ART ALIVE

air bellows outdoor art museum



Drove up to the Air Bellows Outdoor Art Museum to see what has been added since my last look at it. Some beautiful additions, like the one above. They're beginning to pile up now, words and letters on top of others until all the messages and names are blended into an abstraction where the words and names become irrelevant, just colors. I'm finding it curious that this particular canvas is characterized more by words and names, lines. It seemed in the past there was quite a bit of image making. It's notable less images this time around. It's primarily words and names, sometimes numbers. Seldom an effort to make an image. This one above seems to me an image made the same as a letter of an alphabet. It seems like a social change. Makes me wonder if texting, computers, other social influences were causing the young to see words in their mind's eye instead of pictures. The nature of how the paint is used to express visually, has changed. Almost no attempt to express visual art, but word art. Kind of like what the art world called "concrete poetry" in the late 60s, early 70s.



I'm happy the place chosen by common agreement among the ones who like to do such things is so close to home. The nearest best place. A lot of kids. When they have a place to express their existence in their natural teenage way--no need to try to fight it; it's the same generation after generation, just different expression. With a place of their choice to have that kind of not-supposed-to fun, it gets focused in one place instead of all over town. In one place, it makes a beautiful space. I doubt if many drive through there without griping about they hadn't oughta, like anyone has control. No one has control. It just is what it is. It is beautiful to my way of seeing, esp the spontaneity of it, the chance juxtaposition of colors, the layers that have a degree of meaning when they're on the surface, but after a year or two, more gets painted over them and they become indecipherable background lines of color. The deeper they go, the further away their meaning fades. It's not quite as active the last 2 years as it was before. But it has its own character. Each one is beautifully itself.



Several years ago I made a contribution in a time when it was really active, the walls covered with colors, bold, bright colors, changing every week. Then I watched it get buried under several more layers of lines and colors until it was out of sight but for occasional bits of color peeping through. Then a new canvas. I think that was the time a neighbor caught a kid in there spraying. He knew the kid. Told the kid's mother. Parkway got involved. His punishment was to paint the walls and ceiling with a roller, paint over all the art. I think it was painted brown. It doesn't matter what the base color. It was getting ready for a new canvas. It doesn't hurt to periodically get wiped out of existence and start a new canvas fresh. Like the Tibetan sand paintings. The making of it is the purpose. When it is over it is brushed away by the Dalai Lama. The painting on the walls is impermanence itself. It's as impermanent as all the text messaging being done in one given hour. I'm seeing the art in the tunnel an art expression of texting, brief messages, short words and names. I can't number the pictures I've taken in there since it started. I think it was some time in the 80s when the first words appeared. It wasn't long before the whole inside was covered.



For a long time they kept the paint off the rocks, then some years ago somebody painted on the rocks at either entrance, then they were covered right away, the signs painted black. Excess. The Parkway cleaned off the rocks, replaced the signs and painted the walls. This round that's on now is what came next. I have a feeling there may not be a lot more on the rocks. But barriers get broken in this kind of art form as any. They get bolder every year in what they picture. It's approaching a place in its evolution of teenage rebellion where they're looking for the line that says no further. Lines drawn for decency were crossed so long ago not much is shocking anymore. It's funny that nothing can stop it from being a visual assault on a value system. Authorities, parents can't stop it. Short of keeping a guard there round the clock, nothing can be done to stop it. Attempts to stop it increase it.


I see it a living canvas. Like the abstract expressionist painter who looks awhile, then puts a splash of color in one place, then another someplace else, covering the canvas in unexpected colors and shapes. Spontaneous, apparently random, group expression one individual at a time blending all the names and desires with the generation of kids in school over the years. It's been at least 25 years of teenagers. I suppose that means the first ones to paint in there are in their 40s now. All the paint is still there, layer upon layer under the paint on the present surface. It's kind of like reincarnation. One grows and grows, then is gone, blotted out to nothingness, then another layer of something that grows with time until it, too, grows old and dies, is covered over as though it had never been. It comes back to life and grows into a work of art that makes me as happy to live where I live as the view either side of the Parkway from the museum grounds, best above on the road level. It's a beautiful panorama both directions. One way Traphill and beyond, the other way Whitehead, Pine Swamp, Gap Civil and beyond. An outdoor art museum with a view. You can't beat that. And we don't have to pay anybody to do it. No admission. There it is, like Natural Bridge in Virginia. Honk as you go through. It's fun. Kids love it. So does the kid within under several layers of experience where the words have no more meaning, and appear between other colors. Lines and colors. This moment had its day.

