Richard Prince, for a while, combined cartoons with different punchlines and produced artworks that were nothing but detached antique jokes.
So it is now appropriate that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting, from April 21 through August 2, "The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984," a most odd historical cutoff point, since 1984 was roughly when that generation of New York artists began to be copied by the rest of the country. I suppose that is the snide point of this historical survey; when the rest of the country has learned how to copy it, it is over. (One of my mentors said many years ago regarding an essay on deconstruction he was writing at the request of a publication that will remain nameless because I do not remember what it was, "When the nuns and the Republicans want you to explain it to them, you know it is over.")
Of course, copying a generation of self-conscious copyists offered the potential of metacopying, and I did a fair amount of that in my time. I also produced an artwork in which I critiqued one of my own artworks and offered a rebuttal by the artist.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
footnotes to foregoing posts
I have corrected a couple of errors in my previous post about the now-closed show of Tibetan contemporary art from the Rubins' personal collection. I wish I had time and information to write more about what Norbu is doing in Nepal, or Tsering Nyandak in Lhasa. Like Gade, he seems to be commenting sincerely on contemporary situations (though Gade's "new Buddhas" using Spiderman et al are also eminently salable in London, creating an undecidable situation). Tsering Nyandak returned to Tibet after being educated in exile, and this alone makes me want to know more.
Friday, February 20, 2009
and a last chance for Atlantans to see contemporary Tibetan art
Jhamsang's Birth of the Buddha is less startling than his Century of Change but there are few readily public images of the works actually in the exhibition from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection currently at Oglethorpe University (through Sunday February 22).
The latter painting of the Buddha Amoghasiddhi is painted in a 14th century technique but overlaid with gold computer chips and accompanying circuitry that are not immediately apparent when viewing the painting. Like the century of change itself, the painting (which also contains "stone pigment, acrylic, soy sauce and black tea") finds innovative ways of incorporating new technologies into old spiritual traditions. The two are blended so adroitly that it is clear which has the upper hand (the circuitry doesn't do anything, and it is implied that the tangka of the Buddha is or was a "technology of the sacred"), but not so clear whether the positions could be traded comfortably. A digital reproduction of the painting would complete the parallel, but I couldn't find one and don't believe in photographing and posting work without permission, which I never found time to get.
Fortunately, reviews of the exhibition have appeared online and in print publications. It is indisputable that the exhibition deserves a full-fledged contextualization and analysis. Gade's multi-culti "Scriptures" (the quote marks to indicate "so-called" and the italics to indicate the title of an artwork) are masterworks of incoherent narratives written on successive pages in Chinese, English, and Tibetan, as well as in Gade's own made-up script and fictitious language. (One features a King of Clubs on which the kings are Buddha and Ronald McDonald.)
The show indicates the condition of twenty-first century Tibet, caught now as in past centuries between larger cultures that have left their imprint on the stubbornly autonomous cultural zone of the Tibetan-language peoples. Shelka's paintings of Buddhas and of sunglasses-wearing locals demonstrate the meeting points of the forces that today are in sharp contention as well as in a harmony that is up for discussion.
What form successive syntheses will take is a matter that the artists leave open. What makes this exhibition of particular interest is that it incorporates as much tradition as it does into work intended to challenge the expectations of viewers from all cultures, their own included.
I hope someone has found the time to give this exhibition the serious study it deserves. Those within driving distance should consider seeing it for themselves since there is no catalogue and catalogue essay to document its accomplishments.
counterforces? I wouldn't recognize a counterforce if it came up and made me trip over it
Or at least that is what one would suppose from my failure to write about "The FriendSHIP Project" currently at MOCA GA (in a gallery space adjacent to the main gallery space). For this collaborative group of women artists has done all the things that counterforces did back in the day: they have encouraged one another's different art practices while creating a new thematic whole and reaching out to a community that could make use of their shared information.
In other words, they worked together on uncompleted pieces from their individual studios, and produced a new wall piece based on the metaphor of the ship as a place where individuals come together on a collective journey to a new location.
