Funk Machine

"Funk Machine" was the first song Prince wrote.  He was seven years old, and he did it on his dad's piano.  I always think of him writing and producing music just like that, all on his own, driven to make it all up even when he wasn't even aware of what a superstar he was going to be.  He seemed to be able to access that part of himself for most of his life, with or without attention or approval.  

The false trope of "outsider artist" is something I'm always thinking and writing about, that super-precious concept of super-precious "outsiders" or "savants" making super-precious art in seclusion or in places that have been created for them, and art collectors and academics staking claims on their "authenticity" and "strangeness."  As in:  "Is the artist autistic or just crazy?"  I heard that little gem at the NYC Outsider Art Fair a couple years back.  

But here's an outsider artist for the ages, without all that baggage and nonsense:  look at him up there, comfortable in his lair, water-coloring his next "funk machine," the world just a tug on his purple satin sheet.  His face is saying, "You better just leave me the fuck alone right now."  

That photo comprised one of the record-sleeves of his magnum opus, 1999.  The smoky furtive light, the neon pulsing heart-shaped heart, the bouffant hair, the seductive pose.  Lord have mercy. And it's a pose for sure, and yet the pose indicates creativity in a basement, solitude yielding something both super-secret and something to be super-shared.  He wrote for the masses, made music that crossed every borderline (race, class, sexuality, gender, religion, and son), and yet he was the king of the outsiders in the best sense of the word:   toiling away in his basement-kingdom (eventually enlarged and compounded into Paisley Park), configuring and refashioning what makes him want to be alive.  Obviously it was the creation of music.

   

Now that he's gone, I just want to remember him in that essence, that moment.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  I also want to remember myself buying 1999 in 1982, some freaky kid in a little town, poor white trash, drawn to Prince's style and music since stumbling across Dirty Mind.  I'd waited months for 1999.  And when I got home I played that thing over and over, getting in sync with his high-dungeon, punk-drenched super-funk, knowing this was his masterpiece.  There are moments all over that record that turn into trances, that invite you into his purple bedroom to witness the techno-purple majesty of his purple genius.  One of the best is "Automatic," the almost ten-minute song that starts the second record on the album. It's a Sodom and Gomorrah UFO full of synth-pop pleasures and vibes.  It makes you both elated and a little scared, a product of some dark laboratory filled with S&M apparatus and lavender light.

"Baby," Prince coos toward the end, right before a chorus of spastic/erotic screams and cries commences, "you're the purple star in the night supreme."

He had to be looking in a mirror when he sang that.

Corny

Mr. Cornell

 

Joseph Cornell is one of those peripheral and yet totally important figures in contemporary art history who haunts and informs a lot of what is made and seen today.  He passed away in 1972, and yet his influence and the scope of his ghostliness illuminate a lot of what has happened artistically and aesthetically in the 20th and now 21st Centuries.  He was humble and yet ambitious, ingenuous yet sophisticated, "outsider" yet completely in sync with his contemporaries, including the Surrealists and everything after.  He lived in a small, unremarkable house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, taking care of his brother who had cerebral palsy, and working a lot of odd jobs to sustain his household that included both his brother and mother.  He basically spent his lifetime outside of those activities making intricate, oddly meaningful "things" out of materials he lifted from life:  postcards, fabric, toys, bottles, glasses, etc., all usually aligned poetically and ominously in shadow-boxes.  He also made movies, created hefty dossiers devoted to movie-stars and waitresses, wrote, and even collaborated with his brother on a series of delicate drawings/collages that merged fairy-tale wishes with a scratchy/gorgeous obsession.  In fact, most of what Cornell did seemed burnished by an overarching obsession to find meaning in what is already in front of you, as if a junk-drawer in your kitchen is a primal resource for reinvention and even transcendence, every little doodad and left-behind nothing a reason to daydream, to travel while remaining still.

 

Our next Thunder-Sky, Inc. exhibit, “Utopia Parkway Revisited: Contemporary Artists in Joseph Cornell’s Shadow" (opening February 26, 2016 with a reception 6 to 10 pm and closing April 9, 2016). features beautifully and incidentally Cornell-inspired works by Jeff Casto, Marc Lambert, Christian Schmit, Matthew Waldeck, and Matthew Waldeck Jr.  They all make art that both mimics Cornell’s approach (collage, sculpture, assemblage, and appropriation), as well as the spirit involved in his vision, creating and recreating an aesthetic universe based in nostalgia, obsession, and pop culture.  Casto's works are the closest in spirit and materials to Cornell's boxes, but he also has his own sense of deadpan whimsy and ache, as if he's taken in Cornell's need to make something out of nothing and pushed resources and dreaming to their limits.  Lambert's works featured in the show respond to Cornell's use of everyday materials (Lambert paints on ceiling tiles), and also to his starry-eyed sense of cinema and history.  Lambert meticulously recreates universes collaged from movie-scenes and folklore, juxtaposing Sasquatches with pyramids, pterodactyls with UFOs, a psychic boyhood embellished with a sense of sentimental ache and poetry.  Waldeck, Jr.'s drawings have that same sense of longing for Utopian context.  Executed in magic-marker on 8" X 11" sheets of paper, they function as a sort of illuminated manuscript informed by television, solitude, and a search for more than is there.  Waldeck, Sr. creates funky, frenetic dioramas (and other contraptions) made from machine parts and other junk.  They playfully reference space-travel, carnivals, and miniature civilizations, in a Cornellian flourish and flicker.  Schmit's one piece in the show is truly masterful, and acts as both a comment on, and a rapturous biographical portrait of, Cornell, constructed with a painstaking accuracy and ingenuity pretty much akin to everything Cornell accomplished.

