A Little Drag

Emily Brandehoff's take on Goya.

Marc Lambert's take on van Gogh.

Antonio Adams' take on da Vinci.

Why not go for the gusto?

"Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators. In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act… The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is non-carnival, life are suspended during carnival: what is suspended first is hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it… or any other form of inequality among people."  From Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics.

Since starting this whole thing with Visionaries + Voices (V+V) back in the day, I always wanted to focus on the way art made by artists who are disconnected from the "restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary [...] life" is packaged and seen and thought about, and one of the best ways, at least from my POV, is to locate it right smack-dab in the middle of the restrictions.  One manner of defining "outsider artists" is to assume they have no connection to art history, that narrative and thoroughfare and etiquette through which credentialed "insider artists" often enter into careers, or at least shows.  In fact that definition is often celebrated by both ends of the spectrum:  by outsider art enthusiasts gloating over an artist's disenfranchisement and therefore his/her "power" in that realm, and by insider art critics who dabble a little bit in outsider-art criticism when there's a big museum show featuring some of it, wherein outsiders artists are cast as heroic self-taught "geniuses," beyond the "need" for education or edification or inspiration outside of their own little screwy worlds. 

In 2007, one of the first big gigs we did as V+V was "Pop Life:  Outsider Artists and the Pop Idea" at the University of Cincinnati Galleries.  Basically we took Andy Warhol's oeuvre and used it as a resource and confidence-builder for artists at the studio to kind of relocate themselves beyond "Outsiderland." This intervention was pretty conventional and yet kind of messed-up too, allowing participating artists a place where they were able to find a little piece of the world free of the "terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with hierarchical structures."  It was a joyous thing to me to witness:  all that art being birthed from the heard of Zeus/Warhol, positing Andy as an outsider in multiple incarnations (gay and working class, just to start).  A review in one of the local papers stated:  "Outsider art is controversial. Some theorists claim that 'pure' outsider art can only be made when the artist hasn't been exposed to art history or contemporary culture. But that belief assumes that somewhere there exists some Eden-like state, chaste and unmolested, and forgets that even things like art history and contemporary culture are arbitrary. Some might call Aboriginal art outsider art without considering the fact that Aboriginal artists have history and culture; it just doesn't look like ours."  The writer tries really hard and with a lot of genuine sweetness there, but she still doesn't get it.  Kudos for trying anyway.  It's not about "their" history and culture "looking like ours."  It's our culture and history.  Period. 

Oh well.

In 2009, we did it again at the Cincinnati Art Museum, with a show called "Matisse & Picasso:  a Visionary Exploration."  This one had the same strategy as "Pop Life," but we emphasized the inspirations taken on by Matisse and Picasso back when they were formulating their versions of Modernism -- as in lifting ever so lovingly from African sculptors and residents of insane asylums, etc.  In flipping that script a little, we tried to figure out how artists we were supporting had a powerful place to work from, outside of being "educated" about art history.  They have a claim to make.  We did a little slightly saccharine but well intended video for this gig.  You can check it out here:  "Matisse & Picasso: A Visionary Exploration."

In our guise as Thunder-Sky, Inc. we do a lot of this kind of stuff without even trying, trying to pull together artists from all kinds of backgrounds, contexts, and hierarchies into one small but truly articulated zone -- what Bakhtin posits as the "carnival [...] a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators. In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act…"  This act is making art, showing it, and celebrating it without a lot of b-s (outside of the b-s I'm generating right now of course, which is the kind of b-s I'm drawn to so there you go).  But also finding meaning inside that smallness, and each show we do does what it does, hopefully accumulating some sense and significance through the process.  Since starting Thunder-Sky, Inc. in 2009, we've taken on William Blake, Flannery O'Connor, Abstract Expressionism, and a few other modes of American Art and Not-Art History; we don't do this just to be smarty-pants, because we're not that inclined to impress people, just to find a way to relocate and redefine and redeploy some of the ways we treat artists (and people) based on who they happen to be. 

So here comes another iteration:  "History Channel:  New Art from Old Art."  This one opens Friday June 26, 2015, reception 6 to 10 pm, at Thunder-Sky, Inc in Northide next to NVision next to the Comet.  Take a look up top to see some great carnivalizations of high-end art, tongue-in-cheek, but also lovingly made, with a strict eye toward creating something beautiful and funny to look at.  The artists we asked to be a part are maybe "outsider artists," maybe not.  Who cares?  That distinction kind of melts away once you get over a lot of things, including the need to care too much how you're seen and how you see.    

