Cavin-Morris Gallery

Darker Stars

2012-01-06T17:34:00.000-05:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DarkerStars—The Roots of Steampunk Art

January26 – February 25, 2012

The whole idea of Steampunk is revisionist..... its process is to look back on

certain threads  of history and reweave them into the present and future.  There

are no rules.  A literary precedent has been set with Edgar Allan Poe and Jules

Verne up through Lovecraft and Sterling but as that literary history has darkened

and brought in more decadent elements it is common now to include J.K. Huysmans

and his ilk for their embrace of the phantasmal and of artifice as weapons against

bourgeois complacency.  Though there is a Steampunk or Steamgoth literary lineage

the same isn't true of its Art.  There have indeed been Contemporary Steampunk

art exhibitions but none working back through history.  As I mentioned, there are

no rules and so, with this exhibition and several to follow, Cavin-Morris Gallery

is going to explore alternative revisionism and establish some Old Masters in the

historical lineage of what has become known as Steampunk Art.

Despite the twin sisters of poverty or depression, it was ahand-me-down from Victorian times to feel that, with the right machine, theright invention, the right harnessing of one of Nature’s energies (usuallyhaving to do with electromagnetism or electricity or steam), one could be richand a world savior to boot. The Inventor was a god. The role models were people like ThomasEdison and Nicholas Tesla. Inventing could push the outer limits ofindividual opportunity. One could be rich, famous, and in control ofone’s destiny. It is thisfeeling of do it yourself unlimited opportunity that the Steampunk andSteamgoth communities draw upon.

But the mind does not automatically draw within thelines. The fantasy world Jules Verne imagined was shared byothers. Charles Dellschau’s Flying Machines were not a literarydevice. They represented the hopes and dreams of someone who completelybelieved in their existence. Dellschau becomes the center of thisexhibition because of his fixation on airships and flying, he is the epitome ofwhat Steampunk design is all about. But he wasn’t looking backward. He was looking into his present and forward.

Melvin Edward Nelson was another for whom the magazine, Popular Mechanics, was a Bible. Forhim the machine had a different spin and fed a visionary hunger. He wasphysically in tune with astral geology and the ability of the human mind toreceive cosmic information--the very voices of planets being born, of thehealing energy of interplanetary light emanations. He took Dellschau outfurther from the skyways of earth into the planetary airways. He designedand built machines that would harness universal energy; the mind and body wouldfuse and see first hand the awesome births and deaths of planets and stars anduse this experience for healing, and he would be the inventor who made itpossible.

Emery Blagdon grew up with the same belief of the inventor as God. If properly tuned and psychically aimed, a machine could prevent disease orheal the ill. He knew he was intuitive. He could invent and buildthe machines but he couldn’t necessarily explain how they worked. Thatwas the work for scientists. Meanwhile he could channel energy through theHealing Machines and put them to work on an earth that was suffering. Althoughhis goal was a positive one, it was still infused with poignancy in hisrecognition of the dark side of Nature and Her legacy of Disease andDeath. Electromagnetism could be recycled through the machines to counterthese curses.

The Victorian times were also an era of exploration of the occult;of mediums and visionary voyages, of the embrace of mental depression as aroute of survival and a sign of creative intensity. In A Rebours,by Joris-Karl Huysmans, the main character, Jean Des Esseintes, builds amechanical fish to float in a false sea to replace Nature’s more riskyversion. Some in the Victorian world, in opposition to bourgeoiscomplacency, held a need for individual freedom of expression close to anarchy. Religion was also potentially a path to darker visionary worlds. InHenry Darger’s struggle with the blood, and complete immersion demanded byCatholicism, he used Prussian soldiers and huge explosions as forces that bothprotected and threatened the world. War became the ultimate world ofadulthood, both attractive and terrifying. Darger’s vision is a bridge tothe Goth viewpoint in its dance on the edge of cruelty.

If there ever is a revisionist timeline of Steampunk andSteamgoth Art then the names Charles Dellschau, Melvin Edward Nelson, EmeryBlagdon, and Henry Darger, certainly should be recorded as some of the naturalself-taught progenitors.

This first exhibition examines artists who are self-taught and forwhom there is little differentiation between their lives and their artwork. Theart itself was really life process. The second show in this series will presentworks by both trained and untrained artists dealing with the same subjectmatter.

Also shown will be Zbynek Semerak, Leos Wertheimer, and SandraSheehy.

For further information, please contact Shari Cavin, Mimi Kano, orRandall Morris at 212 226-3768, or e: info@Cavinmorris.com.

Jerry Bleem in The Unexpected Edge: Yugen in Contemporary Art

2011-11-20T17:24:00.001-05:00

JERRY BLEEM

Jerry Bleem's sculptures were a perfect doorway for us in learning to erase the differences created by the mainstream between trained and untrained artists. Obsessively made they occupy a space that few artists come close to. There is a male presence to them that is alpha and plainspoken. It was also Bleem and a few other artists that guided us toward the fact that though we respected traditional forms and the precise beauty of the conservative process; what we really wanted in the gallery was the creative edge; the iconoclasts, the artists whose work had that indefinable presence yugen begins to describe.

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Cavin-Morris is pleased to welcome to the gallery Herbert Freeman and Franck Kakussuamesso) Lundangi. Mr. Freeman is from Orlando, Florida, and Mr. Lundangi was born in Angola and now lives in France.

Herbert Freeman has created a series of portraits using found materials and ink. He brings to each image a combination of verisimilitude and mythology so that each person is both individual and icon.

Franck Lundangi paintings always combine man, nature, and spirituality, the balance of focus shifting from painting to painting. His delicate lines wind around bold shapes and strong color.

We invite you to visit the gallery and see the work by Freeman and Lundangi first-hand.

Visiting Wilfred Francis

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He lives on the edge of a Kingston ghetto. Not the worst Kingston ghetto by any means but non-the-less a ghetto. A place where survival doesn't reveal its secrets voluntarily. But he has found ways to survive.
We park and four youths are playing dominoes standing up. Noisily. To our right is a deep concrete moat covered on the bottom with a slight greasing of grey green water and trash of all sorts. It is a mess with signal. A message that says we really aren't hoping for anything very much here.
A low building is divided into many rooms almost like a motel but with entrances and gates. This is where Wilfred Francis lives. A man wearing only shorts nods to us that the artist will be out in a moment. He was quicker than that. I had been expecting an older man. I had been expecting someone who was said to be sick but the man in front of me was a spry spirit much less decrepit than I am.
I had first seen his work in the Intuitives lll exhibition curated by David Boxer at the National Gallery. I was very impressed seeing some connection in his earliest black and white drawings with Chelo Amezcua and a dash of Lee Godie. Lee Godie with horror vacuii. But the work was expensive even back then and I was worried about the fact that they had been done in magic marker. For some reason I didn't look at the dates, I didn't look closely and it didn't occur to me that he had done amazing things using texture and shading with those markers.
He says that now he is a pure Rastafarian. There is little in the work to give the nod to this other than the predominant colors of red gold and green. He has told my friend Herman in the past that he was a kaballist. And he is also a Seventh Day Adventist. I put all this aside as I examined the work that covered the sitting room inside the entrance, behind the room where piles of rice and sugar and other small groceries were meticulously divided into plastic bags and that he sold to the neighborhood through a small window. While we were there a boy purchased a small candy. He also sells single cigarettes. His earliest work according to Herman who was given a tantalizing glimpse of it was geometric with a lot of interwoven circles. Somehow these now have become the brims of the hats the women wear in the drawings.
The Jamaican self-taught artists are not long on romantic sensuality in their artwork. Zacchareus Powell and a few who sell phallic carvings along the roadside are the few exceptions. Jah Morris has carved some beautiful nudes that are exemplary in their graphic delicacy. Though Francis has made nudes, erotic and unselfconsciously exotic in their beckoning, it is his clothed beings that are truly sensual. They are less touchable than his nudes. They seem to be from another age somewhere in between Victorian and flapper. Faces hidden by their beautifully drawn hats, their hair drawn meticulously and obsessively they move through vision, almost opiate, they move through worlds of slowed motion, unexplainable visionary things happen behind them, conversations not heard, a hint of violence here and there almost like illuminated Ethiopian manuscripts. They are like following the meandering improvisations of a low saxophone through a jazz age that never really was, still with one foot in the church and the other in a huge secular world of history and travel.

Wilfred Francis at 83

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Herman is the bearded gentleman on the left.

Wilfred Francis Studio

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Wilfred Francis in a Private Collection

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These were shot at an angle so sorry about the skewed perspective.

My Summer Vacation final Installation

2007-08-10T13:14:00.001-04:00

Here is the last part: I will put up some individual photos of artworks next week: Enjoy!

It was a yam roast of a day when we left to go southwest a bit from Port Maria to visit Lloyd Atherton. The last time I had seen him was on a similarly sun-drenched day last summer and I had been very excited by what I had seen that day but was so distracted by the politics of trying to save our Jamaican show in the artworld that I felt I hadn't paid enough attention. Although he is a second generation carver Lloyd has marked out a distinctly different place for himself in the art world that seems to be more connected to the bush than his father. But even more significantly for me, I feel Lloyd's yard is a direct tie-in with the yard shows of the Southern United States.

Lloyd Atherton wastes no time pulling you into his visions. You cannot go into his yard without first crossing a stone laid into the ground at the gate marked with warding calligraphy. The gate itself is strikingly painted in black with punched out symbols and others created by laying on red tape. Crosses, numbers and any number of kalunga signs, circles with crosses are everywhere. On the gate is painted the words Dred Love (He is not a rasta though he does have neck-length locks, glyphs, and seals placed all around the yard with various types of offerings and arrangements on them. Much of his iconography and personal sense of writing recurs enough that future visits will be needed to focus on them and come up with some way of interpretation. There is nothing accidental or random in this yard.

