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saint_monkeyIn the last entry, my brother, Ben, asked me to choose my favorite five works of art, medium of my choice. I answered with my favorite grisly works of art, because I was playing off of his earlier suggestion of "FIVE DASTARDLY PEOPLE." (Woah, caps lock alert.)
But I think it is something to be revisited, because, when I think of art, I think of passion, and I am most frequently most impressed by the art of passionate people that you KNOW made art because they had no choice, out of a simply irrepressible neeed to create, to express themselves. Their work is usually never discovered until after they die, and when they go on, people find tucked away somewhere, a work so incredible and impressive that people have to stop and take notice. Since usually, these aren't rich or famous people, their work is sometimes passed over and forgotten, so they are doubly worthy of attention now:
Without further ado:
1. The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly. On April 11th, 1931, James Hampton, a Janitor for the Government Services Administration in Washington DC, received a heavenly vision of the Prophet Moses, informing him that soon, God would return to the earth. Hampton's job, Moses told him, would be to make a place for the Lord to sit.
So he did. In quiet solitude, after work, Hampton made a throne for God out of tin foil, old furniture, cardboard, and gold foil liquor bottle wrappers that he would barter from the homeless. Not only did Hampton have to scrounge everything, but to ensure symmetry, he had to scrounge two of everything. Hampton worked on the throne for fourteen years. It outgrew his apartment, so he moved it to a storage locker. When Hampton died, the throne went to his landlord, to pay Hampton's back rent. (Hampton and the Throne.)[1]
2. "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." Henry Darger did not have a good life. Orphaned early in life, he was declared "feeble minded" and stashed away in a home for Boys from the early 1890s (his admission "disease" was listed as "Masturbation,") until his escape at age 17 in 1908. He eventualy worked as an odd-job man and Janitor at Chicago's Saint Joseph's Hospital. He was very probably schizophrenic, and certainly seemed to exist in another reality, which he expressed in private. For fifty years, he rented an apartment at 851 W. Webster. When he moved out at age 80, his landlord discovered a 15145 (you read that right, fifteen-thousand,) page epic sci-fi fantasy adventure story with 300 color illustrations. (Some fashioned from joined pages that when spread out, are three to four feet high, and twelve feet long.) The work apparantly took 11 years to complete. If you seek it out, know that the story is brutal, and Darger, being divergent, was uncompromising in depicting it. It tells the story of a war between a race of people that enslave and torture children, and seven sisters (that are depicted as "hermaphrodites" (ie: girls with penises,) implying that Darger may not have known about the differences between the sexes, and also that Darger's characters may all have been seen as aspects of himself,) and their "angelic" protectors, who wage a war to force the child-enslavers to renounce their brutalities. [2] (biography) [2](art)
3. The Works of Emily Dickinson. Dickinson published only seven poems during her life. The rest (some 1800 exquisitely crafted poems,) she wrote in private, and bound into volumes herself with a needle and thread. The incomplete and rough poems were found all over the place, on scraps of paper, old grocery lists, etc. Her sister Lavenia published the majority of Emily's poems after Emily's death in 1886. As a result of this, you are (most likely,) not fully aware of how brilliant Dickinson really was. Her sister "cleaned up" the poetry, rearranging sentence structure, inserting capitalizaition and punctuation, and removing written pauses like dashes and dots. The "free verse" movement which did away with many of the conventions of punctuation and form, began shortly after her death, Dickinson predated it by some twenty or thirty years. Not until 1955, did Thomas Johnson publish her poems in their original format. However, it is the "corrected" versions that Lavinia made that are the Dickinson poems that are most often published today.[3]
4. ? Possibly Wilfrid Voynich,(The author of MS408, aka the "Voynich Manuscript.") In 1912, Wilfrid M. Voynich, an antiquarian book collector found a strange book, in an unknown language or code, full of pictures of unknown and unidentifiable plants. Much of its history is unknown prior to Voynich finding it in an "undisclosed location," and all of that history was supplied by Voynich, in the form of an accompanying letter from Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the Charles University of Prague, to the learned Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in Rome, "offering the manuscript for decryption and mentioning that it had once been bought by Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia (1552-1612) for 600 gold ducats. The letter further mentioned that it was believed that the author of the manuscript was Roger Bacon (the Franciscan friar who lived from 1214 to 1294)." (from here,) and later, Voynich discovered an erased signature of Jacobus de Tepenec, botanist to Rudolf the Second (Supporting, conveniently, Voynich's letter.) The writing is incredibly complex and appears to be a valid code or alphabet, and not just random gibberish. Cryptologists and linguists have been taking cracks at it for years, never with any result, which leads one to think that it may be the work of another divergent reclusive type, and the language may ave no meaning to someone outside the author's reality. (Hampton created his own language and alphabet, as did J.R.R. Tolkien.)[4]
5. Nuestro Pueblo (The Watts Towers) In 1921, construction worker Simon Rodia purchased an oddly shaped plot of land in Watts, Los Angeles. Using tiling tools and a window washer's rig, but without the benefit of scaffolding or support, he began construction of a 100 foot tall sculpture titled "Neustro Pueblo" overtop of his small home. It took 33 years to complete, and still stands today, despite an effort by the city to tear it down in 1950.