At the end of the day, as Rupaul says, "We're born naked, and the rest is drag."  The quote up top by Mr. Bahktin is probably the urtext that defines Ru's whole career, and what we're trying to do most of the time too. 

Raymond loved carnivals.  He also loved a little drag.    

All of the Above

 

 

Five years.  When I think about it, it's kind of dumbfounding and inevitable at the same time.  Bill and I have been doing Thunder-Sky, Inc. for five years.  We've had a lot of help from a lot of great people, but we've kind of been the ones who push and prod this whatever-it-is (gallery/studio/fan-club/clubhouse/limbo) forward, very slowly forward, the way Raymond kind of moved:  intent, focused, but also nonchalant, maybe insouciant, not caring and yet caring, building and demolishing simultaneously because he knew how the world works. 

 

Above is a photo from October 30, 2009.  That was the debut gig at Thunder-Sky, Inc., when we opened a show called "Raymond Nation."  Looks like a stalwart ghost dangling in a walk-in freezer.  I love that chill Raymond imparts.  He never really let you know exactly how he was feeling or what he was thinking; he was cryptic in the best possible way.  I respect that so much looking back, how he just followed through on his own strictly self-determined purpose, how he built a life out of demolition and fury and happiness, how it all became what he wanted it to become till the very day he died. 

 

And that's why I keep beating this dead horse.  Because Raymond's purpose was to make something out of nothing and to do it without a lot of bull-shit or a lot of attention.  He had a purpose beyond all that and yet he wasn't above any of it.  He relished obscurity as much as relishing those tiny moments of appreciation he was allotted at the end of his life (a few shows of his work at Base Gallery, Visionaries + Voices, and other places we were able to find to exhibit his drawings).  But he also understood the joke of his existence so much so that the joke became his kingdom.  He played it all up -- clownishness, construction-worker-ness, his strangeness and alienness given superhero qualities by his own hand.  And in those drawings he left behind you feel him laughing, sneering a little, letting us know he does not give really a shit, except for the big things like prisons crumbling and being replaced by card-tricks and clownishness, a whole industry of trickery and sarcasm.

 

He was punk.  He was innocence.  He was experience.  He was a freak who made that freakishness a route to grandeur and hilarity and self-knowledge.

 

Most of all he was what he was, without apologies.  He was scary in the way clowns can be scary.  He was lovely in the way clowns can be lovely.  He was hard-working, he was mysterious, he was very simple. 

 

And so this is why we keep doing Thunder-Sky, Inc.:  because I truly can't find any other role-model, any other reason, to organize/coordinate artistic endeavors outside of that stream of light.  Maybe it's obsession or stupidity or stubbornness (probably all of the above), but somehow Raymond's life was too elementally metaphoric and wildly outlandish and secretively productive to forget, to be placed in a pile of other file-folders marked "outsider art" or "people with disabilities" or "folk hero" or "mysterious stranger."  He deserves his own little hall of fame, and so here it is, at least for a little while.  At least another year. 

 

This is a year to year thing.  It has to be.  We don't want it to become bigger than it needs to be.  So Thunder-Sky, Inc. has an under the radar quality, a homespun do-it-yourself-ness that tries to run away from being labeled or even being appreciated.  It is a little place that does not want to be anything except exactly what it is in the very moment you see it.  And for most of the year it's doors are closed anyway.  Open only on weekends, and on the Fridays we have opening receptions (6 times a years), or when someone wants to do a poetry reading, or any other special occasion that seems worth it. 

 

Thunder-Sky, Inc. is a non-profit ghost in the machine.  We do what we have to do to make things move, but not a lot of anything else.  Like Raymond and his drawings:  elemental, precise, completed, on to the next thing.

 

We're celebrating the five year anniversary next Friday, October 24, 2014, with a show called "The New Clownville Amusement," with Raymond-inspired works by Robert McFate, Curtis Davis, artists who use the Visionaries + Voices studio, artists from Able Projects, Antonio Adams, the Waldecks and friends, and many wonderful others.  This show came together like all of the other ones we do, things piling up and then somehow organized into a semblance of order through just doing it.  The five year anniversary means Raymond has been gone for ten years.  Ten years.  Good Lord.  He won't disappear.  Even if Thunder-Sky, Inc. disappears Raymond won't.  He is building and destroying things in all kinds of ways right now that we can't even fathom, which is the way it always was anyway.

