"Culture Is Ordinary"

Antonio Adams' William Blake.

"Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind," Raymond Williams writes.  William Blake writes, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans."  Both Williams and Blake are integral figures in my mind's life.  Both happen to be English, and are visionary radicals that pushed their philosophies out of the realm of "philosophy" and into the realm of the real.  Williams came to prominence in the 1960s.  Everything he's written has contributed greatly to way we talk about what culture is and does, especially when you venture beyond what is "high" and what is "low."  (His Keywords is one of those books I read through all the time; he is able in it to find meaning upon meaning upon meaning without losing the gravity and succinctness of giving a shit.)  Blake we all know by now; take a look down the blog here for posts about Blake's biography and stature, especially this one:  Blake's World.  To sum it up, Blake was a sort of genius outcast who used his art and life to expand the way culture and art knock into each other.  He was interested in aesthetics and revolution (many of his best works try to mythologize and ramp up the French and American revolutions, giving each an ethereal, comic-book grandeur). 

 

Those two quotes above knock into each other.  Williams is about culture not just as museums and academies and universities, but culture as we live it and make it as a society.  Blake made and lived a new kind of culture:  he had to create "a system" in order to escape a system he could not tolerate or fathom.

 

And then of course (you guessed it) there's Raymond Thunder-Sky.  Talk about creating his own system.  Talk about culture as ordinary.  Raymond wanted to enter into real life through drawing it.  He wanted to create himself anew through his imagination, through that burning need to be a part of the regular world while also imagining it as something tolerable and even magnificent. 

 

Last night we opened the show "INNCE/EXPCE:  New William-Blake-Inspired Works by Emily Brandehoff and Robert McFate," and I'm getting a little teary-eyed right now thinking about it.  It was perfect.  Bill and I try to make culture that is ordinary; we must create something because what's already there just doesn't cut it for two weird, working-class gay guys who really want to figure out how to make things better without getting caught up in charity and politics and do-gooder-ness. 

 

So June 28, 2013, from about 6 pm to 10 pm, we opened the doors and we celebrated Blake's legacy as well as Raymond's, and we talked people's ears off about Raymond and who he was (apologies especially to Professor Elizabeth Lokon, who graciously allowed us to show pieces of art from her great program Openings Minds through Art; we had her and her husband cornered for a long time talking about The Essential Raymond Moments, including our trip to Hollywood back in 2001).  And we got to meet Maya, a girl in Suzanne Nall's class at Parker Woods Montessori just down the street who created a suite of beautifully colored and rambunctiously gorgeous drawings that spanned the gallery's back wall.  Maya just loved being in front of her creation.  Her mom was super-sweet.  And other kids came from Suzanne's class, posing in front of their works.  And Robert's big voice boomed through the floor, as he pontificated about how and why he made the works that were in the show, innocent paintings and sculptures that also hold the edge of experience somewhere inside.  And Emily, sweet Emily breezed through in her turquoise high heels and posed with her nephew in his neck-tie t-shirt.  Emily created so many great paintings and drawings that take Blake seriously without being pretentious or show-offy, just point-blank brilliant.

 

And so on.

 

What I'm getting at is that the reason we keep doing Thunder-Sky, Inc. is not because we want to champion the disabled, or because we love art, or because we want to be in charge of a thriving non-profit, or because we even know what the hell we're doing.  The reason we keep doing Thunder-Sky, Inc. is because culture has to be maintained and practiced as ordinary and it has to be created over and over and over by ordinary people with the urge to find extraordinary things inside of and outside of themselves.  Everyone who has work in this show is proof that genius is pretty much self-made and it connects us all beyond "culture" and beyond "society." 

 

Thunder-Sky, Inc. is a way out of culture and a way back into it. 

 

 

 

    

Blake's World

From Poets.org:

"Blake was a nonconformist who associated with some of the leading radical thinkers of his day, such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In defiance of 18th-century neoclassical conventions, he privileged imagination over reason in the creation of both his poetry and images, asserting that ideal forms should be constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions. He declared in one poem, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's." Works such as "The French Revolution" (1791), "America, a Prophecy" (1793), "Visions of the Daughters of Albion" (1793), and "Europe, a Prophecy" (1794) express his opposition to the English monarchy, and to 18th-century political and social tyranny in general. Theological tyranny is the subject of The Book of Urizen (1794). In the prose work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), he satirized oppressive authority in church and state, as well as the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish philosopher whose ideas once attracted his interest."