 

It's going to be an incredible show.

 

A lot of times I argue on this blog that biography often handicaps the way we see and consume art, that knowing that the artist has a diagnosis or hardship or whatever shouldn't get in the way of feeling and understanding the art for what it is and can be.  You don't want to lose focus or respect by attaching charity and other kinds of condescension onto the whole shebang.  But Cornell's work and life intermingle in ways that go beyond "diagnosis" and "charity."  From limited means and a "small life," he forged an incredible body of work that somehow captures lightning in a bottle every time you witness it.  He dedicated his life to minutiae and what it means when you take the time to excavate it, to reinvent and reimagine it.  He discovered vast planets inside the smallest of boxes, and allows us today to take such endeavors completely seriously. 

 

 

Matthew Waldeck, Jr.

Matthew Waldeck, Jr.

Matthew Waldeck, Sr.

Jeff Casto

A wall of Jeff Casto works

 

A wall of Marc Lambert works

Marc Lamber

Marc Lambert

Christian Schmit

Jeff Casto

 



Ghostliness

 

 

Monday night, we started with this little ensemble when looking at how to curate "The Goodwill Biennial," the next gig on deck for Thunder-Sky, Inc.  It's a parody of contemporary art-survey biennials across the world, using donated paintings, sculptures, whatever given to the Ohio Valley Goodwill here in Cincinnati as the starting point of a jurying process that includes me, Bill Ross, Matt Distel, Merry Hoefle, Melanie Derrick, Emily Brandehoff, and Antonio Adams.   Parodying something as pretentious and serious as a "biennial" is kind of a silly prospect of course, close to shooting million-dollar fish in a million-dollar barrel:  those who pursue the biennial lifestyle of course don't give a crap, and those who don't give a crap really don't care.  But still satirizing something so contrived and so integral to the way serious art business often gets done (or doesn't get done) gives us a chance to worship at the altar of Pure and Gorgeous Serendipity, as well as the sad and blurry cathedral of Musty-Smelling Ghostliness. 

 

That's definitely the vibe when unpacking donated art:  that mildew-enflamed fume, that sad sweet grandma-doesn't-live-here-anymore vapor.  In fact, those delicate, precise, dreamy watercolors of 1960s suburban homes surrounded in trees and sunshine had to be unpacked from a mysterious blue suitcase filled with old sketches and photos and prints someone had stuffed into it and locked up tight and sent on its merry way.  That blue suitcase mustiness was an entrance into memory, kind of like the marmalade on the cracker moment Proust went on and on and on about.  Those drawings have such a tenderness, such a nostalgia, and then Matt located the centrifuge of this whole vortex by grabbing the portrait in the center from off the floor, and there she was:  Nancy Kincaide, a name we all brainstormed into being.  She was a realtor, a murderess, a vindictive socialite and so on.  The painting itself is green and heavy and small, and Nancy's countenance both regal and also beautifully come-hither.  By juxtaposing the houses with her circumspect portrait Matt intentionally created a tableau that is easily understood but vast with mystery, story after story spilling out of those dark windows, those water-color driveways.

 

And that's kind of what the whole show is about, dislocating kitsch from all those tossed-aside, handmade objects and finding a way to take seriously what was recently in a canvas bin inside a large warehouse in Woodlawn.  Thankfully all the Goodwill staff were game, and thankfully we have some likeminded souls helping us find our way through.  But the sentiment is serious, and as we juxtaposed and figured out where things went on Monday night it all became a little emotional, in the way maybe you might feel helping people escape from a prison-camp:  there's an odd and kind of exhilarating freedom to reconfiguring what destiny has tried to create and sustain.  This stuff was supposed to be either thrown away or tagged and put on a shelf, and here we were thinking about it, playing with it, introducing ourselves to it in a way that wasn't about anything other than making some kind of moment, or series of moments, happen.  That's the ecstasy of pure aesthetics right there, taking what's trashed and forgotten and un-trashing it and remembering it in such a way that poetry and a little bliss coalesce, appear and then disappear. 

 

Nancy Kincaide wholeheartedly agrees.  Just ask her.

  

Sorted Product

When I was a thirteen, my mom used to work at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, downtown Anderson, Indiana.  Some days I would ride with her to work, and spend the day downtown, usually riding a bus back to the K-Mart near where we lived and walking home from there, or waiting around and riding back with my mom after her shift.  The main reason I wanted to go downtown was that across the street from the KFC where she worked was a huge Goodwill store. And especially that summer when I was thirteen, the Goodwill was an oasis.  I had a weekend job at a little restaurant called the Irish Point and I'd save whatever money I made there (the elderly couple who owned Irish Point and lived above it in a small apartment paid me out of the drawer because I was too young to go on payroll) so I could spend it at the Goodwill on stuff that caught my eye.  I wasn't into clothes or anything, but there were records, toys, books, knickknacks, and other crap, all of it of course used and kind of ghostly, and it was that mystery of past usage and continued afterlife that somehow made whatever I came across glow. 