 

 

  

Naive Melody (The Less We Say about It the Better)

A picture of a tree in Sayler Park Bill took last night.

Last night Bill, Emily and I went to Sayler Park, this little town skirting the Ohio River, about ten miles from downtown Cincinnati.  Matt, his wife Jen, and their son Matt Jr. invited us, and Bob and Angie came too.  There was a music festival in the park at the center of town that we went to, and then went back to Jen and Matt's house as Matt had hung up a white tarp near their garage, turning their back yard into a makeshift drive-in movie theater.  Bill brought Stop Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme Talking Heads concert movie from 1984 with us to show.



Jen and Emily showing off Bill's painting inside Matt and Jen's house.

The Parkland Movie Theater, a little neighbor movie joint down the street from Matt and Jen's house in Sayler Park.  Tickets are 3 bucks a pop.  They had the best movie poster I've ever seen:  Star Trek into Darkness in a scratchy Bic-pen font on wrinkled paper.   Below:  flowers Matt makes from glassware he finds at thrift-stores.  Their garage is overflowing with all of Matt's finds, which he plans on putting to use in a variety of art-related and not-art-related projects.

 

Bill, Emily, Matt, Jen, Matt Jr., Bob, Angie, and I are all connected to Thunder-Sky, Inc. in a myriad of ways, and this Saylor Park experience was like a retreat, or as Emily pointed out, a board meeting for the Island of Misfit Toys, which is kind of what Thunder-Sky, Inc. is, a gathering-place/art-gallery/studio/whatever-else for people who don't/can't/won't fit in anywhere else.  As Thunder-Sky, Inc. has evolved (since we started it in 2009) it has become what it is supposed to be, whatever the hell that is, and that is the way I like it.  It's a non-profit enterprise, so we have to have some kind of organizational structure, but at the end of the day I never want "organizational structure" to be in the foreground of anything we try to accomplish because once you go there you are stuck, and you start trying to figure out how to make "structure" count, when it reality "structure" is just something you pull in as you need it.  We do art-shows mainly, but also once a week an art workshop happens for whomever wants to show up, and sometimes we'll do art shows outside of the space, host meetings inside the space, offer up the gallery for poetry readings etc.  We don't really seek out partnerships or whatever -- they just happen if they need to happen.  I know this sounds hippie/spooky, a little too nonchalant, but I've discovered through doing a lot of non-profit-type activities that you have to let most of the "doing" lead you to what has to happen.  If you impose "structure," in other words, "structure" becomes the only point, until the tail starts wagging the dog and you wind up at non-profit workshops where non-profit professionals tell you how to go for the Big Ask, and you get lessons on how to polish up your elevator speech for that one encounter you just might have with a P&G exec someday.  Fingers crossed!

Raymond Thunder-Sky provides enough structure for what we're trying to figure out.  He gave us 2200+ drawings to archive and investigate, and a life of weirdness and productivity to contemplate and adore and iconize.  That's enough. 

So last night I kind of consider as a board meeting for Thunder-Sky, Inc.  All of us are board members of this makeshift non-profit, doing whatever we can to keep things going.  Basically we ate drank a few beers, ate strawberry cake, and listened to great music and watched David Byrne act like a beautiful fool, all of it splashed all over a white tarp in Matt and Jen's backyard.  Stop Making Sense, and what it represents, also kind of gets at what we're trying to figure out and do:  musicians of all creeds and colors coming together and seriously losing it, finding a sort for redemption in funk and colored lights and the lyrical nonsense of a band that truly tried to find meaning by escaping it.  It is truly an ecstatic sight, witnessing that stage evolve from Byrne doing his "Psycho Killer" solo to Tina Weymouth sneaking in on bass, and then Chris Frantz on drums, and Jerry Harrison on guitar, and then Alex Weir from the Brothers Johnson and Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic come out on keyboards and percussion, followed by Edna Holt and Lynne Mabry, finishing up Utopia as perfect backup singers, in sync with Byrne's delirium, and always on key.

