
          South of Art
          By Willett, HenryHenry Willett
          Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 14-15
          
          In 1974, Walker Percy, with a bit of subtle equivocation, wrote,
"Well, the so-called Southern thing is over and done with, I
think." Of course he was wrong. The Southern thing is as strong as
it has ever been. This past year saw the publication of the 1,600-page
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and a major Hollywood revival of the
cinematic "Southerns," from Mississippi Burning, Heart of Dixie, and
Great Balls of Fire, to In Country, Miss Firecracker, and Driving Miss
Daisy. Steel Magnolias was the most popular stage production in
America last year. Though often flattered, we know the Steel Magnolias
audiences in New_York or Chicago or Los Angeles aren't laughing for
the same reasons the Nachitoches, Louisiana, audience is laughing.
          This regional ambivalence is typical when Southerners showcase
their cultural expression for the rest of the world. Several years ago
Atlantans had high hopes that So Long On Lonely Street, an Alliance
Theater production of a new work by Atlanta playwright Sandra Deer,
would be the play that would win over the New_York critics to Southern
produced drama. Lonely Street had received rave reviews during its
pre-New_York run in Boston, but the New_York critics did not share
their Boston colleagues' opinions. Frank Rich of the New_York Times
concluded that "like that other recent Atlanta export, New Coke,
this play is not the real thing." The New_York Post's Clive Barnes
called the play "preposterous hokum-Southern fried chicken without
the chicken."
          The Atlanta critics responded to the New_York critics in
kind. Helen Smith of the Atlanta Journal referred to the "rigged
mindset" that scorns Southern playwrights and characterized New_York
as "the most arrogant and the most provincial place in the
world."
          We Southerners, it seems, have historically reacted rather
defensively when confronted with criticism. In 1911, Georgia-born
University of Florida professor Enoch Banks was fired after suggesting
somewhat timidly that in the Civil_War "the North was relatively in
the right, while the South was relatively in the wrong." Even
Mr. Banks's "relatives" weren't enough to save his position.
          When the Alabama Shakespeare Festival received criticism for its
presentation of a country-pop musical based on life in rural Georgia,
a production considered inappropriate fare and somehow beneath the
dignity of the state Shakespeare theater, it relied on that tried and
true New_York legitimacy test--rave reviews in the Big Apple and a
Tony award nomination--to justify its programming decision.
          Southerners rely all too heavily on others to select, package,
market and critically-legitimize Southern cultural expression,
resulting in a commodity-marketing of Southern culture that avoids
this culture's power and complexity, instead capitalizing on the
region's stigmatizing stereotypes--poverty, parochialism, eccentricity
and retrograde religion. Nowhere is this more evident than in the
fraudulent, profit-driven marketing of the so-called "outsider"
artists from the South--Howard Finster from Georgia, Sam Doyle from
South_Carolina, Mose Tolliver and Thornton Dial from Alabama, Zebedee
Armstrong from Mississippi, and a handful of others. Many of these
artists are black. Most are poor, uneducated and from rural areas; but
they're making a handful of money for a handful of gallery
owners. American studies scholar John Vlach, of George Washington
University, has called the whole phenomenon a "fraud perpetrated by
the New_York art establishment, 'The Finger-Painted Word' (in
reference to Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word) as commercial exploitation
of the stereotypical view of Southerners as weird, as inbred, full of
pellagra and cholera and any other disease, biological or
psychological." Vlach's characterization of this phenomenon, I
regret, is only slightly exaggerated.
          In the current issue of Art and Antiques magazine Eleanor Gaver
offers the following account of the opening of a recent show of
Thornton Dial's work at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New_York:
          
            ...a row of limousines waited, their engines idling. Inside, a
well-heeled crowd of collectors, dealers and artists marveled at the
paintings, though some were nonplused at the price list. "Fifty
thousand dollars for work by an untrained Negro" asked one educated
and successful neoexpressionist painter.
          
          I stood back and watched the crowd gape at a prominently displayed
black-and-white photograph misrepresenting the Dial family as poor,
down-trodden and huddled together in front of a tin shack. Nowhere was
it 

mentioned that this tin shack was not their home, but the painting
studio behind their pleasant suburban house. I turned to gallery owner
Frank Maresca and said "It's too bad the Dials aren't here for
their opening." Maresca just shook his head. "They shouldn't be
exposed to the art world," he said, "it might corrupt
them. It's better they stay where they belong."
          Perhaps Maresca really meant that the art world shouldn't be
exposed to the Dial family, for it might shatter some of those
Southern stereotypes that he markets so lucratively.
          Like many other resources of the region, Southern culture has
chiefly been an export product, something sturdy, beautiful and fine
which has often contributed richly to the shaping of American
culture. But Southern culture has also often been expropriated,
marketed in a package of stereotypes, and sold for profit. And it will
no doubt continue to be so expropriated until the region develops the
will and the mechanisms for assuming the critical proprietorship of
its own culture.
          
            Hank Willett is the former regional representative to the
Southern_states for thc National Endowment for thc arts. He has
recently left that position to organize and direct thc Alabama Center
for Traditional Culture.
          
        
