age of 84 on April 11, 2007, in Manhattan, New York after a fall at his Manhattan home several weeks prior resulted in irreversible brain injuries.