That metaphor was contributed by Corrina Mensoff, who brought the group (which includes Terri Dilling, Amandine Drouet, Alison Weldon, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Ker-Seymer) together; the other major metaphor has been the quilt, suggested by the presence of a woman who spent much of her life in Gee's Bend, Alabama. (The members of the FriendSHIP Project call their collaborative drawings "patchworks.")
And on Saturday February 21 (tomorrow, if you're reading this blog on a daily basis) they will offer a workshop for community members to produce individual works that will be sewn together in a wall piece that will also be a patchwork, which will be celebrated at the exhibit's Closing Reception on March 5, from 6-9pm.
Participants are invited to come between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. for about 30 minutes of printmaking. They may bring photocopied (not digitally printed) images relating to "friend" or "ship" or learn to make a relief print.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
a recollection deeply embedded in a discussion of a quotation about a game of chess
I ought to tackle Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation again, since I haven’t read it since the late Robert Detweiler’s senior seminar in literary criticism (Bob taught us to approach individual topics via the largest framework possible).
I have no idea whether there is any validity in Koestler’s half-century-old data on the various types of creativity and their physiological, psychological, and social bases. I’ve written somewhere recently, either on joculum or Counterforces, about Koestler’s ability to render his judgments suspect through his fascination with unfashionable topics.
But it is obvious that someone needs to update the blurry understanding of the interior transformation of abstract and concrete topics of fascination: the right arrangement of words is in many ways so different from the right arrangement of shapes and color, and the capacity to combine the two with the right kinds of abstract categorization is a skill that itself is utterly unrelated to the capacity to combine and rearrange numerical relations.
And possession of any of the foregoing does not guarantee any capacity to make practical use of any of it, or even to present it in public comprehensibly.
One might note George Steiner’s sneering aside in a lovely paragraph regarding chess, in an essay found both in his Extraterritorial and in Robert Boyers’ recent anthology George Steiner at the New Yorker:
“To a true chess player, the pushing about of thirty-two counters on 8x8 squares is an end in itself, a whole world next to which that of mere biological or political or social life seems messy, stale, and contingent.” [And hence, “…normal creatures otherwise engaged” such as Vladimir Lenin or George Steiner have pursued chess in “siren moments”:] “Not for gain, not for knowledge or renown, but in some autistic enchantment, pure as one of Bach’s inverted canons or Euler’s formula for polyhedra. There, surely, lies one of the real connections. For all their wealth of content, for all the sum of history and social institution vested in them, music, mathematics, and chess are resplendently useless (applied mathematics is just higher plumbing, a kind of music for the police band). They are metaphysically trivial, irresponsible. They refuse to relate outward, to take reality for arbiter. This is the source of their witchery. They tell us, as does a kindred but much later process, abstract art, of man’s capacity to ‘build against the world,’ to devise forms that are zany, totally useless, austerely frivolous. Such forms are irresponsible to reality, and therefore inviolate, as is nothing else, to the banal authority of death.”
Steiner’s September 1968 essay (and what a month in which to be writing such a paragraph!) misses the distinctions between types of abstract art, but Minimalism is indeed the chess of the art world, and it is unfortunate that Steiner seemed, like so many literary types of that moment, to be operating in total ignorance of what was going on in the galleries. (But then, the galleries were operating in blissful ignorance of what was going on in the streets, much less in the university classrooms.)
And Steiner knew less than nothing about pop music or about the serious types who combined art-school intellectualism with pop-music interests. (One knows “less than nothing” about a topic when the opinions one offers are not only ignorant, but ass-backwards.)
But this brief passage is one of the best summations of the post-WWII world’s problem and promise as it appeared circa 1968: for as the inheritors of Sartre and Camus and Gabriel Marcel would have observed, the only way to “keep it real” is precisely and always to acknowledge “the banal authority of death.” Horace’s antique “I shall not wholly die” seemed irrelevant for thinkers who were painfully aware of how easily the inheritance of a civilization could go up in collateral-damage flames and/or be subjected to systematic extermination. “More lasting than monuments of bronze”? Ha. The manuscripts of antiquity that contained such noble sentiments had barely made it to the Renaissance past the century of the great invasions, and the monastery-burnings of Europe’s wars of the Middle Ages.
