Interesting Ideas Update

Collecting Madness: Outsider Art from the Dammann Collection, by Thomas Röske, Bettina Brand-Claussen, Gerhard Dammann and others. Catalog by the Prinzhorn Collection, 224 pages, 101 illustrations, 2006. ISBN: 3-88423-265-7

It may seem like a cheap shot to call this volume schizophrenic, but between its own punning title and its divided sense of purpose, the description is irresistible.

“Collecting Madness” refers both to the mania of acquisition and to a particular exhibit of a German collection focused on work by artists with histories of mental problems and confinement in asylums. The catalog itself is divided by an abrupt transition halfway through, switching from fascinating explorations of art collecting to a series of rather conventional considerations of specific art works and artists.
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Book Review: The Air Loom and Other Dangerous Influencing Machines, by Thomas Röske, Bettina Brand-Claussen and others. Catalog by the Prinzhorn Collection, 256 pages, 92 illustrations, 2006. ISBN: 3-88423-237-1.

This book, also a catalog for an exhibit at the Prinzhorn Collection, is even more focused on psychiatric issues than the Collecting Madness volume.

In an earlier time that could have been problematic, but the success of Dubuffet and his followers in liberating the art from its psychiatric context actually makes it easier to appreciate the insights. Although there is still plenty to debate relating to terminology and the significance of biography, the specifically medical terrain no longer feels like an impediment to aesthetic value.
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Sublime Spaces And Visionary Worlds: Built Environments Of Vernacular Artists, By Leslie Umberger, Erika Doss, Lisa Stone, Jane Bianco and Ruth Kohler. Princeton Architectural Press, 424 pages, 650 color plates and 100 black and white illustrations, 2007. ISBN 1-56898-728-5

This is a blockbuster catalog for a blockbuster show, and perhaps the best book yet published on the subject of art environments.

The structure is conventional—a handful of essays bookend a set of illustrated biographical vignettes (22 in this case, with exceptionally rich photo reproduction). But intelligence and serious intent distinguish this effort from the usual run of coffee table books. The straightforward biography focuses on understanding how the environments and their artists developed, which is especially relevant in a context where the work’s physical evolution illuminates both its meaning and its current state of being. This is a non-incidental consideration for nearly every one of these sites, given their exposure to the elements and to a sometimes-hostile populace. Read the rest of this entry »

The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art, by Greg Bottoms, University of Chicago Press, 200 pages, 2007. ISBN 978-0-226-06685-1

As an outsider to outsider art, Greg Bottoms is in a great position to ask uncomfortable questions that might otherwise run afoul of the field’s shibboleths and loyalties. Unfortunately, the questions he asks in this book are often as uninformed as they are discomfiting,

Bottoms clearly wants to engage with artists as people, not performers or freaks. Yet he ends up reducing them to some of the very clichés that he seems to want to debunk. Early on, for example, he associates Howard Finster with the myth of outsider-art craziness. He writes of outsider art (and in the context, Finster): “It is more often fuelled by passion, troubled psychology, extreme ideology, faith, despair and the desperate need to be heard and seen that comes with cultural marginalization and mental unease.” Read the rest of this entry »

Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art, Edited by Carol Crown and Charles Russell, University Press of Mississippi, 308 pages, 2007. ISBN 1-57806-916-5 (hardcover)

This book is definitely not bound for the coffee table, with its undersized images and serious, occasionally turgid, prose. But that’s not the point of this art book, whose admirable goal instead is to achieve a sober art-historical understanding of the self-taught art of the South “in the context of the makers’ experience.”

If it displays more rigor than most books on the subject, however, its authors are not immune to the wishful thinking and biographical bias that mar so much of the popular writing they aim to transcend.

The book gains momentum in fits and starts. Some essays will be more comfortable to scholars than to a general audience. Editor Carol Crown’s own heavily footnoted effort, mercifully unclogged with in-line citations, makes nuanced, useful distinctions across the theologies of artists like Howard Finster and Myrtice West. Despite their shared visionary evangelicalism, they speak in different theological languages if you understand what they are saying. Read the rest of this entry »

Although the glory days of fairground art passed with the last of the true sideshows, county fairs and carnivals still offer bits of visual interest even if most of the imagery is blandly commercial. These are from the Lake and Kane County Fairs in Illinois, the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee and the Rosholt Fair in Wisconsin. Plus, a bonus image from the gloriously named Temple of Food in Amstersdam.

Some views from the very pleasant art environment.

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.

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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.

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How the Other Half Worships, by Camilo Jose Vergara, Rutgers University Press, 286 pages, 2005. ISBN 978-0-8135-3682-8

How The Other Half Worships celebrates one of the great engines of true vernacular expression – religion. The subject is inner-city churches, with an emphasis on the storefront variety.

Camilo Jose Vergara has spent years visiting and photographing urban churches and their people, fascinated by their architecture and decoration, by what people do in them and by what they do for people.

The book is built around his photographs, but it also gives the church folk a direct voice. The generous quotations from pastors and parishioners provide a good flavor for their religious language, although the book cries out for one of those supplemental audio CDs. The sounds of their services are a missing dimension.
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