We waited outside the gate for him and then there he was striding toward us looking like a lion in his kingdom from the Burning Spear song. Muscular, full bearded with just the beginnings of white showing through here and there, a cord around his neck with two mule teeth on it, plaid shorts worn well beneath his lean belly, blue plastic sandals and a big cautious grin. Had to keep telling myself that with his father passing in the last two weeks his life was in the midst of many changes.
"Did you see that?" He pointed up into the large tree that nearly abutted his gate. I looked up and there was a human figure hanging by the neck wearing a turban and an oversized shirt. Next to it in classic Yardshow 101 style dangled a truck tire slowly turning in a delicious breeze. We hadn’t even gotten inside the gate yet! The figure seemed to be fully carved under the clothes. He chuckled softly as he saw my surprise. “What do you call it?” I asked, cringing as the words left my mouth knowing I was going to get one of those expected and totally understated answers. “Oh, “ he said, “It’s a scarey crow.”

Of course it was more than that. Don’t fool yourself for a second. It isn’t like we were standing in a cornfield waiting for a murder of crows to swoop in picking off the crops. This was St. Mary, a parish known for its higher percentages of Revival Zion, Pukkumina, Convince, Maroons, balmyards, and some Kumina. There could be no mistake about the constant and never-ending presence of double valenced meanings here. In many ways this was a new beginning for us in initiating dialogue with Lloyd Atherton. His father had been buried three days before, the nine-night and other ceremonies performed to release and free the old man’s spirit were over and suddenly Lloyd was the one of the five Atherton sons who seemed to hold the old man’s legacy of herbs, power carvings and spirituality. In fact his knickname is ‘Powah”.

There was that feeling of beneficent tingling again as I realized that once again I had stepped into a place unlike any other known place on this island. Not even close to art for art's sake but art made for its original meanings and from an intentionality formed by culture and iconoclasm because it wasn't dictated by any sort of immediate traditional form. Yet it reached out in the world. Yet it connected with those yards in other places. For me this is the quintessence of what I mean by homeground. Some might call it the racial unconscious but to me it is very conscious in the sense of awareness and wakefulness. The spring that feeds creativity here is thousands of years old and is not dictated by materials or fashion but rather by deep interwoven genealogical needs and human hardwiring. The hand that puts the yard together is the artists and the creative talent that shapes the space is the artists and the language he speaks is his cultures. And when it is bigger than or more special than the ordinary we call it art.
As Paul Arnett says in Souls Run Deep there are many quiet yardshows as well. Lloyd Atherton’s yard is not quiet.

In fact Jamaica is not a quiet culture. Earlier in the day I stopped off to finally see if it was cowfoot day at the restaurant and Wayne went off to get a machine part and I stood waiting for him on the main street in Port Maria. It is a small town. But if I closed my eyes the place was a wave of sound. I could listen to it like musique concrete. Not so much traffic sounds but human. Arguments, laughter, children, higglers calling, jitneys calling for passengers, wandering merchants selling batteries and plastic bags of juice, men and women flirting, the babble of madmen and madwomen. Noisy and very much alive. And so it isn’t such a surprise to me that the spirit world reciprocates and echoes this noise with its constant presence on other planes. It is languages’ life without or beyond the written word. Mankind is always in a boisterous dialog with the ancestors. Word sounds have power.

As we walked past the gate into Lloyd’s yard for a few moments I thought that I was actually seeing the spirits and hearing the sharp tiny buzz of their barely articulate voices. They were all around me and I could feel the wind of their passing against my neck and face.
Then Wayne said ‘bees’ and Lloyd said ‘bees’ and pointed over to the corner of the small yard where he had two hives both painted with symbols and faces. “Don’t wave your arms around.” And I’m thinking to myself little cynical thoughts like ok ok if it were too easy you’d be suspicious…there is always going to be something that reminds you of your human condition whether it’s the heat or mud or mosquitos etc. The bees were everywhere and I do have to say they animated the landscape in such a way that nothing was static. I cut back my artworld propensity towards grand sweeping gestures and joydancing.

Lloyd is the son most like his father yet very different as well. There are two other carvers. One is Raphael and I have not yet seen his work. He lives in Connecticut and was a policeman and somehow I just don’t think his work will be like Lloyds’ or his fathers. Then there is another brother who carves: Leroy. But Leroy is a carpenter he is more out in the world getting jobs and he is not a bush doctor like his father or Lloyd. His carvings don’t have the variety or intensity of the other two. His yard itself is more circumspect.

You walk through Lloyd’s gate and you are immediately immersed in spirit languages and spirit writing and iconography. It is tacked to the trees and painted on the buildings and scattered on the ground. I wouldn’t swear to the fact that Lloyd is literate but he has a very finely tuned in sense of the iconic power of inherent in the word sign. His shack is splashed with words, pieces of zinc are painted with what he says are the watchful faces of ancestors making sure the yard is under cosmic scrutiny.

There are certainly larger and more elaborate yard shows than Lloyd Athertons’. But the intimacy of the space has the effect of making the whole thing seem more shrinelike even though he lives in a small elevated shack about eight or nine feet square. The first thing you se when you get in, after you reach mental equlibrium from the bees, is a loose almost basketlike structure where he keeps a group of his larger carvings willy nilly mostly open to the elements and insects. I was instantly reminded of the Yupik masks or the Zuni War Gods slowly returning to the earth.

I peered out between the bees and forced myself to slow down and contain my excitement so I wouldn’t miss anything. I of course felt a buzz that went way beyond the teeming apiary. My disappointments about the Jamaican exhibition falling through were gone and one year later I could see things much more clearly.

Lloyd was excited we were there and Wayne and I both picked up a new openness to our presence in him. It wasn’t so much about the selling of carvings and because of his father’s presence in our book Redemption Songs and the mention of it at the funeral. He seemed to have just as much need to tell us things as we needed to hear it. Later on Wayne and I agreed that it seemed he was taking his role as his fathers’ successor and cultural gatekeeper very seriously.

On atable off to the side were an altar-like arrangement of plants, bottles with liquids in them, a mesh basket covered with one of his fathers sculptures. In a few words Lloyd opened a major discourse about Jamaican religion and about the intentionality behind his work and his father’s work. He called his fathers sculpture a seal. Bang! And he called the table a Bongo table thus situating himself firmly in Convince or Kumina tradition. Bongo is Kongo influenced. I don’t want to get into it more till I thoroughly research the implications of his use of the word Bongo. But him calling the sculpture a seal answered volumes on why and what he and his father carve. Seals are spiritually enhanced offerings that beckon and invite the spirits in. We had known that Atherton senior considered his pieces attraction and repelling devices for spirits but calling them seals placed them in a Jamaican perspective and added depth to those words. It also opened up discourse on other carvers and this absolutely New World manifestation of older forms.

I am still deciphering and weighing the experience of Lloyd Atherton’s yard in my head but will end this for now and put some of the pictures up. Any organization interested in a groundbreaking and neverbeforeseen exhibition of Jamaican work in this country (there is much more material now since the Diggs exhibition) can contact me at Mysteries@aol.com. These few artists I hve briefly mentioned are only several of many for several generations back. This is American art and an important part of our understanding of the African Diaspora. It is time that serious attention be paid to it.

Thanks for reading thus far.

2007-08-10T13:11:00.001-04:00

Bongo Table with Vincent Atherton Seal

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Lloyd and the Other

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LLoyd Atherton

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Altar-like contruction

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Seals by LLoyds' Father Vincent

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figure on the trees

2007-08-10T12:31:00.001-04:00

Lloyd Atherton: the Gatestone and Entrance

2007-08-10T12:23:00.000-04:00

My Summer Vacation Part 3

2007-08-06T14:58:00.000-04:00

I think we need to be careful of something as we orchestrate the architectural music of the field’s defining infrastructure. Especially when we throw around words like ‘authenticity’. We have seemingly agreed on the idea that self-taught has come to mean certain things. We have even come to see that in terms of being self-taught in our field self-taught itself isn’t enough. So we have finessed that to mean the work is not intentionally made as the handmaiden in any way to serve the purposes of the art world. It is not made to reflect upon art history itself it is not concerned with academic issues. But beyond this point there really isn’t much else etched in stone.

My own contention has been that there are three generalized areas to the field: Art Brut, indigenous Drawing and Sculpture, and what has come to be called Neuve Unvention or Fresh Invention. Of course there are going to be hazy areas as well s areas of overlap. And only the three areas regarded together make up what we call the field. Any one of these three areas taken alone is just not enough. If the barriers or borderlines or parameters between the three fall away, they must all fall away together.

Making work for the marketplace as a concept confuses the field. In Art Brut it is pretty much anathema to the concept of so-clled purity and invites suspicion. Even the so-called ‘bread’ pictures of Wolfli’s seem to take on an automatically lesser status in the art world because he sold from the. I find this ridiculous. It is mostly true that art brut rtists make work in solipsistic havens of creativity. The work is a process fo self-development and self-healing and not a means of commercial sustenance. It is not uncommon to hear people question the artists commercial intent in making an assessment of their authenticity.

I feel these vlues change markedly in looking at the other two categories. Much of the work of self-taught artists in every area of the world is made by poor people, by lower middle-class people and by people ho might not even show up in the class system at all. By sufferers fighting uphill during an avalanche of disadvantage. In the case of Neuve Invention, an area created by Dubuffet for self-taught artists maintaining more sophistication or contact with ‘high’ culture than ion the other two categories, commercial involvement with their own work can be a more frequent occurrence, often happening simply because they are younger, they re ‘discovered’ younger, and they don’t have a lifetimes’ backlog of work like the older artists and also because they are younger an alive and therefore continuing to make work after ‘discovery’ by the artworld.

Wayne and I had a game with this. We gave and took away points to each artist depending on the way some people in the field would perceive their ‘levels of purity’.
McKenzie for example lost ten points for having a digicell phone but quickly regained it when it became clear he didn’t have the electricity to recharge it. Vincent Atherton had a hundred points because he rode a donkey to work. Kevin Sampson lost three hundred points because he used a computer. Etc. Etc.

