Review: Better

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Review: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

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Inside Outsider Art

Morgan Monceaux, "John F. Kennedy" Source: New York Times

        Morgan Monceaux is a 63-year-old visual artist in Baltimore. He studied music in college, went to Vietnam, returned, battled depression and homelessness, worked at occasional jobs, and for a period lived by rooting through dumpsters. In 1990, he was struck by the idea of painting. Later that year, while living in a migrant shack by a rail yard in Southampton, near where he had found a job as a janitor at a bar, he walked past a gallery showing primitive American art. After looking in, he declared to the gallery owner, “I can do this,” and procured 40 paintings that he had recently, with no training, completed. Now, Monceaux has three works in the National Portrait Gallery, he has painted every president, and while he wasn’t able to purchase a furnace for his home until 2007, he appears to have found his groove. He has been profiled in the New Yorker, he has patrons in the art world, and he was featured in today’s New York Times.
        This is a great story. But is it about great art?
        This past January, I visited the Outsider Art Fair, hosted by Sanford Smith at 7 W New York. Outsider Art is like the long-lost child of the art world. It grew up on its own accord outside of the official avenues of culture: the schools, the galleries, the museums and institutions. It is art created for emotional, psychological, or other personal reasons (as opposed to commercial reasons), and inevitably, as with Mr. Monceaux, it brings with it a story; the term “Outsider Art” itself, a translation of the French term “Art Brut,” comes from French artist Jean Dubuffet’s exposure to art by inmates of insane asylums.
        As this might suggest, Outsider artists are unschooled, if not totally untrained. Some, like Monceaux, sprang to life when a pencil or paintbrush first reached their hands in their adult lives. Others, like Achilles Rizzoli, an architectural draftsman, transferred skills from alternate careers. And so, the aesthetic quality of Outsider Art is enormously subjective and varied, and the artists’ command of technique is often questionable. Nonetheless, the works are almost uniformly visually arresting: the images are frequently hallucinatory, their subject matter often dyspeptic. And yet the works typically demonstrate a great sensitivity to life—in concept, if not in execution. My best attempt at a visual summary is this: works by Outsider Artists appear to have been composed either without the use of a ruler at all, or solely with one. And the lack of any kind of straight line, or the overabundance of them, may also be a good indicator of the nature of the artists themselves. The compositions are fodder for dizzying psychological hypothesizing.

Arthur Klein, "Dog with Blue Legs" Source: www.echo.nl
        Great art, in my mind, has two elements: aesthetic appeal and intellectual content; it is pleasurable to the senses and it stretches the brain. (Note: This does not necessarily mean that it is happy; a tragic story can be beautifully told. Nor does it mean that it is esoteric; fundamental understandings, like why we laugh, can be the most enlightening.) Satisfying the senses and mind, great art compels us to engage and examine the human experience. Good but not great art aspires to this, but succeeds only in varying degrees. Other categories of art break down easily along these lines: cloying or commercial art most often gluttonously (or greedily) aspires to providing (or selling) only emotional animation or pleasure, academic art most often stimulates only the brain, and other self-righteous or self-indulgent art typically satisfies only one element or the other, but usually not both. Art with the highest cultural value is that which most engages our minds and our senses so that we better understand ourselves—our experiences, our emotions, our thoughts.
        Outsider Art, however, is not great art. Simply looking at it is frequently discomfiting; the execution of the work often reveals poor skill at composition or technique so that the artist’s intention is lost—like a man who hears a melody in his head and tries to play it on a guitar, even though he has never played before. The result is a clumsy mess of sound. Sometimes, however, the artist, through dogged persistence, puts so much time and energy into the work that it becomes remarkable simply because of the time it took. But even this, when looking at a canvass covered in scribbles, does not run very deep.
        What salvages Outsider Art is that the shadow of what is trying to be expressed is, for some consumers, not the subject of a work. Instead, it is the story of the artist. Henry Darger, for example, was orphaned and institutionalized as a child, and in his solitary adult life he produced hundreds of images and a 15,000 page single-spaced story. Stephen J M Palmer, prominently displayed by several dealers at the Outsider Art Fair, was a farmer in the Midwest who suffered a spinal injury and then produced hundreds of works from his bed during the remaining decades of his life. Achilles Rizzoli, mentioned above, lived alone with his mother. His meticulous works were only found after his death. The cultural value of these works lies in the stories of their creators. The works are reasons for telling their stories as much as, if not more than, they are meant as standalone objects. They are a pivot point for our consideration of the lives that devised them.
        But this confuses the role of art. Or, at the least, it mismatches mediums. If the story of a depressed laborer who finds solace in painting reveals something about introspection and artistic catharsis, then the story is best told through a narrative. The painting is a complement to the story, but not the story itself. Dealers are trading in the by-product--the paintings--which, by themselves, are often unpleasant. And so, historical context and biography, instead of enhancing works of art, are intended to excuse them. While compelling narratives certainly deserve their due respect, one has to decide whether or not they redeem a repellent painting.

