Sunday Tales.

For reasons familiar to some that know me personally, I'm having a bit of difficulty embracing my job conditions this particular June. I'm ready for the freedom that I'm typically blessed with during this time of year. So to some degree I'm finding myself acting like I usually would, despite this year's peculiar circumstances. Even after spending all of Sunday at an outdoor family barbecue, I found myself wanting to continue the carefree socializing into the night. Not really feeling any strong motivation to go out to a bar, I decided instead to join a couple of friends for some mellow conversation in one of their homes. Inevitably the talk turned to our work lives, but before that we exchanged stories about artists that we've known.

My friend L. has spent time with many artists throughout her several decades of involvement in the arts scene. She's amassed quite a collection of artwork by both local and national creators, and much of it has been acquired through trade. She fell to talking about many of the pieces that were on display around us as we sat around her dining room table. As anyone who collects art knows, there is usually a story involved in every single acquisition. Her tales are usually quite interesting, as she runs in unusual circles with folks that are often quite freakish by conventional standards. In fact she owns several works by various "outsider artists"- some of whom have acquired widespread prominence.

Our informal examination turned on a specific piece created by one of these more prominent figures. Although I'm tempted to identify the artist in question, I've decided to respect his privacy because of the nature of the story L. shared with us. L. has actually been friends with this individual, and has spent time in his studio. He was once a hell-raiser, but found God and renounced his sinful ways. After his "rebirth" he devoted his life to producing a very idiosyncratic body of work that features his current obsessions with a millenarian brand of evangelical Christianity. His work is often darkly apocalyptic, and quite challenging to the largely progressive and academic paradigm of "Modern Art".

Anyway, L. says that this individual (who I'll refer to as N.) never tried to push his beliefs on her, despite the fervency of his faith. But despite this restraint, L. had a very strange experience one time when N. came to town for an exhibition. She put him up in her house, and his initial appearance on her front porch was accompanied by what she took as a foreboding omen. As he ascended the steps and had a seat on the ratty couch, a large black raven swooped down and perched on a nearby post. L. says she had never before seen such a bird on or around her property, and its presence unnerved her. In her account she had an overwhelming sense of "evil" and traced its origination to N.'s person.

This was an odd reaction for L. to have in proximity to an individual whose company she had enjoyed for a long time. When she explained this event, she expressed an astonishment for what she basically interpreted as an almost supernatural phenomenon. But as unsettling as the whole thing was for L., I didn't find her apprehension of it to be that extraordinary. In fact I've had similar interactions with a number of strangers throughout my life, as well as a few that I've been amply familiar with beforehand. It is interesting to me to see how different folks process seemingly mystical experiences. I think these incidents reveal more about the witnesses than the objects of their attention. Everyone seems to perceive these manifestations in a form that they are somehow prepared to understand.

Greg Bottoms, "The Colorful Apocalypse" (2007).

There's something about half-crazed, backwoods, fundamentalist Christians that lends itself to making imaginative claims about looming apocalypse. Sometimes such self-styled ministers have intense visions and decide to commit them to canvas in the form of paintings. Fortunately for a lucky few, we happen to be living through a particularly millenarian age- when even those who can be called nominally 'sane' have their dark moments of terror. This means that there is a growing audience for artwork by these folks. In fact there is even a cultural apparatus evolving to deal in such works. There are galleries, journals, and even museums where you can see it. There's even a formal term to refer to it- "Outsider Art".

Certainly people have their disagreements about just what is, and what is not, Outsider Art. There are some that would suggest that artists who create work outside the mainstream count as members within this category. Others would assert that these creators are, by necessity, driven by mental illness. Greg Bottoms, an English professor, impulsively decided to explore whether or not some of the more famous Outsider Artists were particularly afflicted. Instead of going to the institutions (mental asylums, prisons, etc.) from where much of this body of work originates, he chose to travel to the Deep South and the Mid-West, to meet a few of the most famous Christian Visionary painters of the day. He resolved to keep journals and other recordings from this journey, and eventually worked them into The Colorful Apocalypse.

Bottoms was too late to meet Howard Finster, as he had recently passed away. He was able to meet Finster's sister, who was struggling to preserve her brother's land (called Paradise Gardens) in the face of financial difficulties. After riding around with her for a bit, the author decided to venture forth and meet William Thomas Thompson- an eccentric ex-millionaire who experienced a torrid vision of the end-times, and subsequently devoted his life to depicting harrowing portrayals of Christian horrors. Through lengthy conversations Bottoms was able to get Thompson to expound on his conspiracy theories, and his strident criticism of 'False Christians'. He also managed to wrangle an introduction to Norbert Kox, Thonpson's friend and sometimes collaborator.

