Something Rich and Strange (Page 2)

Liz Locke

The Spirit of Folk Art and the Embodied Postmodern

In The Spirit of Folk Art, Henry Glassie combines folk-art scholarship with fine art historicism to reveal the explicit and tacit understandings, and more important, the misunderstandings reflected in them and passed on to us as descriptions of human creativity in cultural context. Having taken the rare trouble to become educated about Art (as a capitalized category, Art embraces Kandinsky and Matisse as well as storyteller Peter Flanagan and ceramicist Helen Cordero ), Glassie is also among the most empathetic practitioners of Folklore in the United States. As a kind of summation of his writing over many years of experience with folk artists and their works, The Spirit of Folk Art is, among other things, a serious and consciously crafted blow against the empires of commodity capitalism which reduce the poor, brown, and/or female traditional artist to the level of a naive imitator of what post-industrial cultures love most about themselves. In a move designed to turn art historicism against itself, his argument makes a distinction between those artistic products which may be considered "folk" by positively contrasting them with those considered "fine."

..by contrast to fine art, folk art is less formal in education; in appearance it is more abstract, in essence more spiritual, in orientation more communal. As a consequence, its practitioners are less wealthy, its history is more recursive than progressive. The ideal context for folk art is the agricultural village, prosperous enough to have material reserves, large enough to contain craft specialization, small enough to be experienced directly and to be governed by religious tradition.5

If you ignore the exceptions and hold to a definition derived from [...] contrastive pairs, your rigorous work will not return to you the distinction you assume between folk and fine art. Most fine art will be folk art. More important, you would be doing violence to art's reality. It is the purpose of art to be impure, to blend categories, to overturn them and erase distinctions, to disturb simple thought and move the mind behind the senses into a totalizing experience.12

The book ultimately articulates a philosophy which describes the production and reception of Art, understood finally as an undivided holism of human expression, as a continuum in which the fine arts of industrial and post-industrial societies constitute our folk arts, while the folk arts of traditional, Religiously oriented societies comprise their fine arts.13 Given that each of these categories has been used by scholars as entities by which the other must be measured, Glassie's view has the peculiar virtue of enlisting the conventional distinctions which created the two categories in the first place (branded separate and unbridgeable since the Renaissance) in order to maintain folk art as a distinguishable and distinguished entity while simultaneously erasing them in the service of better understanding the universal human impulse to create art, including its "fine" forms. It is unfortunate that so inclusive a statement cannot even admit to the possibility of many of these characteristics in industrial and post-industrial societies.

Glassie is fully cognizant that cultures differ in innumerable ways, as do the individuals who constitute them, even within a single society. His bases for contrast are not artistic, per se, but rather elements that must go into any deeply negative critique of modernity: "The critical context for our appreciation of folk art is the alienation and disharmony of our own world. The physical context for the creation of folk art is the noisy crowd. The conceptual context for the understanding of folk art is religion."14

Glassie's finely tuned attention to and appreciation of the communities he has participated in and reported on for our benefit is combined with his genuine revulsion at the dehumanizing forces of late-stage capitalism. Together these have shaped his perceptions and attitudes in the same manner in which each of our interests and desires, experiences and inclinations, hopes and fears have shaped us. As a consequence of living each within separate bodies while simultaneously sharing the cultural body that is human community, we each mature to form opinions and judgments about what to accept and what to reject about our existence, what to celebrate and what to condemn, enacted within the indispensable categories of the sacred (joined occasionally with institutional Religion), meaning, work and play, genuine value and utility, ephemeral fashion, and enduring art. The difficulty arises when one's life-context and the art that springs from it are described as necessarily linear-progressive, leisured, secular, and profoundly alienated by the simple virtue of being located in the late twentieth-century post-industrial West.

Granted that as the arbiter of goodness, beauty, and truth for a planet it has all but succeeded in destroying, the ravaging Western economic model exported to the rest of the world as democracy and development has failed to maintain the integrated scenes15 which govern the traditional production of folk art. However, if Glassie is correct that culture is nowhere monolithic but inevitably embraces "some who know more [and] some who understand less, even in the tightest traditional community,"16 then it is also not monolithic in the technologically elaborate West, the world in which I live, grieve, communicate, celebrate, aspire, and create. The Spirit of Folk Art simply cannot be the whole picture for those of us who struggle against the common perception that to be a member of the American consumer class (the 99% who control 60% of the wealth17), is tantamount to being in league with the devil. We who increasingly need to see at least some of the products of our own culture appreciated as art in both intention and result, as arising from our own sense of the sacred, must appreciate Glassie for finally giving us something substantial to push against.

