1999 Rodman Gallery Opening Catalogue Essay

HOMEGROUND: THE CULTURAL MATRIX OF VERNACULAR ART BY RANDALL MORRIS WITH INTRODUCTION BY RAMAPO GALLERY DIRECTOR SYDNEY O. JENKINS

Space for a Legacy

For over sixty years, Selden Rodman has immersed himself in the art and culture of Haiti, and his passion was the doorway for many to discover the powerful visual expressions there. As an academic institution with an international mission, Ramapo College of New Jersey is very fortunate to have in its possession the renowned Selden Rodman Collection. The initial donation of art from Carole and Selden Rodman was made in 1983, with subsequent additions in later years. Another Rodman Collection consisting of fewer works is housed at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven.

From the profoundly religious to the decorative, the visions in the collection here offer many things to gallery visitors. These colorful masterworks of “popular arts” feature artists from the Americas and the Caribbean, giving us a rich multicultural link to the developing history of the African Diaspora and the arts. And while our collection is one of the foremost in the world devoted to Haitian art, its range extends to include “self-taught” North American artists and outstanding Mexican and Brazilian painters.

It has taken some time for Ramapo College to develop a gallery specially designed to be a permanent home for such striking, beautiful art. This new space, the Selden Rodman Gallery of Popular Arts, is devoted to the Rodman legacy. Within its walls rotating exhibitions from the collections will be presented on a regular basis as well as special exhibitions including loaned works. We will bring scholars to provide differing contexts for our evolving presentations, and to create interdisciplinary programing. Through these multifarious projects, we can experience what Randall Morris terms “the vernacular muse” and thus provide the region with a major study and exhibition center.

Sydney O. Jenkins
Director of the Art Galleries
Ramapo College of New Jersey

Homeground: The Cultural Matrix of Vernacular Art

I

Our cultures are derived directly from our relations to the earth This applies whether we are nomads or refugees, whether we own the land, rent it, or conquer it; whether we farm, hunt and gather, or use it for houses of manufacture; whether we live on the sidewalks or in remote cabins. It does not take a great leap of imagination to understand that the land itself is an integral influence on the charismatic individuals who become gatekeepers of a culture for their communities and for themselves by preserving memories and histories; by interpreting spiritual encounters; by protecting the community, the self and the family; and by narrating the vernacular power of the culture.

These gatekeepers more often than not use the multiple and infinitely variable mediums of what we historically call art to display and demonstrate this rich cultural homeground. They provide the translations of the culture melded to the landscape. They become visionary landkeepers. It is more than folk art, more than fine art, more than outsider art and tribal art. It is often art only secondarily. In its primary form it is language, an extension of the concerns of an oral culture that still exists powerfully in the world today. The Selden Rodman Collection samples some of the global aspects of this great vernacular art.

I have always been fascinated by people—the Mayanist Linda Schele called the “Edgewalkers”—who sense the creative pulse of a country or of a people and their culture and commit to it so fully that is takes over their lives and their careers. Too often the scholarship in these fringes of the field is either non-existent, in its infancy or ploddingly traditional and centrist in its viewpoints. It has been over fifty years since the efflorescence of cultural homeground in Haiti exploded on the world and scholars and critics still have not caught up with the information, let alone its subtleties and nuances. The Selden Rodman Collection at Ramapo College of New Jersey not only is an example of the early edgewalking of its collector, but also reflects all the issues, discoveries and revelations of the past fifty years of the field in the present and thus serves as a study collection for the future as well.

Selden Rodman’s collection proves if one studies the cultural forces that create and enrich artistic expression the entire world of art falls into perspective; the hierarchies of the art world decrease in the amount of power they hold; and the truth and majesty of the vernacular creative spirit comes to the forefront.

I am sure by now is it common knowledge that all the words we have heard bandied about the last twenty five years of so to describe this art have fallen far short of meaningfulness and necessity. In the early days of Haitian art the common term was the colonialist epithet “naïve.” These words never fell out of usage, but instead were bundled with more current appellations like folk, outsider, art brut, popular, etc. Each of them tells a fraction of the real story; each of them absurdly used to define what should simply be called art. If we think of self-taught and vernacular as descriptions rather than as definitions we already shall be on the road to a better understanding.

Selden Rodman was always a traveler and if one is a traveler rather than a mere tourist, one is constantly shaped and changed by the influences of the world environment. If we are open, the world’s cultures speak to us in dreams and images, through words and ritual intensity. The songs we listen to, and the objects we touch begin to pick up a cumulative meaning about culture and our collections reflect a deeper dialogue with the world. Rodman has written books of interviews with international writers and poets and artists of several generations. This art collection represents a lifelong interview with the muse herself—a vernacular muse whose voice is manifested visually in an accumulation of artworks made by cultural gatekeepers from around the world reflecting their various homegrounds.