Mose Tolliver, "George Washington" Source: Ginger Young Gallery
        But all is not scribbles and splash in Outsider Art. While between form and content it is form that is most often lacking, there are masterpieces of both. Still, among the great remainder of lesser works, there lingers a raw urgency and insistence. It is something visceral and untempered. While it hasn’t been refined by training, neither has it been confused by it. And if examination of human nature is the ultimate aim of art, then Outsider Art succeeds, if in a brutal way. Its creators often come from the margins of our society, and it is generally through contemplation of these extremes that we are best able to understand the middle.

Achilles Rizzoli, "Mr. & Mrs. Harold Healy Symbolically Sketched" Source: The Ames Gallery

Visiting New York; Visiting the Waldorf-Astoria

        I first began visiting New York when I was in college. I had rarely more than driven through the city, and so it had the allure of a foreign land—like a blank space on a map. During these early visits—visiting family friends for long weekends most often—I would inevitably at some point find myself somewhere in midtown with a few hours to kill. So, I would walk up or down Madison or Park or Fifth and just stop at whatever seemed interesting. I’d ride any unguarded elevators, open any unlocked doors, walk up or down any available stairwells, and talk to strangers and shopkeepers whenever it seemed reasonable. Once I found myself in a rare bookstore, and 45 minutes later I was flipping through a 1667 first edition Paradise Lost. Another time, I bumped into a gentleman on the street, and ended up, several hours later, sharing conversation with folks in a sitting room at the Knickerbocker Club. This could only happen in New York, and I’m convinced that to experience the broadest range of this city, we have to just go outside and walk around.
        A few days ago, I went out like this for the first time in a long time.
        Walking down Park Ave, I took a moment in front of the Racquet and Tennis Club and admired the Seagram Building across the way. It was early evening, and the white, rectangular ceiling lights lit up the insides of the skyscraper’s lower floors like a swimming pool with underwater lamps. The office day had just ended, and only a few men in white shirts and dark ties walked around reading stapled packets of paper. The illuminated offices bounded by the sleek, black building made its contents look like a series of stacked dioramas. For all of its perfect proportion and modernist aesthetic, the building always seems smaller in person than it looms in my mind.
        I was drawn to St. Bart’s church next. It was two blocks down, but as I approached, I noticed a tall Art Deco building behind it. It boasted ornate carvings and a tall, narrow body. I hoped for an observation deck, but was disappointed when the guard at the front desk said that there was none. Undeterred, I browsed the building’s directory, found a welcoming-sounding company (the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce), and asked if I could visit them. The guard called up and said, “There’s a man here who wants to speak to someone from Sweden” (which didn’t do my conversational work justice), and grudgingly directed me to an elevator. At the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce, which is across the elevator bay from a Volvo office, there wasn’t much of a view outside, but I learned a great deal about how to purchase Swedish companies, how to interact with America’s Federal Reserve Bank, what professional development and networking opportunities there are in New York for Swedish businesspeople, and the names of a few tasty Swedish restaurants. (I had been to most of them already.)
        Next door, the Waldorf-Astoria hotel was more varied.
        A multipurpose destination like the Waldorf-Astoria is a treasure trove of space and activity. The ground floor, with its expensive gift shops and hotel check-in and concierge desks, offers prime people watching. Floors two through four boast ballrooms, conference rooms and other social spaces—all accessible by stairwell and winding corridors. Men and women roam the halls, some dressed in tuxedos and others in casual attire. A bagpiper echoed through one annex. Caterers and other employees in cummerbunds popped in and out of kitchens and closets. Three children crept through the hallways, too, and I saw them several times as they seemed on a similar discovery mission, though they occasionally walked quietly against the walls with wide eyes, and other times shrieked and ran through crowds of party-goers on their way to one of a half dozen elevator bays scattered on each floor.
        Hotel rooms make up most of the rest of the building, except for the 18th floor, which hosts another dozen or so conference and function spaces. At one end of the one snaking hallway that connects end to end on this level are the smaller meeting rooms for groups of fifteen or so, and on the other end are the large terrace spaces and function halls like the Starlight Roof. Unlike the lower levels, this floor is quiet and secluded. There are no busy corridors or hard floors, only plush carpeting, muted decoration, and a few modest chairs and couches to relax on. In one larger conference hall, copies of the day’s presentation booklet were left scattered about the room. They detailed a Canadian energy company’s land holdings in Alberta and British Company and invited investors to capitalize retrieval of natural gas reserves buried under the Canadian shale. The company framed it as a cash-generation oil alternative that will be ripe for a recovering economy. Flipping through the catalog, I realized that these are the rooms in which markets are moved and landscapes are scheduled for development.
        I took the elevator back to the lower levels after passing through several bands of staff members setting up other halls, and I began to think that landmarks like the Waldorf-Astoria are like small cities in themselves; they contain overlapping communities that turnover numerous interior spaces. And people passing through represent wildly differing constituencies: staff members, tourists, residents, businessfolk, and children and grownups who are just out to explore the hallways. The spaces within are public and private, commercial and residential, meant for gathering and meant for passing through. It’s a miracle that all the systems working within the one building don’t collide or collapse, but instead coexist, possibly and presumably with one or a few people overseeing and directing them all, but most likely because the refining efforts of a thousand people over the decades have continuously carved out little niches of activity that no one person could fully grasp at any one time.

