![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The death of Vollis Simpson at age 94 has got me thinking again about the “culture” end of the nature-culture spectrum with regard to the motives and generating circumstances of visionary folk art. I used to incorporate my interest in the genre into my fascination with hybridity in culture...the notion that the most illuminating cultures are the ones somewhat out of the mainstream, along the borders and places of migration where disparate cultures collide, collude, and contest territory in situations where neither side can become dominant even when one side ends up controlling the government.
A quick look back at a book like John Beardsley’s Gardens of Revelation disconfirms that theory of hybridity as a primary motivating factor, though I still think it is a major one. Some territories are just too physically difficult to allow for much time for visionary artmaking, though even the Dakotas have some sites—but the more clement agricultural and industrial conditions of, say, Wisconsin or the very different physical and cultural situation of coastal California seem to have allowed the impulse to flourish rather than crop up infrequently. Why so much of the South has been so hospitable to the making of visionary folk art is a topic of so much debate that I can’t go into why most of the debate seems misconceived....I do think that family and community circumstances, combined with the conditions of culture at a specific historical moment, should be looked at more closely and analytically than they frequently have been.
It is vaguely suggestive that Howard Finster had his “paint sacred art” revelation not when he was in the throes of delivering the Christian message to a congregation (who were later more likely to comment on the color of his tie than the content of his sermon), but in the contemplative situation of figuring out how to fix a bicycle—a situation in which a set of physical routines allowed other parts of the imagination to flourish unconstrained; thus the openness for which contemplative spirituality yearns worldwide was facilitated by quite secular means.
This is not a reductionist argument—it’s a suggestion that neuroscience allows us to understand the underpinnings of an inner condition that is not only rarely attained by most bicycle repairmen, it is seldom attained by most practitioners of the contemplative life. Michael Murphy wrote Golf in the Kingdom (a book I have never found it necessary to read) to demonstrate that secular (“profane.” in the old sacred-profane polarity) physical activities can create the same types of bodily transformations that religious activities do—and thus Tom Altizer’s intuition that the profane could be a channel to the sacred turns out to have a physiological underpinning despite his infatuation with the highfalutin’ rhetorical flourishes of Blake and Nietzsche and Nagarjuna.
Vollis Simpson wasn’t, as far as I know, a visionary, just a tinkerer who figured out how to use simple and not-so-simple mechanical principles to create works of art that incorporated representations of such emotion-arousing objects as jet airplanes. R. A. Miller used the same principles to create simple whirligigs that operated similarly to Simpson’s, minus the additional gears and pulleys that made Simpson's whirligigs monumental feats of engineering. But Miller, like Finster, also created drawings that were visualizations of Christian theology suitable to his role as lay preacher. Miller had no difficulty juxtaposing dinosaurs from PBS with the seven-headed dragon of the Book of Revelation, any more than Finster did in combining his fundamentalist Christianity with spaceships and multiple inhabited planets as intermediaries between Earth and the Realms of Glory. Both men had a fascination with American history and American technology as well, reinterpreting and reinventing what was given to them by the mass media. (Even so do present-day consumers of mass culture create remixes, fanfic, and other phenomena disseminated via the Internet instead of set up by the roadside to catch the eye of passing drivers.)
About mainstream reactions to those hybrid cultures, which encourage or at least tolerate such singular yet structurally similar eccentricities: Governments, academicians' theories, and political movements are enamored of simplified, synthesized cultural expressions, no matter how much they have to trim and combine to come up with the kind of folksy authenticity they like. I still want to write an essay about various historical expressions of this tendency, especially the ones that have been forgotten or misunderstood from the beginning: e.g., Mussolini’s attempt to invent a synthetic generalized “Italian culture” that would meld the surface features of Rome and the Renaissance into a civiltá that would justify the conquest of lesser cultures for their own benefit, bringing the natives civilized architecture and superior ways of making coffee in exchange for their yielding the best farmland to displaced Italian peasants to be moved into planned agricultural communities in Libya or Ethiopia.
At that point we have gotten a very long way away from visionary folk art, but not from the major concerns of this journal, which I am trying once more to explain to my readers, one or two subtopics at a time.
Thus far in this latest attempt at making sense of why I write all this stuff, we have seen (or I have, anyway) how the necessity for a revised, more sophisticated notion of interdisciplinary research fits into the revised understanding of the old, misleading dichotomies some of us were taught in college, such as sacred-profane, nature-culture, reason-emotion, and on and on. The dialectic or conversation between apparent polarities is always more of a hybridized continuum, and you can demonstrate the truth of that hypothesis by starting from Vollis Simpson or a vast variety of other topics that seem to have nothing at all in common.
This does not mean that the assorted topics are all "the same thing under the outward appearances." They aren’t, and it is the differences that make all the difference. But we also need to contemplate the similarities and see where those similarities take us in terms of the interconnections among apparently disparate phenomena. This has to be done without falling prey to fantasies based on superficial resemblances, and there are reasons why it is hard to keep from falling into such interpretive fallacies. So we have to learn how to guard against them.