Glassie rightly teaches that one can never discover richness by simply focusing on need. He points to the tendency in folk-art scholarship to perceive its creators as the needy Other, the Common People, whose creativity is essentially an imaginal antidote for material economic privation.18 But consider Wagner's notion that in times of stir and trouble, as ours undoubtedly are, all are "eager to number themselves among the People," that vaguely defined but ineluctably moral segment of the teeming mass of humankind to whom we folklorists inevitably point when we talk about tradition and lasting value. We may then find ourselves in agreement with the old musician's declaration that the folk are always and everywhere, regardless of class or taste, those who feel a Want, who recognize their individual want as a collective one, and who spend their whole life's strength upon the stilling of it for the benefit of themselves and their fellow beings. If we assume some small measure of agreement, then the Want of the West is precisely that deep feeling of lack, the stilling of which is identified as one of the most singular and enduring characteristics of the Folk: the ability and desire to perceive and experience art as Other Folk do, as the simultaneously singular and regular interpenetration of the mundane and the sacred.

The Emergence of the Sacred in Everyday Life

In the winter of 1983, I took a walk on a snowy evening to see Koyaanisqatsi, a new film photographed by Ron Fricke with music by Philip Glass. I had heard only that the title, a Hopi word, means "life out of balance." Almost at the theater, I stopped suddenly, compelled to gaze at the stilled silhouette of a white construction crane, resting from its daytime labors, looming tall against the icy trees and small, gray buildings of downtown Boulder. It was simultaneously shocking and familiar, massively present, astonishing, uncompromising, beautiful: mysterium tremendum-as-machine, and it took my breath away.

Inside, the film's cinematography reveled in sequence after sequence-alternately sped up and slowed down-of sun gently illuminating evening horizons, billowing clouds sweeping majestically across azure skies, waves crashing and whispering into rocky, primeval harbors, all underscored by the sweet, endlessly repeating strains of Philip Glass's aural imagination. Finally, after nearly an hour, the camera caught sight of human beings. The first images were of inordinately fat, white, stupid people lounging grotesquely on a garbage-strewn New Jersey bathing beach, backgrounded by the grating sounds and inhuman gyrations of a construction crane fitted with a wrecking ball. More human images followed, more and more often those of the gentle, wise, brown, and furrowed faces of the indigenous peoples of my continent. These were interspersed with the film's now famous razor-sharp, frenetic, neon-laced, blindingly blurred sequences of street lights, traffic lights, headlights mindlessly tracing their blue and red patterns over interchanges and across bridges, across the retina, against all sense and reason, racing on and on toward an inevitable apocalypse of technological depravity. After the screen had mercifully faded to black, it relit in red with the words of a Hopi prophecy concerning the impending atomic holocaust that will be the inevitable end of a world gone mad.

Upon leaving the theater, I looked up at the magnificent, massive white machine that had so completely captured my spirit earlier in the evening and thought about this teaching that Fricke and Glass had offered to me. They had encouraged me to hate it, but not only that: I was now supposed to hate the very world that it and I occupy. I was supposed to believe that a world out of balance is one that-in contrast to a nostalgically rendered simulacrum of a spiritual economy appropriated from (or rather, created for) the Simple, Common, Moral Other-deserves to be destroyed.

But who was operating the camera that photographed those lovely, mottled skies? Who had selected those pristine, empty coves? Who decided that the world was a better place before it was infested with human life, if not the human makers of that film? They had tried to dissuade me from my firmly held belief that the world is-in and of itself, without recourse to my fantasies, opinions or desires-a sacred place. They had tried to persuade me that, through their willful ignorance of the filmmakers' brand of White, New-Age spirituality, the embodied human spirits who inhabit my world are deliberately, deludedly, and deservedly careening toward doom.