 

I discovered Velvet Underground there, as well as Joni Mitchell and an 8-track tape of a Richard Pryor concert that I played over and over.  Don't forget Emerson Lake and Palmer, ELO, and Frank Zappa.  In the book section, there was a dog-eared paperback by Hubert Selby Jr. called Last Exit to Brooklyn, the short stories of Tennessee Williams, all those trashy-great novels by Jacqueline Susann (starting with Valley of the Dolls and ending with The Love Machine I think), as well as John Knowles' A Separate Peace, Agatha Christie novels, and multiple copies of Catcher in the Rye.  It was a random assortment of hothouse configurations:  I was getting at culture by digging up buried treasures I had no idea were treasures, but just wanted to soak in whatever I could.  And somehow as I listened and read I found a way to incorporate all of that stuff into my dreams and desires and the way I thought about things.  It was kind of like a self-acquired education that didn't make any sense, pulled together from scraps and non-sequiturs that somehow snowballed into a sensibility, even a taste.   

 

I was total white-trash, so I didn't have a lot of access to what culture meant, or even what ambition was.  But there was a mildew elegance in those long odd mornings at Goodwill.  And everything was so cheap in there I could buy a bagful of books and records and tapes for almost nothing and spend days absorbing it all.

 

So now I'm fifty, and flash-forward to this:     

 

Bins of set-aside home-made art people have donated to the Cincinnati Goodwill.  I came up with this idea last year:   partnering with Goodwill so at Thunder-Sky, Inc. we could sponsor a parody/appropriation of the Whitney (and all those other contemporary art) Biennials.  It's called of course The Goodwill Biennial, and it opens final Friday in August at the gallery.  As with almost everything I try to do creatively, it's a joke and it's not. 

By that I mean, the whole purpose of working with Goodwill on this project was not to take any of it seriously, and yet to completely take everything (all these hand-made paintings, sculptures, whatever else people deem not worthy of keeping) seriously, in order to find some kind of meaning/redemption in the works that goes beyond kitsch and into another realm I don't know a word or phrase for.  Dreamy incoherence?  The brutal glamor of art people don't want anymore?  You strip away biography from the whole enterprise when you do something like this as well; suddenly these works have a blank disconnection from the planet we're living on, as if they've been beamed into this world from a place that no longer exists.

Vanessa Cornett, the very kind Goodwill rep we worked with, initially set aside the works from the mountains and mountains of donations Goodwill received daily.  The only direction we gave Vanessa was that whatever she pulled should be "hand-made," not a print of color-by-number set, no shellacked jigsaw puzzles, etc.  Just art.  Whatever that means.  Vanessa did a great job.  But still we wanted to not react to the sad-sack nature inherent in each piece (Poor thing, look at you, totally forgotten, who made you? and so on), but to each pieces' strangeness.   By "strangeness," I guess I mean "worth."  For example this painting below Bill's holding.  I'm not really sure if it will make it into the final stretch to be accepted into the Biennial (Matt Distel and Melanie Derrick, two wonderful curators in town, are helping us with the final selections in a couple weeks), but when we came across it I just knew it needed to be in contention.  It has an awkwardness to it, a delicacy that seems somehow ironically ham-fisted and emotionally raw, kind of like if DeChirico got sick of taking his time.  "Sick" is another adjective that might work to describe what we were looking for as well -- a fevered impatience helping the picture snap into itself.  This one below truly seems finished.  Every part of the picture-plane has been contended with, formulated, turned creepy.  And that grayish blob that kind of looks like rope completes it all somehow, like a David Salle affectation bled of affectation.      

I could go on.  But that's the reason for all of this, to kick your imagination's ass by showing it something so off-kilter, not acquainted with rules and aspirations, but just some weird object hand-made and kept around the house for a little while until it has worn out its welcome.

This thing below.  Cookie-Monster/amputation/shiny-frog.  It's a ceramic haiku.

More ceramic haikus below.  On the clay pieces we cheated a little by including this skull-mold in the mix, but come on:  hearts and flowers stamped willy-nilly across a skull is just something you need in your life.  And the lion holding the lamb right next to it.  And there in the middle that 3-D Philip Guston gig, some cartoon but sinister janitor watching TV after work.

This painting below I don't need to go into.  You get it.  Instant nostalgia, the blonde hair from some early 60s daydream, the eyes staring right at you, the plush anonymous green backdrop....

And her here below:  enough said.

And this basket of Martian flowers from the hospital gift-shop.

This is Vanessa Cornett from Goodwill, along with Bill.

The sign taped to the bins of art Vanessa rescued from all the other stuff donated:

The final selections Bill and I chose, over 125 pieces in three canvas pins, covered in funereal cloth. 