The work that I include under the aegis of Indigenous Drawing and Sculpture comes to commerce in an entirely different way than Art Brut. The market is a cultural phenomenon in this category, often enough. It is often rooted in that spiritual homeground; the individual working within community and the information and affect of the community on the individual. In these communities the market place is as much a part of every day survival as anything else. Art is not a privileged act of leisure. It is as natural as making a High Table of spirit seals or cooking a stew. If it becomes a means of engendering financial gain it is a positive action. Just because it is visible at the roadside along with the commercial carved Rasta heads does not make it a sell-out. This is why Atherton’s family remembered him as a Carver. It was one of the many things he was.

When I first got to the island on this trip and took the shuttle to meet Wayne and Myrene I passed the roadside yard of Sylvester Stephens and it looked lush and filled with sculpture. Was funny passing it without stopping. It let me see it as through the eyes of hundreds who pass it everyday on the main road between Montego Bay and Negril; the heartland of the all inclusive hotel belt on the North Coast of Jamaica.

It’s not a transparent place, the yard of this spiritualist who seems always a little flummoxed by the why people don’t just leap out of their cars and buy his meaning laden low fired ceramics for their gardens and patios. Wayne, Myrene and I came back a few days later on a day that made asphalt into soup on our way to their house in Port Maria. It was my first time back to visit Sylvester in several years ut he greeted me as if he has seen me the day before. His yard was magical as ever.

It is still going to take me a long while to even partially unpack the uniqueness of this mans yard and vision. Again, though dreaded and living ital he is ot a Rastafarian though he, like many others, has taken on aspects of the Rasta worldview. There are also elements of New Testament and Revival in his yard. In this sense each artist in Jamaica is in an ongoing process of self-creolizing.

I came into a much fuller understanding of Jamaican religious belief on this trip. Wayne and I have been torturing outrselves as two outsiders trying to at least absorb the fundamental points of view of Revival Zion, Pukkumina, Convince, Kumina and the tapestries woven before and after the ever-encroaching juggernaut of Pentacostalism. To this date no one, not even in Jamaica, has approached the work wholistically with the visionary intent in mind. This is why it is so important for us to contexualize it with the rest of Art History. The older artists are disappearing to fast to wait any longer.

Revival is where Africa went after emancipation when Africa decided to investigate the Church. Pkkumina, Convince waled part of the way with Revival. Kumina remains Kongo in the New World with no church. We began to see that most of the artists we were interested in, the ones with vision, came from the Revival Zion, Kumina side of things. As Revival changes or disappears the art will change again.

Sylvester Stephens probably wouldn’t say he was Revival if you asked him outright but there was evidence all around us in the yard. Not in the form of churchical proselytizing but in the use, for one example,of high seals. In fact most of the yard in a seal format of poles with objects on them. Once they had been on bamboo pedestals but as his pieces get larger and larger and heavier he began making them out of concrete.. He has made an independent variation on many themes. In a Revival church setting the seals have fruit, the bible, glasses of water and other things on them to attract the Angels who will possess the observers and who will bring them communications and instructions from ancestors. Many of Sylvester’s sculptures do just that in that they are tributes, offerings, and portents of ancestors and Jamaican culture bearers from Garvey to Marley to Nanny.queen of the Maroons. This will prove to be the first of two yards we visit where vessels are placed on seals to mediate between worlds.

I am sure of the connective tissue between the seals in Jamaica both in the churches and the yards and balmyards and the objects placed around the yard shows of the African-American United States. The Homeground is similar, the need for mediation in a hostile universe. This is not the shallow reading of homeground as mere ‘place’ but the one that is legitimately rooted in Africa and renewed here. The life is geared toward a physical and non-physical sense of well-being; physical and metaphysical. Afrophobia (resistance and hatred of the idea of Africanness by both whites and blacks) is rooted in the Western support of a good vesus evil dichotomoy as opposed to the African way of moral neutrality where it is up to the individual acting for self and community to balance the moral world.

There are many who find this demeaning. The middle and upper classes are often the ones who find the idea of temporal Africa most upsetting. Ask Kevin Sampson some time about his troubles finding trained African American artists willing to show alongside self-taught artists. The same thing happens in Jamaica where the trained artists are usually from the privileged classes. Even those who aren’t are often resentful of the attention the more oppressed less privileged self-taught artists get. Often the discourse attempts to remedy this by obscuring or denying the homeground context of the work. Jenifer Borum article in Sacrd and Profane is one of the first to address this.

Sylvester Stephens has taken it upon himself to establish his yard as a series of provocative challenges and a shrine of Remembrance. It is impossible to walk through the seals and not reflect on the Elder’s wisdoms. He is fascinating because so much of his yard is hidden right out in the open. He performs for an audience which in most cases will not see or understand what he is showing. Now he has opened a booth on the property which will sell drinks. His yard show is in the face of the overclass yet cannot depend on their willingness to receive this information to be successful.

Yet, and he is very different from say, Finster in this respect, he makes no effort to be commercial in order to engage the public more efficaciously. He chooses to sell cold drinks before he will change his mode of making. He does however sometimes make more traditional pots but ironically these have been replaced for the most part in common usage by plastic. His pieces break and are clumsily mended and the wounds become part of the history of the pieces. The clay he uses is not the best but it has meaning to him and he will not switch. Language and the power of wordsounds is important to him and the way words serve as commentaries and contrapuntal themes throughout the yard.

I am converting my slides to digital images and when I do I wil post some of the previous incarnations of the yard. Sylvester Stephens is extremely complex, related somehow to the Revival homeground, fascinating and brilliant in the uniqueness of his presentation. He is a young patriarch making art in a way that is not seen anywhere else in this hemisphere.

To be continued

Sylvester Stephens 1

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Sylvester Stephens 2

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Sylvester Stephens 3

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Sylvester Stephens

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One Eye Open

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I said this one is looking inside and outwards at the same time. "Yes," he said, "Just like me."

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a few from Cox Collection

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My Summer Vacation part 2

2007-07-31T10:16:00.001-04:00

We traveled up intricate and winding mountain roads through exquisite green vista after vista to see the yard show environment of Errol McKenzie. The last time Wayne had seen McKenzie alittle less than a year ago he had been upset by the fact that McKenzie had destroyed part of his environment; in fact destroyed one of the most sensitive and important aspects of the site; the belly of the Black Moon Goddess, her womb disbanded and consigned to dissolution, her bones and floor reduced to rubble.

It seemed like a funeral march when we got there, some kind of grandeur diminished with no wind and no air only a cruel metallic heat that bore down like an occupying army. McKenzie pointed across the way where he had been doing some terracing. I felt selfish, I wanted his graceful surreal palace back, I thought he was rationalizing some loss, that something cataclysmic and sad had happened in his life. There was no roof, there was no electricity connected to his refrigerator, he mumbled something about channels of energy connecting to his control room, which was his bedroom and did have a roof. We ducked down into the entrance and walked in.

The room still held some of its marvels. The iconography of the carved walls was still sharp and succinct. There were moon rocks molded in and wooden carvings sunk into the architecture, but this room used to open out into the other rooms that had been destroyed, now it was isolated unto itself. In the corner were stacked some of the wooden sculptures he had taken from the original womb room.

He explained then that he had needed the stones in order to build the belly of the White Moon Goddess and that she was more important to him right now because she was getting more feedback from white (nonblack) people then he was from black people and so it was important that he have the site ready for a white woman who shall go nameless for the time being who had come to see him and whom he had recognized as the Goddess, knowing of her arrival before she ever showed up.

So listen to what I am telling you here and try to see it from where we were experiencing it. All the way through the country's heart to see one of the most idiosyncratic and important of the younger generation of Intuitives and he had crashed and burned, destructed Black Moon Island using her bone/stones to create a terrace in honor of some woman whom he now felt was the Great White Goddess.

The whole way up the mountain we had been talking about the problematics of the Gee's Bend situation fully aware of how easily things can go wrong across class, across race and across culture. Politically correct is often morally ridiculous. The artist, the academic, the collector etc are basically walking across a perpetual minefield, usually with little or no cognizance of what other people might have done minutes, hours or days before you arrive on the scene, that will have lasting consequences on what you do or wish to do. The core of Gee's Bend is a simple yes or no, right or wrong with as much chance of being settled out of court through communication as in court.

That very morning I had read the chapter in Sacred and Profane about Gee's Bend and neither side can downplay the glory and the power of the idea that the word artist is such that anyone can wear it and has the right to wear it and be it and be great at it and not held back by the words: self-taught, folk, outsider, or craft. That is the bottomline of the Arnett's intentions and no matter what has happened they have made that necessity of artistic identity public where it wasn't very public before. The artists of Gee's Bend aren't going to let their artistic identities slip away from them so easily ever again. The rest of it seems to be saber-bashing between lawyers and that can be very ugly to behold.

So here we are in the heart-stopping heat with Errol Mckenzie standing there gesticulating and rapping a kilometer a second about numbers and demons and goddesses and it gets more and more obvious all the time that being a sufferer and having less in the world, against your will, never makes things less complicated. He pulled us up to the top terrace and there was a three dimensional mound in relief in concrete and he said that was the moon eye, the combination of the black and white Moon Mothers. He wasn't letting up on us, he was driven to make his old friend Wayne Cox see exactly what it was he is trying to do here. The eye then abstracted off bipedally into two lobes that were the White Moon Goddess's head on one side going down into her neck which was about ten feet long and then a wall that looked like an old burnt out revolutionary era wall maybe pu together with Inca know-how. We were still looking behind us at the skeleton of the old installation. This concrete and neck was not hitting us right. My short hair was hot, my neck throbbing. I kept checking for imaginary fever. I had forgotten my water bottle at the house so all I had was this wet washcloth in a plastic bag. I went down to the car discouraged and de-energized and put the delicious cloth on my face listening to the beautiful little kid in a bright green dress sitting on a bright blue porch of a one room house compulsively slapping her leg in rhythm and I realized that I had been hearing that same beat on her leg since we had arrived and I turned to look at her and just then she went into a sequence of Touretts' barking.

