Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art is a large exhibition currently on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. (The show is curated by MIA art historians and has traveled to Toledo and the Speed Museum of Art in Louisville before returning home to Minneapolis.) The show is fascinating -- indeed, it would take real curatorial malpractice to make an exhibit of this sort dull. Because of its size, the exhibition is a little challenging and, if you attend to each of the 140 or so objects in the show, you will leave the museum somewhat exhausted as well as baffled and confused. I found the exhibit stunning in both a good and bad sense. It was all intriguing, but immersion in this sort of stuff, "the black mud of the occult" as it was characterized by Freud, also leaves you with a sour aftertaste: this exhibit isn't about beauty or formal grace or felicity: the objects in the show appear to have been coerced into existence; there's an unpleasant aspect of brute force about many of them -- they have the blunt hermetic, even, incommunicable aspect of pre-Columbian votive figurines or African fetish objects. And, indeed, this comparison is apt -- like an Olmec ceramic jaguar-baby or a Congolese idol, these things are not art; they were not made by artists for display and delectation. Rather, the great majority of things in the show are either mute witnesses to some kind of ghostly occurrence, testimony as to spectral wonders seen and remembered, or evidence of the afterlife and parallel manifestations of the uncanny such as UFOs and spirit writing. These objects exist as spectral evidence, proof of other realms or, in the alternative, artifacts that attest to the mental illness or obsession of those creating these artifacts. Some of the artifacts on display are quite beautiful (although much of this stuff is depressing and even disturbing), but the formal characteristics of the objects are secondary to their status as paranormal evidence.
The easiest things to evaluate in the show are novelty pieces made by established, academically trained artists. Several of the paintings in the show are quite famous -- there's John Quidor's rendition of "The Headless Horseman", Rimmer's nightmare "Flight and Pursuit", a well-known and startling capriccio made by the luminist painter, Martin John Heade ("A Gremlin in the Studio" -- a much reproduced trompe l'oeil canvas of a little monster dancing under a canvas showing one of Heade's signature images of light reflecting off still water), and several spooky pictures by Andrew Wyeth. (I've always thought that "Christina's World", Wyeth's famous painting of a disabled woman crawling like a spider over a sandy hill on a New England seashore fairly unsettling; there are several similarly disquieting images in this show.) A couple of paintings by James Whistler on on show, one of them depicting a vampire-like society woman poised against the void. George Tooker's big painting of death seizing a woman on the sidewalk, derived from Holbein's Dance of Death, but updated to an urban street is frightening with a strong presence. (The catalog shows Albert Pinkham Ryder's great "The Racetrack" in which death on a pale horse and carrying a scythe seems to gallop around a gloomy, infernal racetrack but I didn't see it in Minneapolis -- this painting may be too fragile to travel; Ryder used idiosyncratic mixtures of paint, oil, and substances like tobacco juice and, then, smeared this stuff on his canvases with impasto knives -- the pictures have flaking, cracked, and scorched-looking surfaces that have been compared to drying magma, are unstable, and don't travel well.) Similar in many respects to the grim, dense texture of Ryder's work are the paintings in the show by Ivan Albright. Albright is an interesting artist and his pictures are, if nothing else, unlike the work of any his North American contemporaries. Albright labored on his pictures for years and created densely congested surfaces in which his portrait figures are half-hidden beneath suppurating tumors of paint -- several of his most noteworthy images can be seen in this show, including a work that embodies his eccentric and macabre style: "The Vermonter -- If Life were Life there would be no Death" in which an elderly man's face and body seem to be elaborately decomposing before our aghast eyes. Albright had some Platonic notion of the soul trapped in carrion flesh and his pictures express this conviction in spectacular, if hideous, form. There are some eerie pictures of abandoned houses by Charles Burchfield and others -- images of decaying empty rooms, some of which are literally haunted by gloomy shadowy ghosts. These sorts of pictures were made by artists once well-known in their day and can be evaluated according to the styles, themes, and fashions in painting existing when they were made -- they are art objects, technically adroit, and can be characterized according to their expressionist or regional realist influences (Wyeth is a New England regional realist; Thomas Hart Benton, who has a memorable image of an imminent head-on collision between truck and passing sedan in the show, is a Midwestern regional realist; Burchfield's images are like Hopper's paintings that have a similar sense of surreal vacancy; Albright, who is, more or less, sui generis, is influenced by expressionists and the Neue Sachlichkeit of artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix.) But these sorts of pictures comprise only a small part of the work on display -- the rest of the stuff in the show is far more eccentric. These are pictures by mediums, images from seances, outsider art by painters who claimed to have seen UFOs or aliens, spirit photographs showing ghostly presences hovering over staid, grim-looking Victorians, paintings precipitated onto canvas by spooks, drawings in which the artists claimed that their hands were guided by dead painters such as William Blake and Peter Paul Rubens (on the evidence of this show, death certainly doesn't improve an artist's technique nor does it enhance the content or form of his work.) This work is largely impenetrable, alluding to visitations so far beyond ordinary experience as to be almost impossible to interpret. What canon of quality do you apply to a chalk picture of a smirking dead girl inscribed by a medium during a seance and probably made ambidextrously while she was spirit-writing in weird hieroglyphs with her other hand? How do you judge eerily photo-realistic pictures of families "precipitated" from mists of color by busy spirits? (A painting of this kind, circa 1900 of the Bird family with husband, wife, and two identical daughters, each with dead flint-like eyes is one of the most disturbing things in the show -- once seen, it can't be unseen and may haunt your dreams; this strangely luminous object was painted, so it is said, by spirit-precipitation of pigment onto a canvas, that is, not made by human hands.) The show is salutary in that it reminds us that, after the great Death of the Civil War, millions of people turned to spiritualism and communed with their dead through mediums and seances -- there are several creepy Civil War pictures to this effect, including a garish and morbid painting by Emmanuel Leutz that looks, more than a little, like some of Otto Dix's savagely gruesome paintings made in the wake of World War One. Spiritualist communities were founded at Chesterfield, Indiana and Lily Dale, New York and, apparently, still survive in some form today. The show features voluminous white drapery that mediums wore in the late 19th century -- possibly to conceal the ghostly apparatus on their persons -- and things like Ouija Boards, ghost goggles, and other equipment for contacting the dead. And there are bizarre pictures made by Outsider artists like Prophet Royal Robertson of Louisiana, images of space aliens and flying saucers surrounded by Biblical citations to the Book of Ezekiel ("the fiery wheel within the wheel") and densely written diatribes against women, politicians, and public figures. In his early youth, a young man from Rumania, Ionel Topalzen, encountered a space ship and, then, spent the rest of his life struggling to diagram the machine in hundreds of small, brightly painted images. There are a few religious paintings, suitably curmudgeonly and loquacious by the Rev. Howard Finster -- he became famous 30 years ago when David Byrne of the Talking Heads began collecting his art. One eccentric painter is represented by a series of images showing apocalyptic octopuses strangling out earthly evil. Another woman, Agatha Wojciechowsky, seems to have spent her life documenting visions that she experienced involving various sorts of angels and demons. Taken in small doses, this sort of stuff is bracing and liberates the imagination -- but the large number of these things on show in this exhibition has an opposite effect: in the end the viewer is left a bit abashed and depressed. A few works of this sort evidence the profundity of the human imagination but galleries of these things leave you with the impression of the unfortunate ubiquity of mental illness or the prevalence of superstitious gullibility.
Several contemporary works in the exhibition showcase current ideology about diversity and race relations. An animation shown on a screen at the entrance to show comments on the fact that the American continent is haunted by vast numbers of Indians who were the victims of organized genocide -- the point is well-taken but the animation is obvious and superficial, not particularly well-done, and politically specious. In one gallery, a large tuberose orb hangs suspended in the air -- murky cloudy forms are projected on the clotted surface of the orb (it is bigger than an adult man) and, now and then, we see lips and hands forming in the object; the thing comes with a soundtrack of whispers, chiming bells, oracular declarations -- it's very scary. (My daughter entering the gallery displaying this object suddenly encountered a bored security guard, gazing in a half-comatose way at the shadowy lips and drifting shadows on the orb; she was startled and jumped half-way out of her skin.)
A show of this sort is valuable for the thoughts that it provokes in its viewers. We may be tempted to condescend to paintings by a man (to take one example) who imagined a vast octopus entangled with allegorically represented human emotions, all of this manifested according to the artist's synesthetic hallucinations. But what to make of the adjacent galleries in the Institute of Art in which we see painted over and over again, a woman and baby inexplicably stationed in a stable with farm animals or, even more distressing, a handsome young man tortured to death on a cross.
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