Kox was an Outlaw biker from Wisconsin whose revelations came by way of a very bad acid trip. He decided to abandon his wife and child, and his motorcycle body shop, and enter into a decade-long retreat in the woods. There he built an elaborate shrine documenting the visceral sufferings of the crucified Christ, and intended to serve as a tour guide and missionary to visitors. He also painted several hundred paintings along similar lines. Philosophically, Kox and Thompson share a lot of the same obsessions. They are both concerned with the political influence of the Masons, the false teachings of Catholicism, and the impending final judgment. Kox has been 'discovered' by the legitimate art world, and has shown his work in galleries across the US and Europe.

Much of The Colorful Apocalypse recounts the interaction between Bottoms and these artists. The author is clear about not being an expert in the field of art history. And while that is not enough to invalidate his insights, it does provoke an inevitable question- just what is Bottoms motivation for writing this book? Apparently he has had personal experience with madness, and he wants to understand its nature. His brother is a schizophrenic who has embraced fundamentalist Christianity. This is problematic as it suggests that Bottoms is clearly biased in his assumptions about Christian Outsider Artists. While he has crafted an entertaining journal, he has also made himself vulnerable to a disproportionate amount of criticism for such a slim and innocuous book.

Danial Johnston, and his movie.

I finally got the chance to watch The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006), a documentary film directed by Jeff Feuerzeig. I had been intrigued by this story of a mentally ill man who wants to find fame as a singer-songwriter. In fact I'm generally interested in psychological portraits of artists who fight against convention to express themselves. Daniel Johnston fits that profile. He struggled with a bipolar disorder for decades. Still he believed that one day he would be famous, like his idol John Lennon. He used film, songs, and drawings to document his daily life. He recorded his raw, warbly, voice and simple guitar-playing on cassette tapes, and distributed them to everyone he met. Eventually people began to take notice. Musicians like Thurston Moore, Steve Shelley, Tom Waits, David Bowie, Yo La Tengo, Beck, and The Flaming Lips became fans of his work.

Daniel Johnston grew up in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. He was the youngest of four children born to a pair of Christian Fundamentalist parents. From the very start his parents realized that he was different. He had a hard time controlling his impulses, and he liked to spend all of his time in the basement playing a rickety piano and creating line drawings. Sometimes he would enlist his brother's aid in making home movies. But he mostly kept to himself, articulating his dreams. Upon graduating high school he briefly attended Abilene Christian University, and later transferred to a branch of Kent State University in Ohio. It was during those years that his bipolar disorder began to manifest itself in serious ways.

While at Kent State, Johnston met what would turn out to be "the love of his life". Although they never even established a romantic relationship, the troubled young man became entirely obsessed with a girl named Laurie Allen. Through the years he would write hundreds of songs about her, claiming that she was his one and only muse. At the same time he was having a lot of difficulty living with his parents, and his siblings in Texas eventually invited him to live with them. It was upon his move to Austin that things began to develop for him. Johnston worked at McDonald's and in his off-hours began to establish himself as a bit of a local celebrity. His big break happened when MTV came to town, and he managed to worm his way into their programming.

As his exposure grew, and his music began to make its way into the hands of musicians and recording industry professionals, Johnston's behavior became increasingly erratic. He began to take LSD. His hallucinogenic drug use combined destructively with his millenarian biblical views to produce severe delusions. He began to act out in strange and maladaptive ways. His condition deteriorated until he ultimately tried to bring down a plane in which his father was attempting to fly him home. Although both Johnston and his father survived the crash landing, this stunt landed Daniel in a mental institution. Incredibly, he had become such a legend in the music underground that major record labels were offering him lucrative contracts while he was under commitment.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston brings us up-to-date with its subject's life. Johnston lives in Texas with his aging parents, in a home adjacent to their own. Although he seems relatively stable (thanks to a comprehensive regimen of modern medication), he is in need of support and care. He still records and performs music, and is assisted on the business end by his father. Tastes are different from the 90's, and there isn't such an appetite for quirky and raw fragility in the guise of indie pop-folk. While Johnston still has his following, he increasingly becomes a novelty act. I'm convinced that people go out to see him for his legend, rather than his actual creative output. He's even gotten his drawings into the Whitney Biennial, which pretty much guarantees that he is past his artistic zenith. But he is still a curiosity, and for those that are unfamiliar with him, the documentary is quite amusing.