LEARNING THE MOUNTAIN WAY

air bellows outdoor art museum



The walls in the tunnel under the Parkway at Air Bellows have been painted layer upon layer by teenagers announcing their presence on earth. I am I. I am here. It's a great place for girls to announce their boyfriends and vice versa. Each is a spontaneous expression by a different individual. Some just write their names. Every other year or so the Parkway paints over the whole beautiful artwork that gets better over time. It seems like the reasoning was if we paint over it and make it like a living room again, the kids will stop painting on it. A kid gets caught and he's in trouble. Raising the ante on a bit of harmless delinquency gives it a persona, the adults hate it. Bingo. All the Parkway paint over does is set up a fresh canvas to start again. Here they come, and before very long it's beautiful again. I'm one who believes the NY subway cars covered with delinquent art expressions all over the outside and all over the inside are beautiful. Of course, they want to arrest somebody caught doing it, making it all the more fun for the ones with spray cans. If the city government could embrace them and show pride in the city's subway artists, and let it be like it is, advertise the subway art for a tourist reason to spend money in New York, the city could have beautiful art everywhere. Don't pay anybody. Make it just as difficult to get to the cars to paint on them as it is now. Keep all that the same. They're acting out a reaction to repression, more than likely at home, a peaceful way of shooting parents and adult society the bird. When the delinquency is drained from it, it's no fun any more. Let's go do something else. Just fantasizing, bereft of information, Limbaugh-think, just a different point of view.



I'm of the belief that we must need places like this for the kids to express. Stop them from making their public marks where they like doing it, and it might start springing up all over town on the walls of buildings like they do in every city in the world. A lot of European city buildings have spray can graffiti from as high as a tall man can reach to the ground. Everywhere. Not an open space anywhere. I've seen some so high somebody must have used a ladder in the middle of the night. All of it is a statement to the powers that be, the big abstract THEY we believe control things, what some call the top 1%. I see them as statements to society at large for all that is truly false the adults take up with, thinking it's the mature thing to do, because the ones that get ahead do it with impunity. There is so much false in the adult world of total focus on money that it is a hard hurdle for teenagers coming out of school expected to jump into that money whirl, a fast-moving merry-go-round that never stops. You get on it like Woody Guthrie boarded a moving freight train. Absence of experience in the adult world kept secret from kids because they don't want to corrupt their minds is suddenly a problem that first summer after high school. Therefore, it follows that the kids are in for a big surprise totally unprepared. It's really not like on tv in a lot of ways, and in a lot of ways it is. Suddenly, we're expected to have a job, be married, have kids, buy a house, at least 2 cars, church, utilities, insurance, all of it enough to buckle a teenager's knees. We're left to figure it out for ourselves. If we can't figure it out, too bad.



I'm one who never figured out how to do all that, and still in the white headed years feel about like I did as a child, a shiver of dread. I'm one who never adjusted. I've never been able to learn how to run my mouth for 3 hours straight and say not one thing. For me, that was the catch. In the city years I studied it like crazy at cocktail parties and social gatherings, trying hard to figure it out, but it eluded me like figuring out a banjo. I figured it was something you were born to or not, and I was not. That was more or less my conclusion, one of many that made me head for the hills. Didn't know where I was going, but that it was another world, which was all that mattered. In fact, I asked God, if he would, to find me a place to live in a totally different culture, one that speaks English. When I began to learn where I was, here in the mountains, saw it was a very different culture and I had a lot of learning to do to understand the people around me. It's a hard culture to learn. Kind of like what I've heard it's like to learn the Chinese language. I had to change much of my old way of thinking in order to know mountain people and have some understanding of their point of view.



