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I see I am repeating topics with increasing regularity; the review of Darcey Steinke's memoir in yesterday's New York Times magazine reminded me of William Rutherfoord's painting of her, which I discussed in the December 15 post about synchronicity. There is nothing synchronous about this event except the Roanoke connection (Rutherfoord lives in Roanoke), and that is too minor to be worth mentioning.
I have rather more major methodological work to do on the topic, but not today. The systematically outrageous Jeffrey Kripal has raised the subject as a phenomenon deserving of serious analysis, but of course he has done so in ways guaranteed to make certain that his suggestions will not be taken seriously.
My remarks on self-taught art dealt with a problem which is mostly one of nomenclature and categorization. Many mainstream artists are self-taught, and have come to complete insider positions via unorthodox methods of education; many outsider artists were in art school before events overtook them that sent them off in idiosyncratic directions; folks living in the countryside were never as completely cut off from big-city dialogues as the romantics among folk-art scholars like to claim; and as I put it with regard to immense back-yard sculptural environments, "Some guys like to make stuff." And some of them make twenty-foot-tall dinosaur sculptures out of old auto parts instead of building a boat in the garage. The issue is where they fit in the acknowledged world of stuff-makers. They might be making kitsch or they might be making interstitial art or they might be making obsessive objects that should not be called "art," but everyone agrees that the stuff is there. We just don't know what to call them or whether they all belong in the same category.
It is much more troubling with events seem to happen in which a community believes but the outside observer does not, or worse, when events seem to happen that fit into models of the world in which the person experiencing them is not inclined to believe. There, the issue is whether anything happened at alll, or whether what happened was perceived incorrectly by the person having the experience, or whether events actually happen for which there are no explanations that fit any acceptable model. ("Where there is a new experience, there a new science must arise," Edmund Husserl supposedly said, or the German equivalent of that sentence. But his phenomenology is scarcely considered a valid Wissenschaft these days by many folks in the university, and just what the heck an "experience" is, is what is up for discussion. So there is a lot more to write, someday, by someone, in spite of the thousands of words I have already expended on this topic.)
I have rather more major methodological work to do on the topic, but not today. The systematically outrageous Jeffrey Kripal has raised the subject as a phenomenon deserving of serious analysis, but of course he has done so in ways guaranteed to make certain that his suggestions will not be taken seriously.
My remarks on self-taught art dealt with a problem which is mostly one of nomenclature and categorization. Many mainstream artists are self-taught, and have come to complete insider positions via unorthodox methods of education; many outsider artists were in art school before events overtook them that sent them off in idiosyncratic directions; folks living in the countryside were never as completely cut off from big-city dialogues as the romantics among folk-art scholars like to claim; and as I put it with regard to immense back-yard sculptural environments, "Some guys like to make stuff." And some of them make twenty-foot-tall dinosaur sculptures out of old auto parts instead of building a boat in the garage. The issue is where they fit in the acknowledged world of stuff-makers. They might be making kitsch or they might be making interstitial art or they might be making obsessive objects that should not be called "art," but everyone agrees that the stuff is there. We just don't know what to call them or whether they all belong in the same category.
It is much more troubling with events seem to happen in which a community believes but the outside observer does not, or worse, when events seem to happen that fit into models of the world in which the person experiencing them is not inclined to believe. There, the issue is whether anything happened at alll, or whether what happened was perceived incorrectly by the person having the experience, or whether events actually happen for which there are no explanations that fit any acceptable model. ("Where there is a new experience, there a new science must arise," Edmund Husserl supposedly said, or the German equivalent of that sentence. But his phenomenology is scarcely considered a valid Wissenschaft these days by many folks in the university, and just what the heck an "experience" is, is what is up for discussion. So there is a lot more to write, someday, by someone, in spite of the thousands of words I have already expended on this topic.)
