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Rupert Loydell: I came across your writing in the first
instance because I asked for a review copy of The Colourful Apocalypse, your
recent book about outsider art. I was pleasantly surprised - though surprised
I was - that the book wasn't what I expected. Neither academic tome nor
coffee table picture book, you offer a very individual yet also informative
and knowledgable exploration of naive art as the result of religious
compulsion. Was the book always going to be written in the way it was? How
did you first get interested in outsider art, and was it always linked in
your mind to religion?
Greg Bottoms: I let the material dictate the form, or I followed what seemed
to be the story and figured out the best way to deal with it, which is what I
always do, I suppose. I once called it a 'lyric documentary' - a series of
narrative scenes, essayistic reflections, autobiographical elements when
seemingly relevant, and cultural reportage and criticism all hopefully in the
service of the larger story, which is to say the story according to little
old me. I knew it would be a personal travel narrative. This is partly
because I find an overt subjectivity, an 'I' as the teller/maker, to be the
most reasonable and intellectually solid ground to stand on, particularly if
we conceive of 'objectivity' as an impossibility, though of course the
criticisms of this 'I' spilling over into self-absorption or self-aggrandizement
can have a point, so the 'I' thing is tricky. I also knew, before I wrote a
word, the book would be driven by questions and ideas about obsession, the
ordering aspects of creativity, superstitious modes of thinking as ways
toward self-definition when rational modes lead toward bleak or dark
findings, and some questions about 'madness' and 'ecstasy' - what they are,
how we might define them and how those definitions change as contexts and
sensibilities and purposes change. I knew this because no matter what I write
about I seem to often end up there. 'Writing reveals your obsessions,' wrote
Milan Kundera in the Art of the Novel. Does it ever.
I got particularly interested in outsider art as a category and an idea when
I was writing the book about my brother's schizophrenia, Angelhead. I came
across Hanz Prinzhorn's Artistry of the Mentally Ill, and
many of the artists in the book exhibited religious obsessions and delusions
just as my brother had, almost exactly at times as my brother had. They had a
'mission' in a grand narrative of God, of good and evil, and they became so
devoted to the importance of this mission that they became unable to function
in mainstream society. Religious delusion is undoubtedly the most typical
kind of delusion in psychosis, and I recently saw a statistic that said that
over 50% of people suffering from psychosis do not believe they are suffering
from psychosis - they've figured it out and everybody else is wrong. And John
Locke, long ago, suggested that religion itself, particularly extreme forms,
could be seen as 'folly,' which would translate to madness or psychosis. I'm
not saying that that's how I see it, only that this convergence of ideas,
these conflicts, fascinated me. I was also interested, though, in some of the
critiques of mainsteam notions of mental illness - Foucault, R.D. Laing,
Thomas Szaz. These definitions can certainly be seen as contextual and
contingent, culture-bound. Prizhorn's book at least partly inspired
Dubuffet's notion of Art Brut. My brother's illness, through my reading,
crashed into art brut. I read Dubuffet for the first time, probably back in
late 90s, and he was a terrific, passionate, and stylish critic of culture
and art and elitism. Some of the writing is dated but I actually think if
Dubuffett were alive and writing now he'd be quite critical of certain
aspects of the outsider art world.
You've had some criticism from, and ensuing dialogue with, the artists
whose work and lives you discuss in your book. Would you like to comment
about that? Did you expect it?
I did expect that it was possible. People do not like to have their
narratives taken over. I am very conscious of that and I tried to be as
careful and as fair as possible while telling the story as I saw it, and I
make the tricky ethics and pitfalls of documentary a central strain of
inquiry in the book. On one level The Colorful Apocalypse is meta-nonfiction,
a nonfiction partly about the difficulty of making 'nonfiction.' As Jonathan
Raban has said, documentary can be 'pastoral' - romanticized, sentimental
depictions of the disenfranchised. And it is always class-bound: a maker from
the socio-economic privileged class, a professor, say, visiting the fringes
to report his findings back to the privileged class. Let's talk about THOSE people. What do the lives of THOSE people
tell us. I of course come from where THOSE people
come from in this case; my grandparents were not so different from Howard
Finster, William Thompson, or Myrtice West, if you took away some
religiosity.