 

II

There are few universals in human culture. We move through time and space in slow, rarely predictable chaos on an earth that varies in its demands mile by mile. From the need to survive on this ever-changing organic surface arises a cultural diversity that is wondrous at its best and sheer entropy at its worst. As aware humans we are involved daily with navigating our way through both our own cultures and those of others. Our homes become statements not only about ourselves, but also about the worlds to which we choose to refer and in which we choose to live. The images made by vernacular artists from around the world directly reflect these very human concerns. There is no community where these artists are not present. They transcend the limitations of class, race and creed. The arts are as ever-present and endemic as speech itself. If we understand this, we may read this art the way we listen to indigenous poetry or music: as messages about the human desire to survive with some sort of cosmic and physical equilibrium that travel a direct path from the heart to the hand.

To best understand self-taught artists we need to deliberately shift our perspective from the ways we have previously regarded artmaking. We are used to seeing the art from the mainstream as a single-sources (western art history) ongoing discourse that has moved away over time from its hunting magic origins to an intellectual commentary on tis own development. The majority of mainstream art is linked intellectually and materially to other mainstream art. It is art made, often spectacularly, in front of its own historical mirror. Most important, in order to understand vernacular artists we must understand that trained artists make art fundamentally about itself.

For non-academic artists this is, with very few exceptions, simply untrue. He or she makes art as an extension of the demands of everyday culture, whether personally or community driven. There is an abstract utilitarian undertone in that it serves a function ranging from a narrative about current events to proselytization of religion, or from a personal amulet to the remembrance of community heroes. This, which I call Homeground, is vernacular art’s primary purpose. When collectors, curators and dealers later come along and call it art, it does not change but simply picks up an additional role. This work has layers of meaning and impact depending both on how the maker sees it and how the various audiences perceive it. I believe there are deep cultural chords are the primary agenda of the art—differentiating it from the art made by trained artists whose first allegiance is to the current art world’s agenda. Another major contrast is the privilege of choice.

Art school teaches an artist that he or she may choose all the varying factors in artmaking from medium to style, subject to audience. The vernacular artist is set in a cultural matrix. The focus is different, not limited, providing a framework without confining artistic genius. This is not folk art that deals with repetition over time with little or no innovation. Vernacular art places little limit on innovation. In fact, at its very best it is often iconoclastic. The bottom line is that most of the world does not make its art as part of an academy; does not separate the act of making art from its everyday functionality of breadwinning, cooking, etc.; and does not base its existence on an art world lexicon and agenda. Its art is made as a process of location in the cultural world, which has the paradoxical effect of mystifying and demystifying at the same time. Much of this art is multi-layered and packed with information for those who care to spend the time seeking to understand it.

 

III

What is this Homeground to which I keep referring? It is an elusive concept that at first seems dense with unknowns, but once grasped becomes almost ordinary in its simple truths. Homeground is the environment-based cultural variable that we automatically use to stake our spiritual and physical claims on the world. In this case we are referring to the way artists—especially vernacular artist who are not park of the academy—use art to define, refine and react to that homeground. Much of it is ethnographic and does not necessarily qualify for the gallery or collector, but Homeground at its most extreme, when it is made by someone with the added mysterious power of genius, has given us an ancient amazing body of work that is still being added to today and will be with us always.

In a book called Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Homeground, Grey Gundaker, an ex-student of that grand visionary scholar Dr. Robert Farris Thompson, spoke of the African American yard-show as a cultural paradigm of the African Atlantic Diaspora. Yard-shows carefully and deliberately place around black homes objects that carry great symbolism of both this life and its natural continuity into an afterlife, rhyming with the great Kongo cosmogram, the cross within a circle that indicates the various life and death cycles. This may be reflected in placement of objects, guardian figures, bottle trees ad commemorative plants; landscaping with earth, plants and stones; or anything eels that reflects a cultural worldview by the owner. Not every home has them, though many do—even in as simple a display as stacked stones. Gundaker says they may be represented metaphorically inside the home as well and that the yard-show and homeground usually reflect four themes: protection and safekeeping; personal virtuosity; community improvement; and/or honor to family and ancestors.

I was thrilled when I read Gundaker’s words. I saw immediately the concept of Homeground would provide the beginning of a language describing all this work by self-taught artists in a personal and cultural context. I also perceived that while the yard-show was the largest manifestation of this concept, it likewise applied to works painted or sculpted indoors; that the yard-show was no restricted to the African American South, but was globally common. This is especially true when one sees the artwork as an extension of oral culture. This art is no less than a vernacular language itself, which means the so-called field of self-taught artists is a moving arena of many cultural homegrounds.