[5]
But I think it is something to be revisited, because, when I think of art, I think of passion, and I am most frequently most impressed by the art of passionate people that you KNOW made art because they had no choice, out of a simply irrepressible neeed to create, to express themselves. Their work is usually never discovered until after they die, and when they go on, people find tucked away somewhere, a work so incredible and impressive that people have to stop and take notice. Since usually, these aren't rich or famous people, their work is sometimes passed over and forgotten, so they are doubly worthy of attention now:
Without further ado:
1. The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly. On April 11th, 1931, James Hampton, a Janitor for the Government Services Administration in Washington DC, received a heavenly vision of the Prophet Moses, informing him that soon, God would return to the earth. Hampton's job, Moses told him, would be to make a place for the Lord to sit.
So he did. In quiet solitude, after work, Hampton made a throne for God out of tin foil, old furniture, cardboard, and gold foil liquor bottle wrappers that he would barter from the homeless. Not only did Hampton have to scrounge everything, but to ensure symmetry, he had to scrounge two of everything. Hampton worked on the throne for fourteen years. It outgrew his apartment, so he moved it to a storage locker. When Hampton died, the throne went to his landlord, to pay Hampton's back rent. (Hampton and the Throne.)[1]
2. "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." Henry Darger did not have a good life. Orphaned early in life, he was declared "feeble minded" and stashed away in a home for Boys from the early 1890s (his admission "disease" was listed as "Masturbation,") until his escape at age 17 in 1908. He eventualy worked as an odd-job man and Janitor at Chicago's Saint Joseph's Hospital. He was very probably schizophrenic, and certainly seemed to exist in another reality, which he expressed in private. For fifty years, he rented an apartment at 851 W. Webster. When he moved out at age 80, his landlord discovered a 15145 (you read that right, fifteen-thousand,) page epic sci-fi fantasy adventure story with 300 color illustrations. (Some fashioned from joined pages that when spread out, are three to four feet high, and twelve feet long.) The work apparantly took 11 years to complete. If you seek it out, know that the story is brutal, and Darger, being divergent, was uncompromising in depicting it. It tells the story of a war between a race of people that enslave and torture children, and seven sisters (that are depicted as "hermaphrodites" (ie: girls with penises,) implying that Darger may not have known about the differences between the sexes, and also that Darger's characters may all have been seen as aspects of himself,) and their "angelic" protectors, who wage a war to force the child-enslavers to renounce their brutalities. [2] (biography) [2](art)
3. The Works of Emily Dickinson. Dickinson published only seven poems during her life. The rest (some 1800 exquisitely crafted poems,) she wrote in private, and bound into volumes herself with a needle and thread. The incomplete and rough poems were found all over the place, on scraps of paper, old grocery lists, etc. Her sister Lavenia published the majority of Emily's poems after Emily's death in 1886. As a result of this, you are (most likely,) not fully aware of how brilliant Dickinson really was. Her sister "cleaned up" the poetry, rearranging sentence structure, inserting capitalizaition and punctuation, and removing written pauses like dashes and dots. The "free verse" movement which did away with many of the conventions of punctuation and form, began shortly after her death, Dickinson predated it by some twenty or thirty years. Not until 1955, did Thomas Johnson publish her poems in their original format. However, it is the "corrected" versions that Lavinia made that are the Dickinson poems that are most often published today.[3]
4. ? Possibly Wilfrid Voynich,(The author of MS408, aka the "Voynich Manuscript.") In 1912, Wilfrid M. Voynich, an antiquarian book collector found a strange book, in an unknown language or code, full of pictures of unknown and unidentifiable plants. Much of its history is unknown prior to Voynich finding it in an "undisclosed location," and all of that history was supplied by Voynich, in the form of an accompanying letter from Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the Charles University of Prague, to the learned Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in Rome, "offering the manuscript for decryption and mentioning that it had once been bought by Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia (1552-1612) for 600 gold ducats. The letter further mentioned that it was believed that the author of the manuscript was Roger Bacon (the Franciscan friar who lived from 1214 to 1294)." (from here,) and later, Voynich discovered an erased signature of Jacobus de Tepenec, botanist to Rudolf the Second (Supporting, conveniently, Voynich's letter.) The writing is incredibly complex and appears to be a valid code or alphabet, and not just random gibberish. Cryptologists and linguists have been taking cracks at it for years, never with any result, which leads one to think that it may be the work of another divergent reclusive type, and the language may ave no meaning to someone outside the author's reality. (Hampton created his own language and alphabet, as did J.R.R. Tolkien.)[4]
5. Nuestro Pueblo (The Watts Towers) In 1921, construction worker Simon Rodia purchased an oddly shaped plot of land in Watts, Los Angeles. Using tiling tools and a window washer's rig, but without the benefit of scaffolding or support, he began construction of a 100 foot tall sculpture titled "Neustro Pueblo" overtop of his small home. It took 33 years to complete, and still stands today, despite an effort by the city to tear it down in 1950.
"I had in my mind to do something big and I did." - Rodia
[5]