The Artistic Paradox.

I made it back to Panza Gallery for another drawing session. I've only been going once every few weeks since the baby was born. The rotation of models has been consistent, so I haven't been missing out on new people to draw. I'd love to finish The Book of Life with some variety. I'm in the business section now, partially through the letter "e". The end of the project is in sight... it has been for awhile now. I am ready to be done with it- an entire phone book filled (every other page) with drawings. Somehow I'm starting to feel confined, as if I was curtailing my artistic progress. On one hand, I know that my skills have improved markedly in the nearly two years that I've been working on this thing. But I can't help feeling that my imagination has been stagnating.

I've been daydreaming about doing some more experimental drawing. I'd like to continue drawing from live models, but find a way to advance a sort of mutated vision. For some reason I've felt constrained to doing rather conventional figure drawings in this book. It certainly seems to fit my intentions for the project. Still I keep thinking about strange growths and exaggerations. I hope finishing this will be as liberating as I think it might be. I could have simply taken a break from it and started something else, but the lag in my progress has been glaring. Last year at this time I was drawing several times a week. As it is, it's looking like I'm not going to be done for several more months.

I know that the structure and the discipline required for completing The Book of Life will have a substantial payoff. The scope of the endeavor entails an inevitable development. I once read about a chess grandmaster who suggested that merely playing a 1000 matches would lead virtually anyone to become something of a master of the game. For that expert, getting better is largely a matter of perseverance. One can't help but learn something from repetition. This is most likely applicable to drawing as well. It would be hard to argue that I'm not improving my level of craft. But I have to ask myself whether it is making me a better "artist".

When I see the mannered paintings and drawings of those who aspire to the mastery of the classics, I don't necessarily consider these pieces to be "art". I can be impressed by the level of craftsmanship displayed, but they don't move me in the ways I expect "art" to move me. There must be conception, not just representation. I don't see the point in simply trying to make an image incredibly realistic. I have photography if I want to represent reality. Even in that medium, I've been moving further away from conventional documentation. So what is it I'm looking for? I appreciate the idiosyncratic and intensely personal work that forms a unique world view. That's the type of art I want to make.

The complication in all of this is that a certain level of technique is necessary to be able to convey my ideas into their external form. I've never had formal instruction in any of the pursuits of self-expression that I'm involved in. That goes for drawing, writing and photography. Still I can't help thinking that study and practice could only expand my possibilities. And yet this has to be balanced with a looseness of articulation that involves being apart from convention. If I learn the "proper" way to do these things, then they are going to be (by definition) less subjective and more derivative. It's a conundrum that I'm having difficulty synthesizing.

What is an "Outsider Artist", anyway?

Sometimes I can find myself in a long, drawn-out discussion after such a minimal prompt as, "Have you read anything good lately?" Last week I wrote about having read a book about outsider photography. The authors were very clear in stating that the subject has not had a long tradition of academic inquiry. Although I might not have expected it to be the case, it turns out that many people are still uncomfortable with the notion of "outsider art" in general. The phrase itself evoked a variety of responses when I brought it up at the Brillo Box the other night. It's not surprising that everyone I was with had an opinion, as they were all either artists or ardent fans of the arts. But I didn't expect the negativity I heard in some of the reactions.

Apparently there are still folks who think that the term "outsider artist" is pejorative. One friend of mine interprets the categorization as a dismissal of an artist's worth. She seemed to suggest that it's akin to an attack on the legitimacy of the work it is applied to. Her immediate associations with the words are a "lack of training" and condescension. I was taken aback by this interpretation, as it seems to me like "outsider art" has paradoxically entered the mainstream awareness of collectors, dealers and critics. This evolution of the concept has certainly made understanding the phenomena more confusing.

When people first began to discover (and take seriously) the artwork of creators who weren't traditionally thought of as "artists", the label may have been appropriate. These works were created by folks who were entirely divorced from the canon of art history. They weren't shown in museums, or picture books, or galleries. They originated in prisons, mental asylums, and other shadowy corners of society. For centuries art was the concern of an extremely rarefied segment of the population. In the early Twentieth Century, established artists such as Jean Dubuffet brought attention to the work of "primitive artists", but it would be decades before the acceptance of the merit of such work would be widely spread.

