Missing In Action: imagery in museums

 

 

It’s always interesting to find a big article on something “small” and moderately culty that you’re involved in. I had that feeling today seeing a piece in the Wall Street Journal about hand painted movie posters from Ghana.

 From where I’m sitting in my studio I’m looking at one of my several hand-painted movie posters from Ghana. This one is “Missing in Action” featuring “Chuck Norris.”

Here’s a close-up of Chuck.

I guess that’s the world the internet has delivered to us. Nothing “special and secret” lasts as a separate entity for long. Still, it’s different reading about something that doing anything about it. I find these movie posters an amazing inspiration for the simple act of creating imagery, something somewhat lost in our sophisticated world of fine art.

I recently visited the Walker Art Center’s show “Nine Artists.” I enjoyed the show but at the same time its level of sophistication pushes it into the theoretical world of (for example) gender politics and what it means to be “invisible” in modern society. Interesting, yes, but far from the simple world of images such as one finds in Outsider Art and world art like these Ghanaian movie posters. It’s almost like the world of fine art had morphed into something more closely akin to academia (politicized academia at that) as if simple imagery is no longer enough somehow. Yes, this is somewhat of a lowbrow attack but I don’t find this kind of intellectual “discussion” offered in shows line Nine Artists to be stimulative of creating things.

What I find much more interesting is something like this book recently out on Amazon, called “Mexican Pulp Art.”

here’s one of my works-in-progress