 

Blake's identity both as a consummate artist and a fringe-dweller is one of the first examples of  a "self-taught/visionary/outsider" artist becoming canonized in Western culture.  He wasn't appreciated during his lifetime, however, and decades after his death his work was re-discovered by artists and writers.  Eventually he would be seen as a forebear to Surrealism, 1960s counter-culture, and the ascendancy of "graphic novels" as a viable art-form.  People who revere him include:  Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsburg, Jim Morrison, Aldous Huxley, and Van Morrison, just to name a few. 

 

When pulling together exhibit ideas, we always try to find historical connections and echoes in order to better understand how artworks made by unconventional people are often not understood at the time of their making because of the cultural noise and drone.  Blake is a prime example of an artist not understood until well after he was gone.  In fact, his energy and spark seemed to come from a singular dedication to visions that contradicted the ideas and even morals of his times. 

 

"INNCE/EXPCE:  New William-Blake-Inspired Works by Emily Brandehoff and Robert McFate" uses Blake's beautifully complicated weirdness and craft as a jumping off point for two artists who are unconventional, operating outside of mainstream culture while also contributing to it.  Cincinnati-based Brandehoff paints visions of ghastliness with a sidecar of gut-level black humor.  McFate, from Pikeville, Tennessee, is a folk artist extraordinaire whose paintings, drawings and sculptures have an innocence backed up by backwoods wisdom.   We selected these two artists to take a look at Blake’s classic bipolar poetic epic, Songs of Innocence and Experience, a cycle of gorgeously illuminated poems that sees the world both as a ghastly garden and an Edenic one.   The results are contemporary paintings and drawings that use Blake’s wondrous imagination to go back to the future.  Also, as both an embellishment and a sort of allegory to correspond with the main show, we've pulled together works  by Opening Minds through Art, a program from Miami University that fosters art-making relationships among college students and elderly people, as well as works by kids from Suzanne Nall's art class at Parker Woods Montessori a few blocks down from Thunder-Sky, Inc.  These paintings and drawings symbolize "innocence and experience" in different, surprising ways, and also pay homage to one of Blake's most quoted statements:  "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is:  infinite."

 

For more infomation about Blake's life and art:  Poets.org.  

 

Thou Art Sick

I asked Emily Brandehoff to jot down some words about her experiences working on the art she's making for "INNCE/EXPCE:  New William-Blake-Inspired Works by Emily Brandehoff and Robert McFate."  The show opens June 28, 2013, 6 to 10 pm reception at Thunder-Sky, Inc.  I'll be asking Mr. McFate to write down his feelings too. 

Love Emily's response:

 

I haven’t read a single poem since all of my writing, journals and books were taken from me when I was a teenager, I assume it was because they were “dark."  After seeing a psychiatrist for it (not my choice), I lost all interest in poetry.  I vaguely heard of William Blake, but never gave myself the chance to read any of his work.  That being said, it was a struggle for me to read Songs of Innocence and of Experience, but after finding liner notes posted online by college students, it all started to make sense.  Good, bad, evil, love, sex, controversy….I guess all of poetry is like that, but being “ahead of his time” is an understatement for Blake.   I related more to experience than to the innocent part, mainly from my own life.  It was a fun project to work on.  And although my mind doesn’t calculate how to tie someone else’s work into mine, I tried.  After some time though, I started to just have fun with it and realized experience is life.  So I chose the darker side because let's face it:  that's what makes someone who they are.

 

One of Blake's simple and unnerving "Experience" poems...

 

Why William Blake?

