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Folk Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction
I’ve just returned from a trip to my hometown in Florida, first visit in several years. What has been latterly called the Historic Downtown was once used in winter by Canadian makers of TV commercials to do spring-fashion shoots, because the buildings look like a Canadian small town if you keep the palm trees out of the frame.
I was surprised to find, in the heart of the Historic Downtown, a folk art gallery, recently re-established as a physical operation after several years as an online enterprise.
The owner and I chatted for a good while about her current show and her artists, many but not all of whom are Floridians, all of whom are self-taught and in that sense undeniably folk. They’re skilled at what they’ve chosen to do, with an amazing sense of composition and visual rhythm in general, as well as an inventive use of materials. And regardless of their backgrounds, their styles fit more comfortably into the general look of what we think of as folk art.
But I began wondering about the mysteries of folk art in the twenty-first century. Some of the creators fit the classical stereotype: African-American, working-class, and isolated by virtue of personal circumstances. But one of the most interesting artists owns a live-work studio in Saint Louis and has just been written up in this month’s issue of Country Home. She earns her living with paintings and carvings of birds that do far more than what interior decorators would demand of them, but much of her output does appear to be market-oriented, and sometimes downright cutesy.
Nothing new there; most artists who live by their art turn out stuff for the market even when they achieve a reputation for more serious work.
But she also produces strangely compelling icons (since her mother is a former nun, she called them “prayer cards,” but some of them are bas-relief and all of them look more like Orthodox icons), some of which feel curiously heterodox, all of which are anything but cutesy and unlikely to fit your average home décor.
My point is only that the field of “folk art” has always been ill-defined because it somehow combines the productions of the unlettered with the psychologically-driven personal visions of artists who sometimes have even had some amount of formal training. The market defined by the term "folk art" has long been criticized as making no sense in terms of artistic categories and as exploitative and condescending to members of marginal minorities, if only because the field lumps together the work of rural isolates with the productions of prisoners and the mentally ill.
And yet this sort of work is instantly distinguishable from tourist art or tasteful paintings by members of amateur art associations, though not from the production of art-school graduates who have put much work into learning how to look untutored.
The genre, nowadays, attracts a certain number of people who are both genuinely self-taught and determined to “look like folk artists,” for the sake of sales. But as I just implied, art-school-educated artists lust after the currently-fashionable look of whatever niche of the art world they have decided to occupy. I was struck, looking at the work in this particular gallery, at how much personal preoccupations do matter; here as with art-school-educated artists, I wanted to know the stories of the artists because of the art. Folk art scholars and dealers alike have usually been criticized for using the piquant stories of the artists to promote the intrinsic worth of their art, but in this case it is the art that validates the sometimes piquant stories.
I came back to Atlanta wondering about folk art in the age of digitalization.
I had been prodded to thought by the necessity of picking up a cheap camera for some non-art-related throwaway documentation. I found a surprisingly good camera in a pharmacy photo department being marketed as a “never buy film again” package. The last time I noticed one of these, nearly a decade ago, the camera you were supposed to take to the one-hour counter to be reloaded with film was unutterably flimsy. This one incorporated numerous automatic features, but was labeled on the back with instructions that suggested the buyer had scarcely ever taken a picture before.
And I realized that this, of course, was the intended market; in an age where everybody buys digital cameras, the only people using film are professional photographers at one end of the spectrum, and folks too poor or insufficientl skilled to own computers.
And that set me to thinking about how few folk photographers there are. What we have instead are so-called vernacular photographers; people of unknown circumstances, but usually giving the impression of being middle-class, who took strange, often haunting pictures. Some of them meant to do it, some did it by accident. In any case, there are very few visionaries of the camera who set out to make bodies of work comparable to the productions of the self-taught visionary painters, or if there are, they haven’t been discovered as frequently.
The visionary folk painters we know about weren’t rural isolates, though they frequently were urban isolates. Some were collage artists, making up for inability to render by incorporating cuttings from magazines or sometimes even images resized for them by photography studios. So they were making the best use of the limited technology available to them.
