Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Visual Arts Art Seen: All Folk at Barbara Archer
Posted by Wyatt Williams @wyatt_williams on Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 11:14 AM
- Whirligig by R.A. Miller and two works of Tramp Art
The term "folk art" gets thrown around too often. It's a broad term, of course, meant to encompass a wide variety of styles and skills and approaches that don't fit comfortably in the canon of western art. Lately though, it brings to mind the imitators cranking out work for the shopping mall style booths at neighborhood festivals, whether they're selling mass-produced whirligigs or by-the-numbers wood carvings.
All Folk at Barbara Archer is a relief, a group show full of visionaries and outsiders and tramps offering welcome reminder of the varied pleasures of folk. Archer, who once dealt exclusively in folk art, has carefully balanced the show among styles, including a couple of pieces of anonymous tramp sculpture, a couple drawings from the self-taught outsider Robert Lindsey Walker, a particularly great whirligig from R.A. Miller, and so on.
These artists, many of them established names in the folk art world and few of them still alive, remind us that the best stuff under the folk umbrella is risky, strange work. It takes minutes sitting with one of Walker's drawings to begin to understand the complex ways he's flattening perspective and arranging the composition. A close look at Captain William Jordan's drawings of nature reverse that order - they seem like simple compositions at first glance but a close examination shows that each shape is nearly embossed on the page, adding a dense level of texture to the work.
The stories behind these artists are worth noting. Jordan's drawing style, for example, was derived largely from the fact that he started drawing after he went blind and needed the sense of touch to create the drawings. Walker's work show some signs of rot and wear because they were all found in his garage after his death. The gallery has compiled biographical information on all of the artists, a helpful resource that's worth glance while you're in the space.
It's precisely these unique qualities that set the artists in All Folk apart from those mass-produced whirligig vendors. The imitators suck all the strangeness, the individuality from the work. They make it recognizable, even normal. Thankfully, All Folk is anything but normal.
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