Читать книгу Spiritual American Trash - Greg Bottoms - Страница 8

I call this book a collection of “portraits.” It is made, in the spirit of the outsider artists I portray, of found materials. My process has been to steep myself in the facts of these artists’ lives, which I found in newspapers, documentary films, websites, museum catalogs and brochures, obituaries, and magazine articles (all of which you could find yourself). From these notes I would create a skeleton of biography (sometimes dubious, with facts in different so-called factual records contradicting each other), around which I would write a character sketch focused on the drama of artistic drive and the psychological impulse to create born of suffering, poverty, and social marginalization, all against the backdrop of the United States in the twentieth century. Of course this book is not the stories as the artists themselves would tell them, or as a scholar or art curator or news journalist would tell them, but rather my subjective interpretations and improvisations around the facts. I care about facts—find them fascinating—and I certainly don’t have any right to knowingly change the verifiable facts of other people’s lives, so I’ve done my best to be accurate on that score, understanding that “accurate,” over time and through art-world talk, history, and journalism, is far from a solid state (more like gas with the wind blowing). Around these already sometimes dubious facts I’ve been selective in the service of the story as I see it, and I’ve marshaled a lot of fictive forces short of whole-cloth invention—speculation, conjecture, imagining of intentions, entering the points of view and consciousnesses of others, inventing miniscenes around the known or rumored to narrate rather than report or analyze key moments of change.

When I was younger, I studied drawing and painting, which accounts for part of my interest in outsider art and artists. I was focused, from the start, on realism, even photographic realism (which required the highest level of craft and skill, I believed), and that has carried over to all that I’ve written, whether autobiographical fiction with one foot in the essay or nonfiction at the very edge of the novel. Over the years I’ve become increasingly interested in the gray area between fact and fiction, truth and memory, historical records and historical stories, as a space to work as a writer—not to be coy or to try to exploit some potential capital in the “true” or “tragic,” but because I am a product of my time and culture (I’m in it; I think about it) and this is the real space in which we all exist, in layers of random information, cursory or even mendacious interpretation, skewed and dangerously clueless ideology, comforting myth that works on the mind the way corn syrup works on the body, and plain fantasy. When I drew as a kid, I wanted a tree to express the full truth of my perception of that tree, which, when you think about it, was the only truth I had real, honest, unequivocal access to. That is what art has always been to me, an adventure in saying this is what I see and life is like this.

I quit writing fiction in any conventional sense of the I’m-making-this-up a long time ago, partly because to me writing is, as Orwell wrote, against a lie, or, as Mario Vargas Llosa had it, produced in a spirit of revolt, and adding overt fabrication on top of both the overt and covert cultural fabrications all around me was no revolt at all, was going with the flow. I mean, I wanted to show you the tree. But my tree, back when I was a kid drawing, was really a piece of paper with lines and shading that had been filtered through my mind and soul and body—the truth, the mostly verifiable truth, vortexed through the unavoidable fiction of the imagination, in an honest attempt to find a deeper truth, a deeper meaning, a tree more tree than tree, if you will. And this book is the same—I really would like to show you the artists—except I have only words, and words and sentences make my portraits now rather than lines and shading. Know all this before you begin.

I chose eight representative artists—all public figures with some notoriety in the current art world, all dead for at least a decade, but none widely known—who created “visionary” outsider art in America—literally art inspired by a magical or mystical vision—all of whom were profoundly shaped by their experiences as Americans, extremely ostracized ones from poor and difficult backgrounds. America was the pressure cooker that made them who they were. Each artist was driven by spiritual necessity, psychological obsession, and a single-minded focus that all but obliterated the rest of their existence as human beings for a short time on the earth. There have been and are dozens and dozens more artists like these in the United States. There is a whole industry and social economy built around outsider art. I tried to stick to writing about artists who had no or at least very little engagement with or understanding of this art industry or social economy, and who went about their business for their own purposes and needs. They made art for a higher power and to save themselves. Even if their ideas skirted the edge of sanity, their motives, I believe, were honest. I appreciate that, admire it.

And, well, maybe just a few more words about me, your narrator through these stories, these sketches, these portraits: I’ve been interested in, fascinated by, outsider or self-taught art and artists for a couple of decades now. This is no doubt a personal issue with me. I grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic brother who had visions and nightmares day and night, who ended up homeless and then incarcerated, who was a victim and criminal on the streets of this country of ours of three hundred–plus million; I was born in the South, of a long line of working-class North Carolinians and Virginians, all of whom were shaped, without pondering it much, by that American pressure cooker of class and by their distance from anything like power; and, finally, I lived deeply as a child in a Christian religious belief system where in the end God would win out, and we believers would be delivered from this life of suffering. I think I get outsider artists. I think I get suffering, which bends and reshapes a person the way extreme sun bends and reshapes a tree. I think I get religious or spiritual obsessions and how they arise from our deepest needs. Partly this is because I get that people cannot survive without some sense of sturdy meanings. When sturdy meanings collapse, when the world stops making sense, as it did for the artists I write about, we—you, me, them—have no choice but to rationalize and relativize, to create a new world in our minds, and then wholeheartedly believe in it.

This is a simple and personal book—like all my books, like all my drawings and paintings when I was younger, because I believe in clarity and owning what you say—that is driven by three questions regarding each artist: Who was this person? What did he/she do? Why did he/she do it? The answers, to me at least, are fascinating and possibly even instructive.