once served to a Princeton alumnus on the occasion of his life. A small rectangle of stiff white cardboard is stapled to the wall and reads: DON’T BELIEVE THE POOR. The slab lists slightly to one side and is bathed in the soft light that is, so we have been told many and many a time, the hallmark of New England summers. A cheerful video loop reveals a smiling youth gesturing toward what he says, or, rather, shouts, is San Francisco. “WHAT WEATHER!” is a phrase that he repeats over and over again. The slab turns occasionally, somewhat like a scena ductilis. But only at certain hours, and not so anyone would notice. Then there is the music that happenstance, as it will, directs, jingle jingle jingle. And all is rendered in a brilliant Lydian translation.
THEOPHILUS
Just opened: At the Kangol-Polo Galleries: You won’t go far wrong with this judiciously selected, and soberly, but not stuffily authoritative exhibition of what has recently come to be called “ingenuous” art, or, occasionally, “crippled” art. The show goes a long way toward sorting out the lines and planes, not to mention the arcs and tangents, large circles and even complex rhomboids of influences, affiliations, and imitative procedures to be discerned within this difficult, often misunderstood, and, at times, hopelessly muddled school. Everything is placed simply, even puritanically, in the galleries’ spacious rooms, and the whole takes up, quite comfortably, the entire second floor of what was once a SoHo firetrap. The works are arranged in shrewd juxtapositions and canny alliances, so as to allow the viewer to discover how these iconoclastic fringe artists and artisans and their art and artisan products play off each other. The great Rube Chang, for instance, and Marco “the magnificent” Globus present three semi-collaborative works (“Blue Asters and Paperback,” “Edward Van de Fugger, Christian,” and “Lieutenant Chip Mainwaring Abusing Himself”), which remind one of the early red-clay-and-torn-denim “cut-downs” made by George, “the soupreem master of magikk,” in his Lake Jango garage, as well as the “moron collages” that were discovered a decade ago in a corncrib on Jubal Chamborizee’s property. (Chamborizee, also known as Lord Chimborazo or Sir Henry Cotopaxi, was the acknowledged master of sooty-cob annealing, a painstaking process whose subtlest techniques died with him.) Ruth Billbew’s “The Beast from the Stygian Deeps,” “Larry’s Bony Wife, Martha,” and “Ants at a Picnic: Study in Black and Egg Yolk,” are clearly in the same early-ingenuous mode as Duwayne Bushelle, Bushelle Edwards, Mac Brontus and his humming raccoons (Brontus’s droll designation for those who selflessly assist him in his crush-and-burn operations); and her “Vomit in the Doorway,” perhaps the central iconic image of all postwar ingenuous art, and an acknowledged focus for contemporary studies of painterly surfaces, especially in the work of Katz, Thiebaud, and, not surprisingly, Warhol, reminds the most jaded gallery-goer of how sublime the “cripples” can be. The powerful construct, “Leventy-Seven,” by Duke Charlotte La Bushe, startles anew in its position of majestic prominence in a small gallery off the main corridor, as it gestures toward, illumines, and shrewdly “explains” its immediate successors in the fiendishly difficult heavenly-glaze procedure, “Uniform and Chips, with Pastor,” by Whitfield Wamp, “Weightlifters at Prayer,” Fincher Leroy Ellerbing’s last known work, and “Jesus Destroying Pornography,” by an anonymous member of the Southern Baptist Corsairs. The catalogue, informative and entertaining, by the exhibition’s curator, Stanford MacArthur, informs and entertains, indeed, yet helps us to remember that which it is dangerous, much like history and current events, to forget; that art is, at its most sublime, simple, decent, and, as one delighted visitor to Kangol-Polo was
THEOPHILUS
Just opened: At the Kangol-Polo Galleries: You won’t go far wrong with this judiciously selected, and soberly, but not stuffily authoritative exhibition of what has recently come to be called “ingenuous” art, or, occasionally, “crippled” art. The show goes a long way toward sorting out the lines and planes, not to mention the arcs and tangents, large circles and even complex rhomboids of influences, affiliations, and imitative procedures to be discerned within this difficult, often misunderstood, and, at times, hopelessly muddled school. Everything is placed simply, even puritanically, in the galleries’ spacious rooms, and the whole takes up, quite comfortably, the entire second floor of what was once a SoHo firetrap. The works are arranged in shrewd juxtapositions and canny alliances, so as to allow the viewer to discover how these iconoclastic fringe artists and artisans and their art and artisan products play off each other. The great Rube Chang, for instance, and Marco “the magnificent” Globus present three semi-collaborative works (“Blue Asters and Paperback,” “Edward Van de Fugger, Christian,” and “Lieutenant Chip Mainwaring Abusing Himself”), which remind one of the early red-clay-and-torn-denim “cut-downs” made by George, “the soupreem master of magikk,” in his Lake Jango garage, as well as the “moron collages” that were discovered a decade ago in a corncrib on Jubal Chamborizee’s property. (Chamborizee, also known as Lord Chimborazo or Sir Henry Cotopaxi, was the acknowledged master of sooty-cob annealing, a painstaking process whose subtlest techniques died with him.) Ruth Billbew’s “The Beast from the Stygian Deeps,” “Larry’s Bony Wife, Martha,” and “Ants at a Picnic: Study in Black and Egg Yolk,” are clearly in the same early-ingenuous mode as Duwayne Bushelle, Bushelle Edwards, Mac Brontus and his humming raccoons (Brontus’s droll designation for those who selflessly assist him in his crush-and-burn operations); and her “Vomit in the Doorway,” perhaps the central iconic image of all postwar ingenuous art, and an acknowledged focus for contemporary studies of painterly surfaces, especially in the work of Katz, Thiebaud, and, not surprisingly, Warhol, reminds the most jaded gallery-goer of how sublime the “cripples” can be. The powerful construct, “Leventy-Seven,” by Duke Charlotte La Bushe, startles anew in its position of majestic prominence in a small gallery off the main corridor, as it gestures toward, illumines, and shrewdly “explains” its immediate successors in the fiendishly difficult heavenly-glaze procedure, “Uniform and Chips, with Pastor,” by Whitfield Wamp, “Weightlifters at Prayer,” Fincher Leroy Ellerbing’s last known work, and “Jesus Destroying Pornography,” by an anonymous member of the Southern Baptist Corsairs. The catalogue, informative and entertaining, by the exhibition’s curator, Stanford MacArthur, informs and entertains, indeed, yet helps us to remember that which it is dangerous, much like history and current events, to forget; that art is, at its most sublime, simple, decent, and, as one delighted visitor to Kangol-Polo was
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