I liked and identified in many ways with the people I wrote about. The
artists had very rigid senses of who they were; the outsider art world
offered a different story of them; I saw them differently than they saw
themselves and as the art world seemed to portray them. So there was, from
the start, a mash-up of meanings. I assumed that as long I got the religious
stuff these artists believed right, which was all they really seemed to care
about while I was hanging out with them and interviewing them, they'd be fine
with the book. And most people in the book are fine with it. I don't set out
to kick people around. I enjoyed my time with these artists and did not mean
my book as an attack on their beliefs or their art, and clearly most readers
don't see it this way. I feel part of what my book suggests is that we all
'shuffle our facts' to form a 'straight line toward meaning' - i.e., we all
construct our beliefs about who we are and what our lives mean in relation to
our culture and society and express this in various ways. Outsider artists
offer a pure and traceable expression of this process because of their
single-minded devotion and belief and output of art, which constantly
reissues a belief system in pictorial design (and sometimes eschatological
writing, as was the case with the artists I visited). In my mind I was after
ideas such as that rather than just human-interest journalism. Often when I
read journalism, even really excellent journalism, I can't help but think
about editorial slants, demographics, advertising, all the forces on the
writing and the writer. Really I see the journalism of my book as part of a
larger project that is an essay, an inquiry, an investigation into the making
of meaning through creativity (perhaps delusion) in the face of dislocation
and despair. All of the artists in the book have, to some extent, overcome
difficult situations through their devotion to their calling and their art.
What I didn't expect before the book came out was how my writing about a
couple of the artists' visionary experiences and religious missions as an
aspect of their psychology, a psychology very much in keeping with the
narrative template, if you will, of many other 'true' outsider artists and
also in keeping with contemporary notions of psychosis (and Prinzhorn's
earliest ideas), would so upset them. This is simply an obvious fact, and
this assumption is common in most writing about outsider art and them. I make
it clear that I'm an outsider to this art world, and that my views are simply
my views, but I don't think you need to be a cultural theorist to get the
sense that these artists are in complicated and institutionalized ways
'exploited' within the outsider art world - in magazines like Raw Vision and
in places like the American Visionary Art Museum - since they, the artists,
assume curators and audiences are coming to hear and see their preaching, so
to speak, when that is absolutely dismissed and perhaps patronized for a new
message in the new art-world context of eccentric, anti-mainstream freedom. At
times, at its worst, it struck me as almost tourism around the ill,
disenfranchised, and marginalized. I don't mean to suggest that religious
outsider artists aren't taken seriously within the outsider art world. I mean
to say what I think is obvious - that they are not taken seriously in the way
they think they are or would like to be taken seriously. At the time, I felt
for them.
How do you balance the notion of making a book intriguing, perhaps
contentious, and preserving the integrity of those you write about? Is that
an issue?
It is an issue. But I guess intriguing, contentious, and fair
are all in the eye of the beholder. I didn't intend contentious. I see it
as bringing up a few thorny issues which might sting a few people. To me,
though, that was simply about having the courage to report what seemed to me
to be the truth of my travels and encounters. I tried always to be respectful
to the artists, both personally and in the writing, but I had to balance that
in the writing with saying what I felt had to be said to tell the story as
I saw it.
I felt you'd been quite restrained in offering opinion or criticism about
the artists and their work. Personally, I felt they all dug holes of varying
depths and widths for themselves: there is no theological, artistic or
philosophical construct behind what they are doing, it's all passion and
polemic! Is there a place for those things in the world? At what point - if
ever - is there justification for interfering or censoring?