Mckenzie was right behind me. I was still feverishly roiling all this over in my head and actually coming to the right conclusion in thinking: Get off it man. This is his place. The story is whatever he does. Holding on to what it was is fine but environments are not static. They are always on the edge of some kind of movement. He is still Errol McKenzie and you have no right to judge a Vision. No right!

He asked us to walk up the hill across from the site so we could get a better view. I remembered my kid when she was six running up this very hill because she thought she saw a deer. It was a brown goat. We would understand better up the hill he felt. The obvious implication of course and he was right was that we weren't getting it yet. And he was so right because we were focusing on the implications of ruins and this white goddess interloper and exploitation and he of course was immersed in this enormous overview. He, even though he now wanted to give the land to this new Goddess, was in control. Control was key word. Everything as built to resolve in his control room.

I climbed the hill in front of him passing the blue house. Blue is the color of warding off evil, and the child in the green dress and the odd smell of sweet laundry detergent where the mother was washing clothes in a metal pail and McKenzie behind me saying Turn, turn around now and I did. And it all looked different!
“Is the white moon goddess you now see…..”
“The black wall is her belly?, I asked.
“Exactly” he said…”And that is…..”
“Oh man McKenzie I think I see her!”

The wall was her belly he said made from the stones that had been in the womb of the old structure. She was there. Instantly huge. Instantly immensely important. There was nothing else like this in Jamaica; there was nothing else like this in the United States and there were several sites remotely related in Europe but still not like this. Not with sacred seals buried under them in the earth, not born from the womb of an older Goddess. The entire dynamic of the site had changed. For over twenty years Black Moon Island had slowly labored along changing incrementally but fundamentally dedicated to the uplifting of the Black Mother, the black moon female presence against the sun, against the patriarchal dyad of Father and Son. A site he wanted to be a didactic demonstration of cosmic balance.

But it had become consumed by devils. Eaten by evil. Evil was throwing his sculptures out into the yard at night and tormenting his head. His wife had finally left after years of a struggle to keep it together. His neighbors were not fond of him. “I saw her before she came, “ he said.

She is there on the hillside in blazing sun yet filled with Mystery and mysteries. His whole effort is a constant stream of attempting to balance a morally neutral universe that cannot be balanced by any institutions that have come before. Her head is divided into two lobes and unified by a single eye. Beneath the earth are buried numerous seals, moon stones and secret things that drive the forces of connection. Her neck is about ten feet long and flows into a graceful torso that culminates in the eight foot high black wall of womb stones. The rest of her body is white so her belly and womb have been carefully created from the black stones that made up the now dismantled womb of the Black Earth Mother.

Below the belly terrace are her two legs which are in motion and activated. Each is at least twenty to twenty five feet long. It must be remembered that these limbs and outlines, with the exception of the head units are not a single layer of outline stones but actual terraces. Earth was moved in large quantities and hundreds if not thousands of stones were lifted and fitted because he didn have money for cement to hold it together so each stone was handfitted and solid into terraces and walls between three and four feet high.

One leg ran toward the the lower south west of the torso in running configuration. Running or dancing. Most likely dancing because the other leg, a much longer one was bent at the knee where (o most amazing concept!) it touched part of the remaining wall of the old Black Moon Island. It then continued down almost doubled under the thigh.

McKenzie was elated that we saw it. He pointed to the knee. “See where she touch? That is the heart.” I squinted. There was a large smooth concrete construction about three feet in diameter split down the middle attached to the wall righ ton the other side of the knee. “that is the heart of both the Black Moon Mother and the White Moon Mother. They have the same heart for Moon Balance.”

And then we could see that from the heart stone began to run the white-marled paths or channels of communication about three to four feet wide that led to his bedroom/control center. Suddenly I could see the entire site as this network of interconnected forms and shoots and it was all organic and connected below, on and above the earth with buried seals, stones, secrets, and wooden and concrete extrusions.

McKenzie has, in essence, managed to create a work that structurally combines sculptural language with the two dimensional schemata of his evil-eating paintings which are compendiums of his channels, seals, organs, wombs, and eggs. His sculptures and paintings can now be read in a similar way. His art work as a whole has achieved forma l theoretical balances, extending his urgencies meaningfully into other planes, pun intended.

As I stood on the hill trying to take in the unified totality of what before had seemed to me truncated and disconnected, sad and broken down I was renewed in my admiration for this man who, against seemingly insurmountable odds, mental and pysical, could create this monument of iconic belief, from earth, wood, stone and concrete.

I was an am still concerned about the white goddess in the flesh. I feel she adds to the thinness of the edge he lives on. I cannot imagine too many potentially happy scenarios to come out of this. At the same time she inspired some of this vision, even though unknowingly. (We now know who she is). McKenzie's life is too real and too abstracted for anyone to be able to warn him about the possible debacle to come when either she never shows up again or does not fulfill his sense and need for a culmination of immediate prophecy.

But McKenzie is an artist who is well acquainted with the use of art as a mode of active cognition. For him it is a vehicle of self-healing. What to unknowing eyes like ours seemed to be meaningless destruction was actually a massive act of creative regeneration and one can only hope and even pray a bit that in the future he will pick himself up yet again from the void and begin to fill it with his unique and important visionary works. I look forward to Wayne Cox's paper on him at the Kohler symposium at the end of September.

(to be continued)

Errol McKenzie

2007-07-31T10:13:00.000-04:00

The Eye of Moon Balance

2007-07-31T10:10:00.000-04:00

The Heart of the Black and White Moon Mothers

2007-07-31T10:08:00.000-04:00

The White Moon Goddess

2007-07-31T10:02:00.001-04:00

More Control Room

2007-07-31T10:01:00.000-04:00

Inside the Control Room

2007-07-31T09:58:00.001-04:00

Entrance to the Control Room

2007-07-31T09:56:00.001-04:00

Errol McKenzie: What seemed to be in ruins

2007-07-31T09:51:00.000-04:00

Here are some of the photos when we first got there and before we had the epiphany on the hill. Fortunately the site was well documented by Wayne in its earlier form as well. Remember you are looking at a transitional phase.

Some Freestanding McKenzie works

2007-07-31T09:46:00.000-04:00

These are just a tiny tiny sampling of Errol McKenzies paintings and freestanding sculptures. Please remember this is just a recording of this visit and not an attempt to be comprehensive about the art.

My Summer Vacation part 1-Jamaica 2007

2007-07-27T15:09:00.000-04:00

Wayne and I went to Vincent Atherton's funeral today. Was in a 7th Day Adventist church but none of the Athertons are Adventists. There was one local pastor and two visiting deacons. Atherton lay in a bright candy-flake purple coffin covered with floral wreathes. He had 15 children, 5 sons and five daughters survived. They were all present except Lloyd who was at the house. Lloyd is the one most like his father.

As we walked into the small but airy Church, ventilated by rows of fans mounted on the walls, the electric keyboard was being set up by a young musician. He tested it with a pre-set of Hard Day's Night. We walked up the center aisle and looked in the coffin but it was not the wild haired old man I had met for the first time the year before. This man in the coffin had been carefully groomed and besuited and one could sense that in the ceremonies and celebrations that had been held all the previous week while he lay in state at his house, the spirit that had occupied that flesh was well on its way to the original Homeground. This was the shell left behind.

Raphael Atherton, a son I hadn't met before, the oldest son, an ex policeman, was dressed in a white shirt suit and white patent leather shoes. He was sitting next to Leroy Atherton who wore a new black suit and was holding in his hand an old tattered copy of our (Waynes and mine) exhibition from 1996 “Redemption Songs.” Raphael leaned over and told me that his father had told him he wanted to be remembered somehow for his carving and his works and Raphael at the time had wondered how that could ever happen but when he came back to Jamaica two years later Redemption Songs had been published and his father was known and this had been a major life-affirming thing on his own personal path. He repeated this when he got up to do the eulogy except he even remembered the page numbers his fathers photograph and words appeared on. And later when I looked back at the text again I saw it was ok little as there was but wished it could have been the expanded version I am working on now. Its been over ten years since that time till this great man died and in all that time there was a long section written on him by Wayne in Prophets and Messengers but still nothing in a major book and I am thinking this was a major crime. So I was grateful, very grateful to hear Raphael Atherton's words, thinking I am reaffirmed also in my need to continue to write about these people and still struggle to catch as many of them alive in their own time as I can. In a way then writing itself becomes an act of libation.

It was a good feeling to hear his family praise him for his role as a Carver. Atherton was a bush doctor, a role too complex to fully explain here. Even the pastor remembered his command of gathering and dispensing healing herbs. He was not a church-going man, his church was the bush, and his community and his African American spirituality. The pastor pointed out that the first carving by Vincent Atherton he had ever seen was a merry go round the old man had made for the local schoolyard. I kind of wished I could have been a fly on the tree at the Nine Night Ceremony the week before to see the communities less formal responses to the man's death.

Again I was reminded of the delicate path we in the artworld walk through these people's lives. It had never even occurred to me remotely that the patriarch would be affected by the few words I had written for him. I had called him enigmatic in the text and he was still enigmatic to me now. Sylvester Woods is barely alive and Ras Dizzy is becoming erratic. We are in the presence of an art historical and cultural changing of the guard.

Of course I have no worries whatsoever that other self-taught artists are out there and will be found in Jamaica. This country exudes creativity from every pore, from the endless delight of its street signs to the painting and patterns on the surfaces of its buildings to its unending wordplay in speech and song. As in the US the forms will change and our expectations will always be sidestepped. One can never be too complacent here for too long. The next to last hymn was sung to the tune of Finiculi Finicula and I knew it would be a great mistake to sell this funny old world short.

Tonight I am standing on a hill overlooking the water outside Port Maria in St. Mary's Parish where Atherton lived. There are fireflies and stars and great expressionist dark clouds that muffle and render occult the excited energy of the lightning behind it. A breeze is blowing and it is like a lover whispering everything in particular against your neck. I am drinking guava and pineapple juice and thinking about Vincent Atherton the Carver.