This story-cum-interpretation is important because of the implications it carries for our understandings about art and the sacred in a technologically elaborate modernity. We individual humans, whether born in Dhaka, Quito, Kinshasa, or New York City, are not so powerful as to be in control of the technological environment into which we are born. We learn through our given traditions-augmented and enacted through imagination, skill, and the material resources at hand-how to shape ourselves sufficiently well in our constructed contexts to flourish in the face of hardship, to discover what it means to be human and, optimally, to apply any wisdom garnered from that discovery to the alleviation of suffering in other beings. This is precisely the process that the most institutionalized of Religions must ultimately describe as the central path by which we come into contact with the numinous, with what William James thought of as a revelatory relationship with something larger than ourselves. That which is sacred relegates our sense of self to the periphery of our own experience, however transitory or lasting, and yet does not instantiate itself by transmogrifying into the will to power.19 This is, as Glassie would undoubtedly agree, the ground of art. For those of us who accept, always with profound reservations, the context into which we were born, whether village or barrio, skyscraper or farm, true artistic expression and reception are our ways of acknowledging it, critiquing it, celebrating it, informing and reforming it, and finally, merging with it, recognizing ourselves as potent participants in a sacred world.

Here, in what Hindus and Buddhists call the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, we have left behind the long kalpas of time in which enlightenment came to human beings only through arduous ascetic practices. The world is now said to be so complex and confusing, so greedily controlled by the illusionary Lords of Materialism, that a mere glimpse into the heart of compassion is said to be sufficient to still Want, to replace suffocating desire with peace. But now, even that glimpse is enormously difficult to obtain.

People create their own relationships with the sacred and the possibility of peace. In thinking about the sacred as it attempts to manifest in the institutionalized forms of religious life, we are aware of Catholic nuns who live cloistered lives, not because they devoutly believe in their sacred marriage with the Redeemer, but because they were sexually abused as children and prefer the exclusive company of women. Outwardly, Religion is their sign, but what does it signify? We know of Buddhist teachers who abuse their sacred roles as gurus to aggrandize themselves and betray their students. Why create a relationship with such a teacher? We know of Muslim prelates who would sooner kill the messenger than hear a message critical of their views. How does one reconcile such dogmatic insistence with the possibility of an individual journey toward God? We know of the kind of faith that resorts to Religion as if it were a vending machine. It promotes the expectation that if you devotedly deposit the prescribed prayers, steps, or practices, you can then simply wait for the goodies to fall out, never having to actually confront the terrifying possibility that the process could result in a permanent change in your relationship with yourself and the world. This kind of faith has nothing whatever to do with the sacred. The sacred annihilates complacency.

Hope of peace and fear of annihilation are at the root of all spiritual-materialist conceits. The Kali Yuga runs on hope and fear. But there are teachers, both within and without institutionalized Religious frameworks, who see through the illusions wrought by materialism. Some of them deliberately use illusion to bring us back, without illusions, to ourselves. Some of them are filmmakers. Some of us connect with their teachings, alone or communally, while engaging in the peculiarly twentieth-century ritual of watching light flicker on one flat wall of a darkened room. We may enter synagogues, churches, shrines, and mosques in the hope of being refreshed, removed from our anxieties, briefly freed from the domination of Want. We may enter a movie theater with the same hope. Sometimes we get, like Koyaanisqatsi, "an Ire Production," like Glassie at his best, a justifiably enraged tribute to earthy Romanticism. But sometimes what we get-without any of the paraphernalia of Religion as such-is a glimpse into the heart of the sacred. Prospero's Books, rather than pontificating on a world contaminated by our presence in it, offers us a window onto an always and already sacred, fully inhabited human world.

Footnotes Page 2

5. Glassie 1989, p. 227.

6. Ibid., p. 128

7. Ibid., p. 129.

8. Ibid., p. 88.

9. Ibid., p. 187.

10. Ibid., p. 61.

11. Ibid., p. 41.

12. Ibid., p. 227. Emphasis added.

13. Ibid. Emphasis added.

14. Ibid., p. 18.

15. Ibid., p. 128.

16. Ibid., p. 238.

17. The statistic was cited by the novelist E.L. Doctorow in a remarkable speech entitled "The Politics of God," recorded on September 30, 1997 in Los Angeles' Skirball Cultural Center, and broadcast by C-SPAN.

18. Glassie 1989, p. 53.

19. I am again indebted to E.L. Doctorow, op. cit. supra, this time for the exact formulation of the sacred which I had been seeking

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