I guess, to me, art has always been an odd connection with posterity and anonymity, a cross-section of ambition and the knowledge that whatever you do creatively isn't going to stop you from disappearing.  But here are works that appear to us (in the Goodwill warehouse) without any clue as to how they were produced, who did it, why.  It's just stuff to look at, dream about.  Which is maybe what art is supposed to be most of the time.

"Let's Talk about Disobeying"

 

 

 

Let's start with Jean Dubuffet, the guy who kind of started it all (at least in my head):  "Art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it; it runs away as soon as one says its name; it loves to go incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called."

 

Amnesia is a good thing in a universe always starved for commemoration, status, brand.  The "universe" I'm getting ready to jabber about is "art" in all of its manifestations:  small-town, big-town, art-school, self-taught, blah and blah and blah. 

 

Everything has to have a name on it, not just a title or the media or the dimensions, but a name:  who did it usurps the purpose of its construction and eventual adoration.  When you take away all of that demarcation and you just look at something for what it is, what the hell happens?  I don't know.  Maybe you just see it.  And that's the most complicated process known to man or woman or whatever.  "Seeing something" without extrapolation, untethered by biography, connections, credentialization, format, institution, organization...  Just looking at the thing and going off on it, "finding" it inside yourself, unspooling from its atmosphere into yours.  All of that is what I want to happen when I go to art-shows.  That's why I hate opening receptions for the most part, because the social aspect disrupts the poetic.  I know that sounds grumpy, but that's the deal, and nobody really cares anyway, but still -- looking is an art too.  "Purity" means something in that moment, and that's why the white clean box of a gallery exists (outside of commodities, sales, branding, etc. of course).  That blankness and clarity outlines the thing(s) being exhibited, and gives you that simple moment of serendipity you live for, that connection beyond connections, when you and it have a little party, all those associations you've bottled up pouring out, landing, pooling, and then it's over.  Sounds like sex, I know, but it's not.  It's not even a version of sex.  Sex is all the other stuff.  This is prayer, and I know segregating prayer from sex is probably old-fashioned, maybe even stilted and officious, but they are completely different, just like seeing and pretending to see are.

 

So here's the deal:  breaking art away from art, looking at something and understanding it's only yours, not even the property of the one who made it.  That's love.  That's what I want to feel when I go to a gallery or museum, like I've stumbled outside of myself and all other selves, and it's the time between memory and ego, the space between love and saying "I love you." 

 

Up top are photos of anonymous art made by people we don't know and given away to Goodwill as donations. 

 

Dumpster diving for tossed-aside artworks is not a new procedure by any means.  There are whole galleries and even a museum or two that specialize in this activity, and more power to them.  Love the idea obviously.  I wanted to do a Goodwill show at Thunder-Sky, Inc. under the umbrella of not giving a shit about identity, about separating art from the ever encroaching and totally minuscule idea that "art is a career."  Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.  But gazing at stuff that has been dislocated from any conscious effort to be claimed as "art" is truly about finding value and worth in life and lives outside of the ongoing diorama of careers and namedropping and scholarly endeavors and art-fairs and so on.  Without that apparatus what does art mean? 

 

I'm totally interested in this because the way I entered the art-world (and continue to stumble through it) is through non-profit little "alternative" spaces where artists often got together to show work without a connection to prestige or fortune:  white-boxes as experimental spaceships, filled with oddness and fever, not built to please, just built to take off and go three or four inches forward.  And when I decided to make art a parallel activity to supporting people with developmental disabilities, "outsider art" became that spaceship, but then again it also became a big black hole. 

 

Identity for "outsider artists" is pretty random and ransacked, based on the market controlled by buyers with good intentions, but also on a concept that artists who are labeled "outsiders" don't have careers, don't have ambition, and that makes them "precious" and "pure."  Still, however, there's those market forces, and in that market the more "precious" and "pure" the artist is (or the artist is seen to be), the more value accrues.  "Outsider artists" shouldn't talk; they should just make cool weird stuff in little romantic hovels, preferably in a sepia-toned, cobwebby Europe in the 1930s or 40s.  That gloss, that sense of majestic "outsiderness," wipes out any sense of equality and inclusion involved.  There are the actual artists with careers and the "outsider" ones who do stuff without thinking about any of that stuff. 

 

And within the context of that pretty reliable binary in steps the sensibility that no one's biography and credentials fucking matter.  How about that?

 

Walls and pedestals displaying art donated to the Goodwill seem like the best next step in trying to unravel all that distinction, all that pomp.

 

While we curate the show (titled "The Goodwill Biennial" debuting in late August), I'll be thinking about all of this, and examining all the exposed ambition and thought and dream involved in the production of art that does not make it, an art disassociated and almost formless, paintings and sculptures and drawings and whatever else populating that universe of amnesia, set aside and bleak, but also waiting to be discovered for exactly what it is.          

