SPIRITUAL AMERICAN TRASH
SPIRITUAL
AMERICAN TRASH
Portraits from the Margins of Art and Faith
GREG BOTTOMS
Illustrated by W. David Powell
COUNTER POINT
BERKELEY
Spiritual American Trash
Copyright © 2013 Greg Bottoms
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Bottoms, Greg.
Spiritual American trash : portraits from the margins of art and faith / Greg Bottoms.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-61902-210-2 (pbk.)
1. Art, American—20th century. 2. Art, American—21st century. 3. Outsider art—United States. 4. Spirituality in art. I. Title.
N6512.5.O87B68 2013
709.2’273—dc23
Interior design by Sabrina Plomitallo-González, Neuwirth & Associates
Illustrations and Jacket design by W. David Powell
COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Patron Saint of Thrown-Away Things: A Portrait of James Hampton
Ghosts in the Mirrors: A Portrait of Geraldo Alfonso
A Place Where the Tears of the Forgiver and the Forgiven Mingle: A Portrait of Annie Hooper
Do You Think Your Soul Believes in You? (from a commonplace book)
Mountainous Harmony and Everlasting Peace: A Portrait of Clarence Schmidt
Residential Chief Artist of Nothing: A Portrait of Frank Van Zant (a.k.a. Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder)
We Are Made in the Image of the Image We Made (from a commonplace book)
The Only One Here: A Portrait of Tressa “Grandma” Prisbrey
In the Devil House: A Portrait of Frank Jones
The Importance of Good Company: A Portrait of James Harold Jennings
Only in Human Terms (from a commonplace book)
To try to understand the experience of another it is necessary to dismantle the world as seen from one’s own place within it, and to reassemble it as seen from his. For example, to understand a given choice another makes, one must face in imagination the lack of choices which may confront and deny him. The well-fed are incapable of understanding the choices of the under-fed. The world has to be dismantled and reassembled in order to be able to grasp, however clumsily, the experience of another. To talk of entering the other’s subjectivity is misleading. The subjectivity of another does not simply constitute a different interior attitude to the same exterior facts. The constellation of facts, of which he is the centre, is different.
—John Berger
Art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it; it runs away as soon as one says its name; it loves to go incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called.
—Jean Dubuffet
SPIRITUAL AMERICAN TRASH
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