Jonathan Demme creates a vision of heaven on earth in that movie, and we celebrated it last night.  And that's the direction we're stumbling toward I guess, off-kilter, meaningful celebrations of heaven on earth.  "Naïve Melody,"one of my favorite songs in the movie, is the best way to explain what I'm getting at I guess.  Here goes:

The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It's ok I know nothing's wrong . . nothing

Hi yo I got plenty of time
Hi yo you got light in your eyes
And you're standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money
Always for love
Cover up say goodnight . . . say goodnight.

Raymond Thunder-Kids

Happen, Inc. has sponsored Raymond-related art-making workshops at their studio in Northside the past couple weeks, preparing for the Raymond Thunder-Sky Folk Art Carnival happening Sept 25 and 26, 2010, at Building Value in Northside (4040 Spring Grove, Cincy, OH 45223).  One of the activities was helping the kids make their own official clown-collars.  Look at their faces.  Amazing.  One of Raymond's beautiful eccentricities becomes a great project.  The ultimate 2 + 2 = 5.

Jet-fueled Ping Pong

It never fails somehow. Seeing Antonio Adams' and Tony Dotson's works together always reminds me how two plus two equals five. Their works play off and with each other in so many ways it's like watching a jet-fueled ping-pong match between Green Lantern and a stick-figure King Kong on a Saturday morning cartoon while listening to Prince sing all his greatest hits, with a Happy Meal on a TV Tray in front of you. Not kitsch, but a deeply felt nostalgia. Comic and tragic and melodramatic but with a straight-edged sense of wit.

Thunder-Sky, Inc. is here at the Atlanta Folkfest through August 22, and our booth is at the back of the North Atlanta Trade Center space, but still Tony and Antonio's works seem to be humming a loud and happy tune.

We're also featuring Dale Jackson, collaborative paintings by Bill Ross and Becky Iker, and a few Kevin Whites.

Above: close-up of a wall of Tony and Antonio's smaller works & the booth itself with me sitting there checking email.

Thunder-Sky, Inc. Cofounder Bill Ross has done a series of works with Becky Iker, an artist from Middletown OH who is moving to Kentucky this week. Tuesday folks at Middletown Center (a day program Becky attends) gave her a going away party. Above:
a photo of Becky, Bill and Cathy Howell & a piece by Becky and Bill. We love you Becky! Bill and Becky have an exhibit of their works opening in October at Thunder-Sky, Inc.

I WAS DREAMING WHEN I WROTE THIS

"Remember Me as a Good Thing: Words & Images by Kendra Bayer-Foreman & Dale Jackson" opens April 30, 2010, with a reception 6 to 10 pm at Thunder-Sky, Inc. The exhibit closes June 16, 2010. It's another piece of evidence to prove that art is art and artists are artists and 2 + 2 = 5. Dale is someone we met through Visionaries & Voices (he still goes there one day a week, I think). Kendra we met back in the day (1999) through a one-person show she did at an art center in Hamilton, OH. Dale and Kendra have collaborated on a couple pieces, but mainly their works play off each other so well that is seems kind of redundant. The show itself is a cool collaboration. Dale makes art out of overheard words and phrases, painstakingly recreating conversations, TV talk and memory-speak in careful stenography on wood panels. Kendra paints delicately surrealistic paintings, the visual equilivant of Dale's accidental poems; her pictures are dream-conversations somehow recorded without words. "Remember Me as a Good Thing" showcases both their bodies of work as beautifully serendipitous, and sweetly mysterious, pieces of an ongoing puzzle, every wall in the exhibit a jigsaw of information you don't actually understand until you stop trying to. Top: "Black SUV," Dale Jackson, acrylic paint maker on wood panel, 2010. Bottom: "Memory," Kendra Bayer-Foreman, acrylic on canvas, 2009. Photo of Dale Jackson's work by Bob Scheadler, Daylight Studios.

Kevin

This is one of my favorite pictures from the opening of "Out of Order: Paintings & Other Creations by David Jarred & Kevin White" Friday February 26, 2010. The show closes April 12, 2010. Kevin took a time-out from drawing that night to explore David Jarred's sculptures... The evening was packed with people, poetry, food, and the debut of Milan DelVecchio's short animated film based on the works. This photo is totally my favorite example of 2 + 2 = 5.