 

One of my best experiences in dealing with all of these thoughts in an art-world context came early last year, when we went to New York City to see the retrospective at PS 1 of Mike Kelley's life and work.  Kelley killed himself in 2012, so he made himself kind of gone from the equation from the get-go, and yet suicide probably has made his prices go up, right?  He was famous for being reticent and DIY-difficult, but also for being a totally prolific genius.  His works, resplendent with a Goodwill-harbored sense of the tossed-aside (dirty stuffed animals are one of his main contributions to artistic culture), spoke volumes to me about the desire to escape authorship and bull-shit.  PS 1 was overwrought with Kelley work, sculptures, performances on video, films, drawings, ephemeral collections, a whole suite dedicated to building miniature versions of comic-book kingdoms, all of that stuff and thought presented not as biography exactly, but as production, as manifestations of the obsession to make something, anything, that allows you to escape what you think is going to happen, even if it does (did).

 

Mike Kelley:  "I chose art, not to become successful, because you couldn’t make a living from being an artist at that time. It was a profession I chose specifically in order to be a failure."

 

That "failure" I guess is what I'm talking about.  I think Kelley used "failure" as a synonym for "disappearance," that beautiful state of elevated nothingness that allows everyone to actually see the universe without being in it.  "Failure" as a synonym for "art."

 

"The Goodwill Biennial" opens August 28, 2015, reception 6 to 10 pm at Thunder-Sky, Inc. 

 

Mike Kelley banner in the PS 1 2014 show in NYC.

 

"The Master of Loyalty Is in the Gallery Tonight"

Antonio Adams, "Unrealized and Unforeseen Day," acrylic on canvas, 2012.

Antonio Adams, Cedric Michael Cox, and Artworks apprentices, "Raymond Thunder-Sky Mural," on the outside of Visionaries + Voices, finished 2009. 

Antonio Adams, "There's a Circus on the Corner of the Streets," marker on large copy of an unfinished Raymond Thunder-Sky drawing, 2010.  In the collection of the Museum of Everything, London, England. 

Antonio Adams, "The Master of Loyalty Is in the Gallery Tonight," marker on paper, 2012 

Antonio Adams teaching a class at Miami University, 2012. 

Raymond Thunder-Sky Polaroid, with clowns, date unknown. 

Raymond Thunder-Sky, "Wrecker Tear Down Old Middletown Nursing Home," marker on cardstock, date unknown.

I wrote the essay below a couple years back for a show at Thunder-Sky, Inc., but I forgot to use it. Found the doc in an old email file.  It's all about Antonio and Raymond, and everything.  These photos were in the same file.  I think I was going to do a little booklet or something, but it seems like a really good blogpost too...  

Antonio Adams wears an elaborate costume to every art opening he attends. Made from felt, glitter, and fabric paint. Antonio calls it his “Art Thing Kingdom Master” attire. A triangular facemask shields the bottom of his face, and on his head he wears a crown. Antonio features himself in this costume in many of his drawings and paintings as well – most significantly in one of his latest works, “Unrealized and Unforeseen Day,” a large 5’ X 4’ acrylic-on-canvas. In this vibrant, rigorous painting, Antonio as the Art Thing Kingdom Master presides over a crowd of “regular people” being summarily transformed into heavenly celebrities, while the “bad celebrities” scale the brick walls surrounding a majestic stage with tears burning in their eyes, unable to get into the Kingdom.

If “Unrealized and Unforeseen Day” is a revelatory moment for Antonio, it’s because since 1999, when he was a lonely depressed high school student with a learning disability, he has been diligently building a visual and moral philosophy that has sustained him through a lot of stress and strife, including the untimely death of his mentor and friend, Raymond Thunder-Sky.

Raymond was a fixture of downtown Cincinnati street-culture for over 20 years before Bill Ross (my partner and co-founder of Thunder-Sky, Inc., the art gallery we run in Raymond’s name) found out he was secretively making incredible drawings in 1999. A social-worker assigned to help Raymond toward the end of his life, Bill at first was taken aback by Raymond. A Native American whose father Richard Bright-fire Thunder-Sky had been a Mohawk chief and a Hollywood actor in the 1940s, Raymond was known as the Construction Clown by those who would see him walking down city streets in a construction-worker/clown costume, a huge toolbox in tow. He spent much of his time traveling to, and drawing, buildings being demolished at sites all over town. At a meeting one day held to discuss Raymond’s deteriorating health, Raymond pulled out a stack of drawings from one of his toolboxes. Bill was flabbergasted.

Raymond’s drawings are done mostly in pencil and magic-marker, and depict buildings being torn down and replaced by imaginary facilities with titles like Clown Suit Factories and Card Trick Amusement Parks. Each drawing is organized straightforwardly, with imagery of construction and demolition festooned with a few lines of narration in a careful script. In one archetypal drawing, a movie theatre is gutted, with a wrecking ball suspended above the wreckage, a nearby caption reading: “Last showing at Old Valentine Theatre in Downtown Toledo Will Being Torn Down to Clearing Way for New Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus Store.” (The whole archive of Raymond’s 2200+ drawings can be seen at www.raymondthundersky.org.)

A few months after meeting Raymond, Bill and I met Antonio. At the time, Antonio was 19 and barely speaking. Bullied at his high school, he took comfort in creating art as a way to endure isolation. At the time, he was making cat sculptures from pieces of wood he’d find. His bedroom was overflowing with them. We introduced Raymond and Antonio in 2000 at Base Gallery in downtown Cincinnati, where we were pulling together an exhibit. Antonio writes about that day, in a caption to a drawing he made commemorating the occasion: “That first time am met Raymond Thunder-Sky at Base Art Gallery he was a Native American outsider self-taught artist of clown-construction-worker. He usually very shy but he also hysterically of sitcom person.”

