Overload — The
Webb Collection — "From
vintage carnival banners and religious banners to contemporary folk
art and art of many forms, the common thread running through the
Webb’s collection is a powerful overload of exploding strong
individual expression." — at
The MAC through July 11, 2004
Wild
Garage Muses
Norbert Kox - Harlot of Babylon
Story by Michael Helsem
Photographs
by J R Compton
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"Bad
Is Good" came a little too late to save
WestCiv©. By the time it'd trickled down from Cloud-Cuckooland,
it met a fetid tide of corporate kitsch gallumphing the other
way which utterly whelmed it; & Elvis is seen to belong
to a chapter in the history of religion as much as to the history
of art.
Can anyone born after, say, 1945 be at all the same
as a Folk Artist (tm) of the earlier ilk, — even if they
were raised, in Grand Prairie, by prairie dogs? Is "American
Idol" Folk Art? Is a homeless shantytown?
What if a loser from that show comes to live in such
a place; & keeps on singing, listened to or not? Let me start
by defining a Shadow Genre as what people do in emulation of a
practice their culture regards as Art; "Shadow" because,
unlike a grad student or a celebrity who paints on the side, no
corresponding career path exists for that hapless unsung Milton.
The chances are good a landfill awaits every one
of their works, no matter how accomplished, because most people
do not know Art without a cassette headphone on & furthermore
earnestly believe this to be a Good Thing.
Vomit Clocks
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Meanwhile, in the rarefied Art World, where to be
misunderstood in a certain way is tantamount to being given permission
to make a living at it, the ideas associated with Romanticism have
mutated to the point where "amateurish"-looking drawing
is zealously cultivated by artists at every level of the subculture
except the true amateur — just as it's only poets outside
the haiku-in-english subculture who count syllables 5, 7, 5 like
the Japanese.
Call it "wabi" rather than "amateurishness." Your
kid could do it & probably has. Perhaps now that we are safely
insulated from traditional besabertoothed genius by generations
of saprophytic jabberwocky, it's the only rude jab art has left
for us. A certain coarseness of execution, owing (in the first
place) to the artist being too hot on the trail of a revelation,
to bother with trivial craft.
Note how central drawing is — often combined
with writing—: these artists think on their feet; & WANT
to be understood. Secondly, availibilism. They don't usually patronize
art boutiques; even a hardware store, i imagine, can seem just
a bit too squeaky clean. There's more mana in a dumpster.
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Odd Fellows Paper Maché Eye
I like Norbert Kox's Harlot
of Babylon the best of these works at the Overload show
at the MAC: a selection of twenty years' collecting from that
amazing institution down in Waxahachie, the Webb Gallery.
Kox's painting is a lot like other visionary artists
i admire — Ernst Fuchs, in the 20c., most emphatically — & it
is cryptic in the best sense, not because of coyness but because
what the artist is compelled to say, has come out of a place wholly
prior & foreign to those convenient symbol-systems we ordinarily
grok symbolic art with.
The artist has spared no pains to render exactly
a most peculiar monster, a six-headed praying mantis with the hindquarters
of T. Rex — & ridden by a Jesus-headed goddess with the
torch arm of the Statue of Liberty. Any artist living would give
their left hand to have created such powerful work. I only hope
the good people at Webb shelled out a whole lot of crackerjacks
for it.
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Too many of the other works in the show are barely
more than make-you-grin weird, without going anywhere you don't
want to end up unless fully equipped with army boots, a flashlight, & maybe
a high-powered
automatic.
For those trained in instant-appropriation & frankness-to-materials,
they are delightful exactly & only on that level. One thing
noticeable about a large gathering of this art, & not when
a piece is seen singly, is a sort of medieval anonymity. It's not
hard to imagine them abandoned beside the highway like turtle eggs
left forlornly on the shore.
Cathey Miller - Cupcake
Trilogy - Panel #3:
The Order of the Cupcoke
oil 48 x 69 inches, 2003
How lovely to find, right next door, Recent
Paintings from Cathedonia by Cathey Miller. Unlike Eberle,
whose art-seriousness cannot be questioned, these paintings do
at times seem product of a wild garage muse & not a shelfful
of Artaud Dubuffet. They are badly drawn (except the faces, all
of the same person), obsessively repetitious, confusingly planned, & colored
in a garishness that is like a circus clown's idea of psychedelic
art.
"The Voluptua Twins," for instance, has
two space women in mustard yellow suits, standing over one of the
flying pigeon-headed lobsters they must have just shot down; between
them floats a crudely rendered, bespangled image of the double
star Beta Lyrae. — I love the bald goofishness of it all.
In poetry right now there is an equivalent movement
called "Flarf". These are over-educated poets who are
hellbent on coming up with something unacceptable even to the very
broad canons of the institutional avant garde. I believe Cathey
Miller has attained to that unnatural beatitude.
06 05/06
04
Links: Cathey
Miller ; The MAC
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