mostly cross-posted from joculum, with annotations

the hip, the historic, the horrible

NOTE: In lieu of the majority of the illustrations, which can be found on joculum.livejournal.com, I am adding the annotation that this meditative essay is not at all a review of the Rebecca Nolan and Meryl Truett show at Gallery Stokes, which I recommend highly. I have chosen, thus far, not to review the show because I don't have any truly representative images to post. The gallery's parallel post of pictures of dirt roads does not give an adequate impression of their respective visions of Southern architecture, a shared sensibility that is delectably precise and exquisitely attuned to the genuinely strange, of which the Southern landscape has ample examples. The neon sign of the Magic Beach Motel is probably the least peculiar example.

The photographic detail above is not by either photographer.




I’ve just learned, with belated sadness, of the demolition of the Deco elements of north Florida’s Marineland, a.k.a. Marine Studios. Apparently only the entry arch was preserved when the place was turned into an updated tourist attraction featuring the dolphins but not the oceanarium (long since displaced in tourist affections by the world’s newer aquariums, and in Florida by the familiar attractions more convenient to metro Orlando).



For a quarter-century after its opening in mid-1938, Marineland did much to stir the architectural and landscaping imaginations of small children who came to look at the fish in the murky dark (and occasionally get confused because Marineland had a deep sea diver, but there were no mermaids like there were at Weeki Wachee and Webb’s City). Minimally Moderne though it was, Marineland design was worlds ahead of the architecture in the towns and cities of most of Florida north of Miami.



The dismayed report was given last night at Atlanta’s Stokes Gallery by Rebecca Nolan, who is showing her photographs alongside Meryl Truett’s in a two-person show of Southern curiosa and changing landscapes. Truett’s photograph of bounding neon rabbits on the Magic Beach Motel which is near Saint Augustine (as was and is the old and the very new Marineland) illustrates the alteration of the horrible into the hip: the mid-20th-century Vilano Beach Motel has, judging from their website, taken on an air of postmodern retro. But given the value of the oceanside land on which it sits, there are (perhaps false) rumors it may not be there much longer.

The Moderne and Deco hotels of South Beach were once considered as hideous and declassé as the motels of the succeeding generation. Today they have been restructured into the ultimate in boutique chic, but when the preservation effort was at its inception thirty years or so ago, developers were saying things like, “Williamsburg is historic. These hotels aren’t historic, they’re just old and ugly.”

I’ve opined earlier on this blog regarding the features that distinguish epochs in architecture and design, and how the prototypical models get recycled into good imitations and on down to really bad knockoffs. The problem is that until roughly four to five decades of historical distance have been achieved, we can’t tell the good second-tier examples from the godawful third- and fourth-tier ones.

I never followed up on Wallpaper magazine’s effort to preserve a ’60s or ’70s hotel somewhere in coastal Croatia (I don’t recall which of the two decades the hotel dates from, but from what I recollect as photos of Howard-Johnson-orange bar seating, it was probably the latter). I do remember that the magazine writer’s examples of what it reminded him of were all from about a decade earlier than the 1974 in which the hotel was probably built; he said something like that the James Bond of the first few movies could be imagined suavely walking through the lobby, or that the Rat Pack would have loved the hallway décor.

My point is that in many ways the ’70s were the nadir of American design, but globally, some of the designs of which faint recollections reached the farther shores of the New World were actually pretty good. They might be physical environments in which I still would not choose to linger, but they encapsulate a historical moment with genuine aesthetic integrity.

This is so even for structures that were never meant to be aesthetic in the first place, as those of us can testify who frequent restaurants and stores and galleries located in former power plants and factories and warehouses. However, I can’t help noticing that one look at the historic photographs makes me happy that someone realized that the brick building underneath the facade was better than what the original buyers had put on to prettify it.

Tastes differ, and Nolan and Truett’s photographs at Stokes Gallery have the distinction of making us see the virtues in buildings we are preprogrammed to overlook or denigrate.

More troublesome, and tiring, is the issue of regional efforts to preserve third-rate examples of a style, because the second-rate examples have all been demolished. (The first-rate examples never made it out of the world’s great cities.) Whether it is better to save something horrible because of its historic value is a question worthy of debate; it’s possible, as per the factories and warehouses, to extract beauty from places so full of design flaws that their present state cries out for demolition.

Meanwhile, being given to petty annoyance like all members of the human species except a few enlightened beings, I am irked that Target has gotten rid of some of their best Michael Graves designs and of Philippe Starck completely. But that, happily, is a separate issue.

cross-posted from joculum.livejournal.com

“The Louvre and the Ancient World,” just opened at Atlanta’s High Museum, is another one of those exercises in museology that is hard to get one’s head around. The purpose of putting these objects from the Louvre in these galleries is not to present the cultures from which these objects sprang; it is to present the history of the cultural institution that collected them.