A few days ago we were driving down one of the most commercial anonymous roads in Jamaica near Negril and we saw a sign that simply said: Helicopters. I didn't take a picture of the sign and I am wishing now of course that I had. But we stopped. We did stop and asked this bright eyed woman where the helicopters were. She pointed around the side and we saw this little structure no bigger than a voting booth and on it was a metal cutout flat helicopter brightly painted and nailed to the door. It actually was a pretty damn good helicopter cutout and it was also a pretty damn good Bert Hemphill moment.

She asked if we wanted to go in and we said of course we wanted to go in and we had to get out of her way so she could pull the door open and we went in after she turned on the light and there were three or four shelves on two walls of the room filled with hand made helicopters. They were made of gourds supplemented with wood structures, some in bizarre shapes and then brightly painted with enamels. The Hemphill in my head was positively dancing with excitement. It was what will happen and still does happen in Jamaica over and over again once you learn the ancient ceremony called “Stopping the Car”. You drive along an innocuous road and you see a sign that says Helicopters and so you stop the world and investigate and instantly you have something new and deep added to your world. Several days later you are standing in front of a bright purple coffin which holds the body of a cultural artist elder singing a hymn to the tune of Finiculi Finicula.

This morning in the wildly glaring sun on the main street of Port Maria I was looking for the restaurant that had cowfoot and I saw a six and a half foot rail of a man walk by completely naked. Suddenly he fell down upon his belly in the middle of the street and began to lap up grayish green water out of one of the ubiquitous potholes. No one bothered him or stared. The next day his pants were back, though quite loose. I backed away and found the restaurant and it was the wrong day for cowfoot and too early for everything else.

Vincent Atherton's carvings are made to flail off evil in any of its forms. They are expressionistic amulets. His herbs were to heal the body from the vagaries of what people in Jamaica have to do in order to survive. His carvings were for repelling evil and attracting good. He started carving late in life yet it is so obvious from the confidence of his hand that he was not unsure or insecure about what he made. Yet they look unlike anything made in Jamaica since the time of its premier inhabitants: the Taino who either went maroon with those who wouldn't be slaves or else committed suicide rather than give in to the colonialists and the slavedrivers. They were gone by the 17th Century. But they used the same materials as Vincent Atherton and other vernacular artists did later. (trees) Lignum Vitae, Cedar, all the indigenous flora that is still growing on this lush island. They painted on cave walls. Some of Vincent Atherton's carvings look like what was painted on those walls. Eccentric minimal faces. But they also look like the three dots on coconuts which Jamaican folklore sees as eyes. The saying is : The coconut has three eyes, it sees you before you see it.

But that is only a very small minority of what Atherton carved. People seeing his work for the first time immediately remark on its African qualities but, as with the work of Woody Joseph there is no direct tribal co-relative. There is a fleeting resemblance to some of the ceremonial carvings of the Fon people who also use a minimal cutting style to maximize effect. But for me this similarity comes by way of subject and process rather than by intentions. Atherton is a black man from Port Maria. His homeground is situated in black Jamaican country. His subjects, his forms, his intentions are part of where he lives and what he looks at. They are in the compressed language of his homeground. That culture itself still holds many of its own abstractions of remembered, retained, and reinvented African life. We have enough to unravel in the complexities of where he actually lived than to look for facile formal comparisons to art that is not part of his immediate context.

The parish of Port Maria is poor and still very much host to various churches that practice the Africanized Baptist religion of Revival Zion.

More Atherton

2007-07-27T14:43:00.001-04:00

Some Vincent Atherton Sculptures

2007-07-27T14:37:00.001-04:00

Helicopters near Negril

2007-07-27T14:28:00.000-04:00

Some Roadsigns Jamaica 2007

2007-07-27T14:21:00.001-04:00

Martin Ramirez Lecture presented at the Museum of International Folk Art on November 2, 2003

2007-01-18T20:32:00.000-05:00

I have not published this lecture since it was given. It is the 4th in a series of articles on Martin Ramirez, 2 in Folk Art Magazine and one featured in the Vernacular Visionaries Catalog curated by Annie Carlano. I thought it most interesting in conjunction with and in the context of the current article on Martin Ramirez in Folk Art Magazine:

Greetings!
I offer this presentation as a libation to a great and important artist of the Western Hemisphere. I place words as a 'comida del alma' on his grave in respectful awe of what he was able to do and in appreciation of how our perception of how his fate changed over time and place. '
On the Day of the Dead what we give is as much about being alive and surviving as it is about the pathways after life. In Martin Ramirez' work we have been given all kinds of paths to follow. I celebrate also the genius and courage of an exhibition like Annie Carlano's because of her insistent and appreciative recognition of that fact that to get to our walls the work of an artist passes through a process of creation unlike any we can imagine; that it stems from the compression of folklore and genius in consummate spasms of outrageous creativity and it expands the big culture itself. This art straddles many worlds. The art you see is the end result of extremely complex process. We suffer from not being there the day the art was pulled and shaped from the ethers but that magical engagement; that tremendous feat of health, strength and life was poured into the work by an artist for reasons rarely if ever consistent with the demands of the academy.

On this auspicious day also I ask you not to be killers. I ask you not to fall into the idiocy of believing this work was made as a result of insanity, of the death of a human intention or by a simple or naïve person. Do not fall for the glib inanity of that word ‘outsider’. We have been taught to point a finger at a Martin Ramirez or Zemankova etc. and say "You are no longer one of us, you are insane. You are an Outsider, or your work is vernacular so it must be funky." but I ask you to stop and wonder aggressively what this might mean to you if you are black, brown yellow or beige. If you are Native-American or Asian. If your spirituality is not Western or if you are from a culture that operates within the reality of visionary experience the way Western Culture once did before it killed and maimed to eradicate any culture counter to it. Think instead of how hard you fight on a daily basis to defend your very humanity with some kind of dignity because the world makes assumptions about where you come from or how you shape your spiritual life. For years, and actually still in the present, people have made these assumptions about Martin Ramirez. It was and is easier to call him and his work American and 'insane' and ‘outsider’ than to say it is the work of a poor Mexican. Try to see what this implies. If you accept any of those views you are killing Ramirez.

Look into your own lives and find the ones you love who have been hit by drugs, alcohol, depression or schizophrenia, diabetes, cancer, AIDS, senility or the haunting fogs of old age. Did you push them away? Did you shove them beyond the range of your hearts and call them Outsiders or Marginal? Perhaps it is easier to do that with someone else about whom little is known and whose life began somewhere else. Out there. Not here.

No artist in this exhibition was so far away from the mortal coil that he or she lost her humanity. Since 9/11 we have sought heroes and I wonder who is more heroic than those who overcome obstacles physical and spiritual to make art that teaches, reaches out and heals. Art that carries the meaning of folkways and cultures and protects that culture at the same time that it pushes the edges further and helps that culture mutate and change. To make positive energies in a negative situation defines heroism well enough for me.

These artists stand between some pretty difficult rowboats. Like magnets they seem to attract every art theoretical shortcoming in the last fifty years or more of folklore and art history. But now the vast machine has come to a complete halt and can't go on in any kind of accurate fashion till all this gets sorted out. Until the folklorists can see the importance of these Gatekeepers of Culture they will never fully understand the natural progressions of syncretism, hybridity and Creolization. Until the minority of the Western Artworld joins the rest of the world no history of art will ever be complete. The closed door is being kicked down for them by the Asians, the Latin Americans, the Africans, et al. We have stepped through the Looking Glass and found all our information is hollow. If we don't embrace the complexity of the truth we will be forever vulnerable in wondering why fundamentalism suddenly rears its head in places we thought were quaint and picturesque. Mainstream art in this country is more often than not prey to severe tunnel vision. When exotic has come to be a bad word we need to look beyond political correctness and get a reality check from the art itself. Vernacular Visionaries is just such a reality check.

This art starts with a homeground. Homeground is the oral culture that makes available a matrix of intentionality that introduces mythmaking, worship of ancestors, magic, music, food, adornment etc. as a utilitarian vehicle for a double process of transformation: Self and the people in the space around you. A cultural homeground provides a language the artist will speak. With very few exceptions, by studying this homeground the language will be revealed by which our understanding of the ‘oral aesthetic’ can be increased. In the best of worlds the the homeground will reveal whether the artist has made the work as an ancestral repository, an amulet, a memorial, a site of self or cultural location etc. The most basic example of this with Ramirez is that if you are not told that he was Mexican then you are just going to be moving unknown objects around on an imaginary plane with none of the imagery seen from the obvious advantage of its native context. Of course by native here I am not referring to ethnicity. In this field we seem to take for granted anglo and European homegrounds because they form the alleged basis of the alleged mother culture. But when it comes to non first world cultures the ivory tower fiercely resists the idea of a different perspective. The bottom line is that if we do not view the work from the perspective we will never meet that work on its own terms.

Examining the drawings of Martin Ramirez from the Euro-view of pure formalism or by the fact that he was in a mental insititution in the United States is to deny him his homeground. For Martin Ramirez this began with a mostly non-Indian enclave of folk Catholicism in the Los Altos region of Jalisco to the North-East of Guadalajara. There is a similar situation in the small Spanish Christian towns in Northern New Mexico. While little can ever be empirically proven it is a fairly safe assumption to make that at least some of this folk Catholic iconography will be present in the drawings. But it doesnt stop there.

Those looking for cultural purity in the work of non-western self-taught artists are nearly always going to be disappointed. This is part of the key to whom these people are because quite often they are the ones who are pushing the creative envelopes of the cultures and because that creativity is an organic part of the culture they are visually advancing and changing the culture itself. The Navajo artist/healer Hosteen Klah, out of cultural necessity, made previously taboo sand paintings public, Charles Willeto expanded the vocabulary of Navajo healing dolls and fetishes, and George Liautaud and Hector Hyppolite of Haiti have materialized the Lwa of Vodou in ways that had never been seen within the culture before. Whether cultural or personal, always running on the grid of homeground, there will be second or third function to the pieces made by self-taught artists. In a wholistic way the work is more often than not utilitarian in some way. By studying enough of these artists in this light we are able to finally put together certain cautious universals. We just have to remember over and over again that utilitarian does not have to be a purely material concept.

