After we left Texas with a bang (ha), we drove all night to Santa Fe. We slept in the car for a few hours in the middle of the night a few miles down the interstate from Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, TX, and woke up to the blinding sun and the sight of the row of cars stuck upright in the ground in the middle of a field. We were deliriously exhausted. It was weird.

Cadillac Ranch at 8 AM

Alisa with a cadillac

We finally got to my friend Max Beck-Keller’s family’s house in Santa Fe in the early afternoon. Max’s family was nice enough to let us stay with them for three days. I lived in Santa Fe for a year when I was a freshman in high school, and it was pretty great to be back again in the land of green chile, adobe, and old ladies wearing tons of large turquoise jewelry. Besides doing a screen-printing demonstration at Warehouse 21, we managed to see a lot while we were in the area–including a visit to Site Santa Fe (currently showing the Eighth International Biennial–the highlights being a piece by Mary Reid Kelley that blew my mind and a piece by Martha Colburn, of whom I am a longtime fan), a tour of the Santa Fe Art Institute’s artist-in-residence program, a visit to Landfall Press, and our only thematically-relevant stop: the Tinkertown Museum.

Elena screen-printing at W21

Landfall Press

Tinker Town

I’ve taken pages of notes at every stop we’ve been to, but these are the only two sentences in my journal from our visit to Tinkertown: “Bad font. Grated my nerves, made me sad.” I did not enjoy the place at all, which is interesting, especially given how much I loved John Preble’s Mystery House, which John created after visiting Tinkertown. Tinkertown had a lot of “Old West” paraphernalia, and a good half of the stuff on display was pertaining to carnivals, circus freaks, “oddities,” etc., all of which made me feel sort of depressed. There were signs everywhere (”bad font”) explaining what we were seeing, which made it feel like a tourist trap. There wasn’t anything that I found particularly clever or funny in there, and there was no climactic moment, no denoument…which there has to be if the experience is going to be so orchestrated. There was a specific entrance gate and a path that left no room for straying. The museum was also overcrowded, and I spent more than ten minutes standing in a tiny hallway with our friend Houston waiting for the line to move forward so we could escape. I think it’s worth trying to describe what I didn’t like about this place, because otherwise I’ve been pretty enamored with everything we’ve seen.

Luckily, Tinkertown is on the way to a beautiful summit called Sandia Peak…

View from the top

Alisa, Max, Elvia and Houston at Sandia

On August 1, we drove west to Tuba City, Arizona, to stay with my family. My aunt, Frances, moved to Arizona when she was young, married my uncle Glenmore, and raised her kids in Tuba, which is part of the Navajo Nation. My cousin B, the youngest of Francie’s three daughters, is my age, and we have always been close. B gave the three of us an amazing tour of Tuba and Coal Mine Canyon, where her family keeps livestock on the land.

My aunt and uncle took all of us to the Grand Canyon on our first night. We brought a picnic and watched the sun set. My aunt bought me a book I had been coveting: OVER THE EDGE: Death in Grand Canyon. We were absolutely not disappointed by the canyon, as one expects to be disappointed by national landmarks–it was incredible.

Uncle Glenmore and Elvia at the Grand Canyon

Sunset at the Grand Canyon

Sunset

On our second day, we herded some sheep…which was absurd. We are apparently incompetent when it comes to herding animals. Our only instruction was “don’t run towards them,” which is of course exactly what we did. In the afternoon, B took us on an amazing hike around Coal Mine Canyon. We slept in the family’s hogan on a buffalo rug for the three nights we stayed there, roasting s’mores in the stove on our last evening.

Elena herding sheep

Beautiful cousin B overlooking Coal Mine Canyon

The kitten, Napoleon, hiked with us the whole way

Though I think my cousin B should be the one to write it, I could write an entire book about visiting Arizona, and the project I’m working on about our trip has a big section about it. It’s just bizarre how little any of the three of us knew about the life in the Navajo Nation, and how much we learned in just three days from B.