I bring all this up because I returned to Atlanta to hear a lecture by Sarah Morris, obviously a world-famous urban sophisticate who never went to art school, but has always been surrounded by self-aware artists and acquired the skills of painting and filmmaking quite professionally.
Her videos of world cities are what I would call intuitively analytical; they owe something to the great imaginative visions of sociology and anthropology, but they aren’t systematic documents. They have something of the hybridity of the Surrealists and Situationists, who turned the style of urban wandering into a semi-science that was also a spontaneous semi-artwork. (Regarding which, I recommend Merlin Coverley’s quick, brief survey Psychogeography.)
So Sarah Morris is decidedly not folk; she knows what she’s about, and she shows in respectable locations and plans out projects.
Most of the indie videographers I know of are also not folk; they may not have gone to art school, but they read widely, learned how to use their equipment professionally, and know very much what they are setting out to accomplish, even though they don’t get to exhibit the results in respectable galleries.
But as we keep moving further out from the artworld-approved center, at what point does someone stop being a self-aware artist and become a marginal visionary? Lots of the twentieth-century marginals read books voraciously, albeit idiosyncratically. (We leave rural isolates out of the picture, but I suspect some of them own vintage VCRs and are now discovering the one-time-use video cam from the pharmacy. Point-and-shoot photography, as I said, has already produced its own occasional self-taught artists.)
I leave the answers to these and other questions for some other post or some other writer, but I can see the time when folk art collections will have to include monitors for viewing folk video and for Photoshop productions by self-taught visionary obsessives.
Visionary photography is already in evidence in my hometown, albeit across the street from the folk art gallery. A professional photographer who emigrated from Sweden has been producing strange sepia-toned images of the spirits of the air and water, creatures out of north European folklore transplanted to a subtropical realm of cypress swamps and abundant large-leafed flora. “The Invisibles” can be beheld on her website, and are for sale at the Historic Sanford Welcome Center.
I’ve just returned from a trip to my hometown in Florida, first visit in several years. What has been latterly called the Historic Downtown was once used in winter by Canadian makers of TV commercials to do spring-fashion shoots, because the buildings look like a Canadian small town if you keep the palm trees out of the frame.
I was surprised to find, in the heart of the Historic Downtown, a folk art gallery, recently re-established as a physical operation after several years as an online enterprise.
The owner and I chatted for a good while about her current show and her artists, many but not all of whom are Floridians, all of whom are self-taught and in that sense undeniably folk. They’re skilled at what they’ve chosen to do, with an amazing sense of composition and visual rhythm in general, as well as an inventive use of materials. And regardless of their backgrounds, their styles fit more comfortably into the general look of what we think of as folk art.
But I began wondering about the mysteries of folk art in the twenty-first century. Some of the creators fit the classical stereotype: African-American, working-class, and isolated by virtue of personal circumstances. But one of the most interesting artists owns a live-work studio in Saint Louis and has just been written up in this month’s issue of Country Home. She earns her living with paintings and carvings of birds that do far more than what interior decorators would demand of them, but much of her output does appear to be market-oriented, and sometimes downright cutesy.
Nothing new there; most artists who live by their art turn out stuff for the market even when they achieve a reputation for more serious work.
But she also produces strangely compelling icons (since her mother is a former nun, she called them “prayer cards,” but some of them are bas-relief and all of them look more like Orthodox icons), some of which feel curiously heterodox, all of which are anything but cutesy and unlikely to fit your average home décor.
My point is only that the field of “folk art” has always been ill-defined because it somehow combines the productions of the unlettered with the psychologically-driven personal visions of artists who sometimes have even had some amount of formal training. The market defined by the term "folk art" has long been criticized as making no sense in terms of artistic categories and as exploitative and condescending to members of marginal minorities, if only because the field lumps together the work of rural isolates with the productions of prisoners and the mentally ill.