I do actually think that each of the artists has a theological
and philosophical construct behind what they do. But it is articulated
through an 'outsider' system of thinking and communication. Its modes are not
always fully rational or easily followed if seen through a mainstream
cultural lens, if we can define such a thing. Of course to these artists my
construct, my thinking, is an 'outsider' system. Outsider art institutions
- magazines, journals, catalogs, galleries - regularly 'interfere' with and
'censor' some aspects of Christian fundamentalist outsider artists' core
messages, which are sometimes about as politically incorrect as a message can
be in our current cultural moment. One day I looked at work by a schizophrenic
who makes incredibly disturbing, violent, pornographic collages, work by William
Burroughs that had to do with morphine
and addiction, and work by some Southern Christian 'naive' artists. In the
secular art world the pornography and the drugs are fine (and never mind that
Burroughs was way outside Roger Cardinal's or Dubuffett's definitions of this
type of art), but the Christian messages had to be tempered and
contextualized and shaped in the catalog copy. They could only be presented
if it was implicitly understood that the gallery did not necessarily agree
with them, when this was not necessary around narcotics or pornographic,
violent fantasy. I didn't want to offer easy judgment or opinion about these
things
so much as to report them as someone trying to be a thoughtful reader of
culture. Personally I don't think any of these messages should be censored
or softened.
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Is your interest in the religious aspect of this kind of art
simply because that is what is around you in the South USA, or is it what
interests you? Your book of short prose, Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks,
seems to suggest that religion is still in the air, implicitly linking back
to writers such as Flannery O'Connor.
Religion is something, directly or indirectly, I write about often. Partly
because I write about the place I come from. Partly because I grew up around
religious obsession. Partly because I am interesting in storytelling, and I'm
interested in how meaning - culturally and personally - is constructed (by a
country, a sect, a region, a neighborhood, a schizophrenic, an artist, a
child, etc.). Back in grad school I was intrigued by some of the thinking of
the Birmingham School of cultural studies - particularly Richard Hoggart and
Stuart Hall. And lately I've been very interested in some personal writing by
cultural anthropologists such as Michael Taussig, Alphonso Lingus, and
Stephen Muecke, who write about myth and belief. I write quite
autobiographically - perhaps annoyingly autobiographically - but
autobiography for its own sake is of no interest to me. I like personal
writing driven by intellectual inquiry, the self subordinate to the idea,
open to its own confusion, the world's complexity, the way every story has counter-stories,
how everyone involved in the story has a different version of it. You could
say that every book I have written, almost every story and memoir and essay I
have written, is essentially this: who is this person and how did this
particularly person from this particular place and culture (or subculture)
come to be who they are and do what they do or did?
My limited experience of the Southern States, including a visit to Howard
Finster's sculpture garden, suggests that there is something strange at work.
I mean it simply isn't normal when you meet people like Finster who has
brothers and sisters falling down wells and being struck by lightning. Is it
simply that society is stuck in a timewarp (I mean, Victorian England had a
much higher mortality rate, lower life expectancy and larger families), or
something else?
Partly it is religion, I think. Fundamentalist religion of any stripe tends
to be anti-intellectual and anti-progress. And class - not just economics,
but everything that goes with that, including especially literacy - is the
great governing structure of America, but people outside of academia and
progressive politics don't seem to go near that one. American mythology is
powerful, and without a high-level of literacy one can't even begin to see
the nature of the systems, institutions, myths, or sensibilities of one's own
time and culture or think about how these things have come to be, how they
shape who we are. Lewis Lapham published an essay many years ago about public
education that pointed out that the perfect citizen for the American system
of consumer capitalism was one educated enough to want and want and want and
solvent enough to acquire and acquire and acquire (and if you don't have
money, no worries - we have great credit cards with rates of 20% or so), but
not educated enough to ask serious questions about the way we live. His kind
of radical point, and a point others have made, was that a truly excellent
public education system would go against consumer capitalism. Also religion,
ritual, and tradition are particularly strong in the South, but I know many
intellectuals and artists in the South (some devout Christians; in a
complicated, existential way I myself am a Christian). There are wonderful
universities and cities in the South. Some days I greatly miss Virginia and
North Carolina, where I spent the first thirty years of my life. It's a
complicated place like anywhere else. I recently read something suggesting
that America is a continent pretending to be a country. The more I travel
around the more I believe that. New England, the South, and the Southwest,
for instance, may have less in common than England, Ireland, and
Scotland.
