The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art
by Greg Bottoms
University of Chicago Press
William Thompson and Norbert Kox are a nonfiction writer's dream, and not only due to their edgy personalities. Both of them have packed into their respective life-spans two distinct lives. Thompson was once a Greenville, South Carolina businessman dedicated to amassing a small fortune in the trade of silk flowers and a staunch member of his church. Now he's a full-time fine arts painter and a radical Christian who uses his art to protest the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. Kox used to make his living as a mechanic at the Bull's Eye Body Shop in central Iowa and party with Waterloo's Outlaw biker gang. He's now a Christian painter and sculptor who works in two 15' x 15' rooms above a closed general store in Green Bay. In The Colorful Apocalypse, Greg Bottoms skims the surface of these men's craggy and fascinating biographies, using them as fodder for a knee-jerk critique of fundamentalist Christianity.
Bottoms, who is making religious visions his outré beat, wrote sympathetically and terrifyingly of a mind awash in scriptural and prophetic delusions in Angelhead, a memoir of his brother's descent into schizophrenia. While he was writing Angelhead, he came across the German psychiatrist Hans Prizhorn's 1922 book The Artistry of the Mentally Ill, a seminal study in the field now generally referred to as "outsider art", which included reports of schizophrenic artists. As he read deeper into the field, Bottoms asked himself if outsider artists might belong to a rare category: that of "crazy people ... who found a tolerable way to get through life."
In 2001, while driving in Virginia, Bottoms heard a public radio story about the death of Howard Finster, a legendary Georgia artist/preacher and creator of Paradise Gardens, a lavish and bizarre sculpture park around his home in Summerville, Georgia. On a whim, Bottoms drove to Summerville, arriving in time to find a gathering of Finster's acolytes and friends. His curiosity stoked, he embarked on a mini-tour of outsider art in the United States, taking in an opening of an exhibition at Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum that included a collaborative work by Thompson and Kox, who've both become celebrated artists working in Finster's "Christian visionary" tradition, and then visiting Thompson and Kox in their respective home studios. Bottoms presents himself as a curious traveler, but his curiosity dies out halfway through his trip.
Outsider art is an ill-defined category that embraces artists who have some claim on "marginal" social status. Often, that claim is psychiatric: many, if not most, outsider artists fall somewhere on a mental illness spectrum between vague and occasional religious visions and the perpetual hallucinations of schizophrenia. In Bottoms' view, the outsider art establishment — a small but high-end group of dealers, galleries, and museums — exploits artists by using diagnoses to help sell their art while skimming the surface of their "actual thinking and mission."
His ire peaks in Baltimore, as he observes an unlikely embrace between a hipster art writer with "a mohawk and multiple piercings" and an enfeebled Thompson right in front of a back-to-the-Bible painting the artist created in collaboration with Kox. Idolatry: The Drugging of the Nations depicts the Virgin Mary as a skeleton holding a string of bloody paper dolls between outstretched arms. Her white robe is decorated with a Warner Sallman style head of Christ (i.e. long-haired, Caucasian). A sword pokes from his eye through the back of his head. Thompson and Kox intended the painting as a call to free Christianity from "idolatrous" images, as well as a protest against "abortion mills."
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But the art writer, telling Thompson that she "totally love[s]" the painting, sees something else: it reminds her of her "weird time in college" when she broke from her church, to seek a more amorphous and personal spirituality. When he sees Thompson smiling, playing along, Bottoms becomes so angry that he cannot look at the woman's face; he focuses instead on her "plink[ing]" of the rubber bands on her wrist. For Bottoms, this woman represents all those who think outsider art is "totally cool" (a category which, sadly, encompasses many of those who will read his book).
Bottoms calls for us to "treat these artists ... like people," and to "let them talk ..." He's right that we should, yet he cannot live up to his own rallying cry. His supreme annoyance with Thompson and Kox — their religiosity and solitude — muddies the clear lens on their lives that he claims to want to provide.
Bottoms' visit to Thompson's home, a forty-room mansion in which a former ballroom on the third floor has been converted into a painting studio, corrodes his hope in art as a curative tool. The artist proves to be a garrulous proselytizer who patters about an "evil trinity" composed of Catholics, Jews and Masons, and contends "no good" has come of "the mixing of the races." These views are undeniably strange and odious, but Bottoms parrots his xenophobia so often (and without providing any philosophical or theological context) that doing so comes to seem like a rhetorical crutch. Where is the thoughtful appraisal of Thompson's three hundred foot mural based on his vision of Revelation? Isn't his art the reason that we're meant to pay attention to his life? Shivering in Thompson's vast studio he asks whether this grouchy old painter has been liberated or "entomb[ed]."
Kox's set-up strikes Bottoms as equally stultifying, though less capacious. He describes the artist's junk-strewn studio, another writer's treasure, with gentle disdain. Kox is obsessed with proclaiming the idolatry of Sallman's version of Christ and has created an imaginative series in which he outfits the blond, Caucasian "idol" with defiantly contemporary accessories such as a cop hat, a gas mask, and a Santa hat. He's also made a sculpture in which parts of baby dolls, comprising arms, legs, hands, torsos, and heads, are painted red and attached to wooden crucifix.
Bottoms focuses on this sculpture, at the expense of considering Kox's more subtle projects, because it fits his thesis that Kox is a fanatical freak. He is, perhaps, but he's also a genuine eccentric who composes inspirational music on his computer, sleeps in his shoes, and, like Thompson, deserves more life on the page.
— Michael Rymer (michaelrobertrymer@yahoo.com)
