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Envisioning Howard Finster
The Religion and Art of a Stranger from Another World
By Norman Girardot UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96107-4
CHAPTER 1
On the Finster Trail
The Business of Howard Finster's Divine Busyness
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
—William Blake
They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
—Andy Warhol
If I could only be a sign upon that trail
If I could only be a sign upon that trail
In this rugged world of time ...
I would point them to the right,
To the morning star so bright.
—Howard Finster
SIGNS UPON THE TRAIL
Twenty-four years after my first encounter, I'm back on the Finster trail in north Georgia during the late summer of 2009. It's hot, as August in Georgia tends to be. Really hot! And the air conditioner in my rented Hyundai is struggling to keep up with the blazing, macadam-melting heat. I had flown into the Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta several days earlier. Having established a base of operations at the house of my brother Steven, in the felicitously named town of Flowery Branch, just north of the city, I'm on the road again. I'm headed more or less northwest, toward Summerville and Pennville, towns sequestered in the Appalachian foothills in the northwest corner of Georgia. Several months earlier, I had received a contract to write a book about the Southern Baptist preacher, well-known folk-visionary artist, and provocative cultural figure Howard Finster. With Finster running around my brain as I drive, I find myself passing through pine-covered hills into Chattooga County on Route 27, right past the Sloppy Floyd State Park and on into the county seat of Summerville and, farther down the road, the town of Pennville, site of Finster's Paradise Garden. Intimations of strangeness shimmer in the heat. Feeling a little nervous but also exhilarated, I'm on a mission to revisit the Finster family and to seek some signs to help me make sense of Finster's astonishing personality and perplexing career.
BRUT AFFINITIES
I begin with a general account of the almost impossibly broad and unwieldy category "outsider art" and its relation to Finster's multiple identities as a preacher, tinkerer, storyteller-performer, visionary, and so-called contemporary folk, self-taught, or outsider artist. Historically, what in 1972 came to be called outsider art in English derives from a not very literal translation, by the British scholar Roger Cardinal, of a reference that the maverick French artist and cultural critic Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) made in the 1940s to an "art brut" that displayed a kind of primal and unfettered creativity. Given Dubuffet's upbringing in the wine trade, there is an intriguing metaphorical linkage of art brut with what the word brut meant when found on a bottle of French Champagne. That is, méthode champenoise produces something that derives its refined and expensive elegance from a taste that is dry and fresh. More interpretively, this could be called a taste that is savage, original, natural, and somewhat astringent. Not brutal, but raw and distinctive. It is a kind of paradoxical refinement that is primitive (in the sense that it reflects the regional earthiness of the grapes) without any sweetly effete or sentimentalized middle-class flavor.
Brut refers to the result of a secondary process of fermentation in making champagne, in which vintners add a dosage of sugars and yeast, yielding alcohol and gas. It is this that produces the characteristic fizz and more acerbic taste. It could, therefore, be said (especially with regard to certain self-styled refined palates) that there is an elite presumption that brut champagne has passed through the stage of sweetness only to return to some primordial condition before any kind of sentimental distortion or corruption. Nothing saccharine is left to mask the earthy character of the grapes. It is an end process that reverts to, or re-creates, the raw beginning of things alive with the original effervescent spirit of life. This kind of sophisticated taste for the ironic brut, or original primitive, condition of things—which is itself a kind of ultimate or transcendental cultural refinement—is not at all limited to the art of making and appreciating good champagne. It is also an oxymoronic cultural trait of the whole self-designated "anticultural" fascination with art brut or outsider art going back to the time of Dubuffet—or, even earlier and more dramatically, to the surrealists.
For Dubuffet and his followers, art brut referred primarily, but not exclusively, to the vivid and often disturbing "art of the insane" discussed in early psychiatric writings about European asylum patients. Said to be cut off from the sweet, asphyxiating influences of normalcy, these artists obsessively expressed themselves visually in ways that were often unsettling but also surprisingly creative and strangely compelling. But the idea that psychiatric patients were totally oblivious to, or uncontaminated by, the surrounding culture is an impossible proposition. As with the secondary refinement necessary to produce a brut wine, psychosis could be said to represent a particular kind of consequential reaction to cultural impingements, a later fermentation that leads to a withdrawal away from the sweet comforts or repressions of mainstream cultural conformity. It represents a reversion to something more basic, primitive, anarchic, subversive, and unruly. For the insane, as with anticultural sophisticates, an unknowing or consciously ironic view of reality—where the rude or crude has value precisely because it goes against the grain of, or shocks, conventional sensibilities—becomes an all-encompassing belief system and way of life. The designation of some artists as visionary or outsider artists—as especially associated with some kind of creative insanity—is in fact the product of an elite cultural judgment that, in the spirit of the surrealist and spiritualist movements, involves artificially privileging various kinds of unconscious mentality or acutely self-conscious marginality.
