Haunted American Art

[flanerieoconnor]

Went to an exhibit last weekend at the local art museum on "Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art". Quality was gratifyingly high, and moreso for the first half, which focused on uncanny/haunted American painting from the colonial period up through High Modernism or so. The second half, which was much more heavily "outsider-art" focused, was less successful- a curatorial mixed bag divided between works that obviously seemed to stem from a genuine encounter with *something*, and an obsessive desire to communicate the contents of that encounter as faithfully as possible, and things that looked much more like glorified doodles inspired by an inflated sense of self-importance- and the fact I found this difference so evident, but was obviously unnoticed by the people who put the exhibit together made this section feel more than a little patronizing. Still, there were some highlights I'd like to look at again: there were a wonderful series of mandala-like drawings warning of an psychically-sensed impending earthquake on the Alaska Coast and the Octopus-like entity that was perceived to have caused it, for example, and some awfully fun paintings used as the backdrops of Sun Ra performances, which were much more impressive in person than similar things look online. Spiritualism, in general, didn't make a very impressive performance- there was an early 19th channeled "spirit drawing" that looked like the direct ancestor of some of the creepiest pieces of 80s and 90s Colorado-style Evangelical art I've ever seen, and in general, pretty much all of the medium-produced work had a kind of sickly-sentimental quality with something unsettlingly off about the eyes. I could see a plausible case that something native to the ambient landscape or culturescape (to the extent these can be separated) was being channeled, but if so, that something was neither friendly nor wholesome.

(my thoughts about the exhibit were more than a little colored by the Erik Davis' exploration of the distinction between the "weird" and the "uncanny" from his "High Strangeness", which I'm currently working my way through after hearing an interview with the author on an old episode of the Hermitix podcast, but which can be found excerpted here: https://boingboing.net/2014/07/14/weird-shit.html).

This was by far my favorite single painting in the exhibition, though (an image on screen doesn't do the presence of the real thing justice, but is still worth reproducing):


-Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, John McCrady