To Gundaker’s four precepts above, I add healings, travel and location of self in the matrix of community. With these thoughts in mind we see there is no art in the Selden Rodman Collection that does not reflect one or more of these aspects of Homeground. To better understand how this theory works, one must think of it as simultaneously reflecting two phases of the individual’s cultural life. In the Caribbean there is a readily applicable phrase: “The One and The Many.” We all, to different degrees, hold a constant dialogue with ourselves as individuals and with ourselves as moving parts of our cultures. In fact, we read how we stand with our culture as indications of both our own and its strength. This immediately filters down through information extended in the artworks. For many artists, creating is a way to temporarily stop the world and take stock of wounds, pain and uncertainty. Making objects to fill cultural functions helps heal the pain. An example would be a painting or sculpture of a relative killed on the street. We all have seen roadside crosses in the Southwest and Mexico. When police in New York shot Amadou Diallo, his doorway was turned into a healing shrine by passersby, who placed objects of remembrance there. In a heartbreaking extension of this, we have seen enormous sections of the battered New York homeground turned into spontaneous shrines and altars of memory and grief after the attack on the World Trade Center. This has the capacity to be seen as Homeground Art, which then may be interpreted to have two major phases.

 

IV

The first of these phases is self-location, an attempt to place oneself in the world as an individual. This applies to the artist utilizing either the artwork itself or the process of artmaking as an autobiographical tool. We see this in the works of Jon Serl and Justin McCarthy. Serl deliberately sets out to recall a time when his place in a more bucolic world seemed more desirable, a world he felt was more easygoing and dignified despite his own personal hardships—his art thus being about his disappointment with the mores of contemporary America. McCarthy was a recluse who lived modern times vicariously through the roiling expressionistic energy of his favorite images of the world: architecture, sports, Hollywood, et al. The self-location factor also is manifested in the works of institutionalized artists whose inner homegrounds have been shattered and marginalized and for whom the process of artmaking is but one more step in finding and healing the psyche.

The Selden Rodman Collection is primarily demonstrative of the second phase of Homeground, the placement of the artist/individual in the context of his culture and community. Viewing these works from the African Atlantic Diaspora and Mexico, we are looking at nothing less than a visual demonstration of the continuities and creolizations of ancient oral cultures. The people who make this art have taken it upon themselves, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes as a result of a vision or a word from a spiritual source, to be the gatekeepers of their community powers. Not everyone is automatically capable of doing this. It is also important to remember that while much of this work often has ethnographic and folkloric value, it does not necessarily make a successful transition into the much smaller world of art. It is not uncommon for self-taught artists in many cultures to have spiritual or creative abilities other than artmaking.

While all vernacular artists reflect a culturally specific homeground, this shows up as variations on certain universalities. All culture is based on some kind of relationship with the earth itself. The land influences modes of dress, music, sense of space, linguistics, shelter, etc. Spiritual systems are developed according to survival needs on physical and non-physical places of existence ranging from the health of the family to the desire for rainfall. Protection and safekeeping refers to the talismanic function of Homeground. Art is charged with prayer and then set in place in the altar of the home. It also involves personal charms and ornaments made for others, including figures created to ward off bad luck and/or evil. Personal virtuosity puts the mark of the artist on the work and makes it a creation of an individual, best demonstrated by the words “I am.” It sets the individual in place in the community; prevents him or her from getting lost in the larger society of state and country; and also reflects a state of community virtuosity in the sense of “This is what WE do and here is how well we do it.” Much of art made for Homeground purposes turn the yard of the home or the easel into an altar of some king, and within and upon these altars one finds links to the cemetery world of ancestors and remembrance of family.

We easily see these directions in the production of Haitian artists. Part of the magic of the Haitian vernacular phenomenon is that the work itself may be viewed as a narrative of the culture. On the one hand there is the Cap Haitian school of marvelous portrayal after marvelous portrayal of everyday life and optimistic modernization on a Baptist model begun by Philome Obin and immediate family members of his family. On the other hand is the Catholic/Vodou axis on which most of the country treads.

Because the Haitian work spins out from an oral matrix of storytelling we wonder over and over at the consistency of the images of the Lwa, the Haitian spirits who are recorded so tirelessly in paintings and metal sculpture. We also see folktales, morality tales and sometimes almost didactic portrayals of work life and the ceremonies of the Vodou pantheon.

It must be remembered that oral culture is at best fragile in this day and age, and it is not inconceivable that the memory function of homeground makes these works the rough equivalents of field interviews. We learn of politics, riddles, legends, rumors, neighborhood scandals or the U.S. invasion in images. Haiti went through a very rich and intense phase of political wall murals that shared roots with the paintings on Vodou humfort walls.

The Selden Rodman Collection also reflects this cultural thread from places other than Haiti. Kumante Gatura charts with an ancient knowing eye the lore of the animal savanna in Kenya; Kapo and Ras Dizzy from Jamaica record the Revival and Rasta worldviews; the Ayalas document Mexican folkways; and on and on. Every work in this compilation is the tip of an iceberg of information.