On the other hand, such lessons could be forgotten in a single generation; despite the disparity of war in Asia, by 1968 the generation born in the wake of the world war was basking in unparalleled prosperity, and its most famous version of irresponsibility to reality was to throw money on the floor of the Stock Exchange, watch the brokers scramble to pick up the pittances, and point out that in an age of abundance it made more sense to automate the means of production and guarantee everyone fully paid unemployment. There was nothing “austere” about that performance-art “frivolity.”
The vision was completely ridiculous; but so was the pursuit of abstract counters for the sake of having the biggest quantity of abstract counters with which to do nothing except acquire still more abstract counters and occasionally trade in a few for the toys of status, with which the acquirers did not have time to play. (And yet that pointless pursuit would eventually destroy entire interlinked economies, and do so more than once.)
A mathematician relative of an artist friend once calculated how many dollar bills would have to be lying on the sidewalk to make it worth the while of one of the world’s richest entrepreneurs to bend down and pick them up. He calculated that the quantity that would justify the time engaged in scooping them up would be astonishingly huge…since only that amount would equal the amount of money the guy acquired by other means of effort.
“Only a mathematician would say that,” I answered. “The correct answer is, one dollar bill. Because that is a dollar that does not yet belong to this guy. And, well, that is just plain unsatisfactory, now isn’t it?”
I tried a few times in childhood and adolescence, but I never could memorize the rules for playing chess.
I have no idea whether there is any validity in Koestler’s half-century-old data on the various types of creativity and their physiological, psychological, and social bases. I’ve written somewhere recently, either on joculum or Counterforces, about Koestler’s ability to render his judgments suspect through his fascination with unfashionable topics.
But it is obvious that someone needs to update the blurry understanding of the interior transformation of abstract and concrete topics of fascination: the right arrangement of words is in many ways so different from the right arrangement of shapes and color, and the capacity to combine the two with the right kinds of abstract categorization is a skill that itself is utterly unrelated to the capacity to combine and rearrange numerical relations.
And possession of any of the foregoing does not guarantee any capacity to make practical use of any of it, or even to present it in public comprehensibly.
One might note George Steiner’s sneering aside in a lovely paragraph regarding chess, in an essay found both in his Extraterritorial and in Robert Boyers’ recent anthology George Steiner at the New Yorker:
“To a true chess player, the pushing about of thirty-two counters on 8x8 squares is an end in itself, a whole world next to which that of mere biological or political or social life seems messy, stale, and contingent.” [And hence, “…normal creatures otherwise engaged” such as Vladimir Lenin or George Steiner have pursued chess in “siren moments”:] “Not for gain, not for knowledge or renown, but in some autistic enchantment, pure as one of Bach’s inverted canons or Euler’s formula for polyhedra. There, surely, lies one of the real connections. For all their wealth of content, for all the sum of history and social institution vested in them, music, mathematics, and chess are resplendently useless (applied mathematics is just higher plumbing, a kind of music for the police band). They are metaphysically trivial, irresponsible. They refuse to relate outward, to take reality for arbiter. This is the source of their witchery. They tell us, as does a kindred but much later process, abstract art, of man’s capacity to ‘build against the world,’ to devise forms that are zany, totally useless, austerely frivolous. Such forms are irresponsible to reality, and therefore inviolate, as is nothing else, to the banal authority of death.”
Steiner’s September 1968 essay (and what a month in which to be writing such a paragraph!) misses the distinctions between types of abstract art, but Minimalism is indeed the chess of the art world, and it is unfortunate that Steiner seemed, like so many literary types of that moment, to be operating in total ignorance of what was going on in the galleries. (But then, the galleries were operating in blissful ignorance of what was going on in the streets, much less in the university classrooms.)
And Steiner knew less than nothing about pop music or about the serious types who combined art-school intellectualism with pop-music interests. (One knows “less than nothing” about a topic when the opinions one offers are not only ignorant, but ass-backwards.)
