Why is it that the most powerful American art is outsider art? Of course, we don’t have the same sort of government patronage for artists that European countries do, so more of our artists are “outsiders” by definition. But our artists seem to thrive in this harsh cultural landscape, which provides the pressure through which eccentricity is formed into aesthetic diamonds. It was Moby Dick, after all, that ended Herman Melville’s career as a writer. The book was his white whale, dragging him down into an obscurity that only ended when an Englishman, D.H. Lawrence, began to champion Moby Dick in the early 20th century.
The trick to being remembered, it seems, is for the artist to remain half-forgotten, quietly smoldering away in the hinterlands while letting his or her work give off an occult heat, drawing in the sensitive. As can be seen in the exhibition “Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Stages For Being,” which was on display at the University of Kentucky and then Bates College in Maine until the coronavirus forced galleries around the country to close their doors, the photographs of Meatyard (1925-1972), a successful outsider artist if ever there was one, still glow with that alluring, alien energy.
Meatyard, born ironically enough in a town called Normal, Illinois, purchased his first camera in 1950 to photograph his first-born child. Having just settled in Lexington, Kentucky, to work as an optician, he soon fell into a group of offbeat misfits that included the artist Guy Davenport, the theologian Thomas Merton, the writer Wendell Berry, and the photographer and theoretician Minor White, who would have a huge influence on how Meatyard thought about his craft. It was within this milieu, a perfect balance between the bohemian and the all-American, that Meatyard forged his unique visual language, a heady, homemade mixture of PTA meetings, Buddhism, little league, and the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.
Using the bric-a-brac of his daily life, including his own children, Meatyard created intensely disorienting images that at times resemble snapshots taken directly from dreams. Commonplace objects such as fountains or walls lose their familiarity and appear vaguely menacing. Birds and dolls appear in unexpected places. People wear Halloween masks while sitting in fields or bleachers. Children in vibrant landscapes are a frequent subject, with the child “immersed in the land [while] the land immerses the child,” as Alexander Nemerov describes in Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic. Meatyard’s images work, to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Walter Benjamin, not only by showing us the actual distance that exists between ourselves and the familiar but by making that distance come alive.
“Stages For Being” was a successful exhibit for a number of reasons. Most important, it was tucked away in Kentucky and Maine. It made sense to exhibit the work in these places. Kentucky, of course, because of Meatyard’s roots, but Maine as well for being an out-of-the-way place that people are still able to access if they care to make a secular pilgrimage. Bates, where I saw the show, has a small but respectable gallery, and the photographs were displayed simply. The images have enough energy on their own without help from the gallerist. What I found particularly wonderful was that many of these photos had rarely or never been exhibited before. A few in particular are worth noting.
In Untitled, 1966 (many of Meatyard’s photos are untitled), a black-hooded child holds a diamond-shaped shard of glass in front of his face. A band of reflected light down the side of the glass makes it almost appear to be a mirrored surface, suggesting that the half-image of the boy’s face in the rest of the glass is a reflection, perhaps your own. The walls around the child bend and disorient. Their surface is muddled and aged, filled with what is nearly indecipherable writing. Dates and lines suggest markings to chart the growth of children, but the squalid conditions of the wall indicate that the project has long been abandoned. It’s a common theme in Meatyard’s work: the juxtaposition of dilapidation and youth, filth and wholesomeness.
In Untitled, 1962, a dead crow, beak agape, lies across the lap of a wiry-haired doll. Three flowers, possibly plastic, sit beside them. The crow (or possibly raven; it’s difficult to tell without a better view of the tail feathers) seems as if it’s always been inanimate, while the doll feels uncannily alive. The doll’s hands are raised and hovering over the body of the bird as if we’ve glimpsed an act of necromancy. Or, stranger still, an occult ritual where the nonliving steals life.
Meatyard’s attitude toward his own work, life, and death can be summed up in this anecdote from Davenport in a 1974 Aperture magazine monograph dedicated to Meatyard:
Scott Beauchamp is the author of Did You Kill Anyone? and the novel Meatyard: 77 Photographs. He lives in Maine.
