In researching old carnivals and circuses, I ran across several bizarre and useful sites. Way led to way and I found that many of them originated with one man, Jim Linderman. I immediately wrote to my friend:I found this guy on the internet. I've written to him to ask if I can put up some of his collection. It is wrong, so wrong, and so much of what I want to do in my work.
My friend is. . . well, I don't want to give too much away, but he is a creative fellow and a scholar and has thought as much or more about this as/than you or I. He wrote back that art is a "vile and violent business," and that much of what artists do is "horribly horribly wrong." I guess he's right. Art, I mean, has always been an accepted way to talk about the taboos of a culture. It allows us to express the intersections of our world view where our grasp of things do not fit together neatly, where the language of our culture leaves us no other way to express this chiasma. Art is one way of talking about a culture's dirty little secrets.
Whatever that means. "Art" is now that thing in the chasm, a cultural embarrassment.
But Jim Linderman's collection is worth looking at, I think. You'll want to do it alone with the doors closed, maybe. If your mother walks in while you have one of his sites up, she will know immediately by your posture and the look on your face that you are doing something you don't want her to know about. You will protest, of course.
"What? Why are you looking at me that way? I wasn't doing anything!"
I'm having a bit of trouble with Blogger right now, and I'm not in the mood to fight it. I will post more about Linderman's collection tomorrow. Or look at the sites and send me your thoughts and I will make a post out of them. Ciao.
Boonton, New Jersey is the town right next door to where I grew up. Frank Wendt sounds so familiar it frightens me. Boonton has a funny little Main street with an old movie theater. Well it once did.
ReplyDeleteI had a lover who moved into an apartment that once was a bar called The Place to Be, right off Main Street. We used to go there because our friends band, the Gangbuster, played there every weekend. It was so strange when it became his house. I hadn't thought of that in years... that was surreal.
And growing up, my uncle used to take us to Boonton Park to the falls -- and down Boogie Street -- man lots of Boonton memories.
The baptism photos remind of that Little Rascal episode when Spanky and Buckwheat skip Sunday School to go fishing and they see a group of African Americans being baptised at the solar eclipse. And are scared to crap. LOL God was inflitrating the Little Rascals -- I never knew til now.
I've copied the circus photos of my Great Aunt Helen for you -- will send.
I like the photo you have up. And almost bought a pair of black long gloves at a thrift shop yesterday that look a little like the ones in the photo below it but longer-- they had a little pearl button at the wrist but continued up the arm. I should have and now want them very badly. She's quite adorable and I like the almost there of how her top covers her tits.
Right art is rarely good. Wrong art is almost always right but rarely popular.
Make what you must make.
My mother and her younger brother went to an old country church in rural Tennessee when they were children. Someone 'insisted' they be baptized and sent them in a room to put on the customary white robes. They escaped through a window and didn't enter a church for many years though the younger brother became a Nazarene preacher.
ReplyDeleteI closed my door, even though my mother wasn't around and looked...I didn't see anything all that wrong or vile...I thought more about how erotica has evolved over the years...I think your work could be this if you wanted it to be. Some of the pictures made me think of Diane Arbus.
Culture embarrassment? I'm not sure about that. But certainly, art is for that region where things don't fit together neatly and I kinda like hanging out there.
jesus, maybe it is all this that makes a person turn to art, the attempt to reconcile these things with. . . well, reconcile it with something. i sit in my home this morning looking out the window across the street at the house of a physician who lives next door to an orthodontist. the houses are large and expensive and beautifully landscaped and well-kempt, but their is untold weirdness there, too. there are only two direction in which to travel when you find yourself living with the circus, and i chose the other. now ensconced in the neighborhood i sought, a place where the cleavers might live, i find the weirdness merely hidden. arbus was right.
ReplyDeleteI prefer the circus people that don't try to hide it behind the social trappings of place and privilege.
ReplyDelete