All Faiths Beautiful
"All Faiths Beautiful" by John Kissick, Spring 2008, p. 87
Recent art’s steady assimilation of low production values and DIY culture has been accompanied by the appearance of a variety of institutions that are committed to the logical extension of this aesthetic: Outsider art. It’s not that it isn’t an interesting topic; it is just that in an age when professional primitives make big money for marketing self-imposed naïveté and fashionably bad art is taught in the academies, one could be excused for feeling a little confused about the conceptual premise. There are of course all kinds of awkward issues raised by the institutionalization and aestheticization of the outsider (whomever or whatever this animal signifies), and no place has become more of a lightning rod for such debates than the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. It is a formidable institution (as anti-institution institutions go) and is in the enviable position of having no specific mandate outside of collecting and displaying stuff deemed visionary. Or outsider. Or visionary outsider. The AVAM is the real deal as facilities go, housed in digs that would be the envy of most traditional mid-sized museums. The museum compound consists of three separate exhibition buildings and is home to a sizable and growing permanent collection. It is one part church bazaar and one part Mardi Gras warehouse, with perhaps just a pinch of a seniors’ learn-to-paint class, all heaved into the curatorial blender and bound neatly together by tight exhibition design and a certain unmistakable museum-style reverence.
There is something comforting about not having too much top-down curatorial baggage hanging about you. The fuzzy notion of the naive artist—someone unencumbered by education, the system or perhaps even mental or emotional faculties— as a junkyard genius or visionary ecstatic is at the very least an infectious concept. It is the critical equivalent of “sticking it to the man” (the man here being the art world, with all its attitude and pretense), and in this world of real people in touch with their souls, the skinny dude with the black turtleneck and the Gitanes is going down. It is the conceptual equivalent of the American dream, according to which hard work and personal initiative get you everywhere, expertise and education are not to be trusted and every citizen is a potential visionary.
Such a strategy enables the AVAM to take on a bunch of big-ticket issues without ever appearing overtly political or ideological or preachy. It lets the work be all things to all people: compelling, at times heart-wrenching biography; raw, unmediated emotion manifested in discrete objects; truth and insight without fluff or condescension. It’s the institutional equivalent of a raving televangelist in a bad suit: he might look tacky as hell, but he can sure touch a nerve with the right crowd. And to those in the audience desperate to be saved from a godless world of aesthetes, that sometimes appears to be all that matters.
So a show devoted to religion at the AVAM—which would seem to epitomize American ideology—was a must-see. To say that the assembled works in “All Faiths Beautiful” were aesthetically all over the place, and that finding the thread between them or a plot line was near-impossible, is perhaps to miss the point. The effect was compellingly cumulative: piece after piece openly wrestled with the sad condition of the human soul. You read correctly, human soul…a notion so at odds with just about everything in today’s art discourse that you would have sworn someone was just trying to be smug and smart (the black-turtleneck dude, perhaps). Anchoring the works was a series of didactic panels, the most poignant listing quotes from the founding fathers of the United States, warning of the scourge of organized religion. It was all there: artists from a variety of religious traditions (and non-traditions, if that is a term) threw just about every possible material and convention at the problem: Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Christian, Jewish and stuff I couldn’t begin to categorize; paint, felt, forks, wood, sequins and other items that defied description. Crucially, it was a show about the personal visionary experience of God and, accordingly, the exhibition privileged the individual over the collective (as does the museum).
The result was an extraordinarily idiosyncratic but nevertheless refreshing tonic to what has become the near-complete politicization of religion by today’s cultural commentators. Here, the anti-institution institution made complete critical sense, wading happily and naturally into a world that most museums wouldn’t dare touch. No wonder it is the most popular art museum in the area.
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