We'll be celebrating William Blake in our next show at Thunder-Sky, Inc. opening  Friday June 28, 2013.  It's called “INNCE/EXPCE: New William-Blake-Inspired Works by Emily Brandehoff and Robert McFate,” and I came up with concept for many reasons, but mainly because I've always been in awe of Blake, both his visual and literary work, as well as his biography.  Back in 1988, when I was a sophomore at Indiana University/Purdue University in Indianapolis, I wrote a paper about Blake in an English class taught by Professor Phyllis Scherle.  She was one of those people that save your life, even though at the time you don't really recognize or understand that significance.  Soft spoken and very kind, she was my advisor.  I was a really shy, backwards kind of person, and she totally helped me understand that I could fit in at college.  I had dropped out of art school in 1984 to go to live with my mom and sister in Tennessee after my parents got divorced, and then I moved back to Indiana in 1985, did a lot of drugs and washed a lot of dishes until 1987, when I realized I had to do something or would just disappear into nothingness, maybe even die if I wasn't careful. Anyway Professor Scherle took me seriously.   Some schlep from nowhere, working full-time at Ponderosa Steakhouse and going to school full-time and feeling completely out of it.  She told me which classes to take and what books to buy, and then my sophomore year I took her English lit class, and she introduced me to William Blake.  She loved him, and this paper I wrote (see below) is sort of a love-letter both to Blake and to her.  Once she graded it, she took me aside and said she was sending it into a contest at Purdue University, and a few months later she told me it won First Prize.   There was a banquet and everything.  

This paper kind of made me realize I could win, thanks to Professor Scherle.  And reading Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience set me free.  They were poems that seem crazy-simple, beautifully and uniquely and disquietingly naive, but also wordly and complex at the same time.  Nursery rhymes that get stuck in your head, but also somehow lead you to the palace of wisdom.  Reading about Blake's life inspired me to no end as well.  He was a sort of literary/artworld curiosity when he was alive, taken seriously only to a point and often shut out of opportunities.  Or as Kathleen Raine writes in her bio of Blake:   "Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work."  Here was an artist and a writer who truly created his own path, and who by remaining stubborn and dedicated to his vision outlasted most of his contemporaries.  

Professor Scherle gave me a reason to stay in school, and to keep writing, and to know that I could fit in, even if I didn't.  

She gave me Blake.

And so when we thought about Thunder-Sky, Inc.'s exhibition season for 2013,  Blake came to my mind as a sort of precursor to the kind of art and artists we want to champion and celebrate.  Then I thought of two great artists who seem to fit the bill:  Robert McFate and Emily Brandehoff.  Both  have idiosyncrasy and creativity to spare.  I also wanted to add an ancillary gig featuring works by children and older folks, who also seem dedicated to finding out what art can do and can mean, outside of buying and selling...

I'm not sure Professor Scherle is still around.  But I'm dedicating this show to her, and to anyone who champions people who seem a little "idiosyncratic."   

Here's that paper I wrote, with Professor Scherle's comments... 

  

Everything Would Appear

A painting by one of the people being helped by Opening Minds through Art.



A work by a child in Suzanne Nall's class at Parker Woods Monesourri.



The title-plate for William Blakes books of poems.

On Monday I met with Professor Elizabeth Lokon, the founder of Opening Minds through Art. OMA's mission (from their website) states: "In OMA people with dementia build close relationships with trained volunteers, staff, or caregivers in small groups... to make beautiful works of art that rely on imagination, not memory."

We usually "embellish" our bimonthly shows with shows that expand on the main theme, and for the one coming up in June (opening 6/28/2013), "INNCE/EXPCE: New William-Blake-Inspired Works by Emily Brandehoff and Robert McFate," we are going to curate an ancillary exhibit featuring the collaborative works by some of the people involved in OMA, as well as works by kids from Suzanne Nall's art class at Parker Woods Montessori a few blocks down from Thunder-Sky, Inc. The idea is to juxtapose the art of "innocence and experience," and to find a sort of dreamy association among people at both ends of the "innnocence/experience" spectrum, and how what they make intermingles in uniquely poetic ways. 

As I pull together this little show I want to be very careful, because as is usual with any art show that features art made by different kinds of people the territory is rife with meanings and misnomers you almost have to shake hands with prior to doing anything.  Professor Lokon seemed a little anxious about the prospect of the art made by the folks in her program being exhibited next to the art of children.  It somehow sends a message that we aren't taking the works seriously.  We are though.  Very seriously. 