As their relationship grew Raymond became the prime inspiration that would guide Antonio’s life, imagination, and art. In 2001 Antonio and Raymond were featured in the show we curated at Base, titled “Art Thing.” (The title came from an object Antonio had made, a tiny kelly-green felt pillow on which Antonio had written “Art Thing” in white fabric paint.) One of the first exhibits featuring local outsider artists, the show was packed and many works sold. After this success, Antonio and Raymond also showed their works at the Pittsburgh Folk Art Festival in 2002, the Outsider Art Fair in New York City (2003), and several other regional and national auctions and art fairs.

In 2003, when Bill and I helped to open a studio for artists with disabilities called Visionaries and Voices (www.visionariesandvoices.com), Antonio and Raymond were the first artists through the door. I can still picture that day, a very clear and tender image: Raymond in a hardhat and clown costume, and Antonio in a t-shirt and jeans, sitting next to each other at a folding table, working on their own drawings, using pencils and markers from a shared coffee-can. A few years later, Antonio, along with artist Cedric Michael Cox and teenaged students involved in a summer art-making program called Artworks, painted a mural on the side of the building that currently houses Visionaries and Voices (now a full-fledged service organization supporting over 140 artists with disabilities in a week-day program). The mural stretches across a large expanse of the building, and features a gigantic Raymond in full Construction Clown regalia, a crane hurling a wrecking ball into a building behind him.

On October 29, 2004 Raymond passed away from complications of liver cancer. The day of Raymond’s funeral, Antonio had a large, scrolled piece of paper with him at the gravesite. The service was reminiscent of Raymond’s beautiful strangeness: a Shriner’s clown read the “Clown’s Prayer” aloud (we came to find out that whenever a Shriner’s clown passes away, they have the Clown’s Prayer read at their funeral), and then an honorary member of the Sheyenne tribe oversaw a sage burning ritual. He spoke about Raymond’s spirit being scattered to the four winds.

After the service, Antonio came over to Bill and me, and unraveled the scroll to show us he had drawn a hysterically funny yet vividly poignant back-story for Raymond. The resulting work of art resembles a heady, Byzantine graphic novel with funky, evangelical flourishes – Antonio well on his way to merging his imagination with Raymond’s. Throughout the piece, Antonio narrates and illustrates key semi-fictionalized moments in Raymond’s life. Each moment is titled with a year, as in, “1950: Raymond born when he was a baby.” The image that goes along with the text is of an infant Raymond, swaddled in his mother’s arms. “In 1964,” according to Antonio’s timeline, “Raymond’s dad Richard Bright-Fire Thunder-Sky and Raymond are dancing to the music of the 60s.” An adolescent Raymond (with a sort of Antonio-styled afro/pompadour) dances with his tall and regal father. In 1973, Raymond is “having a shy moment with the hippies.” Antonio’s depiction of Raymond’s death: “Raymond in Heaven with God. Raymond die for cancer, Friday October 29 2004. What a sad day.” The image is Raymond with his toolbox standing beside a large Christ figure, like brothers reuniting at a celestial barbecue.

Antonio eventually appropriated the “four winds” metaphor from Raymond’s graveside service to create a suite of nine 2’ X 2’ wood-panel portrait paintings, with Raymond’s portrait at the center of them. Embellished in loud circus-neon stripes, each painting pays tribute to the people in Raymond’s life who were instrumental in showing and celebrating the art he made while he was still alive. Directly above Raymond’s portrait is a self-portrait, Antonio in full “Art Thing Kingdom Master” regalia, a direct descendent or possibly even prodigal son. The costume first came into being right after Raymond’s death in 2004, and over years evolved into the blend of superhero kitsch and Samurai finery it is today. The evolution, like all of Antonio’s art, is hyper-intentional. Antonio uses the costume as a reminder of Raymond’s status both as artist and as spectacle.

The “Four Winds” suite of paintings was created for the opening of the art gallery we established in Raymond’s name, Thunder-Sky, Inc. in 2009. Antonio is currently the permanent Artist-in-Residence at Thunder-Sky, Inc., and curates exhibits, as well as oversees an art-making workshop every Saturday in the basement of the gallery.

Of the 2200+ drawings Raymond left behind, about 500 of them were never completed. In 2011, as part of an exhibit at Thunder-Sky, Inc., Antonio picked four of his favorites. We had prints made of them on large pieces of paper. In six months, Antonio merged the unfinished remains of Raymond’s art with his own rich, allegorical consciousness. In each piece, Raymond is depicted as a mischievous god overseeing the destruction of the old world and welcoming in the new. Or in Antonio’s words, “The one and only construction clown who taking over the demolition.” Straddling a crane and smiling gleefully with angel wings sprouting from his clown-suit, Raymond is now, in Antonio’s universe, a sort of go-to spirit, a prophet he can consult with. All four of these drawings are now in the permanent collection of James Brett’s Museum of Everything in London, England.

