Raymondism

Raymond Thunder-Sky

David Bowie

Lindsey M Whittle

We're opening two shows this month at Thunder-Sky, Inc.:  "Radically Visible," featuring costumes, photos, collages, drawings, and other art by Antonio Adams, Sky Cubacub, Craig Matis, and Lindsey M Whittle, as well as a group show curated by Emily Brandehoff, "Bowie in the Basement," featuring about 40  or so works from a variety of artists, celebrating Bowie's life and art.  When I was pulling together news release info, I came across the above three photos, and they've stuck in my head, so that means of course a blogpost about Raymond, Bowie, and radical visibility, but also beyond that I wanted to reconstitute a little of Raymond's myth and menace and glory, conjure up his presence from back in the day, when people did not know what the hell to do with him.  And despite a lot of bull-shit he persevered, finding a way to be what he wanted to be, who he wanted to be.

Raymond had no choice really in that department.  For him, costume, performance, art, life, and being Raymond all intermingled into one sensibility that seemed forever eschewing conformity but also never flaunting the eschewment self-consciously.  I am what I am so just get fucking used to it -- that's all over his face in pictures, especially in the one up top.  He toured Cincinnati like that, all clowned- and construction-workered-up, silently going about his obsessive business of drawing from real life the destruction and construction people did to their surroundings, haters be damned.  And there were haters,  people who treated him like a freak without kindness or even just plain everyday manners.  I'm not going to go into those stories because they don't matter here.  He survived, created his own universe, found a way to make meaning out of what he wanted the world to be.  

He left behind those costumes too, which we've archived at his joint:  hard-hats, clown-suits, boots, overalls, clown-collars, hats. Shininess juxtaposed with burlap ruggedness, a show-off propensity pushed up against the need to be part of a team.  At the end of the day he merged show-business and working-class desires, furtively and yet also somehow loudly proclaiming his right to be a great big beautiful freak, while also trying to invent a job for himself.  (His construction-worker drag came from the fact that he truly wanted to be a construction-worker.  He actually started putting on the work-clothes and showing up at sites with his drawing materials because he couldn't get hired on as an actual construction-worker [he didn't have a driver's license so they couldn't].  He willed himself into that status through a sort of flaky and beautiful camouflage.)

The freakishness and the self-created celebration of the freakishness go hand in hand with Raymond. He was his own one-man band in many, hermetically sealed ways, but also willfully open-ended, walking and walking and walking in that get-up all over the city, riding buses, being a part of the world bubbled-off but completely in the maelstrom, a sort of Native-American-Shriner's-Clown-Working-Class Dandy.  

Nineteenth Century poet and philosopher Charles Baudelaire was always riffing on and refining his metaphysical takes on the "dandy."  He defined dandyism as an elevation of aesthetics to living religion, that a dandy in his finest fineries simply walking about the wretched city, shining like some self-created aristocrat, pisses off the responsible citizenry existentially because the dandy has paid so much close attention to his own existence and identity outside of the realm of their control, and their taste, their lives. 

Casting Raymond as a "dandy" kind of helps situate and contextualize what the artists in "Radically Visible" will be up to, as well as gives some backroom logic to "Bowie in the Basement."  In their work, Sky Cubacub is on a quest to reestablish the meaning of fashion and clothes as both demarcation and demonstration of the way someone should be able to live and love. Antonio Adams, one of Raymond's best friends, carries on Raymond's legacy through his own sense of kingly garments and a continuous reinvention through art of his own mythologized self.  Lindsey M Whittle takes silliness and freakishness in as forms of alchemical oxygen, breathing out little kingdoms of goof and color, and Craig Matis' collages use the circus, itself a version of over-the-top captivity and release, as metaphor for reconfiguring the struggle to be exactly who you need to be, no matter what constraints and condemnations.  

Then there's David Bowie, king of the dandies, shape-shifting his way from space-cadet to thin white duke to harlequin and beyond. Bowie has left behind a legacy of I-am-what-I-am-so-fucking-get-used-to-it; he managed to change the world by appearing not to be in it.  Somehow he was able to crack the code of all clowns and freaks:  be exactly who you are until the day you die.  

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.

 

 

  

Coulrophobia

 

Sometimes it will hit me that the very idea of Raymond Thunder-Sky might put a few people off.  I know he was not universally loved while he was alive.  I like to think he was.  It gives me great comfort that he was, but I've heard stories (the John Wayne Gacy contingent and other forms of trying to figure Raymond out and piegonhole him into a dark place), and I witnessed a few times when Raymond was alive:  people giving him that look, or even saying shit about him right in front of his, and my, face.  And here's this Polaroid of Raymond that probably would be unnerving, if you don't know who the man is.  "Coulrophobia" is the term for fear of clowns.  A  lot of people have that, and I could see how Raymond's very existence could throw people off, even induce a little ickiness. 

