mills

From Kerr:

Gas stations abandoned during the fuel crisis in the winter of 1973-74 were sometimes used for other purposes. This station at Potlatch, Washington, west of Olympia, was turned into a religious meeting hall. -David Falconer, April 1974

I love things like this; look how beautiful those pumps have become! “Fill up with the Holy Ghost & Fire.”

Leonard Knight’s recliner at Salvation Mountain; see Been Thinking’s wonderful post and Flickr set for more.

I love Knight’s work, and that of his fellow amateur builders in Zack Godshall’s documentary on them. One need not resent the preening textuality of much contemporary art -which as often as not needs an essay to explain its purpose, a quality which has the admirable effect of keeping employed many thousands of otherwise useless, overeducated pedants like me- to adore folk art. But perhaps it helps.

As is the case with popular music or regularly intelligible jazz, it is a pleasure to experience visual art that requires no curatorial explanation. This is not to say, of course, that there are clear distinctions between the straightforward, the complex, and the overly-obscure (if there is such a thing); all of us have our own thresholds of comprehension, and what is difficult is often rewarding. But the immediacy and power and vitality of, say, Howard Finster, thrills me.

I bet that it’s quite nice to sit in that chair.

Through the wonderful Mumblelard I saw this photo of Brerfly and her brothers. She wrote:

super heroes are always fighting

My brothers were always playing together and I was left out most of the time.  I don’t know why I was standing there, just waiting to get hit, but I do know that I was wearing one of my favorite outfits: snow pants without a shirt during the summer in East Tennessee…  Plus that is my bikini bottom on my head.

Brerfly’s childhood photos are transfixing: dynamos arrested in supersaturated color and her smiling, beach scenes that remind me of trips I’d forgotten utterly (and particularly: eating fried chicken in the sand, nursing jellyfish stings, talking to hermit crabs), and so on.

As I was exploiting her memories as a means of accessing my own -and I suppose that’s one v. nice element of memoir, and something to be said in defense of sharing one’s recollections the next time a cultural critic paid by the word constructs an uptown thesis about how ‘society has developed a technologically unilateral communicative dysfunction’ or whatever- I came across her trip to see the work of Howard Finster with her family:

I saw Finster’s work most recently at the High in Atlanta, and in fact posted the image below when I returned to Louisiana; it was one of several I liked so much:

When I saw these pieces, I thought: I really don’t ever want to see anything else until I’ve seen all the ‘folk art’ in the world; folk art seems like art that is still concerned chiefly with meaning, beauty, and expression, rather than the formal and, in my view, absurd & dull considerations that occupy professional artists (like contrived originality, referential commentary, and so on). You don’t need an essay on the wall next to a Finster piece; it speaks for itself.

It was nice to be reminded of such color, in life and in art, on a gray Sunday morning.

“Waste can… You should keep the world clean as your house its the only world you have to set your house on… [sic, with guessed punctuation, etc.]”.

Howard Finster, minister turned folk artist. You should see his stuff; it’s really lovely. Despite warnings from the museum, I’m uploading a Flickr set with more of his work.