We drove back west on the 4th, to see the feast day festival at Santo Domingo Pueblo, where my middle cousin, Jesse, lives with her family. The dance we saw was beautiful, especially the outfits. As always, Jesse had prepared an insane amount of food…we left with two entire loaves of bread and enough salads and beans to last us for days (Thank you!) No picture-taking allowed in Santo Domingo, so no evidence–sorry!

After visiting Santo Domingo, we were officially on our return east. Our last three stops have been Lucas, KS, Carthage, MO, and Chicago, IL. Lucas (despite its population of under 430 people), is a strange mecca of outsider/visionary art, home of the Grassroots Arts Center, the Garden of Eden, and The World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things.

Entrance to Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden

The traveling roadside attraction

The Garden of Eden’s creator, Samuel P. Dinsmoor, is in fact entombed in the backyard in a glass coffin, which was quite the sight (again, no pictures allowed). He’s grown a little moldy over the past few years. Another highlight of Lucas was the local family meat market, where we bought handmade bologna to eat for dinner. (A side agenda of the trip has been to sample as many different kinds of meats as possible on the road. Arizona probably wins as far as meat variations: in one meal we ate blood sausage, grilled mutton, and a delicacy called a’chee consisting of two kinds of intestines wrapped around each other to form a long worm-like chain.)

Bologna!

While stopping for a bologna picnic in Lawrence, KS, our car got a flat tire.

The grand finale site of the trip is kind of hard to explain. Alisa and I have been hoping to visit the Precious Moments Museum & Chapel in Carthage, MO, for four years now. The place has become practically mythical to us. Sam Butcher, the man who created the Precious Moments figurines (or at least, drew the pictures from which a Japanese sculptor makes the prototypes, and which Filipino factory workers copy and paint), invested the capital raised from sales in the production of a free religious…well, theme park. The main attraction, the chapel, was inspired by a trip Mr. Butcher took to the Sistine Chapel.

Welcome to Precious Moments!

A Precious Moment

The chapel

I guess I should try to say how our pilgrimage to Carthage fits in with the trip’s goals, since this may not be apparent. Basically, as with everything we’ve seen, it broadened our consciousnesses about what’s out there and what counts as art to whom. Our tour guide at Precious Moments certainly talked about Mr. Butcher as if he were our century’s Michelangelo. The popularity of the figurines (and the greeting cards, and the t-shirts, and the prints..) should tell us something about what much of America values as art, and about American Christianity’s particular aesthetic. So many people we’ve met this month have made our country’s religious fervor apparent to us in a way that I, for one, refused to acknowledge previously. Whether or not you enjoy the “Precious Moments style,” as our tour guide referred to the chapel’s aesthetic (though she said Mr. Butcher also knew how to paint in “Modern Style” and “Classic Style”), it’s probably time I at least looked at the stuff. Personally, I find the “style” unbelievably offensive, in all the big ways: sexist, racist, classist, and even weirdly perverted. It certainly has a creepy Neverland quality. I knew these things before visiting the chapel–but I had not actually taken the time to think further about why it appeals to so many Americans. I think that the Precious Moments chapel, despite looking egregiously ugly to me (divorced from my political revulsion, I don’t think that the tear-drop figures are beautiful…then again, it’s obviously impossible to divorce my politics from my aesthetics…), functions similarly to the way churches have always functioned–to provide a palatial house for God’s splendor on earth, to show us a glimpse of His glory. By aligning God with wealth, religion makes itself powerful. But in this case, the particular aesthetic that God’s glory is conveyed in is confusing to me; where did it come from?

The figurines display at the Precious Moments Museum

"The first factory that produced the Precious Moments dolls consisted mainly of Bible School students and Christian workers from three schools in IloIlo, Philippines."

