Interesting Ideas Update

Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts, by Vladimir Arkhipov, Fuel Publishing, 304 pages, 180 color pictures, 2006. ISBN 0-9550061-3-9

Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, Book Works, 158 pages, 2005. ISBN 1 870699-81-5

Two recent books from abroad attempt to document the spontaneous art making of ordinary people, one broadly and one eccentrically.

Folk Archives, from Britain, covers a wide range of vernacular expression, from protest posters to shop signs. Home Made, also published in Britain, takes a certain kind of ingenuity as its subject, specifically creative responses to the acute scarcity of consumer goods in the Soviet Union and its aftermath.

Folk Archives collects the more obviously artistic material, including a number of conventional (if sometimes clearly self-taught) paintings and sculpture, where the artifacts of Home-Made are far more prosaic – flashlights, screwdrivers and floor lamps, among other things.

While the bodies of work in some instances feel familiar (hand-painted shop signs from Britain, a cloth toy animal from the Soviet Union), in others they seem rather alien. The British protest art doesn’t track to any living tradition in the U.S., nor do the makeshift knives and forks from Russia. As hand-crafted utilitarian objects, though, the Russian pieces resonate with traditional folk craft, and like those objects they occasionally attain aesthetic distinction. Home Made makes a strong case that even the most mundane of these objects convey a message about the society and the people who made them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South, edited by Carol Crown, with essays by Paul Harvey, Erika Doss, Hal Fulmer, Babatunde Lawal, Charles Reagan Wilson and N.J. Girardot, Art Museum of the University of Memphis with the University of Mississippi Press, 215 pages, 122 color plates, other color and b&w illustrations, 2004. ISBN 1-57806-659-X

Stereotypes have two inherent flaws: They often state the obvious and, when too generally applied, they become false. But they also are inescapable because, in the proper context, they are true.

Carol Crown’s exhibition and catalog, Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South, can’t help but draw on Bible Belt stereotypes because they reflect a big slice of Southern reality. There is a lot more substance here than in many folk art theme shows, since the Bible really is the force behind a great deal of self-taught art.

But at the same time, the point that self-taught art of the South is full of biblical references is, because inherently obvious, not inherently interesting. It is often the job of scholars to state the obvious for the record, though, and the essays in this catalog are all scholarly in nature. That’s a virtue, since it grounds the book in actual research. A casual reader may not want to plow through every essay, but Crown’s text gives a good summary of evangelical eschatology (that’s study of the end times) and Southern Protestantism. Charles Reagan Wilson explores the religious underpinnings of the art while setting it in a broader context of Southern creativity in general. And N.J. Girardot gives special attention to the most dramatic of religiously oriented artists, the builders of monumental environments.

Read the rest of this entry »