Category: Culture

Character Assassination: Colorful Apocalypse Review

The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art, by Greg Bottoms, University of Chicago Press, 200 pages, 2007. ISBN 978-0-226-06685-1 As an outsider to outsider art, Greg Bottoms is in a great position to ask uncomfortable questions that might otherwise run afoul of the field’s shibboleths and loyalties. Unfortunately, the questions he asks in this book are often as uninformed as they are discomfiting, Bottoms clearly wants to engage with artists as people, not performers or freaks. Yet he ends up reducing them to some of the very clichés that he seems to want to debunk. Early on, for example, he

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Of Context and Privilege: Southern Self-Taught Art

Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art, Edited by Carol Crown and Charles Russell, University Press of Mississippi, 308 pages, 2007. ISBN 1-57806-916-5 (hardcover) This book is definitely not bound for the coffee table, with its undersized images and serious, occasionally turgid, prose. But that’s not the point of this art book, whose admirable goal instead is to achieve a sober art-historical understanding of the self-taught art of the South “in the context of the makers’ experience.” If it displays more rigor than most books on the subject, however, its authors are not immune to the wishful

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Spamtastic Sculpture

I had to share these two examples of stainless steel sculpture that came to me via some spam mail (“I just browsed your website and find some items are similar to our products.”) I wish I had these kinds of items on my site. Thank you Alisa Chen at Wanfeng (Xiamen) Stone Industry & Trade Co., Ltd. (http://www.sculpturespaces.com/english/home.asp).

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County Fairs

Although the glory days of fairground art passed with the last of the true sideshows, county fairs and carnivals still offer bits of visual interest even if most of the imagery is blandly commercial. These are from the Lake and Kane County Fairs in Illinois, the Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee and the Rosholt Fair in Wisconsin. Plus, a bonus image from the gloriously named Temple of Food in Amstersdam.

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Spontaneous Creation

Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts, by Vladimir Arkhipov, Fuel Publishing, 304 pages, 180 color pictures, 2006. ISBN 0-9550061-3-9 Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, Book Works, 158 pages, 2005. ISBN 1 870699-81-5 Two recent books from abroad attempt to document the spontaneous art making of ordinary people, one broadly and one eccentrically. Folk Archives, from Britain, covers a wide range of vernacular expression, from protest posters to shop signs. Home Made, also published in Britain, takes a certain kind of ingenuity as its subject, specifically creative responses to the acute scarcity of

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Getting Religion on Its Own Terms

Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South, edited by Carol Crown, with essays by Paul Harvey, Erika Doss, Hal Fulmer, Babatunde Lawal, Charles Reagan Wilson and N.J. Girardot, Art Museum of the University of Memphis with the University of Mississippi Press, 215 pages, 122 color plates, other color and b&w illustrations, 2004. ISBN 1-57806-659-X

Stereotypes have two inherent flaws: They often state the obvious and, when too generally applied, they become false. But they also are inescapable because, in the proper context, they are true.

Carol Crown’s exhibition and catalog, Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible and the American South, can’t help but draw on Bible Belt stereotypes because they reflect a big slice of Southern reality. There is a lot more substance here than in many folk art theme shows, since the Bible really is the force behind a great deal of self-taught art.

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