The English term outsider art as used by Roger Cardinal in the 1970s and 1980s came to include a broad, even wildly expansive, range of meaning that went well beyond Dubuffet's original, and rather dogmatic, criteria. As a repository for all sorts of antimodernist and antibourgeois sentiments in art and larger cultural circles, the category of outsider art in recent history gradually embraced whatever was not typically seen as part of the mainstream, and self-referential, art school tradition. This involved especially the progressive elevation of low, pop, or mass cultural images and artifacts to the plane of high art. Mental illness was no longer the primary principle of inclusion, and all sorts of art by people partially marginalized in some psychological, physical, social, ethnic, religious, or cultural fashion were brought under the sideshow banner of outsider tradition. The outsider category came, therefore, to include—in differing degrees, and depending on who were the arbitrators—such things as Paleolithic cave art, tribal or aboriginal art, traditional folk art, children's art, surrealist art, prison art, naive art, tramp art, circus art, visionary art, spiritualist-mediumistic art, tourist art, tattoo art, and so on.
The one term that was largely taboo in this loose litany was primitive art. Pejorative, simplistic, and colonialist uses of the primitive label have had a long and controversial history in academic disciplines going back to disagreements over whether humans had evolutionary origins as "noble savages" or as "childish brutes." African and other tribal art was, in fact, an influential factor in the emergence of modern art at the beginning of the twentieth century. But in the late 1930s in Nazi Germany, and as related to some currents of the eugenics movement, this kind of modern, art brut, and primitive art was condemned as a particularly brutal, degrading, decadent, or "degenerate" art associated with retarded races and minds.
FOLK, VISIONARY, SELF-TAUGHT, OUTSIDER
Howard Finster was first identified as a "contemporary folk artist" who drew upon Southern, evangelical, and craft traditions, although in a idiosyncratic and often visionary way. In later years he especially became labeled a visionary artist, but also a grassroots, vernacular, self-taught, marginal, and outsider artist. For better or worse, and roughly since the 1980s, the terms self-taught, outsider, and more recently, vernacular have proven to be the most generously overlapping, popular, and lasting designations. The label visionary art, which loosely includes shamanistic, prophetic, mystical, surrealistic-automatic, trance, occult, and hallucinatory imagery (obviously, not all of which can be equated)—as well as a subgenre of fantasy/science-fiction-influenced imaginings—is even more problematically related to these categories.
With regard to some consistency of content associated with these labels, and in relation to those trained artists and other opportunists who have brazenly appropriated a faux-outsider persona in response to the trendiness of outsider tradition, I can report only that there is no compelling consensus at this time concerning what constitutes an authentic outsider artist. If anything, the field tends to revel in the ambiguity of the nomenclature. The qualifications of this principle include the belief that "real" outsiders should not be too blatant in adopting an outsider identity or care about how their work fits into the lineage of mainstream art. Moreover, culturally marginal self-taught artists may start out as oblivious to being called outsiders, but after being discovered and sought after by collectors and dealers, they gradually if reluctantly embrace this label. Finster, for example, did not at first understand his activities as being art, folk, vernacular, or necessarily outsiderish. In the spirit of biblical prophecy, he always preferred being called a visionary artist, and he signed many of his paintings as "Man of Visions." However, after he began to be publicly celebrated in the mid- to late 1980s, he tended to go along with the outsider terminology as an effective marketing tool to promulgate both God's and his own messages. Finster repeatedly declared that he didn't put any stock in the outsider label. For that matter, he did not really even care if he was called an artist. Yet he clearly relished and cultivated the attention and remuneration that such designations brought him.
Throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s Finster was a kind of folksy pop superstar of the burgeoning outsider art movement. Although by definition he was outside the prevailing art circles in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, he had been embraced by many elite art patrons, dealers, and institutions. Hip New York artists and designers like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Todd Oldham, and Mark Kostabi sought him out, as did avant-garde bands such as R.E.M. and Talking Heads. In most cases, he knew what he was getting himself into (as in his appearance on the Johnny Carson show), but there were times that his growing hunger for fame got the better of him. One egregious example of this was Finster's brush with the sleazy side of Hollywood in the late 1980s, when, led by suggestions that his visions about space travel would be made into a movie (that is, The Vision of 1982), he was taken to Los Angeles by the convicted con man Peter Paul to win a specious Spirit of America award and to be gawked at by aging celebrities. Finster always called such celebrity acquaintances his missionaries. The reality was always more complicated and ambivalent.
