beware the sounding roar

[gurdonark]

Home at last this afternoon. Wonderful mail art from Eliot (hip zebras), from a nervousness.org exchange (photo of N. CA mountains, very nice) and a postcardx card with text (text was about how simple pleasures are the best). Got the CD of If an Angel Came to See You would you Make Her Feel at Home, which I recently reviewed from memory on epinions.com. What an odd, fun group Black Oak Arkansas really was....Wonderful evening...we went to Nuevo Leon, which actually manages to serve Nuevo Leon Monterrey-ish food, and not merely border food with a catchy name. I had a cabrito and carnitas that were very good. We killed time by going to Virgin Records. My continuing if heretofore subconscious drive to replicate in CD my age 14 LP collection continued with the ELP "Welcome Back My Friends" live album. No doubt I'll soon have the headphones hopping to "Hoedown" (Copeland should have thought of using a mellotron) and reciting the words to Karn Evil Nine, Impression 3, which is probably even nerdier than I wish to admit. Then we went to meet friends and my wife's coworkers' friends at the bar for the Josh Alan show....simply fantastic show, tiny lower Greenville Avenue bar, a pool table, a long bar, bluesplayer photos, modern art pictures along the narrow conical bar, the band crammed into a tiny space at the front, audience, a small group, huddled around bar and in chairs. My favorite part was a cover of "Theme from Shaft",
and I kept thinking of yelling out a request for Bowie's "1984", but I couldn't remember which Diamond Dogs song sounds just like "Theme from Shaft". Josh Alan is great and under appreciated, but I'm really excited that one of our friends gave me my own copy of his 4 track
work of indie genius. I'm eager to plug it in at work....roots music, heavy Dylan influence,
great baritone ukelele solos. It's like mail art, sometimes in life you get really cool things you never expect, but all you can really do is send and enjoy the experience....flight magazine had a piece on the outsider artist Henry Darger. What an incredible artist! I love folk and outsider art because really, despite some desultory knowledge I don't know so much about art but I know what I like, and I like
illustration and complexity, and I like
things I like that are not all concept but instead sometimes about plot and story. Darger's stuff seems to me enthralling enough for years of study.
But I think I'll just look at the illustrations and marvel instead.

Comments

Henry Darger

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

There was a recent article in the New Yorker on Darger to coincide with the opening of the new Museum of American Folk Art in NYC. I am also drawn to outsider art and feel a very tangible connection to it. I think perhaps the closest I've come to having a religious experience was visiting the former Museum of American Folk Art. This stuff really speaks to me...I think it gets deep down into a place I never used to know existed. It's very strange and hard to describe, but it's there...and a lot of outsider art strikes a chord. It is a beautiful, sad melody but one I don't mind hearing over and over again. Perhaps it echoes my own experience of a world that is lovely and frightening and dangerous and, at times, utterly inexplicable.

You can buy the book Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal by John MacGregor in uncut sheets to bind yourself. And I'm very tempted...I'm still a novice bookbinder but I think it would be fascinating to bind something like this, see where it takes me. The book dealer who is selling the sheets wants to reunite all the copies people bind for an exhibition at his shop in Berkeley, CA in 2003.

What I would not Do, I do Anyway

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I usually hate to use always or never in a sentence, but here I go again--you always know the coolest things. Isn't a really cool thing, this idea of assembling pages of the Realms of the Unreal? My own bookbinding ambitions don't run much past figuring out how to get 8 1/2 x 11 tape for easy tape binding, but I'd have to think for a real novice bookbuilderphile, a Darger thing would really work. I like the NY folk museum, and always marvelled at how different it was from the LA folk art museum.
LA's was much less attuned to US outsider stuff, and much more attuned to native peoples' "folk folk" art. I went to a wonderful "little" museum on Madison in Chicago once that had lots of great local Chicago artists work...Chicago always in my mind is the sort of milieu just built for naive and outside artists.

