"Please Do Not Touch"

"Meet Me at the Center of the Earth," currently at the Cincinnati Art Museum, is a revelation.  A survey of Nick Cave's voluptuous costumes, performances and sculptures, the show is not actually an exhibit as much as an "invasion."  I put "invasion" in quotes because that's what Cave often calls what happens when people don his costumes and go gallivanting around town:  art takes over the atmosphere, and even the world.  And in this case the institution.  Cave's flirty, garish, gorgeous costumes merge the kitschy, kitchen-sink glamour of Bob Mackie with the folk-art intensity and precision of Thornton Dial.  Throw in some Leigh Bowery and Jim Henson and Alexander McQueen and (what the hell?) Parliament Funkadelic and you have yourself a militant miraculous mega-party in the RuPaul's Drag Race Interior Illusions Lounge.   

Of course there's the high-minded allusions here to ancient rituals and African dances too, the Shamanistic obviousness.  But what I love about Cave's work is its complete and total showmanship, a dedication to spectacle that creates other worlds just through sheer force of will.  Hulking yet delicate, neon-colored as well as the mucky brown hues of old sweaters, his costumes/contraptions overtake each gallery at the Cincinnati Art Museum, functioning like a smart-assed Greek chorus chanting over and over how both important and unimportant art is.  Cave gets the joke, and his work has both the seriousness and the insouciance of greatness. 

"Please Do Not Touch" state placards on the floor in front of each of his works; I kept hearing that phrase whispered over and over in the haughty, pissed-off voice of a spectacularly resplendent drag-queen. 

Not Evidence of Identity But a Way to Create It

I'm working on an essay about Thornton Dial's retrospective at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and I keep coming back to what "outsider art" represents, and how the meanings it conjures can often be reductive.  Putting art and artists into an overarching, identity-based categorization system eliminates almost any other area of inquiry or interest.  Any other narratives and contexts become unnecessary because the story behind the art-making pigeonholes the artist and situates his/her art in another sphere, "outside" of Art, capital A. 

From its very beginnings, via Jean Dubuffet, "outsider art" was a reaction to "insider art," not a new way to see, but a way to criticize the hegemony of Western culture.  In philosophizing about "art brut" (the forebear of "outsider art"), Dubuffet writes, "Personally, I believe very much in the values of savagery. I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness." 

"Savagery, violence, madness" are of course wonderful things for artists to indulge in and play with, but they are also words that delegitimize and colonize artists who may not be art-schooled or have access to pedigree status.  Often "outsider artists" don't have the choice of how to construct their own narratives.  The identity of "outsider" fills in the blanks.  All the artists labeled "outsider" I've come across are not violent or mad, moody or savage:  they are just hard workers, trying to create their way out of being obscure or ignored. 

In positioning an artist (especially if she/he is labeled "developmentally disabled" or "African American working class") as "outsider," the art produced by this artist becomes evidence that he/she is human and capable and talented, even though they are "mad or moody" and outside of "our world."  We assume these characteristics in other artists who are not labeled "outsider."  An "insider," non-labeled artist's work is not seen as evidence of identity:  it is seen as the way they create it. 
 
What the exhibit of Thornton Dial's works does is allow us to envision an "outsider artist" creating his own identity, breaking free of the cliches and pigeonholes "outsiderness" creates.  Comparisons to Matisse and Rauschenberg are necessary because Dial is not "outside" of the Matisse/Rauschenberg radar.  He is participating in art history, whether he knows it or not,  His art demands that kind of attention.  When we juxtapose Dial's works with the works of more famous artists we start to understand that Dial is working towards clarity and his own aesthetic.  He is doing this not because he is "mad or savage, insider or outsider," but because he is "omni-sided," approaching his work as work, creating art because that's what artists do.

Outwitting Oppressors

"High and Wide (Carrying the Rats to the Man," Thornton Dial

Richard Lacayo has written a brilliant article about the "Thornton Dial:  Hard Truths" exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  Read it yesterday and was completely inspired.  You can't access it on Time's website (just a teaser that tells you to go out and buy the magazine to read the whole thing),  but there is a great photo gallery with information on the site:  Thornton Dial in Time.

Here are some quotes from Lacayo's smart, concise, and on-point piece about an artist whose work can't be pigeonholed, even though his bio (African American, non-credentialed, illiterate, etc.)  would seem to dictate that status from most arts writers. 

Thank you Richard Lacayo...

The introductory paragraph masterfully sets up the case, without using the word "outsider" once: 

"American artists don't have to be licensed -- a good thing, that -- but they do tend to be credentialed.  The art world is bristling with degrees from Yale and Cal Arts and hundreds of other academies.  In that world, Thornton Dial stands out.  He has no formal training and very little schooling of any kind.  To be blunt, he can't read or write.  But sometime during his long years as a metalworker in Alabama, he turned to making what he at first simply called "things," because it would be a long time before he, or anybody else, realized that those things are better described as art.  And not just that, but some of the most assured, delightful and powerful art around."