I found immediately, as soon as I started knowing people, like Tom Pruitt, Bill Pruitt, Don Pruitt, Van Pruitt, Millard Pruitt and a few others, I was in among some very intelligent people. I was intimidated, in fact, by their intelligence. By comparison, I was dumber'n shit. I am anyway, but they really brought it out for me. It's a different intelligence from test-taking intelligence. I felt like after my college years I became an expert at taking tests. Hell yeah, I can take a test. Tell me to put the serpentine belt on the Buick v6 and I'm lost. What page do I find that on? I'd trust about any mountain boy in a pickup to be able to put it on. I don't know that all could, but I know plenty who could. The people named here were not formally educated. Tom left school after the 7th grade, the others left after the 8th. I felt ignorant around them. I did. I was. They taught me a great deal about chainsaws, tractors, mowing machines, putting up hay, dealing with cows, driving mountain roads, and a very great deal more. The great deal more came in the package of Tom and Millard, brothers, and the Regular Baptist Church. I learned the spiritual depth of the mountain people, which not many from outside the mountains have a clue of, except for appearances. I've found people from Away are often afraid to go to a mountain church. Even the sociologist from California studying Sparta was afraid of them. The time we talked I asked him if he'd been to one of the Old Baptist churches yet. No. He said he was afraid to. Of what? He didn't know, people not wanting him there or something. A lot of people have told me they're afraid they handle snakes. I take it they're so incredibly uninformed, I think, go home and watch more television.



It doesn't do any good to say they don't handle snakes or would welcome a stranger from another world. It doesn't fit with the nonsense city people believe about mountain people. Mountain people are working class, down the ladder, not worthy of notice. They even have a frightening edge. Moonshiners shooting revenuers. Beer drinkers, hail razors and snake handlers. But, like I've said before, keeps em away. In my early years was the time of the country radio hit, A Country Boy Will Survive, a lot of guys wearing ball caps repeating it like more recently, Git-er-done. I loved it every time I saw one, because I knew it was so. I knew the guy wearing the hat could do it. Every man I knew could. The women too. What mountain women know and can do I find remarkable, and I don't mean just canning and cooking. None of it's out front advertising themselves. You have to know them to find it. Then it becomes something I'm in awe of. My grandmother had the ways of a mountain woman. I didn't know that's what it was then. It's a good thing I didn't or I'd have probably been ashamed of it. My mamaw a hillbilly? No way!



I don't mean to sound like I mean all I'm saying here in the absolute. An awful lot of people I know, and even more I don't know, here from other places, have learned to understand the mountain people and appreciate them deeply. Of my friends here from Away, all appreciate the mountain people. At Blue Ridge Music Center I have found consistently the audience is half mountain people and half people here from Away, counting myself from Away. Fiddlers conventions have similar audience. Some of my neighbors at Deer Track have been at BRMC on the Parkway every time I've been there. They sit down close, deeply enjoying the music. I don't know them very well, but in my book, they're the kind of people that belong here. They appreciate where they are on many levels. I know an awful lot of people who love the mountain people they know. What I've found for myself is the better I know them, the more I love them. A few times on the radio show, maybe once a year, I'd end the show saying I love every one of ye. I meant it from the heart. Most often I'd say I appreciate every one of you, a common saying here among people when you think a lot of somebody and they've done something to help you out and wouldn't accept pay, "I 'ppreciate ye." The accent in the 5 syllables is on the pre in the middle. It has meaning every time it's spoken.

ART EVERYPLACE

pee-on-ya bud



I found some more public art today. Haven't seen much in awhile, but for old faithful, the Air Bellows Outdoor Art Museum under the Parkway. Every year the authorities feel the need to paint over it, like that discourages putting it there. It makes a new blank canvas. I like it best when it's let go for a long time and you get layers and layers over years, paint on top of paint, colors juxtaposed entirely by chance, free form as it gets. In years past, somebody would make an image from time to time. This year it's all words and lines. That's good too. Whatever happens is what it is. Art as a subject has never been taken seriously in American education, except for the occasional art class in high schools. It's not until college does art start being taken seriously as something to learn about and pay attention to. And there it tends to get academic, which is what schools do.



