Backyard Alchemist: The Art of Thornton Dial
June 21, 2012
The career of Thornton Dial, who is the subject of an upcoming retrospective at the Mint Museum, might illustrate Goethe's dictum that, "when a man does something remarkable, the world conspires to make sure he doesn't do it again." In Dial's case, the world tried, but fortunately it did not succeed.
What very nearly derailed things, just as his work was being launched, was a hatchet job on 60 Minutes. Morley Safer (who, it must be noted, always had a malign touch regarding the arts) implied that Dial and his long-term patron, Bill Arnett, were locked in an exploitive, Svengali-esque relationship, and that there was no way a poor "outsider" artist from Alabama could make work of Dial's virtuosity on his own. Safer's mistake - an egregious one - was not to realize that neither formal range or technical ingenuity can be summoned out of the blue; genius may be recognized but no one can wish, grant, or foist it on another.
Admittedly, there is something appalling about Thornton Dial from the perspective of those with a vested interest in MFA programs and the gallery scene. How did he learn to do so many things, and how did he make the many things he uses do what they do? There is some antecedent for his extreme virtuosity in the use of derelict materials from the tradition of yard art found throughout Georgia and Alabama, but this would not entirely explain how he paralleled and in some instances anticipated the uses of assemblage among the avant-garde.
How to categorize such an artist - how must he be categorized! - is an issue. Is he a primitive sophisticate or a sophisticated primitive—or simply a very fine artist. Early on, Dial was placed under the rubric "outsider artist"— a term I object to in general, and in Thornton Dial's case in particular. "Outside what?" as curator Thomas McEvilley has said. As a rule, "outsider art" means bad drawing and salvaged paint from the perspective of the insane asylum, but Dial is one of those artists who can do anything, like Robert Rauschenberg or Judy Pfaff.
The number of artists to whom Dial has been compared is also instructive. Rauschenberg, Anselm Kiefer, and Pollock head the list as long as a bus line, but such comparisons have a way of multiplying and then cancelling themselves out. The artist is lost in a hall of funhouse mirrors. Whenever a highly original artist emerges, it seems to launch a comparison-frenzy almost in order to convert a new experience into a familiar one.
The assembly of found objects into art—which was almost unknown a hundred years ago—is almost a second instinct in the making of art by now, but the great assemblists each have their own peculiar fingerprint, and the fingerprint of a Petah Coyne who uses hair and taxidermied birds is different from that of a Christian Boltanski, who uses bails of worn clothing, or a Judy Pfaff, who tends to mash up lichen and collapsed Japanese lanterns with PVC pipe and barbed wire. Dial has his own peculiar fingerprint. He can paint with the paint can as well as the paint, which he transforms into splayed, starfish-like constructions set among seas of coiling ropes, broken dolls, carpet remnants, sticks, piping, crockery, animal skulls and bones, disused weathered timber, sticks and stumps. The overriding sense is that he would use almost anything rather than allow it to go to waste, and that in doing so he transforms poverty into richness via the imagination. The main difference between a so-called "outsider" and an avant-garde "insider" is working with what you have rather than what you can afford.
There is a strong political and polemical cast to Dial's work, which is alternately savage, ironical, and reflective, and just as his constructions vary from drawings to collages to painted reliefs to free-standing sculptures, so the intent of these constructions might be compared to stories, poems, political statements and autobiography. But the wisdom of the work comes from the connection of the personal with the political. It has the quality of talking to you, not at you, and that is rare.
It is this quality which makes his construction "Crosses to Bear" one of the few works about 9/11 that is at once intimate as well as public. And it is why his version of the American Flag as a welter of bloodied and tattered cloth remnants, shredded almost to the texture of cotton candy, might seem apt to anyone across the political spectrum. His title is : "Don't Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got To Tie Us Together (2003)."
With a body of work as rich and various as Dial's, the problem becomes where to start. The work that first put me on alert was his proto-Gothic depiction of a slave ship called "High and Wide: Carrying Rats to the Man," in which a Mickey Mouse with features blackened as in a Minstrel show is lashed in chains to the prow of a boat. I think of it as the "Raft of the Medusa" of Assemblage Art.