The difficulty with Finster—that is, a born-again good-old-boy Baptist preacher with a sixth-grade education who created a couple of roadside parks and then suddenly became famous while painting tens of thousands of "nasty" apocalyptic scenes of earthly mayhem and outer-space salvation—simply did not fit comfortably into any ordinary interpretive categories in art history. Neither did Finster as a visionary, eccentric artist-preacher fit easily into American Protestant church history or into the comparative history of religions. Part of the core meaning, therefore, of the designation "outsider artist" is that it refers to someone who is an unschooled artist and is generally unaware of, and largely uninfluenced by, prevailing mainstream artistic styles and movements. The self-taught outsider is also someone who is generally ignored by the art establishment (critics, galleries, museums) and academic traditions of understanding. While these individuals are at first generally oblivious to prevailing art fashions and unaware of being an outsider or an artist, their sense of identity and destiny significantly changes if there is any special recognition of them and their work. An outsider is, then, mostly "self-taught" and is someone who feels compelled, often late in life and sometimes after an important illness or crisis, to express his or her altered relationship to the ordinary world in some artistic way, often in a two- or three-dimensional visual medium.
Whereas all real visionaries can be said to be outsiders in relation to the common worldview of the dominant culture, not all outsiders are necessarily visionaries in the full-blown sense of a Howard Finster or a William Blake. For visionaries like Blake and Finster, extraordinary visionary experience of other celestial and remarkable worlds becomes a regular and often intense aspect of life, accompanied by a pressing need to communicate those visions to others. Whether visionary outsiders or outsider artists with other passions, such individuals have a common need to define themselves through their work and to labor incessantly toward creating a meaningful alternative to the dominant culture and their own personal difficulties.
WHO IS HOWARD FINSTER?
This is not a biographical study, but it is helpful to set out the rough narrative outline of Finster's rural Southern upbringing and subsequent international notoriety. Mystery is present right at the outset, since there is still some ambiguity about when Finster was born: 1915 or 1916. He was himself somewhat ambivalent about this issue, and there have been arguments for the year 1915. With Pauline Finster's blessing, the family had long settled on December 2, 1916. And it is 1916 that appears on the tombstone. Finster grew up relatively poor—the last of thirteen children, and with only a sixth-grade education—on a "hog, corn, and pea-patch" farm in northern Alabama (see figure 4). He said over and over again that his first ecstatic experience, at the age of three, was a vision of his dead sister, Abbie Rose, an event that in hindsight seemed to hint at his later prophetic career. This haunting event fit into a larger boyhood pattern of persistent dreams of flying and various vivid "out of body" experiences. He was admittedly a thoroughly strange, boundlessly curious, and surprisingly resourceful boy who, despite the irreligion of his father, was powerfully drawn to the raw revivalist Christianity in the hills of the Southern highlands. After a transformative born-again experience in his teens that he would theatrically and repeatedly recount in later life, he soon married Pauline Freeman and had five children in quick succession. Among many other odd jobs he held at this time was that of itinerant Baptist preacher in various small towns in northern Alabama and Georgia, an area that combined aspects of rural Southern culture with aspects of Appalachian culture.
Leaving formal preaching in the 1960s to take up the life of a rustic entrepreneur and jack-of-all-trades in Pennville, Finster worked tirelessly on his Paradise Garden, a much more elaborate version of an earlier outdoor attraction he built in Trion, Georgia. A second bornagain event occurred when he was sixty years old, at a time when areas marginal to the "New South" of prosperous sunbelt cities like Atlanta were experiencing severe economic hardship. Finster described having had a revelatory vision of a face (some kind of visionary or hallucinatory personage) in a smear of white tractor enamel on his finger, which commanded him to paint "sacred art." He started compulsively and often sleeplessly to paint what he thought of as burning end-time messages from God that progressively stretched the boundaries of conventional Baptist theology and his preacher's repertory of timely Bible stories. During the late 1970s and throughout most of the 1980s, he experienced increasingly vivid and crowded visions of images and words, which he displayed on myriad eccentric, and meticulously numbered, plywood "cut out" artworks, makeshift signs with biblical and homespun admonitions, unusual junk-tower assemblages made up of all manner of scavenged materials and recycled bicycle parts, and concrete sculptures embedded with recycled debris. All of these activities and objects came together most dramatically in his Paradise Garden, a sprawling environment that also included the ramshackle multitiered World's Folk Art Church and the elevated rolling-chair gallery.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Envisioning Howard Finster by Norman Girardot. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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