This was amply illustrated by the curator’s remark that the Department of Egyptian Antiquities was not, as people think, founded with the plunder from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. It was founded by Napoleon’s chief archaeologist a quarter-century later, but with objects shipped back by diplomats, because in the meantime Napoleon had lost the war and his Egyptian stuff had all been hauled off to the British Museum.

One object with an eighteenth-century provenance is a lovely example of the dilemmas posed by history. It’s a portrait statue of an Egyptian notable who went round the country depositing in temples statues of himself with the local gods perched protectively on his lap.

This leads me to think that there must surely be a book about the evolution of donor portraits, which in antiquity raise the donors to the status of gods themselves, handing off the church building to Christ or whatever. Then donors become humble suppliants, albeit present at the creation as they kneel beside the manger in Bethlehem in medieval altarpieces. Eventually they become apotheosized again, but in the guise of monumental portraiture, and the gods have nothing to do with it.

But this particular donor statue was damaged in antiquity, and has acquired an incongruously Greek nose in the process of restoration. Furthermore, and this is the part that most interests me, the eighteenth century restorers turned the local gods on his lap into the Egyptian gods that were more familiar to eighteenth century viewers.

I am reminded of my meditation a year or so ago about London’s restoration of Russell Square to its original design, with a twenty-first century Italian panini shop in one corner. Original authenticity and contemporary experience are juxtaposed, but in the process everything that twentieth century authors knew as Russell Square has vanished.

This is why the Louvre curators have left this statue in its present odd condition; even if it could be restored to something closer to its original state, what would be lost would be the alterations that reveal the mindset of the intervening centuries. There is no comfortable way of having both, of creating an archaeological palimpsest in which all the successive layers show up equally.

Howard Finster house

This news story from Sept 28 will be of interest to those of my friends who accompanied me to Folk Fest 2007:

Old Finster home turned into 'Vision House' museum
House is cut off from disputed Paradise Gardens

By BO EMERSON
The Atlanta Journal-Constituion
Published on: 09/28/2007

PENNVILLE — Howard Finster created at least 48,000 numbered works of art in his 84 years, though some curators think his output was much greater.

He rarely slept through the night, catching catnaps and working at a furious pace, painting, sculpting and enlarging the phantasmagoric landscape that he called Paradise Gardens, an assemblage of bicycle frames, mosaics, cement statues, highly decorated pagodas and found art in his backyard in this tiny town about 90 miles northwest of Atlanta.

Chicago fine art dealer David Leonardis is shown in the gallery of the Howard Finster Vision House, the folk artist's former home in Pennville.

"It was said that he ate coffee, because it was faster than drinking it," said Susan Crawley, associate curator of folk art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Suddenly embraced by hipster musicians in the 1980s and the art establishment in the 1990s, the sometime country preacher and bicycle repairman became perhaps the most famous folk artist in the world by the time of his death in 2001.

The world hardly knew what to do with Finster when he was alive and seems similarly clueless at handling his legacy.

The newest tribute, the Howard Finster Vision House, a museum devoted to the artist, opens tonight inside the somewhat dilapidated Pennville house where Finster lived and heard a voice tell him to paint sacred art.

The Vision House, created by Chicago art dealer David Leonardis, should be an example of the ongoing influence that Finster has in Georgia arts. But it could also be an example of the conflict and cross purposes that have undermined efforts to celebrate this Georgia legend.

The house is cut off from Paradise Gardens, and the owners of the two properties are separated by chain-link fencing, barbed wire and bitter feelings.

Though ravaged by time and the elements and by the sale of many of its prize sculptures, Paradise Gardens is still the crown jewel of Finster's legacy. Leonardis tried to acquire the art environment two years ago. But Finster's daughter Beverly Finster-Guinn, not fond of Leonardis, passed on his $200,000 bid in favor of a smaller sum from an ordained minister representing a nonprofit organization.

Yet that group hasn't been successful at landing the grant money required to preserve the sprawling four-acre environment.

Finster built his paradise on a swamp, and today the swamp is winning, as exemplified by the dilapidated state of the soaring central structure, a 50-foot birthday cake that Finster called the World's Folk Art Church.

An upper-level balcony sags free, ready to plunge to the ground. Visitors are discouraged from entering.

"It wasn't like that three years ago," says Leonardis, gesturing over the fence at the sagging structure. "It makes my blood boil."

Leonardis, 40, stumbled into the art business in the 1980s when he was a waiter and a collector of Finster art. After buying as many pieces as he could afford, he contacted the artist in 1990 with the idea of making T-shirts bearing Finster's designs. Soon he was creating limited-edition lithographs of Finster paintings and bringing stacks of prints to Georgia for the artist to sign.

"He's our adopted Yankee," said Frances Wilson, married to Finster's grandson Tommy Wilson. The Wilsons and other members of the extended clan have been helping Leonardis with the renovations at the Vision House, itself ready to "collapse into the earth" when Leonardis bought it at a tax auction two years ago.

