Outsider art has become thoroughly commodified in my lifetime, often despite the best efforts of principled people who took great care to preserve its contextual aspects and, really, auras. I’m thinking of John Maizels, who publishes Raw Vision, though I don’t really know him, or Mike McGonigal, who I do really know: more than anyone else, Mike showed me how to appreciate those dimensions. I was fortunate in that respect, which implies that most people aren’t. But we all share one thing in common: appreciation takes place through commodification. We’re all a part of it (or “complicit,” as the moral fanatics like to say these days).
In this case, (@aarneanton), who commits part of their life or at least identity to folk art — and give the phrase “folk art dealer” the attention it deserves — finds this embroidered piece, buys it, and documents it. Then they share it with a friend who runs the top-notch Facebook group, (Anonymous Works) devoted to outsider art; that person, in turn, puts some care into writing something accessible and respectful, and posts it to the group. Now I, like some zillion-ish other number of subscribers, see it and think 🤔 OT1H I love this, but OT2H it isn’t a TikTok vid so take a moment 🤔. And if you’ve gotten this far, now you too have become a link in a chain of people who, with the best of intentions and in their own ways, want to (as the entitlement fanatics like to say these days) “gatekeep” it a bit — by trying to find ways to convey the context without reducing it all to some sort of cultural amber or magical aspic.
It’s tempting to assume that these successive acts of semi-automated electronic sharing are somehow categorically different from the idiosyncratic care that Alice Eugenia Ligon of Fulton, Mississippi, put into creating this — learning a craft, developing a style, assembling words and images, arranging them spatially, translating them into all the countless decisions involved in embroidery, etc. How is that different from subscribing, scrolling, clicking, commenting, and all the rest? But more and more I wonder if that assumption is an epic own-goal on several levels, and maybe a catastrophic mistake.
It’s no accident that outsider arts would become popular in a time when automation, informationalization, and financialization are the rule, is it? The compensatory gesture is as plain as day: these idiosyncratic artifacts seem “authentic” in inverse proportion to our own anxieties about a world that seems increasingly fake. Except for one thing: Ligon, who made this garment in 1949 or so, saw her own world as false. I wouldn’t say that her world was like ours, but I would say that our world is more like hers than we want to admit.
Anonymous Works’s description of the piece is stellar in its descriptive neutrality: “The garment, likely her hospital gown, is full of patriotic, religious and popular references including Noah’s Ark, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the poignant message to her children, ‘May God be with you until we meet again.’” The biblical imagery she’s drawing on — or at least the aspects the writer picked out — aren’t from the New Testament, they’re from the Hebrew Bible, and they precisely concern the stories that bridge the Fall. In theological terms: the “lapsarian” moment when humanity traded its divine authenticity for human weakness, wickedness, whatever-you-want-to-call-it-ness.
The way she pointed to a prelapsarian utopia with her embroidery maybe isn’t so different from the ways we point to pre-financialized, pre-informationalized, pre-automated, pre-industrialized utopia. The materials she used — the cloth, the thread, the needles, the techniques she used were all as “industrial” as they were all industrially made; her religious convictions were probably enough for her to see herself as somehow “complicit” in a world that wasn’t entirely good; and we now understand that even her naive stitchery was “imbricated” (as the abstraction fanatics like to say these days) in a technologized world; and the fact that she used a garment to communicate her vision meets the specs to be appropriation, detournement, or whatever theoretical creatures we want to dress it up as.
This all has some pretty intense implications, but I’ll leave them for another day.