Oldies but goodies, San Francisco February 2007
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Ringo White and Bob Watt
This is something I wrote after meeting local Milwaukee "outsider" artists Bob Watt and Ringo White with my summer vernacular art history class. The image is by Justin Bacon, you can find more of his writing about this site (and others) and more pictures at his blog
Today we met Bob Watt and Ringo White. In a certain way I had met Bob Watt before. My best friend, Lydia, knows how to find the books in the library that no one else has read in years. They’re full of ideas to take because no one has in so long, if that makes any sense. Sometimes they carry old ephemera and trinkets, dollar bills and grocery lists which are all yours to take tenderly and truly if you’re willing. Last summer Lydia found a book of poetry by Milwaukee artists. We were stopped by a poem by Bob Watt that I don’t remember anything about save for its weird, off-putting directness and his tiny black and white photo. She called me later to tell me she thought she’d seen Bob Watt on the public bus. She probably would have known if she had seen him; could anybody but Bob Watt write Bob Watt’s poetry or make his paintings?
He’s distinguished by his stuff. When I first moved to the neighborhood a couple of months ago I happened past his house. I stood outside and wondered about the subject of the big painting outside. I guessed Bill Clinton but it’s got a touch of revolutionary war heroine to it. I was with Lydia then, too. I wondered if we would have put it together, if we had known whose house it was, what would we have done if we had just looked at the name on the mailbox? Maybe we would have been thrown off by the missing T, who knows how long ago it just fell off leaving the thing reading only “Wat”. The outside of the house looks almost orderly in its haphazardness. The junk seems purposeful.
Bob Watt’s work is all about contradictions. His house is filled with hundreds of self-made spiral bound collage books. They’re in the type of covering you might find some corporate lecture materials, spiral bound with clear plastic covers, but they all consist of collages of naked ladies that Bob has photographed in his house. The images are pasted over incongruous magazine nature scenes. Most of the women are young and pretty. They all wear the same floppy sun hat, sunglasses, and nothin’ else. The collaged scenes are entirely improbable worlds. Bob Watt’s paintings, like his ideas about art and the imagery of his collages follow some impenetrable, convoluted thread of logic. There are only a few colors in each of his paintings, mostly red, white, and blue. The paint handling is smooth and the peering, lumpy figures are often accented by stylistic feathers or psychedelic-y abstract tribal-esque patterning.
I feel compelled to document his art and persona, but, in another sense I don’t feel it to be as necessary as I did when I first met him. I just read an article that said “Bob Watt is the sun and all these planets of weird people revolve around him”; I think that’s true. His art might be rich in its own far-out way; his look and his home are outlandish for sure, but his confidence and zany logic somehow make the whole effect manageable. It seems to me that what’s more important about Watt besides than his messy house and absurd crazy conviction is the fact that everyone online seems to know that he meets his friends every morning at McDonalds for breakfast and he can be described as “Riverwest Bob Watt”. He must be the neighborhood and the relationships he forms with people. None of his models looked uncomfortable, I’d have to note, even with a whole heap of Bob wrapped around them. Are Bob Watt’s wacky ideas about art more important than what he represents to his outsider community?
I can understand why Ringo White would be inspired by this friendship to begin creating art, as he told us. At first I couldn’t imagine them interacting. Ringo had no bluff in the way he spoke. He seemed to take comfort in knowing. His house was full of art but like his compositions it was orderly, planned in a spontaneous, organic way, like a cross section of cells. He told us everything about fossils and rock-boring clams in the same way he probably made and hung his art. He was nothing like Bob except they maintained that same undercurrent of sequenced chaos in both of their work and homes. Bob Watt’s enthusiasm and faith in the healing power of art, however veiled by mental muck it was, was obviously infectious.
Bob and Ringo dealt with issues of the environment. Bob Watt’s paintings compare the landscape to psychological states, freedom, beauty. Ringo’s assemblage works are a reflection of the environment and a record of it. His compositions are microcosms. They spawn from a central point; unyielding materials fit together in space to form a unified, bending whole. Single pieces may be rigid and the colors may be subdued by time and Lake Michigan but together they become vibrant and liquid.
Ringo seemed to serve as a holder of the things that people have thrown away but shouldn’t have had in the first place. They wash up on the shore or lay around in the park; there’s no place for this stuff except with him and in his pieces. It’s a tender relationship, if you think about it. Ringo was so familiar with the world. The concepts I saw illustrated by his work did not seem “put” there. They were such an effortless expression of his habits and concerns.
Collections can take over your life the way White and Watt’s art has evidently taken over their lives. Art like this is something you physically live with in a way you cannot otherwise. Art is your gut when you live this way and you’re close to it. What can it mean to recycle the everyday detritus, the discarded elements of life and to live so closely to them the way Ringo does? How can you not begin to feel discarded yourself and perhaps then like a shepherd of these things? Ringo White seem completely attuned to the extra “stuff” in the world. You can read time and place in his pieces. As the world changes, as more plastics are introduced to the environment, they show up in his art. He’s an intuitive environmentalist.
There are a number of ways that talking about these men can go wrong. In one way, that I feel myself trying to distance myself from, they are easy to write off for their eccentricities. It’s hard to define where curiosity ends, scholarship begins, and how much of a combination of the two you have to have. Each artist represents different things, to the art world and the misfits scenes that accept them for their own reasons. In the end I think the only way to approach them is to learn to speak their language and learn to read their environment.