Art in America is New York, LA, SanFrancisco, Seattle a little bit, Chicago, big cities. Great big cities the small percentage of people art is important to can make a sizable number. This makes art something that happens someplace else if you don't live in one of those cities. We're covered up in the modern world with things that only happen someplace else, wherever you are. That makes it something you have to go someplace else to do. Can't do it at home. It's about galleries, collectors and decorators. It's about money. The same as Hollywood. A few people "make it" and everybody else does not. I also see that changing. It's perhaps most visible in rock, an art form that parallels the spirit of what's going on among artists, when in the past it's been about mega stars, the Beatles, the Stones, the Eagles, Ozzy Osborne. The punk interjection that became the next mainstream after about 25 years was about anti-stars. It was an art school phenomenon, not hoodlums. The hoodlums went for Hard-core later. The punk wave was a lot of bands going off doing what they felt like doing. By now there are so many bands and singers and styles of vocalizing and guitar playing there's no keeping up with it.



So much is changing so fast in civilization, meaning it's changing fast in all art forms. And in the same ways, going from the time of big stars like Picasso and Elvis to a time of multiple lesser stars, like a whole firmament of them. I want to see it spread even further until every city, every town has its artists who are doing what they do. I see it like the old-time bands and bluegrass bands that have fan bases where they live and nearby. Artists, too, having fan bases around where they live. We have several artists living here now doing some really beautiful work. But there's not much fan base. It's slow to grow, esp when economy is on the slippery slope. It's a time that I believe if one were to pay attention to what's going on in New York galleries, the paintings, the sculpture, the art all the way around, I'd guess it's gestating about like the Dada period in Zurich, Switzerland, during WWI, the only place in Europe the war wasn't happening. The artists who became the Dadaists went to Zurich as draft dodgers. In a period of 6 months a dozen or so young artists started as if there had been no art before them, went off into whatever happened, chance, breaking down form to bare bones, creating an entirely new aesthetic. Over the next half century, artists around the world collectively went through phases the Dadaists went through in the 6 month evolution of wide open experimenting. It was like they performed a ritual that became the evolution of art over the next half century.



I don't like to pay too close attention to what is current in New York for the same reason I don't pay any attention to the New Yorker. There is more in New York I want to see than I could see if I lived there and had the money to pay. I see in New Yorker a show happening at some museum or gallery, interesting off-off-Broadway theater. I can't stand it knowing something is happening like the greatest show of Brancusi sculpture ever shown in one place. I'd faint to the floor seeing something like that happening and I can't go see it, because I can't afford to and I don't want to drive to NY and definitely not IN NY. New York City I block out of my mind because I don't want to know what's going on there. It makes me ache inside too much. Plus, I tend to think NY artists are onto something I don't get, they've got something I don't have, they're progressive and I'm not. When I pay no attention to NY art it doesn't bug me. My inner critic isn't berating me for painting people such that you can recognize the individual. I like abstractions and like painting them, but feel like I communicate better with recognizable images. Besides, I like painting portraits. I'm painting mountain musicians and that's all it is. I don't want any of them to leave the county, but know some will and must. But their spirit is this county. I don't believe they have any meaning in another county. I don't want them to.



Turning into the parking lot at the BROC office I saw in the tiny slip of lawn beside the highway a Red Grooms tropical fish on a stick next to a Christo wrapped hydrant. I don't have to go to NY. It's everywhere. It's in the scrap metal outside Maxwell Equipment in Whitehead. Sometimes I think when I drive by how wonderful it would be to take all of it to New York and spread it out and pile it up on a gallery floor, calling it an installation. Of the installations I've seen in NY, this one actually has something to say with circles, straight lines, squares, blacks, oranges, white, red, yellow scattered throughout with absolutely no aesthetic consideration. Pure Art. It's Maxwell Equipment tradition. I've taken a lot of pictures in the past of Jr's scrap metal installations over the last several years. The part I like best about the scrap metal collection is that it's practical. It's where he can get steel to weld with to repair whatever comes in the door. Jr thought I was nuts, and he was right.



