Spiritual American Trash. Greg Bottoms
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Spiritual American Trash - Greg Bottoms страница 2
Название: Spiritual American Trash
Автор: Greg Bottoms
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Изобразительное искусство, фотография
isbn: 9781619022102
isbn:
I quit writing fiction in any conventional sense of the I’m-making-this-up a long time ago, partly because to me writing is, as Orwell wrote, against a lie, or, as Mario Vargas Llosa had it, produced in a spirit of revolt, and adding overt fabrication on top of both the overt and covert cultural fabrications all around me was no revolt at all, was going with the flow. I mean, I wanted to show you the tree. But my tree, back when I was a kid drawing, was really a piece of paper with lines and shading that had been filtered through my mind and soul and body—the truth, the mostly verifiable truth, vortexed through the unavoidable fiction of the imagination, in an honest attempt to find a deeper truth, a deeper meaning, a tree more tree than tree, if you will. And this book is the same—I really would like to show you the artists—except I have only words, and words and sentences make my portraits now rather than lines and shading. Know all this before you begin.
I chose eight representative artists—all public figures with some notoriety in the current art world, all dead for at least a decade, but none widely known—who created “visionary” outsider art in America—literally art inspired by a magical or mystical vision—all of whom were profoundly shaped by their experiences as Americans, extremely ostracized ones from poor and difficult backgrounds. America was the pressure cooker that made them who they were. Each artist was driven by spiritual necessity, psychological obsession, and a single-minded focus that all but obliterated the rest of their existence as human beings for a short time on the earth. There have been and are dozens and dozens more artists like these in the United States. There is a whole industry and social economy built around outsider art. I tried to stick to writing about artists who had no or at least very little engagement with or understanding of this art industry or social economy, and who went about their business for their own purposes and needs. They made art for a higher power and to save themselves. Even if their ideas skirted the edge of sanity, their motives, I believe, were honest. I appreciate that, admire it.
And, well, maybe just a few more words about me, your narrator through these stories, these sketches, these portraits: I’ve been interested in, fascinated by, outsider or self-taught art and artists for a couple of decades now. This is no doubt a personal issue with me. I grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic brother who had visions and nightmares day and night, who ended up homeless and then incarcerated, who was a victim and criminal on the streets of this country of ours of three hundred–plus million; I was born in the South, of a long line of working-class North Carolinians and Virginians, all of whom were shaped, without pondering it much, by that American pressure cooker of class and by their distance from anything like power; and, finally, I lived deeply as a child in a Christian religious belief system where in the end God would win out, and we believers would be delivered from this life of suffering. I think I get outsider artists. I think I get suffering, which bends and reshapes a person the way extreme sun bends and reshapes a tree. I think I get religious or spiritual obsessions and how they arise from our deepest needs. Partly this is because I get that people cannot survive without some sense of sturdy meanings. When sturdy meanings collapse, when the world stops making sense, as it did for the artists I write about, we—you, me, them—have no choice but to rationalize and relativize, to create a new world in our minds, and then wholeheartedly believe in it.
This is a simple and personal book—like all my books, like all my drawings and paintings when I was younger, because I believe in clarity and owning what you say—that is driven by three questions regarding each artist: Who was this person? What did he/she do? Why did he/she do it? The answers, to me at least, are fascinating and possibly even instructive.
Patron Saint of Thrown-Away Things A Portrait of James Hampton
1.
Saint James didn’t think of himself as an artist. His intentions went far beyond art. He didn’t think of himself as a “folk” or an “outsider” or a “grass roots” or a “visionary” artist. He didn’t consider himself any of the things scholars have called him since his death in 1964. He didn’t even know what those names meant, not in the way they used them, anyway. “Folk”? That’s what he called his people down in Elloree, South Carolina, where his sister sat on a splintered porch thanking Jesus for the daylight, where the farmland stretched right out to the hem of the sky, where “The Best Pork Bar-B-Que in the World” was made out behind the Stop-’n’-Go. And “outsider”? Man, that one was easy: every black person in America.
When he began The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, a 180-piece sculpture made from the refuse of a dying world, in that old rented garage in northwest Washington, DC, where poverty could beat your soul into some new shape, where a man might rather put a bullet into you than shake your hand, he never would have imagined that one day it would be displayed in a museum, under fancy lighting, against a backdrop of majestic purple, where a janitor—a janitor just like him—would come by at night to dust it.
He built The Throne to prepare the world for the end-time, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, our Savior, as prophesied in Revelation. He worked nights in various government buildings in the District, mopping floors and singing hymns from his childhood in Elloree, where I imagine he first saw the face of God when he was just a boy—not a shadow falling down in a corner or something smoldering at the edge of vision, not a feeling tickling in his spine or cloaking him in the Spirit’s heat, but the real face of God—shining there in front of him one night like an explosion on a drive-in movie screen. It was at that moment that he knew he was chosen, knew he was a saint, knew that he had been granted life, this terrible, beautiful life, to serve God.
2.
James Hampton Jr. arrived in his family’s shack in Elloree in 1909, slick and shiny with birth, face aimed skyward, screaming like a true Southern Baptist. He was named after his father, a gospel singer and self-proclaimed Baptist preacher who would later abandon his family (a wife and four children, including James) in the early 1920s to travel through the rural South and preach.
In 1928, at the age of nineteen, after a childhood of farm work and family and strict religion, James moved to Washington, DC, to join his older brother, Lee. The city was a new world—bigger, yet somehow claustrophobic, harsher, but beautiful, too—with the great monuments of America rising up into the sky, almost as if they somehow grew right out of the ghetto James and his brother lived in.
For more than a decade, James worked as a short-order cook in various diners around the city, keeping to himself, hearing faint voices, taking prayer breaks instead of smoke breaks when he took a break at all. At the end of a twelve-, fourteen-hour day, he walked home, slope-backed and exhausted; past men sleeping in alleys and boys hanging out on corners like packs of young wolves; past prostitutes saying, Hey, little man, hey, Jesus, what I got make you see angels, baby. He kept his eyes aimed at the ground—cigarettes, bottle caps, a bullet.
He wore his day home with him in a cloud of stink: old vegetables, coffee, meat, grease, garbage. And he could still hear the echoes of clanking dishes and order bells, even in the half-still city night, and somewhere down below all the noise of the world ringing in his head—always ringing in his head—he heard the faint mutterings of God like his own teeth grinding, like his own pulse. He’d shower in the apartment he and Lee shared, read his favorite passages from the Bible—Genesis, the Gospel of John, and Revelation—and sleep the sleep made of hard work. Then he’d get up and do it all over again. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. The noisy world in his head. And underneath the noise, just underneath it, God.
3.
СКАЧАТЬ