Baptizing ourselves

We left Missouri feeling as if we had literally been hit over the heads with bibles and made the long drive to Chicago. In Chicago we stayed with our amazing friend Jack Kerns and his lovely family. Alisa’s mother is also here on a business trip, which means that we have now seen a member of each of our families this month. She took us out for dinner at Le Colonial and then drinks at the Ritz…

Dinner in Chicago--last night on the road

And then, of course, we ended the month with one final night of karaoke. On the 13-15, we’ll be at the Wassaic Festival in Wassaic, NY, doing a screen-printing demo and showing some of our work from the trip. We’ll let you know how that goes. Otherwise, get in touch if you would like a copy of one (or all) of our projects: book, cd, or printed shirt. insidersout2010@gmail.com

We signed Jack up to sing Third Eye Blind...continuing in the Austin tradition.

The best bloody Mary in the world.

Tyler and Grace

Austin was awesome. We were graciously hosted by the West Coast operation of Drive-By Press, whose East Coast counterparts had been the ones to make us want to get on the road in the first place. Joseph Velasquez runs the Austin branch of Drive-By, supported by the wonderful Tyler Krasowski and Grace Lawrie. They have a great crew of friends (printmakers and otherwise) in the city, who showed us around for two days. We saw an outdoor movie screening, drank giant, veggie-filled bloody Marys at Rio Rita’s, visited Yard Dog Gallery, sang an amazing night of karaoke at Ego’s bar…and then went to shoot guns near Waco, TX, with Joseph’s teacher/mentor/artist/friend John Hancock.

The man: John Hancock in his studio.

The Gun Show

DPA

Glamour Shot

Glamour Shot

Glamour Shot

Favorite guns included the Lugar, the .357, the 9mm Barreta, and the .45 (Smith & Weston). Not saying that the three of us are in the market to buy a gun now, but…we might be. What’s the connection between printmaking and gunshooting…metal machinery? Precision? Who knows. It makes sense to us.

Group photo of gun team

Other than the gun-fest, the best part about being Austin was talking to the guys and their friends about printmaking, living as an artist, traveling for extended periods of time (they’ve done plenty of that), academia, the art world…you get the idea. I wrote down some things that Joseph said over a few beers at their studio space: “Selling out is when you let repetition become formula,” “You don’t need to choose sides between the gallery world and the non-gallery world,” and “The reason that normal people don’t like art is because they don’t like being made to feel ignorant.” Drive-By Press’s purpose, in many ways, is to democratize art–if people can see how a print is being made right in front of them, they don’t feel so excluded from the product. We’ve been thinking about democratization a lot in terms of outsider art sites. Most of the outsider work we see is made by people who do feel entirely excluded to the art world and its language, and they are often making things that they would never think about as art unless someone told them. The Drive-By guys’ business model is pretty new; they are people who, in fact, did not choose between the gallery and the do-it-yourself approach. Nice.

From Elvia’s Journal, July 26

It seems like an important coincidence that both of the families we’ve stayed with so far, and who we visited mainly because of their proximity to our route, have had a dad who works with his hands and happens to be an avid collector of something. In Arlington, Virginia, our friend Alison’s dad, gave us a tour of his amazing vintage motorcycle collection. Michael Mutter has an entire garage behind his house devoted to his passion for restoring vintage motorcycles and putting them together from scratch. It was obvious that he really loved the machinery—and I could imagine how satisfying it would be to make a machine out of old parts that could take you thousands of miles on it when it was finished.

Michael Mutter amidst his collection

He told us that his dream was to one day do this race across America that people do on old motorcycles, and that the motorcycle he had chosen to rebuild for the event was the oldest possible model that could actually make the trip at a fast enough speed. I thought this was really interesting; the goal was to get the earliest, simplest machine designed that could function to today’s standards. The pleasure and satisfaction, then, were derived from one’s ability to construct an antiquated machine well enough to perform today. I imagine that there is also something of a historical fiction/nostalgia aspect to the feat…you can pretend that you are cruising across America 40 or 50 years ago. The pilgrimage is similar in some ways to the trip that we are making insofar as it attempts to connect us to our cultural heritage and to other trips that have been made across our country for the last 100 years. (Regarding re-imagining history: the show of original photographs by Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, and Baldwin Lee that we saw at the Knoxville Museum of Art in Knoxville, Tennessee made us think about the history of journalistic journeys through the American South and the ways in which our trip can be thought of in terms of witness and documentation. We’ve been talking about the visible ways that the South has changed since Evans’ and Welty’s photographs were taken, and a generation later, Lee’s photographs. This led me to thinking about poverty and of course food, which I’ll get to later.)

