![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I had hoped to shunt off my more arcanely visual-arts-oriented posts to counterforces.blogspot.com, but I realize that parts of my Michele Schuff review there are germane to many topics I have raised on joculum frequently. And the folk-art post raises so many interlinking issues that I might as well give up on doing more than declaring that I shall post to counterforces, with occasional cross-postings to joculum, anything that is an exhibition review of work that can only be viewed in Atlanta, Georgia.
Picking up an advance copy of Gene Logsdon’s The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse reminds me that growing up semi-rural myself, I realized early on that the “rural isolates” to whom I refer in the folk-art post have rarely existed. I wrote in “Vernacular Art in the Age of Globalization” (one version in Art Papers, a differently focused version in volume one of the two-volume survey Souls Grown Deep) about the extent to which the world found its way into most rural homes in the long-ago twentieth century; National Geographic was a pre-World War II staple even in Florida farm families’ attics, and we have ample examples of the walls of presumptive semi-literates or illiterates being lined with the pages of photo-laden magazines that were arranged as art, not just as insulation.
So the Fra Angelico pictures in the issue of Life or Saturday Evening Post I lovingly saved at age ten may have found their way further afield than I thought at the time. The town’s cultural horizons were cramped and limited, but I reflected some decades later on how the thirty-five cent paperback had brought edited versions of The World’s Great Philosophers to drugstore racks. (Although niche magazines still bring unexpectedly specialized information to downscale markets, books are now much more likely to cater to the already established tastes of the venue’s probable buyers, as a walk round any big-box discounter will reveal.) Pictures were another matter, the small paperback format not being conducive to adequate reproduction, and big volumes being, then as now, mostly available as middle-class Christmas gifts.
The point is that folk art, vernacular art, what have you, is so often presented as the work of genuine isolates stuck in the middle of nowhere with no way of even knowing who Picasso was, much less that their drawings resemble mid-career Picasso. This imagined total isolation was not so by the waning days of the Great Depression, and may have been much less so than we think even before that. Perhaps the small towns of the American frontier and the less prosperous farming communities of an older America did shrink to the point where very nearly the only books to be had were Shakespeare and the Bible (with illustrations). But the prototypical yeomen of the early nineteenth-century towns along the Erie Canal were intellectually curious folk who brought small libraries with them and maintained a market for the most heterodox of philosophical and religious tracts. (Neo-Platonism thrived in western New York circa eighteen-thirty.)
So even though we feel that folk art modeled after the Old Masters, such as Lorenzo Scott’s rather wonderful Baptisms in the Jordan, must surely be the outcome of visits to a city art museum (as Scott frequented Atlanta’s High Museum of Art), there were many other sources of transmission available, much earlier on than we think.
While I am on the topic of interconnections, the events in Blacksburg have left me with another sense of how “we are all members one of another” in more than the sentimental sense: The man shot down while teaching the German class was the son of the science fiction writer Michael Bishop, who teaches down the interstate at LaGrange College and lives in Pine Mountain, thus illustrating once again the link between a once-isolated smalltown America and, in this case, the world of speculative fiction. (I have written about Michael Bishop previously on this blog.)
It illustrates, too, the curious mix of global and local concerns that bring, in this case, an internationally minded son of a well-known writer to a tragic end in a small town that has long been more of a hotbed of the avant-garde than has ever been generally known. (Ray Kass’ Mountain Lake symposia brought John Cage to the region on a regular basis, and the rest of the story of how the world found its way to western Virginia would take too long to recount here. Thus did Nikki Giovanni and Suzy Gablik find their way thither, and Lucinda Roy, the now well-known professor from Sierra Leone who did so much to attempt to save that unfortunate Korean-American from his self-selected fate.)
As an utterly unrelated note in the globalization department, I just realized that Joe Bageant, eloquent defender of the despised and dumped-on working class of smalltown America, recently decamped from the decidedly less intellectual surroundings of another part of the Valley of Virginia to go live in Belize. And a longtime friend (and coincidentally a folk art scholar) has been curator of the Art Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke for a decade now, so I felt the Blacksburg story with a particularly stunned intimacy as life in a multi-layered corner of the country turned out to have even more layers than we had suspected.