In the visionary space of the homeground art is seldom made for arts' sake. It rarely if ever takes part in the ongoing art-historical dialogue. It may stand in that place formally and influentially but its concerns are wider and less specifically temporal. The hospitals that Ramirez found himself in the middle of the 20th Century when shock treatment was a common panacea were by nobody's definition paradise. Conversations with one of the men who took care of him builds a picture of tremendous depersonalization. He was in the belly of the beast in as unmetaphorical sense as possible.

I think something needs to be understood here. In the earlier days before we knew that Ramirez was from this atypical enclave of non-Indian population we sought to understand some of Ramirez' imagery through the filter of Mexican Native American/Catholic symbolism. This satisfied some of the images but by no means gave a complete lexicon. One could almost hear the sighs of relief go up when it was found that more than likely Ramirez work had as its basis a folk Christian cosmology. I think it is just as important to consider the ramifications of a folk Christianity. In our mass culture where oral aesthetics have all but been pushed into megabytes and mass consumerism the fundamentalism of basic religions is but a shadow concept to most people. It isn't going to work five days a week and then Church as a feelgood experience on Sunday.

Whether there was Indian influence on Ramirez or not there were still certain basic cultural signs that can be tied to an oral culture, As Chiji Akoma has said in a recent issue of Caribbean Review: " I locate myth within an aesthetic of orality that celebrates the deployment of mask idioms, the coevality of material and immaterial worlds as constituents of reality, and the resistance to individual authorship in cultural production." The artists we call self-taught or 'vernacular' to me are the ones who are able to live the double role of cultural gatekeepers and individuals at the same time howbeit within a homeground context. The issue of the art world and the role the artist might play there does not factor into this until later when a third force takes that work and displays it as art.

Folk Catholicism potentially blends "the coevality of material and immaterial worlds as constituents of reality" as deeply as any Indio-Christian syncretic viewpoint might. The drawings of Martin Ramirez blend his own visionary power with the iconography and the mythology of the vernacular church. The similarity with some of the Native American imagery comes from Place, from the actual interaction with the oral cultures' force of mythologizing and the local reality of barrancas, witchcraft, ghosts, ancestral memories and the Church input of ancestors, saints with suprahuman powers of healing, miracles and the constant dualities of home/wilderness, and the day by day, minute by minute struggle of good versus evil.

One of the other differences between this kind of art and the art engendered by the academy is its role as a visual manifestation of oral culture. Many times its functionality serves the same purpose as storytelling.....In much of the work we can see some kind of narrative at play. In the work of institutionalized artists this often is mixed with the homeground imperative of location. The artist is attempting to record or define himself in both a local and personal sense. Anyone can look at Martin Ramirez' drawings and see that we are witnessing some kind of narrative. It is the likeliness of this narrative that makes me think these are not just odd postcards of the disintegration of a mind, that these are not just ‘what you see is what there is’ picture sof local animals. It is the nature of the peasant homeground to make all things active parts of binary natures. The desert is never an empty desert; it roils with energies hidden beneath its visible surfaces. Beginning with what each place recalls; its songlines if you will. Even today along the roads of southwestern America a place where a loved one has died becomes a shrine, becomes a piece of earth imbued with a public and private memory of the tragedy that has taken place there. There are recurring characters, imagery, buildings , animals and most of all landscape in Ramirez’ drawings. He had made a list of markers that are never truly solipsistic because they belong to his culture as well as to him. If he was alienated from Los Altos in terms of distance he never lost its Place in the recall of his drawings. In most instances this is the landscape of Los Altos. But remember now that this landscape even if it is specifically Los Altos has a presence both material and immaterial. It is this landscape that Ramirez has made the matrix of his dreamlike imagery

It will be forever almost impossible to explain the exact intentionality of Ramirez' work. But this does not leave us without any recourse. We have the overall corpus of the work and we have enough other artists who have worked this way to finally be able to put together some greater universalities to the work in general. It brings us to the toughest and perhaps most controversial arena of looking at his artwork. Why did he make it? Why did he hide under a table, mix his colors in a small pot he made from hardened oatmeal, and make these epic drawings? Were they messages to others? Were they like a last will and testament? Were they an explanation to others of how he lost the battle against Evil and wound up in the earth-monsters belly? Were they drawn for himself or as an apology to his family? To manifest the constant noise of death and evil and the twisted life in his souless prison.? Some of these things will never be answered but it is my contention that a reading of the drawings in a mythological and/or folk narrative sense is possible even necessary. The irony is that this work which seems to trace the epic journey of a soul into the underworld is ultimately and posthumously successful. Were they an admission of guilt in the face of evil or were they his last chance to protest and claim his innocence in a traditional war of good and evil that began in his town in Jalisco?

To the Catholic in Mexico the kind of death you have will reflect on the kind of life you lived. The successful death is within the bounds of Good and of family. A bad death is a death of transgression; one in which you abandoned the symbols of Good: Family, Home, God for the world of the Other: strangers, the Wilderness or the (nothome). There even appears to be a conflict with the types of women Ramirez depicts in his drawings. She is either the Virgin Inmaculada or she is a more Westernized woman who in a couple of drawings has a rope around the waist of a small man. In the Mexican catholic homeground women are either Mothers and wives or else whores and city women who move on the points of evil. The morality is clear. The Church may declare the proper path for a lifestyle but it is the will of the individual that will dictate the bounds of that path. For this reason it is possible to carry ones death inside oneself. One can be dead while still alive carrying it like a dark cloud through ones life.

Why are we so moved by the drawings? It is because of the ambiguity of their outcome. We are attracted like moths to their questioning of the moral landscape. Is the drawing of Ramirez in his death mantle and a smile on his face a happy ending? There is a sense of afterworld, of a place where the familiar can loom up and suddenly become unfamiliar. Was Ramirez still fighting the battle by the time he got to the hospital or has he accepted that his failure had given him over to the evil that hovers over the poor peasant most of his life. So easy to transgress. If these drawings are the maps of relocation then we might want to decide which world Ramirez has self-located in…memory of the moral part of homeground; family, church, work, the Saints, the virgin or has he accepted the fact already that given the hospital and the lost wild souls in his ward, among them murderers and brutes, he was in hell and if not hell at least purgatory, abandoned and forlorn in a place so distant from what he had grown up with that even the language was untouchable.

To me these drawings represent his fight to answer these questions. Whether they succeeded in giving him in a sense of self-resurrection will never be known to me but they certainly leave evidence of a heroic battle to raise those questions. All in all these are humble drawings in content although conceptually they are huge; they are not violent or undignified. Sometimes they seem to me to be the visual equivalent of a Saint’s musing in a cave in the desert. They are not made by a man who is intentionally bad. Self effacing, perhaps. The only victims who show up in the imagery are the small everyman figure who is possibly Ramirez himself. The drawings might be self questioning in terms of moral weakness, perhaps, but it is interesting to note that even Traylor portrayed his demons of drink repeatedly so that we know some kind of drama was being played out in pictorial memory. Though larger, though more populated by beings, though seemingly more detailed the heart of Ramirez drama is more veiled than Traylor’s. This is true to its peasant Mexican character the way Traylor’s poetic mode of depiction is directly tied to his experience of the South. Though both are to some degree tragic, Ramirez’ picaresque journey is more existential. He watches a lot and records a lot without necessarily revealing his ultimate opinions. We can only guess as to the degree of his enigma. He is moving through his drawings with the deliberate speed of a wanderer who wishes to see all. His autobiography has become folktale and myth in its incorporation of the immaterial aspects of his cosmos. Traylor remains more of a pragmatist…his mysteries are those of abstraction and the many complex layers of social and temporal space hidden in the seeming distance of his drawings.

There are visual clues to Ramirez’ sense of desire for resurrection however. To me the images he cut out of newspapers of vehicles and women and buildings hint of some kind of hope. If one was completely dead inside chances are that first there might not be any drawings at all and second that these activated images of a different world would hold little fascination to someone who had given up in their incarceration. Depression will deflate excitement. Vehicles, women, buildings….all symbols of an inner restlessness, a restlessness that manifests in the drawings as well which leads to yet another theory. That perhaps the evil in Ramirez life was this very restlessness. That his need to move, his need to head North, to find the sources of those things he cut out from the magazines and newspapers, are also what his drawings are about. That they represent epic journeys is not hard for anyone to see.

The utilitarian aspect of this art, for example, when a Santero like Nick Herrera makes a saint, is only part of the process that began with vision and manifested in the life of the icon-maker….the artwork becomes a flag in the ground of the great moral battle that began long before the piece was conceived yet is linked directly to it. The physical aspect is only the end result of a long metaphysical process combined with an intense life.

We tend to forget in this field that the piece and the life are inextricably joined but that this is only of value to the observer when the details of the life relate directly to the making of the artwork. In folk art we are used to speaking of the material utilitarianism of the work. In our field I have just begun to try and deal with the process of immaterial utilitarianism. This is bound to be controversial in a society that has made material culture its ballast. I can best exemplify this by saying that there are some collectors who collect art for the object itself and others who collect for not only the object but the powers and forces it represents as well. The great majority of work by self-taught artists, though by no means all, was not made for museum walls or indeed even the walls of collectors. It had always had a different functionality. This does not place any judgment however on the art that was….we are led to ask each time: If this is not art for art’s sake than for what’s sake is it art?

The great question then becomes ; did a live man or a dead man make these drawings? Did a man who hoped to rise above present circumstances and continue a long journey render these drawings as a shout of self-sustaining hope? Or was he someone who realized his life was over? If he didn’t realize it was over, if he hadn't already passed the border into the afterworld is it then possible that he was making these drawings as a map to help himself understand the complex way through purgatory and out of the underworld into heaven?