Eyes to the Sky

        At 94th and Broadway, a hunched and hatted old man crossing the street was cut off by a young woman walking uptown. He scowled up at her back while she, unknowing, continued on away from him.
        Grumpy, he sneered and muttered to himself as he returned his face to the earth. Like many New Yorkers, it was as if he sneered and muttered every day of his life.
        A moment later, though, his tired scowl relented. He stopped walking, and his gaze blankly and wearily rose to level to scan the every day way before him. A UPS truck. Some cars. Trees rustling in the breeze.
        And then, several shuffled steps later, when a beam of sun opened upon his wearied figure, he stopped, turned his eyes to the sky, smiled, straightened, and washed himself in the light.

Review: The Watchmen

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Day Labor

        Heading west, towards New York, just before the Stamford train station, the MetroNorth train passes over a small bridge, and before the bridge, on a road parallel to the tracks, Hispanic men stand scattered along a thousand feet of sidewalk in groups of two to five. They spread across the road in some places and laugh lightheartedly, bundled against the cold in jeans and puffy jackets. The weather is warmer today, and some wear windbreakers and jackets from high school sports teams.
        On the approach to the bridge, where the road parallel to the tracks hits a cross street, a sign on a telephone pole reads: “Day Labor Pickup 1000ft →”. It points in the direction of the men. At one moment, a Subaru Forester turns off the cross street and onto the parallel road, and a few of the men near the intersection gravitate towards it, as if pulled by its relative weight in their universe. Their attention is locked onto it, but the car has another destination and rides off down the road in the direction of the highway.

        I just saw a short movie the other day on YouTube called “The Job,” in which businessmen and women stand in clumps outside an office building until a Hispanic man drives up in a pickup truck. He calls out his needs—“Chief Financial Officer!” “Media Consultant!” etc.—and selects a few of the eager people in suits. They pile into the back of his truck, he closes the gate, and they drive away.
        I understood the movie, but I didn’t fully get it until just now.

Reviews: The Castle of Otranto, Watership Down, and Six Degrees of Separation

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