Sometimes the art is actually a physically utilitarian object that bridges this world and other worlds, an amulet that protects either the artist or his community from evil. Georges Liautaud not only made pieces for sale, but also crafted paraphernalia for the local Hougans, including forging iron crosses replete with Vodou symbolisms for local cemeteries. Even though most Haitian art is not Vodou art but rather about Vodou, there have been several artists whose work occasionally occupies both spaces—such as Liautaud’s crosses and Pierrot Barra’s altar sculptures. Some of the old masters, including Hector Hyppolite and Andre Pierre painted on humfort walls long before they ever laid a brush to canvas.

An artist may place just as much importance on the making of the piece as on the finished product. The work becomes a visually articulated prayer set on the conceptual altar of homeground and the art becomes a medicine by which the artist achieves mental, spiritual and emotional stability. Sometimes the end result is not as important as the making of the piece. Howard Finster felt his work was going out into the world with an evangelical purpose. His explanations were always about content and rarely about craft, and the medium was merely a mode of travel by which Jesus’ teachings could reach the world.

There is often a moment in artmaking—including music, etc.—in which a trace-like state is reached and time itself is destroyed. For many artists this is a form of conceptual travel, not unlike the flight of the shaman but with integral differences. It is fitting that there is a Tookoome shamanistic drawing in the Selden Rodman Collection to demonstrate this. The art becomes a way to leave the body and travel to different worlds both spiritual and secular. It ignores the politically correct complaints about exoticism and uses travel as a pathway of enrichment and life enhancement. It becomes in a way a membrane between the personal and universal forms of homeground connecting the outside worlds with the inside worlds. This art is often a mediator between the worlds of the living and the worlds of the dead in its commemoration of ancestors and culture-specific history. All of these creations light up a web of activity between the dimensions of living and past. A painting may pray; a painting may document and commemorate; a painting may provide closure for hurtful or unanswered questions. Through artmaking these artists create altars as well as visionary bridges to reach the other side of the cemetery world.

The African American homeground—and I include the Caribbean—that makes up the majority of the Selden Rodman Collection is an extremely diverse and complex one. The Haitian homeground may be the most complex of all, being a religion still in creolistic process as well as a nexus point for different cultures and vernacular worldviews. The relationship of architecture to the locations of body and land is seen in the layout of humfort with its centerpole/tree of life/axis mundi and its various rooms for specific functions and its sanctified yard. The Jamaican Revivalist yard has similarities as well. The Native Americans view the expanse of the earth itself as an altar with six directions, while the Mexican Indo-Christians combine earth and architecture in their altars. Anglo homegrounds are also complicated ones—the hunger for land, expansion and gold, etc. having pushed that culture to add to its own holdings since time immemorial. The current crisis in the Middle East is certainly as much about homeground on spiritual and secular levels as it is about anything else. Jon Serl’s work was a career-long testimonial to his search for a homeground. As we certainly can understand all too poignantly now given the loss of comfort after the World Trade Center attacks, Jon Serl in his time felt that the world changed permanently after the Second World War. Many of his paintings reach back to his sense of the lost innocence of the pre-war mores of the United States.

V

We have always been tied to land. We shape it and are shaped by it. We destroy it and are destroyed by it. We seek it and lose it. We fight wars about it and on it. We build entire systems of governance regarding it with which we are rarely comfortable or satisfied. We are nurtured by it, artistically inspired by it, awed by it and, finally, we are scattered upon it or buried six feet under it. I certainly am not attempting here to insert yet another catch-all phrase into the public mind. Homeground describes the source of the artmaking impetus. There is no such thing as Homeground Art. It is an art that on one level is melded to its context and on another, when the circumstances are special, carries its context to a higher aesthetic tier. Art is only one of the many homeground by-products. But there are many varieties of this art that drift in a never-never land of willing art historical ignorance.

When Selden Rodman acquired this work he responded first and foremost to the sincere passion of the artists making it. He compiled what spoke to him, knowing that this kind of work was shamefully underrepresented in museums and personal collections. His eclectic tastes allowed him to step beyond the parameters of collecting by art world decree. Until this kind of art becomes an ordinary part of our educational curriculums we have to depend on the sensitivity and foresight of those intrepid collectors who tune in so directly and presciently to this most human artmaking. We are all parts of the homeground these enlightened works so brilliantly describe. By understanding the cultural imperatives of these objects we destroy the pre-existing belief that this is the work of the other or of an artificial exotic whole life never touches ours. This art forms a much larger mirror than the academic world reflector. In it we see where we have been, who we are and what we will become. The art of the cultural homeground is our art.

Randall Morris
2001