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Under the Radar:
The Flourishing of Unfunded Art in Central Illinois
Tunneling down the furrow of Illinois 128 in end-of-September
weather, accelerating between walls of high corn and simmering
waves of light, I detect a little black glitch in my peripheral
vision. Some strange shape flies into the ambient brightness then
instantly vanishes. Route 128 points like an arrow to Shelbyville,
the county seat of Shelby County. And on subsequent and better
charted trips down the two-lane blacktop, I positively identify
the UFO as a black plywood silhouette of a crow, realistically
perched on a single section of white picket fence artfully wedged
into the glowing wall of corn. A farm house stands in the background,
and I immediately sense the deliberately staged quality of the
scene, a rural tableau replete with rusty-hooped wagon wheel,
imitation (two-dimensional) bird houses in various pastels, and
plentiful clumps of Spanish moss curled and draped into frames.
The crow, I later realize, is a sub-species of a larger population
of matte-painted silhouettes-the Dobermans reared up on hind legs
and caught in a permanent fighting stance outside Hillsboro on
Route 16, the turn-of-the-century farmer and wife (with real bandannas)
waving goodbye to Illinois motorists as they cross over into Indiana
on Interstate 74, the conductor and old-fashioned locomotive riding
the roof of Stan's Restaurant in Findlay, the flying Canada geese
flapping their black wings on the walls of Wooter's Sport Shop
on the nearby Bruce Road. Even my closest neighbor, Arliss (not
his real name but close enough), has positioned a silhouette of
a young girl with watering can at the edge of his bean and tomato
garden. Whenever I behold her, I do the proverbial Double Take.
For these outlined figures are performing a kind of prairie version
of M. C. Escher's trompe l'oeil deception, exciting the edges
of the cerebral cortex where the meaning of meaning resides. Silhouette
art has dislocated my thinking, making me conscious of the fact
that what I "see" of the world (including people and
ideas) is often a two-dimensional artifice. I am, in fact, studded
with more silhouettes than any portion of the landscape-an insight
both disturbing and oddly liberating. But isn't that the point
of art-to liberate us and explicate our private spaces? I was
being forced to reconstruct my all-too-solid prairie as a mere
panorama of subtle cut-outs on an endlessly pink horizon of steeples,
barns, windmills, and willow trees.
 Here
were these anonymous artists improbably turning the hybridized
world of agricultural Illinois into the stuff of art. Somehow
they had made the leap from thinking of the museum as a metaphor
for the world to redefining the world as a museum. They
became the self-appointed and unpaid curators of this big airy
space, installing free-standing artwork on the most visible roadsides
and ridges. In a commercialized culture where we mount glitzy
shows of Monet and Van Gogh, turning "high art" into
mega media events (TV documentaries and "specials")
and marketing opportunities (Monet's water lilies into postcards,
Van Gogh's starry night into a tote bag), art has become a very
serious business. These silhouette-makers, throwbacks to the creators
of portrait silhouettes and paper cut-outs of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, remind us that, at some irreducible level,
art must always be fun.
Now I am not suggesting that plywood figures (including Holstein
lawn cows and mushrooms), painted saws, spray-painted willow wreaths,
two-dimensional bird houses, tin Christmas figures (Santa, the
Elves, and Frosty), "antiqued" spice racks, various
Cute Things (ice skates fashioned from pipe-cleaners and paper
clips, snowmen created by cleverly stacking smaller and smaller
inverted flower pots atop each other after daubing them white)
will supplant Da Vinci or Degas. And I freely concede that it
is sometimes powerfully frustrating to distinguish outright Trash
(broken buttons and old ballpoint pens) from so-called Collectibles
(old soda bottle, bits of barbed wire, and matchbook covers);
Kitsch (Lincoln ash trays and busts, usually in the form of obscenely
bronzed-over pot metal) from Popular Art (old movie posters, Star
Trek lunch boxes, Coca Cola signs, and Mr. Peanut lapel pins).
It is even harder to draw the line between Folk Art and the unrecognized
and largely Unfunded Art of which I speak. Most computer-literate
citizens in the 1990's (a handy demographic grouping) would probably
consider a Shaker table art, and they might stretch their definition
a wee bit to include, say, a Mennonite rocker or an Amish quilt.
Folk art is generally acceptable nowadays because it is encoded
as "high craft" (especially if it takes the form of
textiles, glassware, or ceramics) as opposed to the "low
craft" randomly scattered on tabletops at yard sales, auctions,
church bazaars, cake sales, and the like.
Yet unfunded ("low") crafts of all kinds are being
created at an exponentially growing rate all over the country.
They are generally unheralded and unnoticed by the arts press,
omitted by Dan Rather and company from the evening news, and dumped
into the same informational black hole (the quasar site for unwanted
data) that contains the ubiquitous little theater groups, low-circulation
literary magazines, and independent creative writing collectives
and support-groups. No reliable census of these arts and crafts
practitioners even exists; they survive and even thrive below
the sweeping radar line of the art world's official screen, meriting
not so much as a blip-or a dollar-when reckoning time arrives,
whether in the form of grant money, documentaries, or column-inches
of critical prose. By any reasonable definition of art, however,
indigenous Illinois crafts deserve more than passing attention.