August 29, 2012, Antonio’s one-man show at Thunder-Sky, Inc., “Unrealized and Unforeseen,” opened. Antonio choreographed the whole reception, giving us a list of foods, people he wanted to invite, as well as a very structured layout of where each painting, drawing, photograph and sculpture should be installed in the space. The result felt as if we had been given access into Antonio’s brain, a territory of vivid colorful landscapes, stringent common-sense rules, and a penchant for tragedy and comedy blending into absurdity and bliss. He had been working on the concept for over a year, creating an epic portfolio of artworks in which famous “bad” celebrities (including Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen) get “unrealized” (meaning returned to non-celebrity status), while unfamous folks (people Adams has selected from his everyday life) become major celebrities in his own personal cosmos. In the same way Raymond appropriated construction/demolition tropes for his aesthetic purposes, Antonio uses tabloid stories and reality-TV as a framework to tell his own story in each of the “Unrealized and Unforeseen” works, culminating in his to-date masterpiece, “Unrealized and Unforeseen Day.” In transforming universal gossip into personal gossamer, Antonio has reinforced a vision and morality that has been in all of his work since Bill and I first met him. It is a message of epic transformation, imagination trumping rational thought in the pursuit of truths no one is ready for. In “Unrealized and Unforeseen Day,” the message is clear: no matter whom you think you are, you’re still like everyone else, and that subjugation is your freedom, your chance at grace. On the right side of the painting, where the canvas curves over the stretcher bar, Antonio has painted a blue, translucent rendition of Raymond smiling in the periphery – always there, quiet and calm, like an angel sanely orbiting and overseeing his world.

Born in Cincinnati in 1981, Antonio Adams has been drawing, painting and creating since he was a little boy. Now his work is exhibited and collected nationally.  He is one of the co-founders of Visionaries & Voices, an arts organization for artists with disabilities in Cincinnati, as well as Thunder-Sky, Inc., an art gallery also in Cincinnati.  His sculptures, paintings and drawings have been featured at White Columns Gallery in New York City, The Outsider Art Fair (New York City), The Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati), The Cincinnati Art Museum, Base Gallery, Visionaries + Voices, the Pittsburgh Folk Art Exhibit and Symposium, Middletown (Ohio) Fine Arts Center, Fitton Center for Creative Arts (Hamilton, Ohio), University of Cincinnati Gallery, Kennedy Heights Arts Center (Cincinnati), Country Club Gallery (Cincinnati and Los Angeles), and In the Gallery (Nashville, Tennessee). His art was featured in an exhibition at the Museum of Everything in London, England.  He has an upcoming exhibit at the Westin Gallery in Cincinnati in November 2015.   

Perfect Little Nothings

Patricia Murphy

Ricky Walker

Vincent Gray

Dale Jackson



 

Some of the shows we do at Thunder-Sky, Inc. are junked-up paradises, maximalist, thrift-store exercises in gorgeousness that seem to fall apart as soon as they come together, and come together as soon as they fall apart.  "She Blinded Me with Science," one we did in 2013, comes to mind:  lots of pseudo-steamer-punk flourishes, a silly overarching narrative attached to a 1983 techno pop-song, etc.  Just dumb fun.  "Dumb fun" in the best sense though.  We've done shows dedicated to freak flags, to Raymond's messy sense of place and non-place, to art-school drop-outs.  The gallery has been home to vast expanses of sewn-together plastic grocery-store bags, Magic-Marker-ed rocks, Antonio Adams' complicated all-consuming cosmology of super-stardom and non-super-stardom.  We've had a basement full of monster drawings from a nine-year-old boy's notebooks, as well as walls covered in heavenly, William-Blake-inspired kid drawings, and don't forget:  one whole gig dedicated to a homeless guy's hats. 

But this one we're doing the end of this month (opening February 28, 2015, with a reception 6 to 10 pm) is one of my faves because it has a focus and a predetermined feel to it, comprised of works that are humble, conceptual, silly and pretty.  I kind of pulled it together in my head before I even found the name for it:  " Makeshift," one of those nondescript adjectives that feel derogatory coming out of your mouth and yet somehow regal going into your brain.  I first thought of a show like this one when I saw the works of Ricky Walker, someone Bill met through his work as a social-worker, kind of like back in the old pre-Visionaries-+-Voices days, an artist who only has access to crayons and copy-paper, and thus creates what he creates with what's at hand:  simple, nervous, perfect little nothings that somehow have a grandeur and power, like New Wave album covers or notes written in secret in a language not yet invented.  That led me to think about Dale Jackson, an artist who uses both V+V and Thunder-Sky, Inc. as places to make stuff, and by "stuff" I mean long poetic treatises on paper, cardboard, and wood, in marker usually, made from non-sequiturs and overheard and/or remembered phrases, catch-phrases, and old Motown classic.  Dale creates an endless expanse of language without giving a crap about what it means, only feels, kind of like the James Joyce of Kroger parking lots (that's Dale's day-job, working at Kroger).  Ricky's wordless missives match right up with Dale's wordy ones, until they make a trade-off, translating into one another.  Vincent Gray is an artist who has come to many Thunder-Sky, Inc. shows, sometimes bringing his work with him and showing it to folks on the sidewalk during openings.  I included him in this one because he is pure style, and the paintings I chose to be in "Makeshift" are exercises in Pointilism, that old-school 19th Century technique.  Dots blur into imagery, like visual measles, developing lush, sad pictographs like the one above, almost anonymous, but also kind of feverish too.  Patricia Murphy's sculptures have a carefree concentration to them, colorful, blissful, a little off, and I thought of her work once I saw the three other artists' works together.  I needed something off the wall, literally.  Made of all kinds of low-end and high-end materials, Patricia's works have a cartoonish melancholy that seems both dreamy and yup makeshift, like boats adrift a sea of plastic kindness. 