Dial can also be funny (like Duke Ellington ending a big band hit with a quotation from Chopin's Funeral march) in a free-standing sculpture like "Losing Cows," which uses steer skulls and bones and conveys what it must feel like to plough fields in Hades. And there is autobiographical work such as "Strange Fruit: Channel 42" which depicts a lynching, and refers to Dial's treatment at the hands of Morley Safer. It is a quiet work for all its shock value, and conveys and indelible sadness somehow harder to bear than outrage. But to cite these works alone would be lopsided, as Dial can also make work that communicates ebullience, child-like joy, and the joi de vivre of a grown man.
The Mint Museum seems to be establishing a nice tradition of linking their exhibits with musical and dance performances, as recent collaborations with the ballet company and the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra attest. For the preview show, they are featuring the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who have vigorously revived the string band tradition of the rural South, and recorded three albums for Nonesuch, the first of which, A Genuine Negro Jig, won a Grammy. The impressive array of instruments played by the group range from the hand-and-homemade to the more conventional cello. The aplomb with which they play them is a perfect fit for celebrating Thornton Dial, and no one who has heard the hammerstyle banjo picking of Don Flemons, or his polyrhymic playing of the bones, or the a capella singing of Rhiannon Giddens is likely to forget it. They are delving for the roots that Thornton Dial rose from, and their presence adds to the sense of triumph connected with the exhibit. Tickets are still available ($50 for Mint members,$75 for non-members). This preview event is on June 27 from 6 to 10 in the evening.
Kudos is in order for Wells Fargo, as well, for sponsoring the show. In the words of Senior Vice President and Community Affairs Manager Jay Everette: "Wells Fargo is excited about underwriting and bringing this exhibition to the community. Not only is Thornton Dial recognized as a leading contemporary artist, but his subject matter and themes create the opportunity for challenging topics." Topics, no doubt, including the purposes of art, and who may make it.
The career of Thornton Dial, who is the subject of an upcoming retrospective at the Mint Museum, might illustrate Goethe's dictum that, "when a man does something remarkable, the world conspires to make sure he doesn't do it again." In Dial's case, the world tried, but fortunately it did not succeed.
What very nearly derailed things, just as his work was being launched, was a hatchet job on 60 Minutes. Morley Safer (who, it must be noted, always had a malign touch regarding the arts) implied that Dial and his long-term patron, Bill Arnett, were locked in an exploitive, Svengali-esque relationship, and that there was no way a poor "outsider" artist from Alabama could make work of Dial's virtuosity on his own. Safer's mistake - an egregious one - was not to realize that neither formal range or technical ingenuity can be summoned out of the blue; genius may be recognized but no one can wish, grant, or foist it on another.
Admittedly, there is something appalling about Thornton Dial from the perspective of those with a vested interest in MFA programs and the gallery scene. How did he learn to do so many things, and how did he make the many things he uses do what they do? There is some antecedent for his extreme virtuosity in the use of derelict materials from the tradition of yard art found throughout Georgia and Alabama, but this would not entirely explain how he paralleled and in some instances anticipated the uses of assemblage among the avant-garde.
How to categorize such an artist - how must he be categorized! - is an issue. Is he a primitive sophisticate or a sophisticated primitive—or simply a very fine artist. Early on, Dial was placed under the rubric "outsider artist"— a term I object to in general, and in Thornton Dial's case in particular. "Outside what?" as curator Thomas McEvilley has said. As a rule, "outsider art" means bad drawing and salvaged paint from the perspective of the insane asylum, but Dial is one of those artists who can do anything, like Robert Rauschenberg or Judy Pfaff.
The number of artists to whom Dial has been compared is also instructive. Rauschenberg, Anselm Kiefer, and Pollock head the list as long as a bus line, but such comparisons have a way of multiplying and then cancelling themselves out. The artist is lost in a hall of funhouse mirrors. Whenever a highly original artist emerges, it seems to launch a comparison-frenzy almost in order to convert a new experience into a familiar one.
