Derek Pell

Biography

Derek Pell dropped out of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1960s and opened The Not Guilty Bookshop & Press on Martha's Vineyard. His writing & art began appearing in publications of experimental literature under various pseudonyms, most notably Doktor Bey and Norman Conquest. His primary style was incorporating mixed-media and using collage-text and cut and paste techniques. After the success of his Doktor Bey series in the late 1970s, Derek Pell moved to Los Angeles in the eighties, during this period he was charged by the FBI for defacing US Currency while working on a mail-art performance. He began experimenting with cybertext, hyperlinks, and other computer-aided art in 1991. Pell & Conquest currently reside in the Bay Area where they edit Black Scat Books, a small independent press devoted to "Sublime Art & Literature."

Themes

Derek Pell explores literary modernism/postmodernism themes and styles in his craft. Using a remarkable range of formal discourses and methods, Pell's work often employs elements of intertextuality, metafiction and reflexivity, decenterization, pastiche, appropriation, found materials, and sampling. Through various mediums such as mail art, text-and-collage, gallery exhibits, and book object(Artist's book), his style uses satire, sarcasm, wit, and humor (wordplay, dark humor, absurdist humor, shock humor, visual and textual puns) to comment, criticize, and occasionally openly mock America's traditional cultural attitudes and values though work that is as much conceptual and performance art as it is fiction.

Pseudonyms

Derek Pell has published work under various pseudonyms, some with fictional biographies, which serve to question the concept of authorial originality intention while giving focus and outlet to his different faucets of creative expression.

Bey is a fictional scholar, born in New York City and Tibet in 1877. Author of Doktor Bey's Suicide Guide (1977), Doktor Bey's Bedside Bedbug Book (1978), Doktor Bey's Handbook of Strange Sex (1978), Doktor Bey's Book of Brats (1979), Doktor Bey's Book of the Dead (1981).

This is Derek Pell's visual and performance focused alter-ego and digital artist. Norman's art is featured in texts by authors such as Harold Jaffe's Straight Razor (1995), as well as his own work, Sartre's French Phrase Book (1974); Interiors: A Book of Very Clean Rooms (1985); Extremely Weird Republicans (1994); A Beginner's Guide to Art Deconstruction (1995); The Neglected Works of Norman Conquest (2012); What is Art? (2012); Rear Windows: An Inside Look at Fifty Film Noir Classics (2014); Corn on Macabre & Other Conundrums (2016). (A complete list of titles appears below.)

In 1989, he founded the international anti-censorship art collective Beuyscouts of Amerika (www.beuyscouts.com). He has created mixed-media works, book-objects, multiples, and collage works and has been featured in the Spencer Museum of Art. Several of his multiples are part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Conquest is currently Editor & Publisher of Black Scat Books (www.blackscatbooks.net).

Conquest edits a free monthly online journal Le Scat Noir.

One of Derek's earliest fictional pseudonyms, which appeared on the novel "Brother Spencer Goes to Hell" published by The Fault (Union City, CA: 1979) Source: [1]

Books

X-Texts
Collection of iconic sexual and erotic literature, in which each story is a meta-story, or treated version, of the original. Examples include Lady Chatterley's Loafer, Lolita, Over the Hill, and 9½ Weeks: The Long March.
Assassination Rhapsody
A deconstruction version of the materials in the Warren Commission Report. Examples include the use of collage and absurdism mixed with mechanical manipulations and transformations of the Commission texts' in A The Nature of the Shots, illustrations in A Bullet Theory Poem, and lipogram in The Magic Bullet.
The Marquis De Sade's Elements of Style
Introduced as a "found book" originally published by Marquise de Sade while in a lunatic aslym, with pictures and edits done by the "author", Derek Pell. Presented as a book on style, it is divided into four sections, Elementary Principles of Composition, A Few Matters of Form, Words and Expressions Commonly Misued, An Approach to Style, and an untraditional index, with wood print images either designed or found and incorporated throughout.
The Little Red Book of Adobe LiveMotion
Written as an absurdist pastiche of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, informing the citizens of "correct" political behavior, it also manages to be a guide to Adobe's LiveMotion software. The text serves as a humorous instruction manual for using flash as a political tool to oppose corporate culture and to foster a political revolution against capitalism. Resignifying symbols, images, and texts, the book is an example of the fluidity of meaning and identity found in the World Wide Web. This is the world's first (and only) satirical technical book.
Bewildering Beasties
Written as a warning, the book is framed as a rare surviving copy of a book of endangered species from England's Victorian period. The illustrations serves as puns and wordplay combine with nostalgia, pastiche, and found materials to serve as an absurd, but nonetheless less meaningful warning on extinction and humanities role in the environment.
Morbid Curiosities

Naked Lunch at Tiffany's

Scar Mirror reprinted in 2013 by Black Scat Books

Doktor Bey
The Doktor Bey books are designed as absurdist collages of mixed media recontextualizing images to create these darkly humorous "How To" guides.
Doktor Bey's Handbook of Strange Sex
Doktor Bey's Bedside Bug Book
Doktor Bey's Suicide Guidebook
Doktor Bey's Book of the Dead
Doktor Bey's Book of Brats

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Books by Norman Conquest (and assorted pseudonyms)

Ambiguity for Two

Interiors: A Book of Very Clean Rooms

Sartre’s French Phrase Book

A Beginner’s Guide to Art Deconstruction

Extremely Weird Republicans

The Neglected Works of Norman Conquest

What is Art?

Rear Windows: An Inside Look at Fifty Film Noir Classics

Snowdrop in Africa

Don’t Worry, It’s Not About Hats

Selected Poems of Poems of Edward D. Wood, Jr.  

It’s Fun to Be Rich in America (with Michael Leigh)

The Little Red Book of Commie Porn (with Terri Lloyd)

Straight Razor (with Harold Jaffe)

Burn This Book

Fervent SFdical: Selected Captchas

Corn on Macabre & Other Conundrums

Three Plus Three Makes Seven

Adventures in ‘Pataphysics (“Anonymous”)

The Other Side: The Shocking Truth Behind 100 Classic Paintings  (as “Cecil Sears Hibbard”)

Wasted Energies, Baffled Thoughts: On the Writing of the Insane (as “G. Mackenzie Bacon”) 

The Little Cock That Could (as “Patty Sanders”)

True Crime: The People vs. Rrose Sélavy (as “Karl Waldmann”)

—Anthologies edited by Norman Conquest—

By Any Means: An Avant-Pop Anthology

Personhood Anthology

Oulipo Pornobongo: Anthology of Erotic Wordplay

The New Urge Reader

The New Urge Reader 2

The New Urge Reader 3

Photography

Pell has been involved with photography since 1974. He writes the Zoom Street blog (zoomstreet.wordpress.com) and is the author of SHOOT TO THRILL: A HARD-BOILED GUIDE TO DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY (Que: 2009)

His only other nonfiction book is The Little Red Book of Adobe LiveMotion (No Starch / O'Reilly) -a guide to Flash animation. He has worked as a press photographer for UPI, and his photographs have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Rolling Stone, LensCulture, The Times, New York, Interview, L.A. Weekly, American Forests, Fiction International, The Village Voice, and Zink.

Publications

A comprehensive list of the works of Derek Pell and his alter-ego's is found in Larry McCaffery's Some Other Frequency.