Finale for the Fantastical

By ROBERT HUGHES

Washington's Corcoran mounts a fiery, marvelous folk show

In the '60s, when the taste for folk and primitive art was gathering momentum in America, a museum director was asked: Why is there no more folk art? Because, he neatly countered, we have no more folk. And he was almost right, but not wholly. The urbanization of American culture, the bulldozing of eddies, pockets and old beliefs, went on everywhere. But there have been exemptions in some areas. One of these was the rural black community in the South; another, the city ghetto. Yet no major museum, until recently, asked the question: Is there a black folk-art tradition that survives today, now that the white one has died?

Eighteen months ago, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington thought it would find out. Working on hints and tips as much as on the normal museum network, its associate director, Jane Livingston, and one of its curators, John Beardsley, traveled thousands of miles in America, mainly in the South, looking and interviewing and listing. The result opened at the Corcoran last month: "Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980." Fifty years, 20 artists (most of them completely unknown outside their own communities), and almost 400 works--this is a singular act of discovery. Lovers of the quaint need not attend, for there is something fiery, marvelous and strong every ten feet.

Folk art serves religious ends because folk have faith: the home requires icons, the clapboard meeting hut needs a picture of Jesus or Jonah or the Horned Beast of Revelation, and private grace will out.

High culture no longer seems to produce high religious art. But it is the religious impulse, absolutely authentic and rising to the point of visionary splendor, that dominates the show in Washington.

Its masterpiece, from that aspect, is James Hampton's Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millenium General Assembly. Hampton (1909-64), a janitor for the General Services Administration in Washington, started his own sect, of which he was the only member. The Throne was his life's work. It occupied him for 15 years, and it was still unfinished, locked in a rented garage, at his death. It was provoked by visions of Moses, the Virgin Mary and Adam. They inspired him to raise a monument, not to a past event but to a future one--the Second Coming of Christ. Its centerpiece would be a throne on which God would sit, surrounded by his angels and saints.

In the garage where, he believed, God whispered to him every night, Hampton slowly constructed the setting for the end of history, a suite of winged celestial furniture, complete with lecterns, pulpits, vases, an altar and crowns--180 objects in all. Only some of these are actually on exhibit; the throne itself is not, because it is too difficult to move. The entire construction is made out of junk, covered with layers of metal foil and kraft paper. The effect, twinkling and blazing under the museum lights, is of quite breathtaking intensity: the gold and silver may be only foil, but they go beyond rococo incrustation into a domain of absolute theatricality. Hampton's vision contains not one depiction of an angel or a saint, let alone Jesus; this, however, is the source of its power, since the Throne is an empty stage set, literally waiting to be peopled by visitations more real to the artist than the brick wall of the garage.

Though nothing else in the show is quite so majestic, it is full of striking religious images. There is, for instance, the white room containing the paintings of Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-80). Convinced that her fate was to be the bride of Christ and to bear witness to Scripture, she covered hundreds of panels with hortatory texts and vibrant images of heaven and hell; in New Jerusalem, circa 1965-75, the choiring angels burst into white bloom like magnolias around a many-chambered house.

Such images, and others like Elijah Pierce's elaborately carved wooden panel of the Crucifixion (about 40 figures, including blacksmiths forging nails for the cross and a moon raining blood on Golgotha), are not meant to be "imaginative" in any arbitrary way, though they are deeply expressive. Their aim is to bear witness, to teach. Sometimes they do it in oddly naive ways: Pierce's carving of one person straining at a gnat while another literally swallows a camel, the beast halfway down his throat, comes out of the same impulses that drove the Romanesque carvers at Vezelay or Autun to their didactic grotesqueries.

Even when the subject is not biblical, a whiff of another world comes off many of the works: Sam Doyle's portrait of Dr. Buz, the voodoo man, getting instructions from his conch shell, or the extraordinary sculptures of charred old wood made by Jesse Aaron (1887-1979), totems and animals whose sheer metamorphic intensity would blow late Dubuffet out of any museum. The strength of Aaron's work owed everything to his belief that his task was to release the latent image from the log, where it was trapped. "God put the faces in the wood. Don't bring me a piece of wood and ask me to carve something out of it. 'Cause I won't. Don't tell me what you want, it might not be there, you understand?" Michelangelo took several sonnets to say the same thing.

The show is not just concerned with exalted matters. A lot of it is secular, and about memory, politics, fantasy, shaggy-dog humor or none too sly bawdry--the best of the last being a wind-driven whirligig by Steve Ashby (1904-80) that shows a donkey doing something fairly unmentionable to a woman. The wildest, most fantasticated eye belongs to David Butler, now 83, who lives in Louisiana and makes whimsical windmills and silhouettes out of painted, snipped tin--spotted, striped, jagged marvels of the doodling imagination. The gravest, to Ulysses Davis, now in his late 60s, a barber and woodcarver in Savannah, Ga., whose main work, over the past decade, has been a set of whittled portraits of the Presidents from Washington to Reagan. The funkiest, to George White (1903-70), whose storytelling objects--notably Emancipation House, 1964--are crowded, hilarious pastiches of black cultural cliches. The scariest--but why go on?

This must be one of the most abundantly enjoyable shows that has been put together in America in the past decade. It will travel to Louisville, Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Houston during the next year. One wishes it would never go away, but it will, and so will the kind of art it sets before us. Most of the artists are either dead or in their 80s. The youngest of them was born in 1926. "If we believe at all in the promise of our society," writes John Beardsley, "we shall soon see the end of much that generates this art." One could not put the problem in a more mealy-mouthed way. It is not the promise of American society that will eliminate black folk art, but the threat.

These visions succumb to the homogenization of experience, which, through the TV set and other devices of mass unconscious instruction, overcomes all grass-roots culture. The language in which the idiosyncratic, the obsessive and the fantastical can be expressed is already diluted. The soaps take away one's dreams, because they are designed to. When popular culture becomes the quantified product of skilled technicians--something done to people and not by them--folk art dies. So one should see it now. It will not be here tomorrow. This is the last of it. --By Robert Hughes

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