But this brief passage is one of the best summations of the post-WWII world’s problem and promise as it appeared circa 1968: for as the inheritors of Sartre and Camus and Gabriel Marcel would have observed, the only way to “keep it real” is precisely and always to acknowledge “the banal authority of death.” Horace’s antique “I shall not wholly die” seemed irrelevant for thinkers who were painfully aware of how easily the inheritance of a civilization could go up in collateral-damage flames and/or be subjected to systematic extermination. “More lasting than monuments of bronze”? Ha. The manuscripts of antiquity that contained such noble sentiments had barely made it to the Renaissance past the century of the great invasions, and the monastery-burnings of Europe’s wars of the Middle Ages.
On the other hand, such lessons could be forgotten in a single generation; despite the disparity of war in Asia, by 1968 the generation born in the wake of the world war was basking in unparalleled prosperity, and its most famous version of irresponsibility to reality was to throw money on the floor of the Stock Exchange, watch the brokers scramble to pick up the pittances, and point out that in an age of abundance it made more sense to automate the means of production and guarantee everyone fully paid unemployment. There was nothing “austere” about that performance-art “frivolity.”
The vision was completely ridiculous; but so was the pursuit of abstract counters for the sake of having the biggest quantity of abstract counters with which to do nothing except acquire still more abstract counters and occasionally trade in a few for the toys of status, with which the acquirers did not have time to play. (And yet that pointless pursuit would eventually destroy entire interlinked economies, and do so more than once.)
A mathematician relative of an artist friend once calculated how many dollar bills would have to be lying on the sidewalk to make it worth the while of one of the world’s richest entrepreneurs to bend down and pick them up. He calculated that the quantity that would justify the time engaged in scooping them up would be astonishingly huge…since only that amount would equal the amount of money the guy acquired by other means of effort.
“Only a mathematician would say that,” I answered. “The correct answer is, one dollar bill. Because that is a dollar that does not yet belong to this guy. And, well, that is just plain unsatisfactory, now isn’t it?”
I tried a few times in childhood and adolescence, but I never could memorize the rules for playing chess.
the third blog
We are, all of us, increasingly talking to ourselves. And fewer and fewer people are overhearing the conversation.
I could cite numerous examples of blogs that I enjoy when I read them, but I seldom read them, and frequently find no point of entry at which I could start a conversation with them even when we share subject matter.
Part of it is as simple as methods of categorization (that being one reason I retain my unfashionable interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose place in the social pecking order of multicultural Austria-Hungary led him to be unusually sensitive to cases of mutual incomprehension and missed social clues). A former editor of my acquaintance once established a number of new columns and then spent inordinate amounts of time trying to decide whether a given topic fitted into one column heading rather than another column heading.
I have tried (not always successfully) to keep Counterforces and Other Little Jokes an art blog (with a certain amount of specific Atlanta-centric content) and joculum an everything-else blog, but I find myself wanting to write a growing number of autobiographical notes that don’t spin off into thousand-word essays about the human condition, or if they do, they are too anchored to personal experience to count.
Any suggestions as to which host might be most useful for a hypothetical third blog that only the truly me-obsessed would read? (I suppose I could establish it as a very specific friends-only subsection on joculum, since LiveJournal allows for infinite subcategorization of subscribing readers…the problem being that they do have to have their own LJ usernames, which Rodger Cunningham, for example, doesn’t. But Rodger Cunningham—the other RC—wouldn’t be interested in this subsection, anyway.)
In the interim, I shall try to shoehorn the occasional recollections into larger topics. (Does anybody use shoehorns anymore? I don’t, but then I never liked them.)
I could cite numerous examples of blogs that I enjoy when I read them, but I seldom read them, and frequently find no point of entry at which I could start a conversation with them even when we share subject matter.
Part of it is as simple as methods of categorization (that being one reason I retain my unfashionable interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose place in the social pecking order of multicultural Austria-Hungary led him to be unusually sensitive to cases of mutual incomprehension and missed social clues). A former editor of my acquaintance once established a number of new columns and then spent inordinate amounts of time trying to decide whether a given topic fitted into one column heading rather than another column heading.
I have tried (not always successfully) to keep Counterforces and Other Little Jokes an art blog (with a certain amount of specific Atlanta-centric content) and joculum an everything-else blog, but I find myself wanting to write a growing number of autobiographical notes that don’t spin off into thousand-word essays about the human condition, or if they do, they are too anchored to personal experience to count.
