Bill Wilson (1932-2016)

In April 2010 I met Bill Wilson in New York, when I visited him together with John Held Jr.  We had a wonderful time and he showed us the many collections he treasured and had stories to tell about.

I got in contact with Bill Wilson because he was researching the artist Mondrian, and he was looking for information from a dutch perspective. So I tried to help a bit and a corrsepondence started that was always full with informations.  Today on Facebook I read that he died just hours ago, and it touches me since he was such a nice man, a man with many stories, and someone who didn't placed himself in the center but was constantly researching all the things he encountered.

He also sent me many lovely books, letters, interesting articles, so a wealth of information I always enjoyed receiving. In the larger network he was a crucial source of information. He also wrote a lot of things down. So it is very sad to know he isn't there anymore. Such a wonderful man.

Bill showing me one of the objects from his collection in New York. April 2010

Bill Wilson and Hannah Higgins at the EHF in Broadway, New York.

Hannah Higgins and Alison Knowles where doing a Fluxus Performance / Lecture there that I visited.

April 2010

from Mark Bloch (on facebook):

R.I.P. Bill Wilson aka William S. Wilson (1932-2016). He was a scholar and the keeper of an important Ray Johnson Archive, the one Ray asked him to keep because Ray knew he would do a good job--and he did. I don't mind saying Bill was a curmudgeon and a pain in the ass who gave me a difficult time at every turn because he was also very generous with me and others and I met a great many people through him and heard of a great many things from him personally--as well as indirectly. Most importantly, though, through his curmudgeonly ways, he taught me how to be rigorous and accurate and to pay attention to detail in scholarship. That was what he was after and I will miss his rigor and accuracy and detail, even when it comes to information about myself which he was not shy about sharing, often appropriately, sometimes not, mostly to my face, although he also traveled in other channels, god bless him. He traveled in information, for better or worse. Ray Johnson told me once that mail art had become "an industry" and I have felt since his death in 1995 that Ray himself had become an industry. Well, the man at the center of the Ray Johnson Industry from 1995-2015 has now passed so there is no telling what will come of Ray's legacy next but I sense that we are all a lot less likely to uncover it completely with the passing of Bill Wilson. He knew things no one else knew. I always urged him to tell me less of his opinions about Ray and more of what he knew as facts and details of the life of Ray. He was a conglomeration of both of those and I am not sure he knew where one began and the other left off. But he was rich in both and we all hung on every word and we will miss him. Godspeed, "Beel," as Ray once called him. Backstroke in peace. Keep in touch!

Friends –

Please forgive this group email bearing bad news.

As some of you know, Bill Wilson died on Monday afternoon of a heart attack not long after surgery for cancer. April 7th would have been his 84th birthday.

Bill was lucky to have had such a wide circle of caring friends, and I know that he will be remembered fondly and missed.

I’d like to think Bill would sign off with his signature “many loves” closing today so -

Many loves,

Michael

(e-mail from : Michael von Uchtrup <vonuchtrup@mindspring.com>

In a 1978 New York Times book review, Kenneth Baker described Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka as: "…the most powerful New American fiction I have encountered in years. A demanding, exhilarating work." Nearly 25 years later, FC2 is proud to reissue this classic collection of short fiction by William S. Wilson that seems even more relevant today. It touches on controversies over the role of science in our lives and deals with cosmetic surgery and the medical uses of human embryos, heart transplants, and regenerated genitalia. And that's only the beginning.

The story "Metier: Why I Don't Write Like Franz Kafka," implies that Kafka responded in his fiction to questions that no longer need to be asked in fiction. The epistolary story, "Conveyance: The Story I Wouldn't Want Bill Wilson to Read," is an intimate letter from a woman who had wanted to write fiction and who now challenges Wilson's reaction to her report of a tragedy. "Interim" chronicles the imaginary reforestation of Scotland and "Anthropology" turns on the actual moment in Structuralism when Claude Levi-Strauss relocates the ear to the back of the head in order to interpret a myth.

Written with cool precision and a subtle touch, these meditations and metafictions will continue to reverberate for decades to come.

"...a demanding, exhilarating work." —New York Times Book Review