On the Right Path to an Introduction and Field Situation?

Hey fellow students of religious studies--I need a little help in the way of my paper! I'm working on the field situation right now, but I'm going to put up my attempt at an introduction. My question is: does my introduction seem conducive to an outline of the academic discussion taking place on Folk art/culture? Does it flow at all, or even make sense? Please don't worry about being critical, I need all the direction/input I can get. Thanks a bunch! I might update a new post with the field situation soon, so you don't have to bend over backwards to edit the thing either; I just want to make sure I'm kind of on the right path. Hopefully. Maybe.... Alright. Here we go.

Folk...the people. The folk of the town. The folk of the region...It’s hardly what you would ascribe to the word ‘folk’ if you were looking at a dark, silhouetted cyclorama depicting such gory scenes as a soup-ladle disembowelment—and yet there they are, staring at you and whispering in your ear, contributing to the din of popular culture and the tangle of Folk cultural lenses. The haunting silhouette work of contemporary Folk artist Kara Walker insights a visceral response that is still connected to the haunting themes of folklife in the Old and antebellum South...and therein do we begin to get a sense of how these representations are connected to the greater “Folk” culture of a region. Shadowy shapes of the Maenadic African American slave-women giving birth (albeit the umbilical cord still attached) and/or being molested by a typical Southern plantation owner pervade the walls; the dark, featureless forms create quite the spectacle, and yet they are somehow easier to observe than one would think—perhaps because there are no details. Just black scenes.

Folk art, belief, and material culture supply us with a way of looking at the inner reaches of particular communities, even if the subject matter is not so contained or comfortable. Perhaps one of the more interesting ways to observe abstract cultural phenomena is through this dichotomous lens of the direct and indirect spectacle, especially when the subject matter lends itself to the grotesque, the bizarre, the myth, and the magico-religious. More importantly however, is the hermeneutical value that Folk cultural fodder (in all of its forms) affords to the interpretation and analysis of belief. To this end, the dynamic region of the American South has presented a rich, unique story of Folk belief through art and material culture spanning the late 18^th century ethos through the contemporary art realm; Kara Walker is one example of a modern artist who draws from the folkloric themes of the South’s yesteryear. This serves as an interesting vantage point from which we can compare the aspects of visual culture in the past and present—especially as they relate to myths, rituals, spectacles, and magic.

Despite the potential picture it paints, little scholarship has been devoted to the particulars of Folk culture in the American South. Perhaps this is because the very act of characterizing individual material culture undermines the true intentionality behind it; for example, looking at a Cherokee ceremonial headdress on the wall of a museum is highly anticlimactic, and far less generative of meaning and narrative than seeing the piece of art on a human being during a Native American shamanistic ritual—namely, the piece in its own context. The substance of ‘Folk’ research exists largely in the domain of speculative definitions, backed by an extensive corpus of ethnographic fieldwork.  For an accurate investigation of Folk art and material culture in the American South, however, it is pertinent to first delineate these adjacent classifications and components taking place in the greater academic discussion before delving into the particulars of the fieldwork. 

Folk Visions and Archetypal Fodder in "Gone With the Wind"

I wanted to call attention to one more section in the second Kara Walker interview (please see previous post for discussion ramifications).

I mentioned earlier that Kara Walker had some interesting things to say in the way of Southern folklore and mythology, which reminded me of what she said on the subject of Gone With the Wind (since it's definitely something that's come up in Religion class). I'll repost the interview for you to read in complete (it's a really interesting interview if you're into contemporary artists and that sort of thing), but I mainly wanted to repost her thoughts on the archetypes and consequent "permutations" of the story. When asked to describe the "artistic fodder" in Gone With the Wind that influenced her work, she answered:


"What can I say? Within the story of "Gone with the Wind"—the actual novel and then the permutations of it in film and in life—my expectation, as I said, was to go in and be sort of horrified and disgusted with representations of happy slaves or ignorant slaves. The mammy figure is both soothsayer and does everything to please her white folks. And I went into my reading of the book with a clear eye towards inserting myself in the text somehow. And the distressing part was always being caught up in the voice of the heroine, Scarlet O'Hara.

Now, I guess a lot of what I was wanting to do in my work, and what I have been doing, has been about the unexpected. You know, that unexpected situation of kind of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time. And, that kind of dilemma, that push and pull, is sort of the basis, the underlying turbulence that I bring to each of the pieces that I make, including the specifics: the mammy characters and the pickaninnies and the weird sorts of descriptions. At one point Scarlet in her desperation is digging up dried up roots and tubers down by the slaves quarters and she's overcome by a "niggery" scent, and vomits. [LAUGHS] And it's scenes like that that might go washed over by the sort of vast, epic structure of the story, but that is an epic moment for me. What does that mean? And why is there an assumption that I should know what that means? And where does this idea come from, you know, why is this smell so overpowering?"


Once again this sense of opposing forces, both push and pull, as well as a barefaced acknowledgement of the offensive and the grotesque dominate the artistic visions of this astute artist. The problematic archetypes and dilemmas that inspired Ms. Walker are very similar to the subjects I want to explore in the way of Folk Art functionality, and I'm glad to finally be enthused about a topic. 

Kara Walker: the Palpable Face of the Grotesque

In my Creativity 212 class we've been looking at the work of several artists, including the silhouettes of Folk artist Kara Walker. Having some particularly pertinent things to say on the subjects of Southern archetypes and Southern mythology, you would never know this perspicacious personality was a native Californian and Northeastern college graduate.


However, what really interested me about her work was the blatant way she chooses to investigate visions and images of the antebellum South. In cycloramic narrative scenes of black silhouettes, she portrays pictures of the monstrous and the grotesque on the walls for all the world to see...


There is no hiding. There can be no casual ignorance of the subject; it's all on the wall. Panoramas of slave revolts and "representations of blackness, representations of race, racial history, minstrelsy, and ... metaphorical qualities of the body" are dealt with directly and in plain sight; for example, one part of the cyclorama depicts a "series of slaves disembowling a master with a soup ladle" (Interview: Projecting Fictions: "Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On").


Granted, in a later interview Walker contends that "the silhouette lends itself to avoidance of the subject. Of not being able to look at it directly, and yet there it is, all the time, staring you in the face." And a little later: "...it's designed to avoid the confluence of disgust and desire and voluptuousness that are all wrapped up in this bizarre construct of racism." (Interview: the Melodrama of "Gone With the Wind")

This direct/indirect way of looking at a subject is an interesting way (I think) to investigate the dynamic function of Folk art and culture. What are the subjects of Folk Art trying to convey to us, and/or what are the implications of these artistic statements for us in the contemporary world? What role did material culture/Folk Art play in the antebellum South that it doesn't play today? What relationship does Folk Art have with different belief systems and peoples of the South (past and present)? Are we better able to deal with problematic elements of the past in contemporary expressions of the grotesque, as Kara Walker has done?

For the rest of this course, I'm going to be working on hashing out some of these questions.