“Outliers and American Vanguard Art” at LACMA, Los Angeles
LACMA, Los Angeles November 18, 2018 – March 17, 2019
One of the more striking throughlines of “Outliers and American Vanguard Art,” curator Lynne Cook’s show of “outsider,” vernacular, and thus-inspired art from the 20th and 21st centuries, was the frequent presence of Christian motifs. The Peaceable Kingdom featured in several paintings, like Horace Pippin’s Holy Mountain III (1945); so did “The Fall of Man,” as in Edgar Tolson’s series of illustrative wooden carvings. American art, in this portrayal, is not unlike medieval or Renaissance art on similar themes, where self-conscious artists train contemporary sensibilities on classical subjects. See the cruciform pop of Roger Brown’s Contrail Crucifix (1975); or Bruce Conner’s grisly, waxy CRUCIFIXION (1960). The textile works that concluded the show comprised a quilt by Rosie Lee Tompkins that incorporates smaller textiles in a garment-district vernacular of needlepoint rags, silkscreened t-shirts, and a Christ rendered with a digital loom. A generally zany work by Lonnie Holley, The Boneheaded Serpent at the Cross (It Wasn’t Luck) (1996), is a wiry concatenation of charms: a horseshoe, dried flowers; crosses made of rebar and bone. Like the show as a whole, Holley’s piece takes a kitchen sink approach to folk superstition and its sculptural forms. Rather than religious fervor, this tendency seems driven by the exploration (and exploitation) of American craft traditions, including Native American, African American and South American influences. Style is key – the more idiosyncratic the better. The exhibition extended chronologically, and so ended with examples in “naïve” craft styles by knowing artists like Howardena Pindell and Jessica Stockholder; or riffs on vernacular photography by Cindy Sherman and Zoe Leonard. Near the start was a room devoted to what Alfred Barr branded the Modern Primitives – self-taught artists who skillfully depict daily life in mundane scenes, like Los Privados by Pedro Cervántez (1937), laundry on the line beside an outhouse, or the deadpan Dog Fight over the Trenches (1935) by Horace Pippin, with the power of academic modernists. Henri Rousseau is the primary example. The three paintings on view suggested a deliberate de-skilling; the subjects of Rendezvous in the Forest from 1989, a European couple reclining in a densely rendered jungle, are clothed like French colonialists, while the only figures in the less detailed, mutely colored Tropical Forest with Monkeys (1910) are monkeys.
Folk art, its crude materials, its childlike simplicity or directness, are all metaphors for authenticity. Rawness of expression might present the unvarnished truth, as with John Kane’s self-portrait of 1929, a
work of unforgiving objectivity… Or the truth can manifest in ways as simple as an economy of means, as in another Kane work: a farm scene on one side, the illuminated text of the Gettysburg Address on the other. This goes for the found-object assemblages of Betye Saar and Noah Purifoy (both lived in LA), for instance, or the junkyard brutalism of Sam Doyle’s BROWN BOMBER (1979), a work on tin in paint and tar. Beyond this is a resourcefulness that almost seems deranged: when a painter like Louis Michel Eilshemius abandons his academic chops for thin, scratchy scenes of dark ponds and nude bathers on pieces of brown cardboard, he invokes the less “knowing” materiality of Martín Ramírez or Henry Darger, who patched together huge drawings from bits of cheap paper. This physical thinness or fragility is part of what gives these “outsider” pictures their otherworldly or phantasmagoric feel – as if the true artist was too compelled by the visionary to worry about the practicalities.
That’s what artists are, after all: VISIONARIES who see the world for what it is. The more outré that vision, the more real that world. Some of the most pleasurable works are preoccupied with detail, pattern and texture – like Pippin’s The Den (1945), in which the leopard-print armchairs to either side of the fireplace dominate the composition from its wings. Such “formal density” struck a nerve with later artists, especially the psychedelically inclined, who looked to marginal traditions as much as to Art Deco for the mindmelting styles of the 1960s. The Chicago Imagists were well represented in “Outliers”; they shared walls with the naïf masterpieces that inspired them, like the striated train tunnels of Ramírez or rutted mountain valleys by Joseph Yoakum – whose visions more than verge on hallucination. (This is also why ecstatic paintings that predate LSD by a hundred years can look grandfathered-in to psychedelia.) The most electric works on view included Barbara Rossi’s 1971 Male of Sorrows, a quilted aquatint on satin that’s like a crucified mound of limbs and hair quintupled by light trails. It’s no accident that Rossi and the so-called Hairy Who, a subset of the Chicago Imagists, invoke the forests of tiny extruded lines rising out of every surface when, influenced by one substance or another, one stares at one thing too long. For example, upon reflection on Christina Ramberg’s Lola La Lure (1969), the highlights of a woman’s hairdo become the most important thing...
Schizophrenia, childhood, drugs, or dreams – these artists were for whatever can peel back your perception to the “raw” idea of what is important. Indeed, the urgent question, which the show rephrased again and again, is one of BELIEF: what matters? who can tell? who decides? It bears repeating that the adoption of this sort of outsider formalism signaled a wider rejection of beaux-arts, Hudson River School society – as well as the romanticization of artists/ figures who didn’t choose to drop out, but were dropped: marginalized for everything from mental illness and religious fanaticism to race and class. How many of these artists were institutionalized in one way or another, whether in the university or the psych ward, was buried in the exhibition’s sense of immediacy and exuberance. But this problematic little thrill of pariah-hood was always part of the draw for the counterculture. The beauty of “Outliers” was the way that, in American art as in America, the answer points again and again to the individual – artist or outsider, neither or both.