Interesting Ideas Update

Claus Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum, now recreated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was hugely influential when I saw it at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1977. His collection of commercial tchotchkes (salt-and-pepper shakers, Plasticville train set buildings, robot toys, product packaging), shown with pieces of his own art and models for works in progress, validated my own nascent fascination with pop culture objects, proving that they were interesting in and of themselves. I was just starting to collect kitsch items, commercial paraphernalia, handicrafts — prosaic stuff that seemed to resonate with some kind of meaning, wit or design choice. Much of the resonance was in my head rather than in the objects. But Oldenburg’s own collecting made me believe it wasn’t a waste of time, though our underlying purposes were probably very different. Although I doubt I saw these Oldenburg quotes at the time, they reflect the longer-term direction my own interests took in the years after seeing the Mouse Museum: “The city is a landscape worth enjoying — damn necessary if you live in the city,” and “Dirt has depth and beauty.” Starting with serious buildings, evolving through roadside architecture,and eventually encompassing commercial shop signs, I made a conscious choice to observe and appreciate the built landscape exactly because it made living amidst it so much more tolerable, even interesting.

I also visited Inventing Abstraction at MOMA, though the Mouse Museum was my main destination. My fuse is longer than some, and I planned to walk through the show and enjoy some objects without fretting. But the show’s studied isolation of the work and the artists was stunning. Even if the offending title were mitigated by calling it “Abstraction Re-Invented” or “A New Abstraction” or “Inventing Modern Abstraction,” it would not remedy the curation’s reductionism.

I haven’t read the catalog so maybe it mounts a defense, but whatever justification could be applied, the isolation does a disservice to all, the modernist artists included. How can you appreciate the distinctiveness of their creativity if you don’t see it in context with the abstraction that came before? The falseness is even more aggravated by the absence of centuries worth of fabulous abstract art. History and fairness aside, including other threads of abstraction, including European, would have made the show a far richer and meaningful experience.

Schaafijs en wilde bussen: Straatkunst in Suriname, by Chandra van Binnendijk , Paul Faber and Tammo Schuringa, KIT Publishers, 160 pages, 2010. ISBN 978-9-4602-2054-8. Dutch, soft cover, 19.50 euros

Kit Pubishers, the same Dutch company behind African Signs, also crossed the ocean to document the decorated buses and snow cone stands of Surname, a former Dutch colony next to Guyana in South America.

Shaved Ice and Wild Buses: Street Art in Suriname, published in conjunction with exhibits in that country and the Netherlands, is an ideal coffee table book if you don’t happen to speak Dutch – you can just look at the photos without guilt.

The book documents a tradition of decorating small urban buses said to go back to the 1970s. Many of these images are more polished than the African signs in the previous books, and their scale is often small –medallions painted above the license plates that look to be just a foot or two square.

The shaved ice carts are much smaller than the buses yet seem more monumentally decorated, perhaps because the paintings tend to cover the entire carts. The style on the carts also seems more varied, in some cases similar to the bus images but in others more personal, with some being outright pornographic.

The explicit scenes aside, most of the paintings on both buses and carts show celebrities ranging from Bob Marley to Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and a bevy of movie stars, both Hollywood and Bollywood varieties. Political figures also turn up, including Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Nelson Mandela and Mohandas Gandi. A particularly nice image shows George W. Bush, labeled the Boss, gesturing between two seated, almost angel-like, babes.

For good measure the book supplements the buses and carts with a number of wall paintings and concludes with biographies and photos of a number of artists, again unfortunately all in Dutch.

Click here to view a video of this material and artists producing it.

South African Township Barbershops and Salons, Simon Weller, Mark Batty Publisher, 128 pages, 2011. ISBN 978-1-935613-04-6. Hard cover $27.95

If African Signs, with its minimal text but rich collection of photographs, provides a window to African vernacular culture, South African Township Barbershops & Salons passes through that window to provide something of an inside tour. Simon Weller, a professional photographer, not only document numerous advertising signs but also spent time with the hair cutters and their customers as well as several sign painters. He aims not just to show the art but also the culture in which the art is embedded. That took him across much of South Africa, both cities and countryside, and into place that few whites, let alone tourists, every visit. In one rural district he asked whether anyone had ever photographed the shops and founds only one case, and that was a government official documenting a structure for possible demolition.

Seeing inside the ramshackle structures, many of them converted steel shipping containers, gives a richer sense of the businesses the signs advertise, including details like their reliance on car batteries for their source of electricity. Weller also sketches the history of strife and the current poverty that are as part of the vernacular as any of the painted images. He observed that the poorer the community, the more the barber shops and salons serve as centers for community interaction.