Any suggestions as to which host might be most useful for a hypothetical third blog that only the truly me-obsessed would read? (I suppose I could establish it as a very specific friends-only subsection on joculum, since LiveJournal allows for infinite subcategorization of subscribing readers…the problem being that they do have to have their own LJ usernames, which Rodger Cunningham, for example, doesn’t. But Rodger Cunningham—the other RC—wouldn’t be interested in this subsection, anyway.)
In the interim, I shall try to shoehorn the occasional recollections into larger topics. (Does anybody use shoehorns anymore? I don’t, but then I never liked them.)
Sunday, February 15, 2009
a book review imitative of George Steiner's habit of embedding the title very deep in an essay seemingly about something else: in re Gary Monroe
There is a book remaining to be written that the world is still not ready to accept.
Actually, there are many such books, but the one I have in mind is one that involves a topic which global society, and Anglophone-academic even more than global society, is unlikely to contemplate without the effort being derailed by prior assumptions.
The book would involve some of the worse mythicizations of relationships of art and power and money and human behavioral mechanisms. The mythicizations in question are usually perpetrated by academic theorists, but the issues stir up passions and oversimplifications among all levels of education and temperament.
The book would be about the role played by art-school-educated artists in reviving traditional arts, or in creating new schools of largely self-trained artists.
Parts of the topic shade off into the preservation of never-extinguished forms of traditional art, and that preservation is as much a matter of creating foreign markets as it is one of stirring fresh interest among artisans who no longer find much purpose in replicating the old ways. Anthropologists and missionaries (and missionary anthropologists or anthropologist missionaries) have revived such basically extinct forms as Palauan storyboards, and have revivified practices that were in the process of transformation, such as Asmat carvings, in need of repurposing after they no longer served their original function.
We can exclude from our hypothetical book any cases in which the community itself, or the artisans/artists in it, find their own ways of transferring from tradition to the marketplace.
Even there, the structural similarities between unrelated transactions would be of interest. Several recent and no-longer-recent books on locally generated conduits for the sale of contemporary and semi-traditional African art deserve to be contemplated and written about in tandem. It would be even more interesting to write about them in conjunction with the studies of traditional African-American and white Appalachian folk artists who negotiated their own self-generated points of entry into the ways of global marketing.
It is the “self-generated” part that is in contention. “Outsider artists” who figure out by themselves how to become artstars have been judged by the romanticizers as lacking “authenticity.” Others are deemed to have been contaminated by the proddings of patrons, or worse, taught how to do things “the right way” by certain graduates of art schools.
But we have a desperate inconsistency here that remains too touchy to be discussed.
Community involvement has been all the rage for a full generation now; you aren’t really grant-worthy if you aren’t teaching all sorts of folks how to use art processes, and then keeping hands off and letting the genius of the individual have its way. And sometimes, wonderful things happen as a result of this.
But Tim Rollins was widely condemned for turning K.O.S. into a moneymaking art collective with himself as its head. And in general, artists who take too much interest in the financial success of their protégés are regarded as somehow poisoning the wells of authenticity.
But authenticity is where you find it, and it is one of life’s interesting ironies that the globally successful Shona sculptors of Zimbabwe had their origin in an art school that encouraged the use of a medium that was not part of their uninterrupted inheritance. (I omit vexed questions of history here.) Once prodded, the artists encouraged and educated one another in an explosion of creativity that today is known to audiences throughout the world, including the transit passengers who use the moving sidewalk between concourses at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, where there is a permanent installation of monumental work by a wide variety of Shona sculptors.
The passions and the politics still run too high to permit discussion of which of the community-oriented efforts to empower artists produced autonomous individuals who accomplished the creation of a set of aesthetics that would not have existed in that form without the initial intervention. (Something would have existed. But not exactly that, and that is where the controversy arises.)
I have used a variety of left-wing and right-wing shibboleths here (“empower artists,” “creativity,” “aesthetics,” “intervention,” “autonomous individuals,” “community-oriented”) to indicate why, to put a nuanced spin on Henry Kissinger’s familiar description of faculty politics, the passions run so high whether the stakes are low or not. The nature of the stakes is part of the problem arousing conflict.