The Encrypted Eye Press Release

2006-10-06T14:17:00.000-04:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Encrypted Eye:
Introducing the drawings of Jerry Wagner and Timothy Wehrle

October 26 – December 2, 2006

Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present a special exhibition introducing two self-taught artists new to the gallery: Jerry Wagner and Timothy Wehrle. Despite their difference in age, Wagner was born in 1939 and Wehrle in 1978, the work of these artists meets on an immaterial dissecting table. In these drawings synesthesia, coincidence, place and the pan-historical whisperings of American spirits hover amidst pain, beauty and innuendo.

The work of both artists reverberates as if nature and ectoplasm were run through a conceptual blender to spit out an uneasy chatter of image and idea. By tying or binding together disparate time zones and images each creates his own ‘sound’. In the hands of lesser artists this could create a tiresome moebius strip of solipsism, but here both artists invite the viewer inside to handle, muse upon and either crack or transcend those internal codes.

Wehrle’s work is pure dreaming but very tightly wound and charted out. His themes are classical on the surface and chaotic at core; almost the opposite of Wagner’s more expressionistic collage approach of blending drawing and old diaries and journals. So what appears chaotic to the eye is self-managing internally. Though younger, Wehrle is still moving through the world while Wagner is closer to the consummate Art Brut artist, making work never intended to go out into the art world, keeping it around him in carefully organized stacks and heaps, geared toward amuletic reasonings that strive toward personal stability.

Both artists function with intimacy. Wehrle idealizes the world through his work, sweetening it to the point of near-fetishism. Wagner is the eternal internal American wanderer who reads mystic pan-cultural texts and vernacular signs, weaving them together in an almost indigenous tapestry. Both artists manage to combine inner and outer worlds in such a way that we are drawn in and able to reveal out own potential to be healed by their work.

For further information or questions, please call Shari Cavin, Krishna Fitzpatrick or Randall Morris at (212) 226-3768, e: Blugriot@aol.com.

Jerry Wagner

2006-10-06T12:49:00.000-04:00

Timothy Wehrle

2006-10-06T12:37:00.000-04:00

Kevin Sampson

2006-10-02T12:20:00.001-04:00

2006-10-02T12:20:00.000-04:00

Christine Sefalosha

2006-09-19T20:53:00.000-04:00

Keith Goodhart

2006-09-19T20:52:00.000-04:00

Mort Golub

2006-09-19T20:46:00.000-04:00

Chris Hipkiss

2006-09-19T20:45:00.000-04:00

Gregory Van Maanen

2006-09-19T20:44:00.000-04:00

Sandra Sheehy

2006-09-19T20:43:00.000-04:00

Gera

2006-05-02T17:02:00.000-04:00

Gera is a healer from Ethiopia. These drawings are made as a form of deeply codified magic calling up improvised but deeply iconic configurations for wealth, love, healing of sickness etc. The longer one gazes upon these drawinhs the more different parts of it engage the eye and the psyche and thus succeed in being a personal incantation.

Prelude to an Exhibition of Indigenous Drawing

2006-05-02T15:19:00.000-04:00

Here are some very brief sightbytes of our current two shows. We have been building up to Indigenous Drawing for over twenty five years but never felt the material had the critical mass it does now. It touches on everything we love about self taught artists and cultural homeground. It is about the art as an extension of oral culture. It is vital and everchanging and this show only touches the surface of what is and will be possible. The commentaries are off the cuff and by no means even part of the whole story. This is a very personal exhibition for the curators. I will add a few photographs of the artists here and there.

The Vernacular Buddha show is a gift from Lee and Vichai Chinalai who took me seriously when I first suggested it about three years ago. The photos cannot do justice to a room full of the powerful and evocative sculptures and paintings presented here.

I hope you enjoy this exhibition as much as we did pulling it together.

Randall Morris and Shari Cavin

Indigenous Drawing and Vernacular Buddha Press Release

2006-05-02T15:16:00.000-04:00

For Immediate Release

Indigenous Drawing: Stories from the Homeground
and
Vernacular Buddha

April 27 – June 3, 2006

Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to present Indigenous Drawing: Stories from the Homeground. The artists in this exhibition are Indian, African, Native-American, Mexican, Japanese, Ethiopian, Australian Aboriginal, Peruvian and Inuit. They are all non-participants in the Contemporary Art Mainstream yet their works warrant a place in the eye of the contemporary observer. Drawing on paper is not part of the original cultures of any of these artists, they have stepped into a new arena of their cultural worldviews or homegrounds by placing their marks on this medium. Each has a different intentionality for drawing ranging from documentation of disappearing information, to amuletic healing and protection, to appropriating oneself in an ever-shifting world, to meditation, to capturing an ayahuasca vision or preserving shamanic information.

The languages that inform this work, the contexts of the artists’ lives are still greatly influenced by the worldview of their diverse cultures. Several are shamans, one a female shaman from the Seri tribe in Senora, Mexico of which a mere two hundred members survive. Another was the houseboy in Isak Dinesan’s Out of Africa. Another, from a family of traditional Indian artists, has incorporated controversial feminist concerns into her work. Other works are imbued with nothing more than their original spiritual functions. To look at them as a group and understand what artists outside the standard lens are doing, one can see that, as wide ranging and open as Contemporary Art is today, we still have seen only the most minimal aspects. These works put a different twist on the concept of art for art’s sake. It is undeniable that there are aesthetic concerns at work with each artist but the actual process of creation, the visible aspect of oral culture, is what makes it unique. As art historian Esther Pasztory suggests in Thinking With Things, the art itself is a form of cognitive thinking, integrated fully as part of the process of living.

In Gallery Two Chinalai Tribal Antiques will curate an exciting exhibition of Buddha sculptures and images which are made for personal use or which show idiosyncratic styles. We will exhibit both bronze and wood pieces primarily from South-East Asia. The curator’s preferences are toward those sculptures that show the hand of the carver more than the idealized form of Buddha.

For further information please contact Shari Cavin, Krishna Fitzpatrick, or Randall Morris at (212) 226-3768, or e: blugriot@aol.com

Vision Ledger Drawing

2006-05-02T15:13:00.000-04:00

This visionary drawing is done on the two ends of a ledger book. It can be viewed either side up.

Old White Woman

2006-05-02T15:09:00.000-04:00

When Native americans were imprisoned and put in schools to westernize them they made drawings in school ledger books to remember their identities and to record happeneings in their lives. These books give us our deepest insights into an American life that has completely disappeared. This drawing by Old White Woman is one of the few known erotic ledger drawings in existence.

Wesley Ngainmijra, Audrey Nadjoh

2006-05-02T14:48:00.000-04:00

Almost 15 years ago a friend of ours went to Australia and brought back a sheaf of drawings made by artists already well known for paintings on bark. We were excited but never till now had quite the right context for showing these mystical drawings on paper. It turned out to be a very small window of opportunity because they were never really continued. This is the first time they have been seen in the United States.

Kumano Kurouemon

2006-05-02T14:41:00.000-04:00

Known as the Bear of Echizen for his violently fired oversized pottery, Kumano is as close to what we call 'outsider' art in the highly process oriented world of Japanese Woodfired ceramics.
In looking at pictures of his home and kiln I noticed that he painted calligraphy on doors and walls, such as one apologizing to his postman for having to traipse through so much snow to reach his mailbox. I was thrilled to be able to get a couple of his calligraphic ventures on paper. They truly represent his outsized and bold artistic vision.

Inticona

2006-05-02T14:36:00.000-04:00

Inticona was a Peruvian shaman who used ayahuasca as a vehicle for having visions. He was befriended by a Peruvian artist, Valerian, living in Germany who encouraged him to put some of his cosmology on paper. While visiting the artists studio Inticona saw these magazine images and decided to make some drawings over them.

Amalia,a Seri Shamaness

2006-05-02T14:28:00.000-04:00

Jose Bedia, the Cuban artist, himself represented in Magicians of the Earth, introduced me to the Seri Indian shamaness Amalia five or six years ago. There are only a couple hundred of these poeple left in Northern Mexico. Mostly known for their iron wood and stone carvings as well as their beautiful basketry there has never been a tradition of drawing. Amalia decided to make these drawings for Bedia in order to preserve the culture and explain their cosmology. The fragile ecology of their fishing culture is difficult and heartbreaking. Amalia's cave is right around the corner from the scene on the May issue of Gallery Guide; a photograph by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide who was the one who introduced Bedia to the area. I fell down the hill where Amalia has her sacred cave and was then dubbed Conejo Loco by Amalia.

Mohammed Mrabet

2006-05-02T14:21:00.000-04:00

Mrabet is famous as being the close companion and friend of writer and compoder Paul Bowles in Morocco. He is also an accomplished published writer and story teller on his own. These seemingly kif ( a marijuana like leaf) inspired drawings of visions have an amuletic power influenced by the Jilala tribesmen and their music. The same people influenced Burroughs, Gysin and Brian Jones who put out the first recording of the master musicians of Jejouka. There is a night time poetry and mystery in these drawings.

Gatura Kamante

2006-05-02T14:06:00.000-04:00

Kamante was the houseboy in Isak Denisen's Out of Africa. Later he also worked for photographer Peter Beard and they put out a book together. Coincidently he used the same technique as Joseph Yoakum; colored pencil and crayon polished with tissue to achieve a lustrous muted surface. Kamante's drawings are about the food chain in the veldt in Kenya. All of his people and animals are involved in survival and ceremony. He is a great narrative artist.

Shuvinai Ashoona

2006-05-02T13:46:00.000-04:00

It was a thrilling day when we, by serendipity of course, came across the work of an allegedly autistic Inuit woman who made fascinating drawings of northern rockscapes. Though they look fantastical it is said that if you look at her drawings and then go out into the tundra it can be seen how she caught the essence of those places. She has also recently begun to do more drawings of people and populated places but in a style completely her own.

Pushpa Kumari

2006-05-02T13:34:00.000-04:00

Though her work comes from a new tradition of drawings, Pushpa is the iconoclast of the group taking her questionings of the universe and her bold more sensual imagery light years further than those of her compatriots. We are always attracted to and fascinated by those who maintain the power of traditional knowledge but are driven to take it somewhere new and controversial. The Tsunami drawing is particularly strong.