The blurb on Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks suggests
the book 'provocatively [blurs] the lines between autobiography, short
fiction and essay. Is this correct? Might we be in the realms of
creative-nonfiction here?
Not sure if it is 'provocative.' It's an autobiographical book that moves
from memoir to essay to little essayistic meta-fictions. Literary
autobiography is best understood as a contingent form, I think, housed in
other forms - poems, essays, stories, biographies, journalism, memoir.
Is there a clear line between invention and reportage, between observation
and critique? Does it matter? Is everything 'fair game' for an author, or is
there a moral duty to disguise, change or hide your sources in fiction? (I
haven't read it, but I note that your first book, Angelhead, is
about your brother.)
The lines are blurry in some cases - memoir in particular. My friend, a great
writer, says memoir should be seen as autobiographical poetry is seen, since
memory is a kind of 'fiction,' a 'dream machine' that reshapes itself over
time and as our identities and conceptions of self change as we age and go
through life's events; not to mention all the living within cultural myths,
technology, popular culture, etc. If telling your own story is easy, he would
suggest, you can bet it is padded with delusion and that it resembles the
truth only to you. If you think of great memoirs - Michael Ondaatje's Running
in the Family, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, John
Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers, English books like
Blake Morrison's When Did You Last See Your Father? or Lorna
Sage's Bad Blood or the autobiographical vignettes in Alan Bennett's Untold
Stories - it is clear that those texts are mixes of memory and
imagination, recounting and creation, observation and speculation. That's
what memoir is. The past cannot be fully recovered. It requires some form of
invention. Once memory and encounter are made into narrative they start to
become 'fictionalized,' even while your mission is to pursue with rigor and
intelligence the 'truth' of a situation, and you don't need to be Derrida to
understand that. But I'm interested in reporting, in an imaginative and
subjective way, about the world I live in. I think one has a real obligation
to the facts especially when writing about other, real people. In those
cases, such as in The Colorful Apocalypse, I travel, talk to
people, use tapes, transcripts, notes, do research, keep a big folder of
articles and photographs, try to know the background of my subject(s), try
make sure the manuscript is carefully checked. As I have seen, though, even
with all that your work will be absolute fiction to someone. I can pretty
much assure you that if the farmers in Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
or the miners in Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier ever
read those books, they said something along the lines of 'what is this crap?
I like me job!'
Is this mix of genres 'provocative' as the blurb suggests, or is that
marketing talk from the publishers?
You're making me regret that word! Assuming the world is this complex place I
seem to think it is, then maybe the old conventions of genre can't hold what
needs to be said as well as they used to. I think of writers like Lydia
Davis, Geoff Dyer, W.G. Sebald, some of the prose of Czeslaw Milosz or
Charles Simic. The French writer Jean-Paul Kauffman's or Cees Nooteboom's travelogues.
What are those wonderful things they make - poems, stories, novels, essays,
profiles, travelogues, philosophy, journalism, parable, fable? Also, it is
worth us at this late date thinking about for instance what freedom a
novelist or poet has, what constraints but also authority a journalist has,
how memoir is certainly widely popular to some extent because at this time we
are interested in confessional and testimony and cleansing rituals. (I think
of the great scene in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace where he must
confess his sins to the authorities to save his academic post; maybe no scene
in a novel signifies the contemporary moment as well as that one in my mind.)