The motivations of the young African-Americans who became known as the Highwaymen (fifteen years after they were no longer a group) were uncomplicated. They wanted to make money, and an artist was willing to teach them how to make it.
It is worth contemplating, in terms of our book that cannot yet be written, the fact that while we know the names and the work of the artists who arose from these initial interventions, we are seldom as familiar with the artists who served as the catalyst. In this case, it was Florida landscape painter A. E. Backus, who is well known to those who have visited his museum in Fort Pierce, but is famous only in specialized circles of the global artworld.
The photographer Gary Monroe has become the chronicler of the Highwaymen since their rediscovery in the 1990s. Scheduled for publication in late April, The Highwaymen Murals is the latest of his books published by the University Press of Florida. Its introductory essay provides a condensed overview of the story of this remarkable group of 26 largely mutually educated artists.
Although some painters now insist they were never really anonymous Highwaymen, the group that formed in 1960 was united by the techniques originally taught by their mentor, and by technical modifications developed by one or another group member and taught to the others. But they worked as independent artists who marketed similar forms of paintings together, sometimes signing their production, sometimes choosing not to do so.
Speed and quantity were the point, but composition and palette were controlled by what the market would bear plus their own creative impulses. The paintings evoked an older Florida that in 1960 was still readily visible from car windows on two-lane highways. Most of the marketing was done out of car trunks by the roadside of tourist-frequented routes. Flame trees, palms, lakes, cypress swamps, and egrets abounded in the paintings. (They also abounded on the main roads frequented by the tourists.) The luridly shaded or shadeless commonplaces of beach-town surf art were nowhere to be found, but idyllic scenes in a vivid yet surprisingly understated palette were de rigueur.
In other words, the paintings were meant to stir the emotions of souvenir-hunting passersby or wall-decorating newcomers, and they succeeded brilliantly on that count. Before the decline of consumer interest in scenes of subtropic and rural Florida during the Disneyfied 1980s, the various Highwaymen artists created upwards of two hundred thousand paintings.
What distinguishes their readily recognizable productions from frame-shop offerings of the period, or from the more serious creations of such locally popular genre artists as E. B. Stowe—that is an art historical question that ought to be tackled by a formalist critic. It would raise the whole issue of what distinguishes good “bad art” from bad bad art, and from bad examples of what has been deemed to be “good art.” The Highwaymen have been rediscovered because their aesthetic strategies borrowed from but did not copy the shorthand techniques of the truly disposable and/or merely provincial painting of the Florida of those transitional decades.
But the Highwaymen unabashedly admit they were in it for the money, and the rise in aesthetic complexity was all part of the process of pushing product. Al Black was the most successful salesman of the group, to the point that he was forbidden to paint in order to devote his time to making visits to the offices of the professionals who sometimes allowed the group to hang their paintings in lobbies and waiting rooms. He regularly found buyers for the paintings left over from individual members’ selling trips.
Black apparently developed personal difficulties in the era of crack cocaine. Coming in the wake of the collapse of the Highwaymen’s art market, his difficulties earned him a prison sentence.
What happened next was the return of Black’s capacities as an artist. Asked to paint murals on undecorated walls (a practice that apparently is the rule rather than the exception in correctional institutions nationwide), he created evocative Florida scenes that returned inmates to the natural world from which incarceration had cut them off (in fact, it was a natural world that increasingly existed only in older tourist-brochure photographs).
Eventually Black was transferred to various facilities specifically for the purpose of producing new murals, and despite threats to the murals’ existence when less art-interested wardens took over, thus far none of the works have been painted out or destroyed in prison expansions. Monroe has presented them in situ rather than as isolated works of art, documenting their sometimes disconcerting juxtaposition with general prison architecture.
In 2006, Black was released from confinement, in time to enjoy the fruits of the renaissance of interest in the Highwaymen.
The issues that this seemingly simple book raises are, as I’ve indicated, entirely too numerous and complex to be dealt with in a single essay. These are diverse murals that, like the original Highwaymen paintings, were executed with astonishing rapidity. They were sometimes created in tones specifically intended to be soothing. These are among the reasons why large segments of the art world would be expected to treat them with contempt, or more likely, simply ignore them.
