March 12–19, 1998

critical mass|art

By Any Other Name

Outsiders? Primitives? Self-Taught? Whatever you call these artists, their work is full of wonders.

by Robin Rice

Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology

Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th and the Parkway, through May 17, 763-8100

		Rizzoli exhibited in his living room, his shows attended mostly by neighborhood children; Martin Ramirez spent much of his life as a patient in a Los Angeles mental hospital.

Talk about mixed media: oil paints, crayons, photographs, concrete, stone, electric lights, pill bottles, aluminum foil, wire, roots, paper glued together with starch and spit, chicken bones and brushes made of human hair are among the materials used by the 32 artists in Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology, which just opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

There's an exciting heterogeneity in the mix of artists represented, too: none of them has a formal experiential bond with the historical flow of art traditions—high or low; popular or aristocratic—or with any other artist in the show.

Yet for all this diversity the visitor experiences a sense of appropriate wholeness.

For guest curator Elsa Longhauser, director of the Paley/Levy Galleries at Moore College, An American Anthology and its companion exhibition Perspectives on Patterning (concurrently at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City) are the culmination of a long-term interest in the work of self-taught artists. In 1981 Longhauser organized Transmitters: The Isolate Artist in America for the University of the Arts and later, for the Galleries at Moore, a series of related solo exhibitions.

		Billowing Parallel Lines: Martin Ramirez, Untitled (1950)

I like Longhauser's earlier term "isolate artist" better than "self-taught" because it emphasizes the artistic individuality and quirkiness of this work—though its suggestion that the artists were socially isolated is not always correct.

The opposite was true, for instance, of Elijah Pierce (1892-1984), a maker of orderly, painted wood reliefs. The son of a former slave, Pierce was a Mason, an important member of his church, and a successful barber whose art was appreciated by his African-American community in Columbus, OH.

But any choice of terminology is fraught with problems. People used to call the artists "primitive" or "naive." That seemed patronizing; so "folk" became popular. But who are the "folk," anyway? Pierce was probably one of them. "Outsider artists," popular during the '80s, seems to apply best to those who, unlike Pierce, are crazy.

Self-taught is, at least, not offensive, though it isn't completely accurate. All artists are self-taught to some extent and some of those in this show formally studied skills which are applied to their work. The most obvious example is A.G. Rizzoli, who studied drafting, rendering and mechanical engineering and worked as a draftsman for an architectural firm for 34 years.

Rizzoli belongs in this show because, as an artist, he doesn't fit anywhere else. During his life, exhibitions held in his living room were attended mostly by neighborhood children, but his work absolutely does belong in a museum. Patently the product of obsessive repressed sexuality, his lacy elaborated architectural elevations are delightful, and their odd integrity is authentically monumental.

		Ordinary People: Edgar Tolson's Adam and Eve (1979)

Rizzoli's "Kathedrals," which are symbolic portraits of acquaintances (often children or his mother), are all part of a grand scheme for the fantasy city he named Y.T.T.E. (Yield To Total Elation). Rizzoli was not above a bit of humor. In his majestic metropolis: A.S.S. (Acme Sitting Station) is the acronym for toilet.

Perhaps more repression would make the educated art of our day more interesting. Eroticism working its way through the barriers of repression is one of the dominant themes of the show (religion, an incubator of repression, is the other). A couple of rooms have posted notices that material may not be suitable for children.

Henry Darger's arcane and violent vignettes of bizarre little girls (sometimes with penises) have the élan of fashion layouts and the narrative character of Chinese scrolls. Steve Ashby's "fixing-ups," as he called them, are equally disturbing, though the assemblages are so abstracted that very young children may not be able to decipher the imagery. Driven by simple whirligigs, figures including Mickey Mouse and a mule are designed to engage in explicit sexual acts with cut-out plywood women whose faces are magazine pictures. There is something oddly innocent about these fragile crude tableaux.

In another context, Ashby's work, like others in the show, could be passed off as consciously child-like art brut and a sophisticated commentary on the contemporary commodification of sexuality (Ashby died in 1980). One of the ironies apparent here is that "school-taught" artists are influenced by "outsiders," but influence does not flow the other way. The autodidact tends to admire conservative—even unimaginative—representation.

		Complex Patterning: Morris Hirshfield's Girl With Angora Cat (1944)

Morris Hirshfield (1872-1946), like Rizzoli, one of numerous well-known names in the show, delights in patterning. Hirshfield was a slipper manufacturer; his professional work with fabrics perhaps sensitized him to the elaborate ornamentation which dominates his work. Though Hirshfield renders complex patterns perfectly in the fur of an angora cat, in draperies and hillsides, he falters when it comes to representing an American Beauty. Her awkward and distorted anatomy emphasizes her glowing nakedness as an organic irregularity in the overall design.

Another star, the Mexican-born Martin Ramirez, is also a pattern-oriented artist. For much of his life a patient in a Los Angeles mental hospital, Ramirez pasted together small bits of paper to make the surface for large drawings. Billowing parallel lines frame and sculpt space, suggesting an undulating infinity of scale distortions. (A newly discovered group of 10 Ramirez drawings is included in the Patterning exhibition.) Again, we can imagine contemporary artists borrowing eagerly from Ramirez, but the process could not be reversed.

A re-creation of the 800-square-foot shed filled with Emery Blagdon's "healing machines" is among the highlights of the show. Colored lights and electrified assemblages can be viewed from several open niches in the walls of the "building," which was originally situated on Blagdon's Nebraska farm. There are numerous radiating sun-like objects, but infinite stacked and layered repetition and mysterious technology are the most powerful images.

Blagdon's neighbors were invited to bask in the aura of the mysterious carnivalesque installation, which is somewhat suggestive of a side chapel in a Gothic church: a vague shadowed space filled with gleaming reliquaries and mysterious elaborate furniture. Many believed in the building's healing power. Complete with an evocative rural audio, the space is inviting and comforting.

Altogether there are 300 works in this show. Though linked to the present century, it begins with Henry Church's (1836-1908) appealing glass-eyed stone sculpture and sophisticated colorful paintings, and continues with such folk aristocrats as Horace Pippin (1888-1946), whose historic paintings have been widely exhibited; Grandma Moses' (1860-1961) meticulous records of farm life; and Edgar Tolson's (1904-1984) carved wood sculpture of ordinary people. Living artists in the show include Howard Finster (b. 1916), whose bombastic literary style has made him a wealthy man, and Thornton Dial (b. 1928), who is showing up-to-the-minute tributes to Mother Theresa and Princess Diana.

To consider these artists as a group, the art writer is almost forced to discuss trivialities like age (they do seem to live a long time) or universal impulses like patterning, to generalize about the creative process or, as Arthur Danto suggests in his penetrating catalogue essay, to focus on the history of collecting and exhibition.

The latter study portrays the work of the collector and curator as a crucial process. But often with this kind of artwork the connoisseurs—the people who discovered and nurtured it—demand as much attention as the art does. While Longhauser and her collaborator Swiss curator Harald Szeemann acknowledge our debt to the collectors, the spotlight in the show is where it should be—on art and artists.

This is a wonderful show: filled with wonder at the sacred and the perverse; at nightmares and absurdities; and at the ordinary and the sublime.