Picking up an advance copy of Gene Logsdon’s The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse reminds me that growing up semi-rural myself, I realized early on that the “rural isolates” to whom I refer in the folk-art post have rarely existed. I wrote in “Vernacular Art in the Age of Globalization” (one version in Art Papers, a differently focused version in volume one of the two-volume survey Souls Grown Deep) about the extent to which the world found its way into most rural homes in the long-ago twentieth century; National Geographic was a pre-World War II staple even in Florida farm families’ attics, and we have ample examples of the walls of presumptive semi-literates or illiterates being lined with the pages of photo-laden magazines that were arranged as art, not just as insulation.
So the Fra Angelico pictures in the issue of Life or Saturday Evening Post I lovingly saved at age ten may have found their way further afield than I thought at the time. The town’s cultural horizons were cramped and limited, but I reflected some decades later on how the thirty-five cent paperback had brought edited versions of The World’s Great Philosophers to drugstore racks. (Although niche magazines still bring unexpectedly specialized information to downscale markets, books are now much more likely to cater to the already established tastes of the venue’s probable buyers, as a walk round any big-box discounter will reveal.) Pictures were another matter, the small paperback format not being conducive to adequate reproduction, and big volumes being, then as now, mostly available as middle-class Christmas gifts.
The point is that folk art, vernacular art, what have you, is so often presented as the work of genuine isolates stuck in the middle of nowhere with no way of even knowing who Picasso was, much less that their drawings resemble mid-career Picasso. This imagined total isolation was not so by the waning days of the Great Depression, and may have been much less so than we think even before that. Perhaps the small towns of the American frontier and the less prosperous farming communities of an older America did shrink to the point where very nearly the only books to be had were Shakespeare and the Bible (with illustrations). But the prototypical yeomen of the early nineteenth-century towns along the Erie Canal were intellectually curious folk who brought small libraries with them and maintained a market for the most heterodox of philosophical and religious tracts. (Neo-Platonism thrived in western New York circa eighteen-thirty.)
So even though we feel that folk art modeled after the Old Masters, such as Lorenzo Scott’s rather wonderful Baptisms in the Jordan, must surely be the outcome of visits to a city art museum (as Scott frequented Atlanta’s High Museum of Art), there were many other sources of transmission available, much earlier on than we think.
While I am on the topic of interconnections, the events in Blacksburg have left me with another sense of how “we are all members one of another” in more than the sentimental sense: The man shot down while teaching the German class was the son of the science fiction writer Michael Bishop, who teaches down the interstate at LaGrange College and lives in Pine Mountain, thus illustrating once again the link between a once-isolated smalltown America and, in this case, the world of speculative fiction. (I have written about Michael Bishop previously on this blog.)
It illustrates, too, the curious mix of global and local concerns that bring, in this case, an internationally minded son of a well-known writer to a tragic end in a small town that has long been more of a hotbed of the avant-garde than has ever been generally known. (Ray Kass’ Mountain Lake symposia brought John Cage to the region on a regular basis, and the rest of the story of how the world found its way to western Virginia would take too long to recount here. Thus did Nikki Giovanni and Suzy Gablik find their way thither, and Lucinda Roy, the now well-known professor from Sierra Leone who did so much to attempt to save that unfortunate Korean-American from his self-selected fate.)
As an utterly unrelated note in the globalization department, I just realized that Joe Bageant, eloquent defender of the despised and dumped-on working class of smalltown America, recently decamped from the decidedly less intellectual surroundings of another part of the Valley of Virginia to go live in Belize. And a longtime friend (and coincidentally a folk art scholar) has been curator of the Art Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke for a decade now, so I felt the Blacksburg story with a particularly stunned intimacy as life in a multi-layered corner of the country turned out to have even more layers than we had suspected.