The assembly of found objects into art—which was almost unknown a hundred years ago—is almost a second instinct in the making of art by now, but the great assemblists each have their own peculiar fingerprint, and the fingerprint of a Petah Coyne who uses hair and taxidermied birds is different from that of a Christian Boltanski, who uses bails of worn clothing, or a Judy Pfaff, who tends to mash up lichen and collapsed Japanese lanterns with PVC pipe and barbed wire. Dial has his own peculiar fingerprint. He can paint with the paint can as well as the paint, which he transforms into splayed, starfish-like constructions set among seas of coiling ropes, broken dolls, carpet remnants, sticks, piping, crockery, animal skulls and bones, disused weathered timber, sticks and stumps. The overriding sense is that he would use almost anything rather than allow it to go to waste, and that in doing so he transforms poverty into richness via the imagination. The main difference between a so-called "outsider" and an avant-garde "insider" is working with what you have rather than what you can afford.
There is a strong political and polemical cast to Dial's work, which is alternately savage, ironical, and reflective, and just as his constructions vary from drawings to collages to painted reliefs to free-standing sculptures, so the intent of these constructions might be compared to stories, poems, political statements and autobiography. But the wisdom of the work comes from the connection of the personal with the political. It has the quality of talking to you, not at you, and that is rare.
It is this quality which makes his construction "Crosses to Bear" one of the few works about 9/11 that is at once intimate as well as public. And it is why his version of the American Flag as a welter of bloodied and tattered cloth remnants, shredded almost to the texture of cotton candy, might seem apt to anyone across the political spectrum. His title is : "Don't Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got To Tie Us Together (2003)."
With a body of work as rich and various as Dial's, the problem becomes where to start. The work that first put me on alert was his proto-Gothic depiction of a slave ship called "High and Wide: Carrying Rats to the Man," in which a Mickey Mouse with features blackened as in a Minstrel show is lashed in chains to the prow of a boat. I think of it as the "Raft of the Medusa" of Assemblage Art.
Dial can also be funny (like Duke Ellington ending a big band hit with a quotation from Chopin's Funeral march) in a free-standing sculpture like "Losing Cows," which uses steer skulls and bones and conveys what it must feel like to plough fields in Hades. And there is autobiographical work such as "Strange Fruit: Channel 42" which depicts a lynching, and refers to Dial's treatment at the hands of Morley Safer. It is a quiet work for all its shock value, and conveys and indelible sadness somehow harder to bear than outrage. But to cite these works alone would be lopsided, as Dial can also make work that communicates ebullience, child-like joy, and the joi de vivre of a grown man.
The Mint Museum seems to be establishing a nice tradition of linking their exhibits with musical and dance performances, as recent collaborations with the ballet company and the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra attest. For the preview show, they are featuring the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who have vigorously revived the string band tradition of the rural South, and recorded three albums for Nonesuch, the first of which, A Genuine Negro Jig, won a Grammy. The impressive array of instruments played by the group range from the hand-and-homemade to the more conventional cello. The aplomb with which they play them is a perfect fit for celebrating Thornton Dial, and no one who has heard the hammerstyle banjo picking of Don Flemons, or his polyrhymic playing of the bones, or the a capella singing of Rhiannon Giddens is likely to forget it. They are delving for the roots that Thornton Dial rose from, and their presence adds to the sense of triumph connected with the exhibit. Tickets are still available ($50 for Mint members,$75 for non-members). This preview event is on June 27 from 6 to 10 in the evening.
Kudos is in order for Wells Fargo, as well, for sponsoring the show. In the words of Senior Vice President and Community Affairs Manager Jay Everette: "Wells Fargo is excited about underwriting and bringing this exhibition to the community. Not only is Thornton Dial recognized as a leading contemporary artist, but his subject matter and themes create the opportunity for challenging topics." Topics, no doubt, including the purposes of art, and who may make it.