So there. I have spoken, or written, to be more exact about it.
A quick look back at a book like John Beardsley’s Gardens of Revelation disconfirms that theory of hybridity as a primary motivating factor, though I still think it is a major one. Some territories are just too physically difficult to allow for much time for visionary artmaking, though even the Dakotas have some sites—but the more clement agricultural and industrial conditions of, say, Wisconsin or the very different physical and cultural situation of coastal California seem to have allowed the impulse to flourish rather than crop up infrequently. Why so much of the South has been so hospitable to the making of visionary folk art is a topic of so much debate that I can’t go into why most of the debate seems misconceived....I do think that family and community circumstances, combined with the conditions of culture at a specific historical moment, should be looked at more closely and analytically than they frequently have been.
It is vaguely suggestive that Howard Finster had his “paint sacred art” revelation not when he was in the throes of delivering the Christian message to a congregation (who were later more likely to comment on the color of his tie than the content of his sermon), but in the contemplative situation of figuring out how to fix a bicycle—a situation in which a set of physical routines allowed other parts of the imagination to flourish unconstrained; thus the openness for which contemplative spirituality yearns worldwide was facilitated by quite secular means.
This is not a reductionist argument—it’s a suggestion that neuroscience allows us to understand the underpinnings of an inner condition that is not only rarely attained by most bicycle repairmen, it is seldom attained by most practitioners of the contemplative life. Michael Murphy wrote Golf in the Kingdom (a book I have never found it necessary to read) to demonstrate that secular (“profane.” in the old sacred-profane polarity) physical activities can create the same types of bodily transformations that religious activities do—and thus Tom Altizer’s intuition that the profane could be a channel to the sacred turns out to have a physiological underpinning despite his infatuation with the highfalutin’ rhetorical flourishes of Blake and Nietzsche and Nagarjuna.
Vollis Simpson wasn’t, as far as I know, a visionary, just a tinkerer who figured out how to use simple and not-so-simple mechanical principles to create works of art that incorporated representations of such emotion-arousing objects as jet airplanes. R. A. Miller used the same principles to create simple whirligigs that operated similarly to Simpson’s, minus the additional gears and pulleys that made Simpson's whirligigs monumental feats of engineering. But Miller, like Finster, also created drawings that were visualizations of Christian theology suitable to his role as lay preacher. Miller had no difficulty juxtaposing dinosaurs from PBS with the seven-headed dragon of the Book of Revelation, any more than Finster did in combining his fundamentalist Christianity with spaceships and multiple inhabited planets as intermediaries between Earth and the Realms of Glory. Both men had a fascination with American history and American technology as well, reinterpreting and reinventing what was given to them by the mass media. (Even so do present-day consumers of mass culture create remixes, fanfic, and other phenomena disseminated via the Internet instead of set up by the roadside to catch the eye of passing drivers.)
About mainstream reactions to those hybrid cultures, which encourage or at least tolerate such singular yet structurally similar eccentricities: Governments, academicians' theories, and political movements are enamored of simplified, synthesized cultural expressions, no matter how much they have to trim and combine to come up with the kind of folksy authenticity they like. I still want to write an essay about various historical expressions of this tendency, especially the ones that have been forgotten or misunderstood from the beginning: e.g., Mussolini’s attempt to invent a synthetic generalized “Italian culture” that would meld the surface features of Rome and the Renaissance into a civiltá that would justify the conquest of lesser cultures for their own benefit, bringing the natives civilized architecture and superior ways of making coffee in exchange for their yielding the best farmland to displaced Italian peasants to be moved into planned agricultural communities in Libya or Ethiopia.
At that point we have gotten a very long way away from visionary folk art, but not from the major concerns of this journal, which I am trying once more to explain to my readers, one or two subtopics at a time.
Thus far in this latest attempt at making sense of why I write all this stuff, we have seen (or I have, anyway) how the necessity for a revised, more sophisticated notion of interdisciplinary research fits into the revised understanding of the old, misleading dichotomies some of us were taught in college, such as sacred-profane, nature-culture, reason-emotion, and on and on. The dialectic or conversation between apparent polarities is always more of a hybridized continuum, and you can demonstrate the truth of that hypothesis by starting from Vollis Simpson or a vast variety of other topics that seem to have nothing at all in common.
This does not mean that the assorted topics are all "the same thing under the outward appearances." They aren’t, and it is the differences that make all the difference. But we also need to contemplate the similarities and see where those similarities take us in terms of the interconnections among apparently disparate phenomena. This has to be done without falling prey to fantasies based on superficial resemblances, and there are reasons why it is hard to keep from falling into such interpretive fallacies. So we have to learn how to guard against them.
So there. I have spoken, or written, to be more exact about it.