Really, it wasn't until the 50's and the beginnings of the Pop Art movement that art was truly democratized. On a grand level, artists like Lichtenstein and Warhol exploded the traditional definitions of what could be considered "art". The simultaneous advance of technology did its part to spread the new paradigm. Suddenly entirely new groups of people began to engage the art world, and brought with them irrevocable change. Not only could the masses appreciate a wider range of work, but they could also (on occasion) make it as well. This novel spirit of adventurous discovery became all-encompassing, and art connoisseurs started seeking out art in increasingly unusual places. The expansion of the market demanded a steady stream of product, and there was a place at the table for work that would have formerly been rejected.

But a strange thing happened as this process developed. The artwork of "outsider artists" was integrated into the marketplace. Soon it was appearing in galleries and museums, and established critics paid attention to it as well. Once academia appropriated the more famous examples within the expanding "genre", the lines of discrimination got blurred. The artists themselves (at least the ones who weren't dead) went through their own transformations as they became aware of their own value. Some of them were even being invited to host their own solo shows at prominent galleries. They had become "insiders", and prominent figures within a movement of "outsider art". Ironically, the success of such artists ultimately undermines the authenticity of their banner.

Outsider Photography?

It seems inevitable that in the process of Christmas shopping, I end up finding a few things that are just right as gifts... for myself. Somehow it feels easier to justify indulging myself while I am buying stuff for other people. These are the type of objects that I would love receiving as a present from someone else. It's just that the chances of getting something that I would purchase spontaneously approach zero in likelihood. That's not to say that my tastes are too oblique for others to determine- but rather that they are rather widespread, and there's no way for anyone else to figure out whether or not I already have a particular item in my collection. Anyway, when I stopped by Half Priced Books the other day, I had an idea I'd be taking home some choice items to keep.

I was impressed to discover that someone (Chronicle Books in San Francisco) saw fit to publish a volume of "outsider photography". I've always been drawn to artwork that originates from outside of the art school pantheon. That's likely because I didn't attend art school, and have very little formal education in anything having to do with art. So whether it's the work of the insane, the incarcerated, the reclusive, or the addled- I'd like to see it. Whatever it actually is- it generally falls under one of a few different classifications tagged with words including visionary, outsider, folk, primitive, naive, or "Art Brut". There are already numerous collections of painters and sculptors who fit within this broad category, and the conventional art world has taken notice. Within certain cultural circles, the names Howard Finster, Henry Darger, Adolf Wolfli and Charles Benefiel are quite well-known.

But what about C.T. McCluskey, Alexandre Lobanov, Morton Bartlett, and Joe "40,000" Murphy? Do any of those names ring a bell? Most likely not, because all of them used components of photography in their work... and that is one medium that is still too often overlooked within the art community. Perhaps it's because the materials of photography have always been so readily available. Everyone has snapshots lying around their house- one need not consider themselves an "artist" to grab the camera and take some shots. There's a certain intentionality implicit in painting and sculpture that suggests that the perpetrator of such activities knows what they are getting themselves into. On the other hand we simply take it for granted that anyone can take some pictures. Very seldom do we see it as the proper business of "the artist".

Create and Be Photographed: Photography on the Edge (edited by John Turner and Deborah Klochko) presents the work of seventeen "largely self-taught artists who have used photographs or photographic elements in their creation." This study has broad enough parameters that include photo montage, collage, manipulation, and tableau methodologies. Whether the artist is setting up a fantastic scene, gluing cut-out photos into a work, or painting over the top of a photograph- he/she is employing non-conventional means to express a wildly idiosyncratic and personalized vision. Few of the artists in this book ever had any intention to engage the world of exhibition and commerce. Like their painting and sculptural kin, they are driven by inner obsessions to express themselves through their artwork. For them photography isn't necessarily about documenting "what is"- but rather "what would never be", without their own mediation.

I think the editors are on to something when they declare that this sub-field of art appreciation is largely unrealized. Who knows what unseen gems are going to see the light of exposure in the near future? For decades people have been defining their relationships with the external world through the eyes of cameras. With digital technology increasingly replacing film processes that limited the scope of participation, we are bound to see a further expansion in the numbers and variety of "outsider photography". Who knows what we'll find on vast photo-sharing sites such as Flickr? This most democratic of platforms is bound to stimulate a new renaissance in photography. For those engaging the world of the lens (and whatever side of it that they find themsleves on) there is an array of adventures to be discovered*.



* Check out this and this...