 

I guess that's why Raymond is a lesson to me in so many ways, especially now that he is no longer on this earth.  His spirit seems to be about moving forward, being exactly who you want to be, and creating a solitary space that allows you to survive whatever happens because of who you are.  There's a magical freakishness in this world that cannot be pummeled or feared or talked out of existence, and Raymond had that.  He was so otherwordly he became more real.  His life was a secret that yelled itself out of secrecy.  And now we have all his drawings and other stuff, we've established a little art gallery in his name, and it's just a wonder.  If you really just step back and look at him and who he was and how he lived, it kind of stupefies.

 

Look at that face, surrounded by clowns.  He's holding a drawing and what looks like some kind of mechanical equipment.  He's dressed in one of his finest confections (it's still around; the drawing is hiding the King Wrecking Company decal he sewed onto the outfit), and he is in Heaven here, you can tell.  It's like a picture of where he is right now.  

 

You get wiser because you meet incredible people like Raymond and they show you how to be without really saying one word. 

"Fish sandwich, Coke, fries."

He walked into Wendy's holding a toolbox in his left hand.  A huge yellow one.  He wore a green hard hat and olive-colored overalls and black boots.  The dude just stomped up to the front almost like he was doing a dance or maybe more of a sleep-walk.  Just stood there, and I looked at him from behind the cash register.  His face was burnt-looking and a little bloated, dark eyes pointed right at me and then away, like he did not want me to know he could see.  I asked him what he would like and his voice was a grunt more than a voice, a machine-gun grunt, but you could understand "fish sandwich" somewhere in there, and so that's what I pressed in.  "Fish sandwich, Coke, fries."  He said it like he had committed it to memory and he was afraid he might forget before it got out of his mouth.  He stood there not looking at me when I asked him what size Coke.  Something was not right but I guess since he could order what he wanted I didn't get freaked out too much.  I didn't know what to think really.  He was round-bellied, not too tall, but he had the presence of a statue that had come to life.  You were supposed to be afraid of him, but still he was not terrifying.  Just intense and silent, standing there not answering my question about the Coke, so I just wrung in large, and he pulled out a ten dollar bill and put it on the counter, and then I took it and gave him his change.  He swept it up and quickly hid the money away somewhere in his overalls. 

 

 

As I got him his Coke, and the cook put his fish into the fryer, he stood at the counter completely quiet, looking over at the fryers, staring as if somehow his stare might make things go faster.  He was not comfortable waiting.  He had some salt-and-pepper hair hanging down from his hard hat.  He had ruddy jowls and the yellow toolbox had a "Danger High Voltage" sticker on it.  He gripped that toolbox real tight.  I told him I was sorry he had to wait because I could see it was killing him, but then I explained that we don't make fish sandwiches ahead, and he grunted like he understood, and even though I had never waited on him before I kind of knew him from riding the bus and seeing him walking on the sidewalk in that same get-up, but it never dawned on me what he would sound like close up, or look like either.  He had the presence of a visitor from another planet about him.  He had a pride about himself that shined out of his stubborn face.  He did not look scared as much as just stubborn and ready to do what he had to do.  He did not fidget but he did not stand still either, as if his stillness vibrated inside him, through his bones.  He had gray chapped lips.  You could tell he worked outside.



The fish timer went off and the cook slid the wrapped sandwich onto the tray while I got the fries.  I turned around and saw the dude put his toolbox into a booth over by the front windows.  He came back and got his tray of Coke and fries and fish sandwich and walked back to the booth.  A couple of boys came in and ordered something and I got them what they wanted, and by the time they were gone he had eaten and drank it all and was throwing away his trash.  Two minutes, tops.  Then he walked into the bathroom.  I looked over at the cook and the gal who ran drive-thru.  We were a little, I don't know, unsettled I guess.  He was the only one out in the dining room.  It was about 3 pm on a Wednesday in February.  Snow was starting outside, gray light and snow.

 

You could hear him stomp out of the bathroom, the door slamming behind him.  As he turned the corner I saw what he had done to himself in the bathroom and it felt really completely shocking for a few seconds.  He had put on a clown costume in the bathroom.  It was blue, green, red, purple and yellow polka-dots.  Big old clown outfit, with the boots still on, and the overalls underneath the costume.  He was carrying the tool-box still too, and he had also donned a big fluorescent green clown collar to complete his ensemble.  His face above the polka-dots was unchanged.  No clown smile, no clown anything in his eyes.  The blankness of his expression gave the whole thing a dream-like feeling, as if it were a moment I would need to come back to many times, just to convince myself it had actually happened.  This big, dark-complected, round-bellied construction dude going into the Wendy's bathroom and coming out a clown, like Clark Kent turning into Superman.



 

Me and the cook just looked at each other.  It was like we were witnessing a new way of seeing people, like after this nobody would have any secrets.  People would just come in, go into the bathroom and change into who they really were.  The dude took off into the snowy afternoon, stomping away.  He'd spent maybe all of five or six minutes in here, but he had left a big impression.  I wondered where he was off to on foot.  He disappeared into that snow, a clown erased by falling snow.

 



The photos are close-ups of Raymond Thunder-Sky's many clown costumes he would wear all over the city.