Because you Didn't / Fear Not

Last February I took a trip to DC to see the Joseph Cornell show at the Smithsonian. Cornell is like the Jonathan Richman of art - he goes to bakeries all day long, and he's just genuinely charming.

The Smithsonian also has this amazing altar-room thing called The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly. It's totally classic nutso outsider art - all the sparkles you're looking at are silver and gold tin foil. In the room with it, I overheard my new favorite definition of art:

Dude: I could have done that, it's just tinfoil, so how come it's art?

Dude's girlfriend: Because you didn't.

I was going to stop there, but reading the back-story when I found the pictures made it, of course, juicier. There's an essay you can read here and a zoom-y interactive thing of the whole piece here.

The altar was made by James Hampton. He started having religious visions in his early twenties, and when he was 41 he rented a garage to make his altar in. He worked on it there, mostly late at night after finishing his shift as a janitor, from 1950 to his death in 1964. It's made completely of scavenged material - he sometimes bought secondhand furniture and encrusted it with foil; lots of the insides are cardboard tubes, and in some places structural elements are just held together with wrapped tin foil. Somehow it also involves light bulbs and desk blotters.

Fourteen years is a really long time to make a tin foil altar.

Like lots of outsider art, nobody really knew what Hampton was up to until after he died and his landlord opened the garage. His family hadn't known about his project and didn't want to keep it. The National Museum of American Art did want it, so there it is. There's a subplot here, too - Hampton spent fourteen years talking to God in his garage, and what he left behind was spectacular in a way that appealed to a museum curator, which of course makes it even rarer.

It really appeals to me, too, in a kind of formal way, which is maybe weird to say about something that's all substance and no style - like all re-contextualized outsider art (he was making an altar, not a museum piece) it feels kind of like looking at somebody else's dirty pictures. I love how it's totally low-tech, self-taught, self-thought-up, how it feels transcendent and amateur at the same time. Which is something I've chased after a lot more cautiously, consciously or not, with the typewriter painting (old and unblogged) and the clothespin fence.

Today I'm wondering what "Fear Not" is about. First I was thinking about art and fear - You spend all this time on your own, holed up in your head/studio/garage, wherever, wondering whether what you're doing is awesome or laughable, but feeling totally driven to do it all the same. At least once, Hampton tried to let the world know what he was up to - he called the newspaper, and two reporters came out to see the garage and laughed at him. Ouch.

Then I searched the bible (did you know you can do that now? It's like totally text searchable online, and in umpteen languages and versions, of course) and he probably means this part of Isaiah -

Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have summoned you by name; you are mine
When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burned;
the flames will not set you ablaze.

God really likes him, right?

It's Just Yarn-Overs

So this thing happened a while ago. I was working on the baby blanket for Hannah, and I showed it to Meghan (my therapist). She was kind of floored by it. I was like, "Well, you just go around and around on double-pointed needles, and these holes here are how you add stitches to it when you switch needles. Then later you add more stitches, and that makes it ruffle-y. It's just yarn-overs." She told me that she couldn't knit, and I didn't believe her. I amended it to "You don't know how to knit yet."

Or like another time Noah asked me if I built bikes - I've got three bikes that I ride (one for commuting, one for touring, and one for going fast) and I've put just about every part of each one where it is myself, including installing two out of three headsets and lacing and truing four of my six wheels. I told Noah no I don't build bikes, because I don't know how to weld - I don't build frames.

I have this kind of huge tendency to think that anybody else could be coming up with and doing the same things that I do. Like here's another story - the other day Scott was telling me about James Turrell, who bought himself a crater in New Mexico and has been transforming the shape of it with bulldozers so that when you're in the bottom of it it feels like the sky is upside down. Through a random coincidence I already knew about this - an ex went to school with his daughter, who got married in the crater. But what I thought was, "Oh, that's funny, I know another story about an artist with a crater." Like somehow my assumption was that a whole bunch of artists had craters - New Mexico must be full of them. Oh, that Spiral Jetty!

In a sense, it is just yarn-overs. I'm attracted to simple, do-able, low-talent, low-tech, often economically impossible forms of art-making. Knitting is really simple and repetitive, which is part of why it's so great. Just about anybody with a ton of time on their hands who can knit in the round can follow the pattern to make the anemone blanket - even the fringey bits are just cast-on-bind-off.

But also obviously the stuff I do is way more than yarn-overs. I've been thinking a lot lately about where this all comes from - the it's-just-yarn-overs thing touches down all over the place in my life, like punk rock, my family, my super-awesome grandpa, and my ideas about what art is what I want to use it for and why I do all this crafty, arty, fixit stuff in the first place.

This is gonna be super long, so I'll stop here for now, but I'm gonna keep poking at it and see what happens. Stay tuned.

(Illustration from howstuffworks.com. Go there and learn all about increases.)