It had housed two other families after Finster and his wife moved out in 1991, then stood empty for a while.

Leonardis moved 8 tons — yes, tons — of debris out of the house, rewired, plumbed and replaced walls, windows, doors and floors. While the front rooms are spick-and-span, the area behind is still derelict. Gaping holes in the back-room floors reveal the dark, cobwebby basement, where Finster kept count of his artwork with graffiti on the beams.

Leonardis has big plans for the unprepossessing structure. He wants to put in an industrial kitchen, living quarters for an artist's retreat and eventually stage weddings on the quarter-acre lot.

Tonight the Vision House offers what Leonardis calls Phase 1: a museum of Finster prints, with a few originals and some works by children and grandchildren. There is also a gallery with prints for sale.

Tommy Littleton, chairman of the nonprofit Paradise Gardens Park & Museum, hoped to buy Finster's house to reunite it with the art environment out back, but was not aware that the house was being sold for back taxes (Leonardis paid $1,479). "Our attentions were spread pretty thin," said the Birmingham resident.

Littleton said the group could probably stabilize the major structures in the Gardens with a $350,000 grant, but they've been unsuccessful in landing any significant money.

They did raise $5,000 with a silent auction at the recent Folk Fest in Norcross. The money was used for repairs at the Folk Art Church, and there are plans for future fund-raising.

Some Finster loyalists wonder why Atlanta organizations have failed to step in and rescue the Gardens.

Crawley said that's not part of the High's mission. "Rescuing environments outside a museum is not part of the brief of an art museum."

Finster scholar Tom Patterson applauds the High for doing what it could by preserving major pieces removed from the Gardens and installed in a special Finster exhibit at the Midtown museum.

Pennville, Patterson says, is a long way from Atlanta and from the arts organizations with the means to support it.

The Gardens have the additional disadvantage of being built on an earthen sponge, with multiple creeks trickling underneath.

On the other hand, the Gardens embody Finster's philosophy of taking that which is considered useless and turning it into art.

Littleton still marvels at how Finster "turned a swamp into a worldwide tourist attraction."

All it required was 30 years of herculean labor.

Now it remains to be seen whether Littleton's group and Leonardis can match the energy of one diminutive country preacher.

irrelevant remarks here

Beep Beep Gallery won the readers' best new gallery award in the Atlanta Creative Loafing.

I had always thought of Beep Beep's name in terms of the Roadrunner cartoon, but just now I heard a 50th anniversary of Sputnik broadcast on NPR in which a commentator was recalling hearing NBC News on Oct 4 1957, "The announcer said, 'And now you will hear the sound that will forevermore divide the past from the future,'and then you heard 'beep beep beep beep.'"

relevant remarks elsewhere

I have reached the point where I no longer even have the time to crosspost to Counterforces, an appropriate little joke, I should think. See joculum.livejournal.com today for further remarks on outsider art and similarly related topics.

crossposted from joculum.livejournal.com

Although I think my previous posting on folk art was only on Counterforces and Other Little Jokes, the approach of the 90-gallery art fair called Folk Fest has led me to think again of what on earth links together rural portraiture, carvings by prisoners, paintings by visionary preachers, and large numbers of objects arranged in a front yard. Not to mention traditional weaving and quilt patterns and pottery.

Especially since one hypothesis is that much of what was originally called nineteenth-century folk art is actually inept fine art, done by educated artists who developed increasing visual shorthand for the pressures of traveling around catering to the wishes of the more well to do community members of the antebellum American republic.

So it comes to me, reading the review of the sophisticated self-taught sculptor/photographer in this morning's NY Times that the only possible definition of folk art that encompasses everything is: "art created according to rules that seem to be communally agreed upon and which are subject to strong pressures for fairly exact stylistic conformity also developed by a community as a whole rather than an artistic elite; or, art made to an aesthetic which does not comport with the agreed-upon aesthetic qualities of the artistic elite of an epoch, but which does not allude deliberately to an earlier epoch or diverge deliberately from the dominant aesthetics."

That makes room for the hauntingly inept Sunday painter alongside the meticulously obsessive who know nothing of how far they are from making "real art." And it allows for signs painted for fraternal lodges, barber shop advertisements, what have you; first I've ever come up with something that makes sense of a field that feels compelled to invent new terms that never quite work: folk and outsider, self-taught, vernacular, et cetera.

The Art Section

www.theartsection.com has begun the counter-dialogue I had hoped for, and more, in terms of John Perreault's version of multiplicity as the model for art history. can the global dialogue on the overlooked and the intrinsic qualities of multiplicity be far behind?

well, yes, it can, not least because I am not ever going to have the energy to found Counterforces or even, as I had thought of doing, solicit outside writers to contribute to this blog, of whom I had four or five in mind.

but I highly recommend The Art Section as a new vehicle for the inscription of a delectably unpredictable number of the previously unarticulated aspects of art.