Lacayo also surveys the meaning, purpose and history of assemblage in modern art, mentioning high-art touchstones like Schwitters, Picasso, Braque, Nevelson, Twombley, and finally Rauschenberg, in order to not just contextualize Dial's personal history, but to give his work a place in the artworld outside of biography and "outsiderness."  He also finds a way to do exactly what I always want writers about unconventional artists to do:  he places Rauschenberg directly beside Dial, and finds a way to unite their works through what inspires them:

"Just like Dial, Rauschenberg, who grew up in the largely black town of Port Arthur, Texas, was influenced by the 'yardshow' assemblages he saw as a boy.  The memory banks of small-town African America, yardshows were pieced together from things discarded without losing their residue of personal history, the kind from which the larger varieties of history are built."

And toward the end of the essay, again using art history and world history to invert the way people locate and relegate artists and art, Lacayo finds a way to champion Dial as a contemporary artist worthy of art-historization, without losing the authenticity and grit of what Dial is trying to accomplish:

"When Dial is at his best, he even manages to inject new life into one of the most cliched images of postwar art.  Mickey Mouse, who usually gets dragged into service as a symbol of the trivial strain in American culture, does much more complicated double duty in High and Wide (Carrying the Rats to the Man).  A stuffed Mickey doll, the white portions of its face smeared in black, hangs in chains in the midst of a wire-and-rod construction meant to signify a slave ship with goat-hide sails.  With one compact gesture, Dial invokes the atrocity of the Atlantic slave trade and the minstrel-show culture the descendants of those slaves adopted to entertain and outwit oppressors.  It would all be funny if the laughs didn't come so hard....  In a piece like that, Dial claims a place within the line of history painters stretching back to the 18th and 19th centuries.  He doesn't try to call on their visual language -- who would anymore? -- but at the same time, there's very little in his work you could call folkloric."

Damn.  That's it.

Mystery, Mischief and Meanness

Keith Haring



Thornton Dial



Jimmy Baker

Bunky Echo-Hawk



Tony Dotson


It's an incredible time in this part of the world to love art: five great shows are opening within a span of two weeks, in Indiana and Ohio. Each of the artists are incredibly different in what they do and who they are, and yet their works have a sort of commonality: a seriousness that is tempered with humor and electrified by mystery, mischief and meanness. 

Thornton Dial: Hard Truths is a retrospective of an African American "outsider artist" who has become canonized; his paintings and assemblages have a high-art resplendence like Robert Rauschenberg's works, and yet they also have more of a bite to them that allows the subject matter to be go mythic but stay intimate: a disheveled household becomes the end of the world, a plastic doll gets smothered in love and paint, raw sad objects and new ways of seeing them get swept up in the flood of Dial's persistence and joy. Opens February 25, 2011 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Keith Haring: 1978 - 1982 and Jimmy Baker: Remote Viewing  are two exhibits opening at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati February 25, 2011. They survey two artists' careers in ways that pay homage to youth and ingenuity, optimism and wisdom. The Keith Haring show looks at Haring's early work, and finds a celebration not just of high and low art, but also of spirit and body, innocence and experience. Haring's work is well-known, even a little ubiquitous now, but it's such a pleasure to have the opportunity to go back to where he started and to feel that exuberance of not knowing anything but what you want to do.  Baker's show promises to have that same thrill.  He's at the beginning of his creative output but he has a prowess and promise and a sort of worldly stubbornness in his work, constructed and deconstructed collage-like large oil paintings that blur the oversaturated world of media and information into blissfully creepy nowheres.

Bunky Echo-Hawk: New Works is a show we're doing, featuring Native American artist Bunky Echo-Hawk. He's going to show up on Friday February 25, 2011 and for a couple days paint/perform in the gallery, producing the works that will make up the two-month show. His paintings, music and poetry all revise and re-invigorate the way Native Americans have been represented. He has a sarcastic, clean, clear and Pop-Art-instinctive eye that telegraphs meanings within meanings, while also telling jokes. His performances take away the preciousness of "art gallery" and replace that with "party." And yet the works produced become a part of his constant reinvention of the way we're taught to see. Show opens February 25, 2011.

Tony Dotson: Shock and Awe pushes Dotson's mean-spirited yet innocently and gorgeously streamlined aesehetic into newer and fiercer territories. While you might think Dotson is telling the same joke over and over, he is also stubbornly dedicated to allowing that one joke to splinter into hot little sparks that burn your eyes.  His pictographs, painted on wood usually in bold but somehow placid colors, make you want to laugh not just because they are funny but also because there's truth embedded in each painting's core. And while he wants to eliminate the decorative, Dotson comes up with devious little tableaus that are as pretty as a picturebook. The dangers and shock-values of each painting increase due to his dedication to that simplicity.  Inspired by outsider artists, Dotson's work does not pay attention to that canon as much as parodies the way most people view outsider art, as a sort of "kid's table" of the art world. Dotson wants to make outsider art the "adult's table" feast: a violent, drunken Thanksgiving dinner with John Wayne Gacy at the head of the table, ready to carve the turkey. Show opens March 4, 2011 at Pac Gallery in Cincinnati.