But they shouldn’t. Just as the Highwaymen transcended their original motivations, and created an oeuvre that elevates the category of “roadside art,” these murals are anything but “prison art.” And the problems that they, shall we say, problematize extend far beyond the cramped categories of “folk art.”
—Jerry Cullum, February 15, 2009
Actually, there are many such books, but the one I have in mind is one that involves a topic which global society, and Anglophone-academic even more than global society, is unlikely to contemplate without the effort being derailed by prior assumptions.
The book would involve some of the worse mythicizations of relationships of art and power and money and human behavioral mechanisms. The mythicizations in question are usually perpetrated by academic theorists, but the issues stir up passions and oversimplifications among all levels of education and temperament.
The book would be about the role played by art-school-educated artists in reviving traditional arts, or in creating new schools of largely self-trained artists.
Parts of the topic shade off into the preservation of never-extinguished forms of traditional art, and that preservation is as much a matter of creating foreign markets as it is one of stirring fresh interest among artisans who no longer find much purpose in replicating the old ways. Anthropologists and missionaries (and missionary anthropologists or anthropologist missionaries) have revived such basically extinct forms as Palauan storyboards, and have revivified practices that were in the process of transformation, such as Asmat carvings, in need of repurposing after they no longer served their original function.
We can exclude from our hypothetical book any cases in which the community itself, or the artisans/artists in it, find their own ways of transferring from tradition to the marketplace.
Even there, the structural similarities between unrelated transactions would be of interest. Several recent and no-longer-recent books on locally generated conduits for the sale of contemporary and semi-traditional African art deserve to be contemplated and written about in tandem. It would be even more interesting to write about them in conjunction with the studies of traditional African-American and white Appalachian folk artists who negotiated their own self-generated points of entry into the ways of global marketing.
It is the “self-generated” part that is in contention. “Outsider artists” who figure out by themselves how to become artstars have been judged by the romanticizers as lacking “authenticity.” Others are deemed to have been contaminated by the proddings of patrons, or worse, taught how to do things “the right way” by certain graduates of art schools.
But we have a desperate inconsistency here that remains too touchy to be discussed.
Community involvement has been all the rage for a full generation now; you aren’t really grant-worthy if you aren’t teaching all sorts of folks how to use art processes, and then keeping hands off and letting the genius of the individual have its way. And sometimes, wonderful things happen as a result of this.
But Tim Rollins was widely condemned for turning K.O.S. into a moneymaking art collective with himself as its head. And in general, artists who take too much interest in the financial success of their protégés are regarded as somehow poisoning the wells of authenticity.
But authenticity is where you find it, and it is one of life’s interesting ironies that the globally successful Shona sculptors of Zimbabwe had their origin in an art school that encouraged the use of a medium that was not part of their uninterrupted inheritance. (I omit vexed questions of history here.) Once prodded, the artists encouraged and educated one another in an explosion of creativity that today is known to audiences throughout the world, including the transit passengers who use the moving sidewalk between concourses at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, where there is a permanent installation of monumental work by a wide variety of Shona sculptors.
The passions and the politics still run too high to permit discussion of which of the community-oriented efforts to empower artists produced autonomous individuals who accomplished the creation of a set of aesthetics that would not have existed in that form without the initial intervention. (Something would have existed. But not exactly that, and that is where the controversy arises.)
I have used a variety of left-wing and right-wing shibboleths here (“empower artists,” “creativity,” “aesthetics,” “intervention,” “autonomous individuals,” “community-oriented”) to indicate why, to put a nuanced spin on Henry Kissinger’s familiar description of faculty politics, the passions run so high whether the stakes are low or not. The nature of the stakes is part of the problem arousing conflict.
The motivations of the young African-Americans who became known as the Highwaymen (fifteen years after they were no longer a group) were uncomplicated. They wanted to make money, and an artist was willing to teach them how to make it.
