Norman Conquest

Norman Conquest is the pen name under which the American artist, writer, satirist, and photographer Derek Pell (b. December 9, 1947) has worked since the mid-1970s. A self-described verbo-visual prankster, Conquest writes and assembles experimental fiction, parody, collage, sound poetry, and constrained design, and works out of the Bay Area in Fairfield, California. The identity is one Pell has publicly acknowledged across the published record; JEF keeps his Conquest titles here and his legal-name titles in the separate Derek Pell room, because the two personae publish different work.

In the summer of 1989 Conquest founded Beuyscouts of Amerika, an international anti-censorship art collective formed in response to the Republican attack on the National Endowment for the Arts led by Senator Jesse Helms. Its 1992 multiple Piss Bush is held in the John M. Flaxman Library Special Collections at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since July 2012 he has been President-Fondateur and Editor of Black Scat Books, the independent press he founded to bring back print magic and mischief; Black Scat publishes Allais, Jarry, Terry Southern, Doug Skinner, and JEF founder Eckhard Gerdes (writing as Apollo Camembert), and runs the periodicals Black Scat Review and TYPO.

His books are eclectic and visually driven, from Sartre's French Phrase Book (Transient Press, 1974) and Interiors: A Book of Very Clean Rooms (1985) through the underground A Beginner's Guide to Art Deconstruction (Permeable Press, 1995) and The Selected Poems of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (unexpurgated edition, Black Scat, 2020).

JEF Books publishes two Conquest titles: What Is Art? (Journal of Experimental Fiction 48, 2012), a scripto-visual Dadaist-Derridean quest assembled from appropriation, bad puns, found objects, and collage, and MOFA: The Museum of Fungible Art, a collection of verbo-visual gems. Under his legal name JEF also published Naked Lunch at Tiffany's (2015).

Start with What Is Art? for the scripto-visual method at full tilt.