I think you're right about "striking a chord", and in particular art that is not afraid to
unabashedly pursue a sort of spirituality, even if the spirituality is unorthodox (or perhaps especially if). I also relate to the sheer exuberance...the art as explosion of creative impulse...the "I've painted these daemons and
these verses because I must" or even the "isn't this a cool thing to do with pop tops?". I want to always be a fingerpainter decorating the throne of God, without art, without artifice,
without fear.

Re: What I would not Do, I do Anyway

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking the same thing about the Darger book. It would be great for an "untrained" bookbinder to do it. Right now my mind's eye can see a binding made out of brown paper bags and dirty ribbons...

And, yes! The notion of having to make art, not having a choice, working on a higher plane. That is what I find so fascinating about outsider art. And I always try to make a distinction between outsider art and folk art. They seem very different to me.

outsider,folk

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Although in folk art I note that folks spend all their time debating the definitions, I find that
folk and outsider are still not used the way that
I would use them. I would use "outsider" for folks whose distance from the art world is more than a distance in training and influence, but I'll see some writers still use outsider to mean all non-trained art. I prefer the term "naive art" for art (like mine when I paint) that is just untutored. Outsider should be untutored + a tangible form of other disconnection from the
culture...a madness, a mania, a religious obsession....what negative terms....I think "folk art" should be the umbrella term, and that aboriginal art should be called "native cultures art" or some such....but the problem is that my universe of definitions is just as flawed as the art books. It broke my hypothetical heart a little when I saw Dargers now sell for 25K to 125K, not because I mind putting a value on precious things, but it seemed so "let's put it in a museum and show we understand its worth" and "I own a gallery"-ish.

Nobody can just let things be, just be.
I think we need to start putting folk and outsider and naive and what have you exhibits in the suburban county musems, and leave fine art behind altogether....but I still kinda wanna see the abstract expressionist print show at the Kimball, which is a about as "endow the fine arts" ish as a museum gets....

Josh Alan

[(Anonymous)]

Hi-- Scott here

I must say, I prefer Josh Alan as an acoustic act. To my ears he doesn't
use the electric guitar and the backing band to say anything that he's not
saying with just his acoustic. I like the electric stuff fine; but if my first
experience with J.A. were of him brandishing his Strat and fronting a band,
I wouldn't have made the effort to keep up with him.

He must really want to make the electric thing work, though-- I was reading
the liner notes of his latest (electric) CD, where he described his boyhood
experience of meeting John Lennon and having Lennon autograph his copy
of In His Own Write (maybe it was A Spaniard In the Works-- I forget) and
draw a little sketch in it. He sold the book on ebay to bankroll the making of
the CD. I don't know what it would take for me to part with a possession like
that, but I'm sure that making a CD would not be it. And I'm not even that
much of a fan of John Lennon.

Re: Josh Alan

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Hey Scott:

I think I could imagine ebaying a Lennon autograph to make a CD. My own treasured autograph is a Bobby Fischer autographed
My 60 Games of Chess. I could imagine an appropriate purpose for it, like to finance a book publication or a CD, but on the other hand, I could also imagine just donating it to the Cleveland library chess collection so that I don't ruin it.

I think that Josh Alan is good electric, but I'd rather hear an acoustic set myself. I think with most people, a one or two piece ensemble (a "one man group") is the best thing, after all...
Now what was that middle name order again?

Re: Josh Alan

[(Anonymous)]

Breaking it down, it's two middle names and an extraneous last name:

Charles
Wallace
Wyler

Is it rock-n-rolly to have five names?
One name is great: Bono, Sting, Esquerita, Prince, Moulty
Two names, of course is the norm.
Three names is doable: Jerry Lee Lewis, Michael Martin Murphey, Andy Fairweather-Low
But four names? Five names?

Re: Josh Alan

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

My memory is that Brian Eno has numerous middle names. That's not that uncommon in the UK, but I did not realize it was bogalusa standard operating procedure until recently.