The artists Weller interviews demonstrate as much variance in their stories as in the styles on view in their work. An artist known as Smoky, active in Soweto, told Weller he had wanted to be an artist since he was five and studied art in college. He paints what he considers fine art but also does commercial signs for income. He works fast, taking from 45 minutes to 2 hours to complete a commercial work.

Chris Masekela, from a rural area outside Pretoria, is self-taught and reports being “inspired by an art gallery that I used to see when I came to town and became interested in white man’s art.”

“I like black man’s art but I like white artists because they show real life and draw towns and people, for instance showing guys playing dice. Black art only shows traditional things like a black woman carrying a calabash on her heard, going to fetch water from the river.”

Masekela’s portraits have a definite edge to them and for whatever reason seem to show less of the American influence (often hiphop in nature) that characterizes much of this work and is widely acknowledged by the artists and their customers.

Weller found another artist who produces versions of his shop signs for sale. Durban painter Espoir Kennedy – actually a refugee from Burundi — said he sells hair signs in a gallery for $95 while charging $40 for actual shop banners.

Click here to see a selection of photos from the book.

This review originally appeared in The Outsider, magazine of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

African Signs, by Rob Floor, Gert van Zanten andPaul Faber, KIT Publishers, 208 pages, 2010. ISBN 978-9-4602-2080-7. Soft cover $45

Every once in a while those of us who don’t often make it to Africa have an opportunity to glimpse the continent’s extraordinary commercial visual culture. As recently as this summer vibrant examples of hand-painted movie posters from the 1980s and ‘90s were on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, which also mounted a show in 1996 of elaborate decorated coffins from Ghana. Both genres have books devoted to the,

African hair salon and barber shop signs, meanwhile, were featured in an Intuit show in 1994 and have become what might be the most widely collected hand-made trade signs since those of 18th and 19th Century American came into vogue. These signs are popular enough that many of the examples that end up for sale abroad are apparently made specifically for export.

African Signs is a broad survey of Africa’s commercially inflected vernacular art. It collects hand-painted signs, mostly photographed in situ, across a number of categories, including food, clothing, health, electronics and the ubiquitous hair. Among other things, the book shows off a scale of work that can’t be grasped from the individual signs collected in the U.S. That scale includes many mural-size images, but also remarkable photo that shows more than a dozen individual signs displayed outside a pharmacy in Togo. And these being health signs, the explicit representation of ailments – some obvious and some obscure but many just gross — is easily as disturbing as the kitschy violence seen in the low-budget movie posters featured in the Extreme Canvas book and the Chicago Cultural Center show.

There is certainly a kitsch element contributing to the appeal of some of these signs, but only some. The degree of talent evident in them also varies, reflecting apparently low barriers to entry for the signs’ producers. As the introduction notes, the continent is generally too poor to produce the art school graduates who might otherwise populate a commercial art industry. But the need for commercial art in the continent’s thriving local markets has produced a demand for creativity that is ripe to be filled in interesting and creative ways.

Paul Faber, the museum curator who wrote the book’s introduction, tracked down one of these artists, who goes by the interesting name of “Middle Art.” Faber notes that Middle Art is one “of the hundreds of professional painters in Africa who don’t see themselves as ‘artists’ in the romantic sense … but as craftsman who make a living with paint and brushes. This modesty can also be found in the name ‘Middle Art.’ … He doesn’t consider himself very bad but also not very good, just Middle Art.”

However accurate Middle Art’s judgment of his own ability may, the talent displayed in this book is impressive if unpredictable. Some artists can’t manage much more than caricature, other produce nuanced portraits. Some show flights of imagination, others lavish loving attention on the most mundane (or sometimes bizarre) subjects.

This review originally appeared in The Outsider, magazine of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

Jacksonville, Florida, like many southern cities, is a treasure trove of roadside art

Here are some more masterpieces of prosaic art from around the world.

John Margolies, Roadside America, edited by Jim Heimann, with contributions by Phil Patton, C. Ford Peatross and photos by John Margolies. Taschen, 288 pages, about 400 color photos, 2010. ISBN: 978-3-8365-1173-5. Hard cover $39.99.

The enthusiasm for vernacular expression that began flowering in the United States in the 1970s never quite gelled into a unified movement. Yet a new generation did learn to value the work of self-taught artists and a sizable coterie of writers, photographers, architects and others discovered an exterior landscape whose aesthetic dimension was almost entirely accidental, but all the more striking for it.
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It’s been some time since I’ve stumbled across anything as nice as these fashion drawings in an antique store, mostly because I don’t spend much time in them any more.

Some new views of the monumental Bottle Cap Inn, and an updated page format.

There are great signs up and down Clark Street. This is part 2 of what will no doubt be a continuing series. Here’s part 1