Julian Kabza

Julian Kabza is an American experimental video artist and writer whose work in publishing and video art is sometimes associated with the language movement.

Encounters with John Cage, Andy Warhol, James Osterberg, Eric Dolphy and Blue Gene influenced Kabza's early musical experiments. He associated with members of the ONCE Group, in Ann Arbor, and worked with Robert Sheff and Jim Osterberg – Iggy Pop. A 1966 festival organized by Gene Tyranny, 12 Hours of the New Music included music by Kabza along with pieces by John Cage, Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley. Kabza later published (Annex Press) documents from Bob Sheff and Sam Ashley's piece "Taking Out the Garbage" (narration by Phil Harmonic) which aired at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

In the late 60's and early 70's he performed and traveled with U Utah Phillips, George Pedersen, George Koppel (a.k.a. Van Rozay), Kate McGarrigle and guitarist John Bian.

In 1973 he founded Annex Press, a non-profit publisher of experimental literature and art work. Along with This magazine and Burning Deck Press Annex Press was one of a handful of small literary presses publishing work of the Language group Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman and Rosmarie Waldrop, among others. In the mid seventies Kabza lived in Paris and discovered the work of French writers Alain Veinstein, Anne Marie Albiach and Claude Royet-Journaud. He later translated works of Veinstein with Maria Claudia Saiz, Larry Shields and Rosmarie Waldrop (The Archaeology of the Mother) by A. Veinstein, Spectacular Diseases, 1986. In Paris, Kabza met the dancer-performance artist Mark Tompkins who later appeared in his film Spiral Notebook, 2009.

In 1980 he founded the Translation Work Center in New York.

With grants from Poets & Writers, he directed the Annex Press Poetry series in Ithaca, N.Y. In 1982 he co-founded the Memphis Cinema with visual artist Lisa Marie Majewsky. Kabza's machine, text and dance work AMINO SHIM premiered at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum performance festival in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1984. His workSpiral Notebook, a blend of narrative and non-narrative that fragments encounters with the cities of Detroit and Paris, France, which spans the years 2000–2009 continues in edit despite having appeared at festivals. His works Metamorphoses 1 & 2 for Kate Mcgarrigle, (Ron Silliman's blog, Aug. 2009), are examples of a text on image tendency. His work based on Franz Kafka's Before the Law, 2000, is split screen.

In 2017 Kabza's translation of a work by Jean Daive Anne–Marie Albiach et Paul Celan Urgence et Négation en Réponse (co- translated with poet Donald Wellman) was published.