The second collecting and crafting dad we met was Steve Corn, Elena’s brother-in-law, whose family we had the pleasure of staying with in McMinnville, Tennessee (a few hours west of Knoxville). Steve makes miniature figures, mostly from old Western films, for collectors around the world. He was trained as a blacksmith at the Appalachia Center for Craft—an beautiful place that we visited on our way South—so he already had the basic skills necessary for casting and sautering miniature weaponry, etc., before he began. A few years ago, his daughter Hana (now almost 13) asked for an expensive dollhouse, and Steve decided to build her one himself…the rest is history. I don’t know if he started collecting figures before or after he started making them, but in addition to the one’s he’s made he has tons of vintage ones lined up on a shelf in his bedroom.

Steve Corn hard at work

These “hobbies” seemed right in line with something Mark Cline had told us at his workshop last week in Natural Bridge, VA: “No matter how high-tech the world gets, or how high-tech they think they get, it’s still basically, humans like to work with their hands, they like to use their minds—you know, they like to go out in the garden, they like to do something.” This is similar to what Roger Manley told us about the need for satisfaction that comes from manual labor with a visible result (see previous entry). And apparently, people love to make stuff, but they also love to amass tons of it. Most of the art environments we’ve visited feature not only incredible amounts of creation, but sprawling collections of stuff. Part of this is probably due to the need to accrue a mass of raw materials in the hopes of one day making something out of them (you never know if you might be able to make something out of 60 empty whiskey bottles or doll heads), but there also seems to be a relationship between a love of making and a love of objects themselves. The feeling of excess and total indulgence in the pleasure of worldly things reminds me that Rebecca Hoffberger at AVAM told us that the primary impulse that drives the creation of visionary art environments is the desire to create an earthly paradise, a heaven on earth. Especially in some of the poorer areas we’ve visited, like Bynum, it’s easy to imagine how non-utilitarian excess could seem heavenly.

A stash of Howard Finster's collected bottles

In a turn of thought, the idea of excess brings me back to a thought about food. We have seen an unbelievable number of fast food restaurants while driving through America. I’m not sure I have thought critically about this fact in a while, as these chains have been such a fixture on the landscape for most of my lifetime. But while traveling, it has often been impossible for us to find a place to eat that is not a fast food chain, and this seems a remarkable difference from the landscape Walker Evans was documenting not too long ago in some of the same areas we are passing through. We heard a story on NPR on the way out of Charleston about the insanely high number of Americans barely subsisting on food stamps these days. I’m not sure what I want to say about this except that the presence of excess in the form of fast food makes sense to me when I think about the unbelievable poverty many Americans are living in. As anecdotal evidence–the teenagers we met in Crossville, Tennessee, had been living at the Minister’s Treehouse for two weeks at the time, because they had fallen out with their families and are now homeless. The only meals that either of them eat these days are from Wendy’s or Taco Bell.

Thinking about this great disparity in Americans’  lives makes me want to reiterate that we are not combing the South for characters to make fun of or people to gawk at. It is true that we are culturally out of our element in our own country, but I think that the relationships we are forming with the people we meet nullify the interpretation that we are joke tourists.

Back to collecting. John Preble at the Abita Mystery House in Abita Springs, Louisiana told us his theory that the New York art world can’t understand “collections of junk” (he was referring to his own work) because there is just not enough space in city apartments for people to keep so much stuff. He said that New Yorkers “can’t emotionally acknowledge” an aesthetic not confined by limited square-footage. This makes sense to me–I did protest that rich New Yorkers find enough space to keep their crap…so I’m not sure that the size of homes is the ultimate determinant. But I agree that a minimal aesthetic only makes sense in the context of comparative affluence. The combined possibilities for privacy and expansion in rural areas allows for the kind of sprawl that an imagined worldly paradise would imply.

Part of John Preble's collection of paint-by-numbers