It is worth contemplating, in terms of our book that cannot yet be written, the fact that while we know the names and the work of the artists who arose from these initial interventions, we are seldom as familiar with the artists who served as the catalyst. In this case, it was Florida landscape painter A. E. Backus, who is well known to those who have visited his museum in Fort Pierce, but is famous only in specialized circles of the global artworld.
The photographer Gary Monroe has become the chronicler of the Highwaymen since their rediscovery in the 1990s. Scheduled for publication in late April, The Highwaymen Murals is the latest of his books published by the University Press of Florida. Its introductory essay provides a condensed overview of the story of this remarkable group of 26 largely mutually educated artists.
Although some painters now insist they were never really anonymous Highwaymen, the group that formed in 1960 was united by the techniques originally taught by their mentor, and by technical modifications developed by one or another group member and taught to the others. But they worked as independent artists who marketed similar forms of paintings together, sometimes signing their production, sometimes choosing not to do so.
Speed and quantity were the point, but composition and palette were controlled by what the market would bear plus their own creative impulses. The paintings evoked an older Florida that in 1960 was still readily visible from car windows on two-lane highways. Most of the marketing was done out of car trunks by the roadside of tourist-frequented routes. Flame trees, palms, lakes, cypress swamps, and egrets abounded in the paintings. (They also abounded on the main roads frequented by the tourists.) The luridly shaded or shadeless commonplaces of beach-town surf art were nowhere to be found, but idyllic scenes in a vivid yet surprisingly understated palette were de rigueur.
In other words, the paintings were meant to stir the emotions of souvenir-hunting passersby or wall-decorating newcomers, and they succeeded brilliantly on that count. Before the decline of consumer interest in scenes of subtropic and rural Florida during the Disneyfied 1980s, the various Highwaymen artists created upwards of two hundred thousand paintings.
What distinguishes their readily recognizable productions from frame-shop offerings of the period, or from the more serious creations of such locally popular genre artists as E. B. Stowe—that is an art historical question that ought to be tackled by a formalist critic. It would raise the whole issue of what distinguishes good “bad art” from bad bad art, and from bad examples of what has been deemed to be “good art.” The Highwaymen have been rediscovered because their aesthetic strategies borrowed from but did not copy the shorthand techniques of the truly disposable and/or merely provincial painting of the Florida of those transitional decades.
But the Highwaymen unabashedly admit they were in it for the money, and the rise in aesthetic complexity was all part of the process of pushing product. Al Black was the most successful salesman of the group, to the point that he was forbidden to paint in order to devote his time to making visits to the offices of the professionals who sometimes allowed the group to hang their paintings in lobbies and waiting rooms. He regularly found buyers for the paintings left over from individual members’ selling trips.
Black apparently developed personal difficulties in the era of crack cocaine. Coming in the wake of the collapse of the Highwaymen’s art market, his difficulties earned him a prison sentence.
What happened next was the return of Black’s capacities as an artist. Asked to paint murals on undecorated walls (a practice that apparently is the rule rather than the exception in correctional institutions nationwide), he created evocative Florida scenes that returned inmates to the natural world from which incarceration had cut them off (in fact, it was a natural world that increasingly existed only in older tourist-brochure photographs).
Eventually Black was transferred to various facilities specifically for the purpose of producing new murals, and despite threats to the murals’ existence when less art-interested wardens took over, thus far none of the works have been painted out or destroyed in prison expansions. Monroe has presented them in situ rather than as isolated works of art, documenting their sometimes disconcerting juxtaposition with general prison architecture.
In 2006, Black was released from confinement, in time to enjoy the fruits of the renaissance of interest in the Highwaymen.
The issues that this seemingly simple book raises are, as I’ve indicated, entirely too numerous and complex to be dealt with in a single essay. These are diverse murals that, like the original Highwaymen paintings, were executed with astonishing rapidity. They were sometimes created in tones specifically intended to be soothing. These are among the reasons why large segments of the art world would be expected to treat them with contempt, or more likely, simply ignore them.
But they shouldn’t. Just as the Highwaymen transcended their original motivations, and created an oeuvre that elevates the category of “roadside art,” these murals are anything but “prison art.” And the problems that they, shall we say, problematize extend far beyond the cramped categories of “folk art.”
—Jerry Cullum, February 15, 2009
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