Lanna Yantra Drawing

2006-05-02T13:27:00.000-04:00

These drawn upon textiles are fascinating for their complex amulet powers. Worn under clothing or as clothing, they have come to replace tattoos worn during times of crisis or healing. They contain healing recipes, astrological diagrams and juxtapositions of magical writing and codes. We are also showing a number of old books based on these magical configurations as well.

Acharya Vyakul

2006-05-02T13:20:00.000-04:00

We have been admirers of Vyakul's work for years. The drawings are done as Tantric homage to the female Goddess. They are noticeable for the intensity of their simplicity and gestural power. Vyakul was in the important Magicians of the Earth exhibition.

Some previews of Vernacular Buddha

2006-05-01T22:21:00.000-04:00

Here are a few examples of Sculptures from our large exhibition 'Vernacular Buddha' guest curated by Lee and Vichai Chinalai. They are predominantly Lao Buddhas made for use outside of temples. They range from the 16th Century to the present. Some show great wear from having been outside in shrines by rivers or forests.

Susan Harris: Tripod Ding

2006-04-28T16:15:00.000-04:00

2006-02-25T13:03:00.000-05:00

For Immediate Release

The Fire This Time: An Introduction to Contemporary Japanese Ceramics and
Weavings by Hiroko Takeda

March 11 – April 22, 2006

It is with great pleasure that Cavin-Morris Gallery presents their first dedicated show of Contemporary Japanese Ceramics. The artists represented in this exhibition range from established artists to a new generation of emerging artists. All, however, are well known, collected and exhibited in Japan and by cognoscenti in Europe and the United States. Ryuichi Kakurezaki, Koie Ryoji, Mihara Ken, Hiroyuki Wakimoto, Takashi Nakazato, Jinembo Nakagawa, and others are just a few of the artists whose work will be shown. Most pieces chosen for the exhibition were made in anagamas (or wood-fired) kilns. The artists have each taken traditional forms and personalized them on many levels from kiln construction to manipulation of melting ash, to form surfaces that are timeless and fascinating. They are constant experiments in carefully controlled accidents. We will offer a selection of different forms of tokkuri and guinomi, the bottles and cups used for drinking sake. As well as highlighting unique forms, in this exhibition we will emphasize the sensual and tactile facets inherent in this pottery. For the artists in this exhibition, aesthetics, form and function blend seamlessly as their creations serve multi-tiered lives between utilitarian and contemplative aesthetics.

We will also show a selection of work by Jeff Shapiro, an American ceramicist who spent nine years studying and exhibiting in Japan. His dramatic work is respected and shown in Japan as well as the United States.

In addition to the ceramics we will feature the weavings of Hiroko Takeda, an artist who received formal training in traditional Japanese textiles and has taken these ideas to fascinating and dramatic new places. Takeda observes: "While my work is not limited to any particular theory or tradition, I have a continuing interest in expressing incongruous harmonies: a balance within an unbalanced state, an organic element arising from a synthetic structure, a ruin in stormy seas." This will be the first time Ms. Takeda is showing with Cavin-Morris Gallery.

For further information, please contact Shari Cavin, Krishna Fitzpatrick or Randall Morris at (212) 226-3768, or e: Blugriot@aol.com.

Ryoji Koie

2006-02-25T13:02:00.000-05:00

Ken Mihara

2006-02-25T13:00:00.000-05:00

Jeff Shapiro

2006-02-25T12:59:00.000-05:00

Masami Nagaoka Vessel

2006-02-25T12:57:00.000-05:00

Kato Takahiko Winged Vessel

2006-02-25T12:56:00.000-05:00

Kato Takahiko Sake Flask (Tokkuri)

2006-02-25T12:54:00.000-05:00

Kato Takahiko Guinomi (Sake Cup)

2006-02-25T12:52:00.000-05:00

Update

2006-02-25T12:36:00.000-05:00

Thanks to all who made our appearance at the Outsider Art Fair a smashing success! This was a good fair this year and it was a great pleasure to be part of a field that seems to be able to recreate itself periodically. We were reaffirmed in our mission to introduce lesser known artists of quality. Some photos of new work , though not even close to all, follow. Our next exhibition will be Japanese Contemporary Ceramics which fit in beautifully with all our collections, and then we start work on the main Spring Exhibition called Indigenous Drawing. The Artist Ashoona, whom we introduced at the Fair, is a preview of this exhibition. She is an Inuit and draws rock formations from memory that are said to be amazingly accurate despite their abstraction. Her autism has not interfered in any way with her deep interaction with her culture and has probably added to her ability to take in the sacred landscapes with such powerful detail.

Chris Hipkiss

2006-02-25T12:35:00.000-05:00

More Mort Golub

2006-02-25T12:34:00.000-05:00

Mort Golub

2006-02-25T12:33:00.000-05:00

Ashoona

2006-02-25T12:31:00.000-05:00

Ignacio Carles-Tolra

2006-02-25T12:30:00.000-05:00

New jon Serl Cache

2006-02-25T12:29:00.000-05:00

Christine Sefalosha

2006-02-25T12:28:00.000-05:00

Adam Sabhan

2006-02-25T12:26:00.000-05:00

New Kevin Sampson works

2006-02-25T12:07:00.000-05:00

New Keith Goodhart

2006-02-25T12:02:00.000-05:00

Japanese Blues- Art of the Boro

2005-11-16T15:06:00.000-05:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Japanese Blues: The Art of the Boro
December 8 – January 14, 2006

The repeatedly mended indigo-dyed futon covers and garments used and worn by farmers and fishermen in Pre-World War II Japan are far more complex than mere patchwork. These boro (translated as rags) contain in their layers of shima, kasuri, hemp thread and other recycled materials, a vernacular history of survival and creative ingenuity.

A fascinating aspect of boros is that they are a form of art history in process. They embody the passage of time. They are arrangements of ideas and memories, mnemonic devices of the soul. The Gees Bend quilts, in contrast, represent a single act of memory. The saved pieces of recycled cloth are pieced out in a single manifestation of creation. A boro records a process that can extend over one hundred years. They are a textile version of a mountain or stone or any natural phenomenon that is prone to change, and that change inspires renewed contemplation and appreciation. Boros were also a reflection of the changes in the outside world as various scraps of cotton manufactured over time became incorporated through the harsh and frugal world of their makers into a futon cover or jacket. The message of survival and hope, emblematic in these utilitarian objects, is visible in their rough beauty. A boro combines the intimacy of the personal choices and marks of its maker with the larger patterns that manifest when it is seen from a distance. The Japanese especially have been known for raising the utilitarian object to modern works of timeless art. It is no accident that the boros seem to rhyme with those works of Western art that sought to examine visually some of the same concepts intrinsic to Japanese aesthetics; emptiness, silhouette, eloquent silence and the deep-seated affectations of minimal forms.

This is Cavin-Morris Gallery’s second exhibition of Japanese textiles and the first exhibition in a New York gallery focusing only on the wide variety of boros.

In Gallery Two, we will be previewing some of our burgeoning collection of Contemporary Japanese Ceramics, and in addition, have on display Southeast Asian textiles, jewelry and amulets from Chinalai Tribal Antiques.

For further information, please contact Shari Cavin, Randall Morris or Krishna Fitzpatrick at (212) 226-3768 or e: Blugriot@aol.com.

Some Boros

2005-11-16T15:04:00.000-05:00

More pictures from System in Chaos: Kosek

2005-10-27T13:20:00.000-04:00

Semerak

2005-10-27T13:15:00.000-04:00

Plny

2005-10-27T13:14:00.000-04:00

Wertheimer

2005-10-27T13:13:00.000-04:00

System in Chaos Curated by Terezie Zemankova

2005-09-21T16:18:00.000-04:00

Here is the press release for the next show along with some new arrivals from Sefalosha and Anna Zemankova and Humberto Hermosillo.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SYSTEM IN CHAOS
October 15 – November 26, 2005

It is with great pleasure that Cavin-Morris presents SYSTEM IN CHAOS: New Art Brut From the Czech Republic. This exhibition, two years in the planning, is organized by Terezie Zemánková, curator for the ABCD Collection, and granddaughter of well-known self-taught artist, Anna Zemánková. Ms. Zemánková has focused on four extremely different artists whose diverse ways of coping with illness create four very different world visions, each grand in its inception.

Leos Wertheimer, an ex-car mechanic had a condition that required him to retire young. He became passionate about drawing large-scale, almost fetishistic portraits of locomotives. As the curator implies the attention he pays to their detail is quite anatomical in intensity.

Lubos Plny was an electrician who began to model at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts. The Academy gave him the honorary degree of academy model, a stamp of which he uses to emboss many of his drawings. Plny audited several anatomy classes, and studied grave digging. His drawings, highly anatomized self-portraits, contain careful notes about the presence or absence of bodily fluids. One senses the drawings serve as an obsessive vehicle of visual contemplation, containing thousands of detailed markings all strange and beautiful, making a path through the thicket of his illness.

Zbynek Semerak’s complex drawings are layered visions of mythical, architectural, and technological history done in an almost ephemeral self-effacing style that is nervous and delicate and very intimate despite their ponderous and far ranging subjects of man’s cultural diversities.

Zdenek Kosek was a typographer for fifteen years. His illness forced him to retire in 1989. As opposed to his more conventional amateur paintings he made in healthier times, he began to produce a series of small, obsessive, and diverse drawings based on meteorology and the weather. He felt that he could control the cyclones, storms, tornadoes, and rains around the planet. In these drawings he meticulously charts wind, bird flight, sounds, chemical changes, infinite numbers etc. In the curator’s words "He considers his head as a kind of radar, a propeller, a whir, a transmitter-receiver of a multitude of information. He believes he is ‘the brain of the earth’." These drawings are from a feverish period of activity (1990-1992) before he was hospitalized.

For further information, please contact Shari Cavin, Randall Morris or Marisa Torres at (212) 226 3768, or e: blugiot@aol.com.

Anna Zemankova

2005-09-19T15:41:00.000-04:00