The main reason I want to juxtapose works by children and older people is pretty obvious:  to correspond with Blake's binary, in a sort of sweet and point-blank way.  But I also wanted to do this small show as a tribute to what art means and can do for people who don't consider themselves artists.  The kids in Suzanne's class probably aren't thinking about their next show at the Whitney, and the folks in Opening Minds through Art are trying to find a new way to think and feel and remember that goes beyond "memory," using their imaginations as a way to supplement, or even supplant, what's missing.  I love all these works because they serve a purpose beyond my seeing them.  As the kids learn to manipulate materials, they fashion finished moments they can claim as their own.  The older people, being supported by Opening Minds through Art because they have dementia, are relearning that same process in a collaborative way -- art as a way to reinvent who they are and who they were in order to find some peace, a space where they exist in the present, but can somehow access meanings and emotions that go beyond it. 

One of the most cited quotes in William Blakes' vast repertoire of quotes is this one:  "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

That is what art is doing for these artists, opening up doors they did not know were there, onto self-made vistas.  Their art somehow allows us to experience those moments of infinity as well. 

The poems Blake wrote in "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" have that same sense of predestined beauty, of works of art made to find a place beyond "real," and yet anchored by their simplicity and grace to reality and to us as readers.  In the works in both books of poetry, Blake finds epiphanies and music in the simplest of moments:  a baby in a cradle, a lamb in the field, a little girl and a little boy getting lost and then getting found.  These tropes have a fairy-tale glimmer but also a Bible-story resonance.  You read them like lullabies, but something else is occurring within what you thought was just a song.  Meanings flutter past like a bird's wings you don't see, only feel, a slight rush of wind that somehow lets you return to memories you didn't even know were there.

Blake was born on November 28, 1757 and died August 12, 1827.  Most of his life he lived in obscurity, creating masterpiece after masterpiece, illustrated poems and books that spiral out of control, and yet there's never any chaos.  Blake used his art to teach himself how to escape the constraints of art and society, to make something new, in much the same way the kids in Suzanne's class, and the elderly folks in Opening Minds through Art use art as a way to learn and relearn who they are and what they once were and can be.  They are illustrating their lives, creating meaning with the simplest of materials, and the by-product of this search is the works we see:  art with a purpose, and yet still something beautiful to behold.

The Bare Bones of Belief and Decency

We went to Finster Fest at Paradise Gardens in Summerville, Georgia over the weekend with a booth of Thunder-Sky, Inc. art.  It was one of those experiences I'll never forget -- being in the epicenter of a universe I have been circling most of my life. 

Art is often a way out for many people:  making it, buying it, loving it...  Art-making for Howard Finster was a way for him to find a sort of heaven on earth.  He seems to have relished the idea of Slipshod Utopia, and that aesthetic is in full-bloom now, with all his sculptures and installations slowly (and some quickly) deteriorating.  But it is a spiritual disintegration, isn't it?  All that art and love and godliness left to the elements, being eaten up by rain and time.  It seems almost like a prophecy, Biblical, humble and small.  Finster's art has the same effect:  his paintings and other works may come off to some as Bible-belt kitsch, when in reality he was doing what William Blake did, creating his own aesthetic and philosophy using organized religion only as a platform for something bigger, stranger, and kinder.

I felt as if I had drifted into somebody else's dream being there, but it was my dream too somehow.  Finster has made sure of that.  Concrete facades built from bear faces and pop bottles, old costume jewelry and broken dinnerware.  There's that initial whimsy to it, of course, but that has worn off now, and what's left is the bare bones of belief and decency.  Finster did not construct a Paradise that would last.  I think that's part of his meaning:  you can't get there from here.  You can only find glimpses and create idols that crack and melt into grotesques.   

The area around Paradise Gardens is residential, and many of the other homes are abandoned.  There's a state prison in Paradise's backyard.  Highway 27 toward Summerville is green and raw, a landscape of hollow trees and overgrown grass and static cows, old ranch-style houses and barns, and a sky above it all as blank as thoughts before you go to sleep.  I kept thinking of a phrase Flannery O'Connor said of her version of Georgia -- that it was "Christ-haunted."  That's the feeling.  A holy ghost barely visible, being chased away.

Paradise Gardens is not paradise of course.  Its poetic decay is incredibly moving, but also very sad.  It makes you wonder if Finster had not been categorized in the way he was (as an "outsider/folk/self-taught/visionary artist"), maybe we would not be losing Paradise in this way.  Finster made immense contributions to culture from this location.  Respect needs to arrive soon in the form of conservation and curation.  Here's the website if you're interested in providing any kind of support:  Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens.

Below are photos we took...  An incredible place...