So this one is personal to me somehow, and a little more careful, but still has a comfortable, late-afternoon feel to it, like watching TV after school, or doodling and/or writing love-letters in church, or listening to the radio right before you go to sleep on a summer day:  pictures, words and other things that kind of melt away your decision not to see them.

"Makeshift:  New Works by Vincent Gray, Dale Jackson, Patricia Murphy, and Ricky Walker," opens last Saturday in February, 2015.  Reception 6 to 10 pm.

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.

 

 

  

Junkyard and Deliverance

Last weekend I got to go to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington DC.  This is what I thought about it all:

James Hampton died in 1964. He was a janitor and an artist, and his major work, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly, is one of those astounding pieces of art that has to be seen to be felt and understood, although "felt" and "understood" are somehow interchangeable here when you witness the glory of Hampton's dedication, his secret devotion to what he believed, what he needed to do because of that belief probably just to get by day after day, night after night. Constructed from trash he would save from the dumpster (old light bulbs, pieces of foil, old furniture, wood scrap, and so on), The Throne has an interstellar heft to it, a set-design chic that somehow allows you to fall into its sumptuousness, to uncurl into that luxury culled from the trash-heap, and yet also the scene Hampton depicts is a sort of tone-poem to the way Hampton understood and felt passages from the Bible. It's art toying with functionality but the functionality serves some mysterious purpose beyond worship and therapy and even beyond creativity and intelligence. It's mystically significant, something that can't really be said about a lot of modern or contemporary art, and yet it also has a workmanlike quality to it too, a bold, no-nonsense theatricality that compels you into wanting to enter a dream-state that is both junkyard and deliverance. That mix of throwaway and grandeur, of loveliness and crap, is what makes Hampton's Throne not really the work of an outsider or an insider artist, but of an artist trying to decode what poetry and belief can mean once you transmorgrify daily life into spiritual significance. Hampton was a janitor/ecclesiast who found his way through life by absorbing its debris and re-interpreting it into bliss.

Duane Hanson (who sculpture is above) might be Hampton's opposite.  He takes the materials that creates debris (fiberglass, Bondo, resin, etc) and uses them to give us waxworks figures from daily life, often with a grotesque flourish.  His Woman Eating from 1971 is made from polyester resin, fiberglass, and polychromed in oil paint, decorated with clothes, table, chair and accessories from a thriftstore.  The overall effect is of cynicism burnished into voyeurism, a sort of blank stare that collapses on itself and parodies the way you see strangers not as forms of yourself, but as complete and total "other."  When I look at this woman I don't feel empathy or compassion or anything, just a dull vibration, a creepy little laugh going off like a smoke-bomb inside my head.  Maybe Hanson's intent was to be a 3-D practitioner of Diane Arbus's sense of alienation and connection to freaks, but this "tribute" here is more like a mock-up for a bad early 80s SNL skit, a character that isn't a character but a compilation of bad habits and bad genes.  There's nothing interesting here.  All that attention to detail that might sometimes have a sort of kinky aftertaste (Jeff Koons is all about that) here leaves no taste at all, just dead air, a corpse propped up and going through a scene in a really stupid movie. 

That same feeling of cynicism and horror is what Philip Guston's "abstract" painting (pictured below) investigates in a way that launches into nightmare and joy.  Guston's evil little nest here is a parody of Abstract Expressionism that somehow out-expresses the target of the joke.  There's a kindness built into his assault, a need to find grimy little angels, sort of like a Chagall painting that has turned melty after a house fire.  I kept staring and staring at this thing, and it was just a revelation, the webby tones and oddness, the smears and crooked little lines, those bleeding-newspaper and crumbling-brick colors, all of it cascading into nothingness and then back out toward image.  A masterpiece.   

And finally, Robert' Rauschenberg's "Reservoir," a piece I have always wanted to see in person.  It's one of those totem-poles inside my head; I've seen it in books and magazines, and I've always loved its simplicity and elegance, and yet also its brute stupidity.  That lame-brained greatness is given force and verve and significance here because of Rauschenberg's skill at editing and combining.  If Hampton is trying to create a palace, Rauschenberg is trying to make a celestial shotgun shack, and there's music and laughter spilling out of every little fucked-up room.  The clocks make a mockery of time, the paint a mockery of painting, and the wooden embellishments and dirty clothes stuccoed to the surface remind you of the day after a disaster, a grim sense of hope that no matter what has happened there's always proof of something after, clues to escaping tragedy by staring it right smackdab in the face.