He thought he was nuts too. He was. One evening at the table with our drams he said to me in earnest, "I'm full of shit." He meant his whole life he was a prankster, joking, laughing, picking much of the time. He meant it at a deeper level too. I felt I understood how he meant it. It told me his wisdom wasn't as much a concern to him as his mistakes. I felt he dwelled too much there, but it was also his humility, not allowing himself to acknowledge he had something as big as wisdom. He wouldn't hear of it. Wisdom is only in the Bible. In his own eyes, he was a fool. He made a good case for it too. One I couldn't refute. But I can make an equally convincing case for his wisdom, but he'd never hear of it. He let me take pictures of his abandoned work benches piled with tools he used to use. It amused him. City mind in the country. I know that so well. It's who I am. Can't help it. City educated, my time in the mountains has been my post-graduate education in what it means to be an American. In these mountains I've found what's left of the real thing.

AIR BELLOWS ART

Parkway tunnel now
air bellows art museum #1

a few years ago

air bellows art museum #2

At Air Bellows we have a small outdoor museum of spontaneous art created by mostly the county's teenagers. Layer upon layer, adding new colors, new words, new names, new squiggles, new touches of every kind that can be made with a spray can. It grows over time and changes over time like a living thing. I always drive slowly through there seeing all I can of this spontaneous work of art created in momentary bits of juvenile delinquency.

Never had a spray can touched the Parkway tunnel at Air Bellows until about 20 years ago somebody committed spray can grafitti on the tunnel wall. Then another and another until the whole three sides were covered in colors, names, spontaneous squiggles within a year. I came to see it as a canvas for anyone to add something to, anything, and watched it grow of its own. There was no artist mind creating it. No mind was involved in the creation of the whole.

The most mind that went into any of it was, 'I don't know what to say.' So a name goes up in orange. A graduation date in hot pink outlined in black. Lots of I-loves over the years. It strikes me interesting that someone approaches the wall with a can and doesn't know what to say, but wants to say something, writes the word love. Others drop the F-bomb, first thing that comes to mind. You can just about tell, one is a boy and one is a girl. You know as well as I do which is which.

When mind does enter the equation it's often somebody with volcanic rage inside, a pressure cooker hissing all the time. I've seen some serious letting go of steam on those walls. Seemed to me like a good thing to have out in public for frustrated teenagers needing to vent in great big letters for the whole world. Anguish over breaking up has been all over the walls too. Names of heartthrobs galore.

Names of rock bands are a favorite. Always metal and punk bands. The colors grow on top of each other and after the first year, the whole interior of the tunnel was covered with several layers of colors randomly chosen, randomly placed, no aesthetic guide but the compulsion to add something to it. It's as close to art made of perfect chance as it gets. Just pick a place and start spraying anything you want. Absolute freedom for people who need that feeling from time to time, to keep their batteries charged, to go on feeling alive in a world that suppresses all the energy that's going off inside like never-ending strings of Chinese firecrackers.

It's an act of juvenile delinquency, albeit as small as it gets, self-assertion on property held sacred by adults. And everybody has to complain about the kids and grafitti and against the law and it oughta this and it oughta that. And it so predictably cracks the kids up in advance. It's why they laugh and have a good time doing it. They know the adults will hate it, and they know it's harmless. They're not hurting anything, just elbowing parents in the ribs and saying, 'Get over it. Stop being so serious.' It's a place for people newly discovering themselves, who they are, to stand up and say, I Am.

I remember a time some years ago being told about somebody I knew catching a kid standing in the back of a pickup spraying the upper part. He knew the boy's mother. Called her and told on the kid. I was told this like proud of it, and inside I'm thinking: you did what? So the kid is sentenced to take house paint and paint over the whole thing and make it clean and pretty. Not. It just started another canvas. Periodically the Park Service paints over it and it keeps on going.

I've loved it all the way along. It's one of those gestures by kids to push adult buttons to make them say something smug and self-righteous. It makes the kids laugh just thinking about it, because they know it's going to happen every time an adult passes through the tunnel. I'm glad the place for that kind of spontaneous expression is close to home. I don't have to go far to see it. Just one mile from the house. I'd far rather see those colorful expressions on one great canvas than on rock walls by the courthouse, or the sides of buildings in town.