Even painted silhouettes in the favored plywood medium and saw
blades painted with latex trim paint possess style; that
is, they can be readily replicated with numerous variations on
a basic theme. Furthermore, they attempt to accomplish difficult
aesthetic goals with unforgiving or unyielding materials (as poets
in the act of rhyming, or potters in the process of squeezing
slimy clay cylinders into vases, pots, and jugs).
But no matter how carefully we frame the discourse on art or
art-funding, it is never easy to categorize the encyclopedic variety
of art being produced today. So it is entirely understandable-if
regrettable-that a state regranting agency like the Illinois Arts
Council would be forced to draw sharp lines of demarcation between
fundable and non-fundable forms of craft. Utopias, by definition,
are impossible to find. Not every artist can (or should) be funded,
but it behooves us to rethink our understanding of art and the
surprising role it continues to play in the background and foreground
of our daily lives. This closer scrutiny of arts funding is all
the more appropriate when taxpayer revenue is involved (including
appropriations from the Illinois State Legislature and grants
direct or indirect from the National Endowment for the Arts).
And the difficulties of clear discourse go well beyond the old
frustrating conundrum of how to define art or how to square the
aesthetic standards of high (or elitist) art with the pressing
needs of a democratic society (especially in its present highly
diverse and multicultural form). There are even deeper, more intractable,
confusions that grow out of misunderstandings or misreadings of
the powerfuleffects of class and technology.
While trying to untangle these knotty ambiguities and nagging
inconsistencies, I am drawn to a "crafts barn" (actually
a converted elementary school building) in nearby Moultrie County.
The structure has recently been repainted and tuck-pointed. New
windows gleam, colorful canvas awnings puff out like sails, and
the whole place is a perfect example of "adaptive re-use,"
a prime tenet of the new architectural credo. There is an Amish
kitchen on the premises (Arthur, the heart of Amish country, is
only a few miles distant), with white-capped matrons doling out
hefty portions of homemade noodles, braised pork chops, green
salad with sweet and sour dressing, blackberry cobbler, and strong
coffee. I shall leave those culinary arts to another commentator,
however, and pull myself away to focus instead on the ancient
schoolrooms turned into showplaces for antique reproductions,
Amish tables, scented candles, "antique" greeting cards
in favored tones of sepia and sienna, and abundant local crafts,
including odd sign boards with a single leaf or flower captioned
Thyme or Sweet William.
Having spent the last few days (and weeks) brooding on the themes
of Class and Technology, I amble over to the display of painted
saw blades and stand dumbly before a particularly interesting
example. It is a cross-cutting saw about five feet long with raised
walnut handles, perhaps eighty or ninety years old (maybe older)-the
kind of tool a father and son might have used to saw chunks of
pond ice or river ice into neat blocks for stacking and storage
in the ice house. Those clear and unpolluted blocks were stored
for later use, making possible the sweet summery pleasures of
hand-cranked ice cream and oversized tumblers of lemonade, all
the more enjoyable in the days before air-conditioning or even
electric fans.
Already, I am starting to register the implications of Class
and Technology in this artifact now become a saleable piece of
art. This painted saw was once a working tool put to daily use,
anchored to a particular niche in history, and still an authentic
symbol of the working class. I am no Marxist, but clearly the
artist is implying something by choosing to use a tool
in this way-a rather special twist on the meaning of "adaptive
re-use." The saw testifies eloquently for the Old Ways (pre-electric
and, more importantly, pre-electronic); it is old technology given
new life. In a world of high-tech surfing on the Net, this rusty
old gap-toothed thing persists in all its low-tech glory. Its
original owner was some yeoman farmer, most likely, a weathered
fellow with callused hands and dirty nails. There isn't anything
obvious to suggest Baby Boomer or Yuppie values in this odd old
implement, yet it exerts a powerful attraction on these very groups,
apparently meeting needs not fulfilled by the ergonomically correct
world in which they try to unwind.
The saw has been painted in four seasonal panels, beginning on
the left with botanically correct redbud trees bursting into magenta
flowers, and ending on the right with a refrigerator-white winter
scene of Zen-like stillness. In between one sees depictions of
plowing, harvesting, haying-in short, the agricultural world of
hard manual labor, performed out of doors, the world most familiar
to Americans until the decade after World War One when farmers,
by the millions, took to their Tin Lizzies and headed for the
Big City. In a flash, I saw the black plywood silhouettes as the
ghostly survivors of this idealized world. They could live with
two-dimensionality in the form of scenery on saw blades and unusable
bird houses because everything in their world was purely symbolic,
after all. They had once possessed the Platonically perfect homestead
that we moderns deconstructed about the time phrases like "quality
time" and "latchkey children" appeared on the scene.
We became profoundly and genuinely nostalgic, a word that derives
from the Greek nostos or "homecoming." And the
only homecoming available was through art. This variety of nostalgia
was existential in origin, and hence it could not be satisfied
by the instant nostalgia offered by made-for-TV movies or superficial
documentaries of sports figures, movie stars, and the like. So
no one had to inform the unfunded artists that there would be
authentic interest in their work; they already knew that in their
bones.
In this Postmodern Era, academics, politicians, and social reformers
have opened the cultural doors to all comers, while innumerable
people have devised some way to "come out" of whatever
closet restricted their lives (marriage, occupation, sexual orientation).
So can't the art establishment, in this spirit of openness and
inclusion, offer an official entrée to our local and independent
artists, those low flyers coming in, even now, just below the
radar?
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