Today we met Bob Watt and Ringo White. In a certain way I had met Bob Watt before. My best friend, Lydia, knows how to find the books in the library that no one else has read in years. They’re full of ideas to take because no one has in so long, if that makes any sense. Sometimes they carry old ephemera and trinkets, dollar bills and grocery lists which are all yours to take tenderly and truly if you’re willing. Last summer Lydia found a book of poetry by Milwaukee artists. We were stopped by a poem by Bob Watt that I don’t remember anything about save for its weird, off-putting directness and his tiny black and white photo. She called me later to tell me she thought she’d seen Bob Watt on the public bus. She probably would have known if she had seen him; could anybody but Bob Watt write Bob Watt’s poetry or make his paintings?
He’s distinguished by his stuff. When I first moved to the neighborhood a couple of months ago I happened past his house. I stood outside and wondered about the subject of the big painting outside. I guessed Bill Clinton but it’s got a touch of revolutionary war heroine to it. I was with Lydia then, too. I wondered if we would have put it together, if we had known whose house it was, what would we have done if we had just looked at the name on the mailbox? Maybe we would have been thrown off by the missing T, who knows how long ago it just fell off leaving the thing reading only “Wat”. The outside of the house looks almost orderly in its haphazardness. The junk seems purposeful.
Bob Watt’s work is all about contradictions. His house is filled with hundreds of self-made spiral bound collage books. They’re in the type of covering you might find some corporate lecture materials, spiral bound with clear plastic covers, but they all consist of collages of naked ladies that Bob has photographed in his house. The images are pasted over incongruous magazine nature scenes. Most of the women are young and pretty. They all wear the same floppy sun hat, sunglasses, and nothin’ else. The collaged scenes are entirely improbable worlds. Bob Watt’s paintings, like his ideas about art and the imagery of his collages follow some impenetrable, convoluted thread of logic. There are only a few colors in each of his paintings, mostly red, white, and blue. The paint handling is smooth and the peering, lumpy figures are often accented by stylistic feathers or psychedelic-y abstract tribal-esque patterning.
I feel compelled to document his art and persona, but, in another sense I don’t feel it to be as necessary as I did when I first met him. I just read an article that said “Bob Watt is the sun and all these planets of weird people revolve around him”; I think that’s true. His art might be rich in its own far-out way; his look and his home are outlandish for sure, but his confidence and zany logic somehow make the whole effect manageable. It seems to me that what’s more important about Watt besides than his messy house and absurd crazy conviction is the fact that everyone online seems to know that he meets his friends every morning at McDonalds for breakfast and he can be described as “Riverwest Bob Watt”. He must be the neighborhood and the relationships he forms with people. None of his models looked uncomfortable, I’d have to note, even with a whole heap of Bob wrapped around them. Are Bob Watt’s wacky ideas about art more important than what he represents to his outsider community?
I can understand why Ringo White would be inspired by this friendship to begin creating art, as he told us. At first I couldn’t imagine them interacting. Ringo had no bluff in the way he spoke. He seemed to take comfort in knowing. His house was full of art but like his compositions it was orderly, planned in a spontaneous, organic way, like a cross section of cells. He told us everything about fossils and rock-boring clams in the same way he probably made and hung his art. He was nothing like Bob except they maintained that same undercurrent of sequenced chaos in both of their work and homes. Bob Watt’s enthusiasm and faith in the healing power of art, however veiled by mental muck it was, was obviously infectious.
Bob and Ringo dealt with issues of the environment. Bob Watt’s paintings compare the landscape to psychological states, freedom, beauty. Ringo’s assemblage works are a reflection of the environment and a record of it. His compositions are microcosms. They spawn from a central point; unyielding materials fit together in space to form a unified, bending whole. Single pieces may be rigid and the colors may be subdued by time and Lake Michigan but together they become vibrant and liquid.
Ringo seemed to serve as a holder of the things that people have thrown away but shouldn’t have had in the first place. They wash up on the shore or lay around in the park; there’s no place for this stuff except with him and in his pieces. It’s a tender relationship, if you think about it. Ringo was so familiar with the world. The concepts I saw illustrated by his work did not seem “put” there. They were such an effortless expression of his habits and concerns.
Collections can take over your life the way White and Watt’s art has evidently taken over their lives. Art like this is something you physically live with in a way you cannot otherwise. Art is your gut when you live this way and you’re close to it. What can it mean to recycle the everyday detritus, the discarded elements of life and to live so closely to them the way Ringo does? How can you not begin to feel discarded yourself and perhaps then like a shepherd of these things? Ringo White seem completely attuned to the extra “stuff” in the world. You can read time and place in his pieces. As the world changes, as more plastics are introduced to the environment, they show up in his art. He’s an intuitive environmentalist.
There are a number of ways that talking about these men can go wrong. In one way, that I feel myself trying to distance myself from, they are easy to write off for their eccentricities. It’s hard to define where curiosity ends, scholarship begins, and how much of a combination of the two you have to have. Each artist represents different things, to the art world and the misfits scenes that accept them for their own reasons. In the end I think the only way to approach them is to learn to speak their language and learn to read their environment.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
whimper not bang
This is a project from freshman year. It consisted of all these little trinkets sealed into bags and pinned to the wall. I had the idea that sometimes you experience something the last time you ever will but there's no way to memorialize that moment because you don't know its happening. I think that's what fuels regret, when you realize that. I included little pieces of text throughout the piece, one of which is pictured. I think it could have been well summed up with something I heard recently "some things go out with a whimper and not a bang".
Not the best thing I've ever done but there are some compelling elements here, for me.
Not the best thing I've ever done but there are some compelling elements here, for me.
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