It is suggested that the fifteen prose pieces of S,HR
accumulate and interact to provide a 'meditation on the nature of, and
necessity for, storytelling itself.' Certainly, something I teach my first
years - before we get to fragmentation, hypertext and postmodernism! - is
that we make sense of the world through narratives, and that we can only
filter, edit and select from what we experience ourselves. This works both
ways: it both denies authorial invention, but also says everything can be
utilised as source &/or subject. Where do you stand on that?
I guess it depends on the project. In my first book, a memoir, I stayed tight
to the facts and did research but 'invented' a depiction of my brother's mind
in psychotic state based on what I knew from living with him. I also, though,
call attention to this speculation/'invention' on my part, let the reader see
what I'm doing and hopefully understand why and even how I'm doing it. I also
hold up the 'truth' as I see it against newspaper accounts, which were
'untrue' in some ways while having gotten all the facts they used correct. In
the last section of SHR, the fictional pieces all use facts and actual events
as starting points but then veer toward pure invention, keep pointing out how
facts fail us or tell only a little of what we need. I would only call that
fiction, but you can see how close to the line I am when I'm on either side
of it. The Colorful Apocalypse was an attempt, if
we divorce form from content for a moment, to pull apart the mechanics of
searching out story, fact, and incident. The book is actually structured as
the story of a writer traveling around collecting information to write a book
- a fraught endeavor, one that might actually be upsetting to some whose
interests are at odds with the writer's interest. But each episode and scene
depicts the actual interaction, the actual conversation - I knew the people
in the book would read the book and judge it - thus the tapes and
transcripts, the notes and photos I took so that I could accurately describe
clothing, rooms, what people said and did, their accents, how they moved,
etc. But of course it is consciously a literary construction, a creation. I
use and narrate only what I need to make the book, to tell the 'truth' of the
situations, characters, and interactions as I experienced them. But given
these factors you can see - I can see - how people who don't give a hoot
about literature, or don't know anything about literature, don't live in it
the way I do, don't think about the 'nature of narrative,' who are more
interested in or connected to the topic of outsider art, would say, Hey, this
isn't an academic book, or a coffee-table book, or cultural history, or
straight newspaper/magazine profiles. Who does jackass Greg Bottoms think he
is?
Can you tell us what you are working on the moment? And what or how you
teach?
I have a new book that uses autobiography as a vehicle to explore white,
working-class masculinity in the South, boys and men, and the subtle and
overt effects of violence and aggression on those who live in or around it. A
mix of narrative and cultural criticism. It also contemplates some of these
issues of the past, memory, and writing. I also want to write a book about a
street I lived on in Richmond, Virginia, where some of the stories in SHR take
place. I lived below the poverty line while I was there. I want to describe,
very particularly, some of the every-day concerns of having no money and
living among people who also have little money or opportunity. I really got
an education, first hand, of how about 90% of violence in America takes place
among the bottom 10% of the economic scale. Down and Out in Paris and
London would be a precursor perhaps, and I think I would bring my
reading of that book and other related books, by London and Dickens, for
instance, into my own book. Memoir, travel, belle lettre. I'm just staring to
think about that one, though.
As for teaching: A new course is American Travels, which looks at the genre
of literary travel writing as a vehicle of cultural investigation and
critique. We read Agee, Kerouac, Dickens, Marx, Jonathan Raban, Jamaica
Kincaid, Alice Walker, etc.
I also regularly teach workshops in advanced nonfiction writing - essay,
memoir, cultural criticism, documentary narrative, sometimes prose poems.
© Greg
Bottoms & Rupert Loydell 2007
The Colourful Apocalypse. Journeys in Outsider Art, Greg
Bottoms (University of Chicago Press, 2007)
Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks. Stories from the New South, Greg
Bottoms (Shoemaker Hoard, 2nd edition, 2007)
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