And yet this sort of work is instantly distinguishable from tourist art or tasteful paintings by members of amateur art associations, though not from the production of art-school graduates who have put much work into learning how to look untutored.
The genre, nowadays, attracts a certain number of people who are both genuinely self-taught and determined to “look like folk artists,” for the sake of sales. But as I just implied, art-school-educated artists lust after the currently-fashionable look of whatever niche of the art world they have decided to occupy. I was struck, looking at the work in this particular gallery, at how much personal preoccupations do matter; here as with art-school-educated artists, I wanted to know the stories of the artists because of the art. Folk art scholars and dealers alike have usually been criticized for using the piquant stories of the artists to promote the intrinsic worth of their art, but in this case it is the art that validates the sometimes piquant stories.
I came back to Atlanta wondering about folk art in the age of digitalization.
I had been prodded to thought by the necessity of picking up a cheap camera for some non-art-related throwaway documentation. I found a surprisingly good camera in a pharmacy photo department being marketed as a “never buy film again” package. The last time I noticed one of these, nearly a decade ago, the camera you were supposed to take to the one-hour counter to be reloaded with film was unutterably flimsy. This one incorporated numerous automatic features, but was labeled on the back with instructions that suggested the buyer had scarcely ever taken a picture before.
And I realized that this, of course, was the intended market; in an age where everybody buys digital cameras, the only people using film are professional photographers at one end of the spectrum, and folks too poor or insufficientl skilled to own computers.
And that set me to thinking about how few folk photographers there are. What we have instead are so-called vernacular photographers; people of unknown circumstances, but usually giving the impression of being middle-class, who took strange, often haunting pictures. Some of them meant to do it, some did it by accident. In any case, there are very few visionaries of the camera who set out to make bodies of work comparable to the productions of the self-taught visionary painters, or if there are, they haven’t been discovered as frequently.
The visionary folk painters we know about weren’t rural isolates, though they frequently were urban isolates. Some were collage artists, making up for inability to render by incorporating cuttings from magazines or sometimes even images resized for them by photography studios. So they were making the best use of the limited technology available to them.
I bring all this up because I returned to Atlanta to hear a lecture by Sarah Morris, obviously a world-famous urban sophisticate who never went to art school, but has always been surrounded by self-aware artists and acquired the skills of painting and filmmaking quite professionally.
Her videos of world cities are what I would call intuitively analytical; they owe something to the great imaginative visions of sociology and anthropology, but they aren’t systematic documents. They have something of the hybridity of the Surrealists and Situationists, who turned the style of urban wandering into a semi-science that was also a spontaneous semi-artwork. (Regarding which, I recommend Merlin Coverley’s quick, brief survey Psychogeography.)
So Sarah Morris is decidedly not folk; she knows what she’s about, and she shows in respectable locations and plans out projects.
Most of the indie videographers I know of are also not folk; they may not have gone to art school, but they read widely, learned how to use their equipment professionally, and know very much what they are setting out to accomplish, even though they don’t get to exhibit the results in respectable galleries.
But as we keep moving further out from the artworld-approved center, at what point does someone stop being a self-aware artist and become a marginal visionary? Lots of the twentieth-century marginals read books voraciously, albeit idiosyncratically. (We leave rural isolates out of the picture, but I suspect some of them own vintage VCRs and are now discovering the one-time-use video cam from the pharmacy. Point-and-shoot photography, as I said, has already produced its own occasional self-taught artists.)
I leave the answers to these and other questions for some other post or some other writer, but I can see the time when folk art collections will have to include monitors for viewing folk video and for Photoshop productions by self-taught visionary obsessives.
Visionary photography is already in evidence in my hometown, albeit across the street from the folk art gallery. A professional photographer who emigrated from Sweden has been producing strange sepia-toned images of the spirits of the air and water, creatures out of north European folklore transplanted to a subtropical realm of cypress swamps and abundant large-leafed flora. “The Invisibles” can be beheld on her website, and are for sale at the Historic Sanford Welcome Center.
