The (Sometimes) Surreal South: What, if Anything, Happened to it?
Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985), Moss Fingers, 1946, printed in 1947, Gelatin Silver Print, High Museum of Art (1)
The Older South…
PROVOCATIVE COMBO OF SHOWS AT THE HIGH MUSEUM OF ART
Sometimes an accidental combination makes you think. For a very few days (until May 19) the High Museum of Art is featuring a fairly provocative combo of shows about the older South…maybe even about the Old South, but not quite.
I’m talking about the weird old South, the South of Southern Gothic, the South of strangeness so peculiar that even Flannery O’Connor couldn’t quite capture it, although she came as close as anybody.
CLARENCE JOHN LAUGHLIN
That South, as the New Orleans photographer Clarence John Laughlin experienced it in the decade of the Great Depression, gave him such a case of the heebie-jeebies that he became, according to some, the Father of American Surrealism.
He cheerfully called his work “the first true Surrealist pictures done by any American photographer”, creating images of eerie figures posed in isolated settings and poetically documentary pictures of tumbledown mansions along the Mississippi.
The High has acquired a fair number of his photographs, and the show “Strange Light: The Photography of Clarence John Laughlin,” scheduled to run from May 11 – November 10, presents more than eighty of them.
RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD
Laughlin wasn’t the only Surrealist-tinged photographer working in the American South, but as far as I can tell in advance of the opening date, the essential creepiness of Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s unnervingly comic pictures of masked figures isn’t available for comparison.
The catalogue of another museum’s Meatyard show is for sale in the museum bookshop alongside the book that serves as the sort-of-catalogue for the High’s major photo-and-folk-art exhibition “Way Out There: The Art of Southern Backroads.”
That would be the late Jonathan Williams’ Walks to the Paradise Garden: A Downhome Southern Odyssey, a newly published account of trips he took in the 1980s with photographers Guy Mendes and Roger Manley to visit all sorts of odd places and odder characters, including Meatyard, who when not producing surreal images was a conventional optician in Lexington, Kentucky.
PHOTOGRAPHERS GUY MENDES & ROGER MANLEY
Williams’ interest in Meatyard’s photography and in the self-taught artists of the rural South is very much in line with the Surrealists’ love for the “ideal palace” that the Postman Cheval constructed out of odd materials, and other buildings by people who seemed to be directly in touch with the strange qualities of the unconscious mind that seldom are allowed free rein to do what the Postman Cheval did in France, or Howard Finster or St. EOM did in rural Georgia, creating architecture without thought for a blueprint or a building permit.
Roger Manley (American born 1952), James Harold Jennings, Pinnacle, NC, 1988, Courtesy of the Artist and Institute 193. (3)
Walks to the Paradise Garden is also for sale in the museum store, but the photographs reproduced in the book and a lot of other updated material is only available until “Way Out There” closes on May 19. So the opportunity to wander at the High from Laughlin’s strange light to the strange yard art of the self-taught artists visited by Williams and Mendes and Manley is a short one, only a week, really.
Even though Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden is evoked year-round in the High’s folk art collection, these photographs from an era that seems much longer ago than a third of a century will soon only be available between hard covers.
And that last observation is what has set me to thinking. The sites of some of the yard environments survive, even though the makers of them do not. But the places have turned into tourist attractions with their own brochures and websites, as an information rack and map in “Way Out There” makes clear.
IS THE SOUTH STILL WEIRD?
Has the South had the weirdness wrung out of it by the proliferation of trendy restaurants and specialty shops even in what once were remote little towns with barely a corner store to boast of? Why did the South produce such a bumper crop of stubbornly individualist visionaries in the first place, apart from its African inheritance on one side and freewill-and-freewheeling version of Baptist roots on the other?
And why, given the prevalence of visionary forms of religion in large parts of the South to this day, are new visionary artists seemingly not arising? The retired millworker R. A. Miller drew his pictures of the Book of Revelation’s seven-headed dragon while watching nature shows on his local PBS station, so it’s not just the arrival of new media in rural households that accounts for the paucity of once-abundant personal vision.
Is it really possible that these days, everybody is too busy watching Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, or The Walking Dead to produce their own inwardly generated images of stranger things, plus tales with pictures that would beat all hollow the Night King’s CGI arrays of dragons or the armies of zombies that have proliferated both in Winterfell and in a fantasy version of metro Atlanta? What has happened to the South’s backroads visionaries?
Guy Mendes (American b. 1948), James Ford Son Thomas, Leiland, MS, 1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Courtesy of the Artist (1)
WHERE ARE THE VISIONARIES?
I can think of a good many Atlanta gallery artists with rural origins who are visionaries in their own right, and maybe I’m looking in the wrong direction in general. After all, the self-taught Lonnie Holley is still with us, and he got his start working at Disney World decades ago. Now he is world-famous not just for his museum-quality symbolic art but for YouTube videos of songs like “Six Space Shuttles and 144,000 Elephants.”
There are also less visionary and more political self-taught African-American artists such as Joe Minter, who is the oldest artist in this year’s Whitney Biennial, after decades of near-invisibility (even though, like Lonnie Holley, he has long been championed by legendary vernacular-art advocate Bill Arnett).
Guy Mendes, Reverend Howard Finster, in his Paradise Garden, Summerville, GA, 1982, Courtesy of the Artist
A FEW FINAL THOUGHTS…
Who knows who else is out there on the few back roads not yet discovered by influencers and trendsetters? Who knows who will be the one who catapults them into international recognition? Will it be the visionaries themselves, posting to YouTube or Instagram?
This story is © 2019 by Jerry Cullum, although I am willing to discuss Creative Commons licensing instead. My bio is out there for anybody who spends a little time doing a web search. Generally, you can find my other stuff these days on artsatl.com, where I write the monthly column, Cullum’s Notebook.
Jerry Cullum is an Atlanta Art Critic, a long time friend and a guest blogger. You might be interested to read other blogs in this category.
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NOTES ON PHOTOGRAPHS:
#1 Clarence John Laughlin (American 1905-1985), 1946, printed in 1947, Gelatin Silver Print, High Museum of Art (1)
#2 Clarence John Laughlin (American 1905-1985), 1939, printed in 1940, Gelatin Silver Print, High Museum of Art (3)
#3 Guy Mendes (American b. 1948), Front Gate, Land of Pasaquan, near Buena Vista, GA, 1982, pigmented inkjet print. Courtesy (1)
#4 Guy Mendes (American b. 1948), Royal Robinson’s House in Baldwin, Lousiana, ca. 1986, pigmented inkjet print. Courtesy (1)