Lunar Follies

THEOPHILUS

Just opened: At the Kangol-Polo Galleries: You won’t go far wrong with this judiciously selected, and soberly, but not stuffily authoritative exhibition of what has recently come to be called “ingenuous” art, or, occasionally, “crippled” art. The show goes a long way toward sorting out the lines and planes, not to mention the arcs and tangents, large circles and even complex rhomboids of influences, affiliations, and imitative procedures to be discerned within this difficult, often misunderstood, and, at times, hopelessly muddled school. Everything is placed simply, even puritanically, in the galleries’ spacious rooms, and the whole takes up, quite comfortably, the entire second floor of what was once a SoHo firetrap. The works are arranged in shrewd juxtapositions and canny alliances, so as to allow the viewer to discover how these iconoclastic fringe artists and artisans and their art and artisan products play off each other. The great Rube Chang, for instance, and Marco “the magnificent” Globus present three semi-collaborative works (“Blue Asters and Paperback,” “Edward Van de Fugger, Christian,” and “Lieutenant Chip Mainwaring Abusing Himself”), which remind one of the early red-clay-and-torn-denim “cut-downs” made by George, “the soupreem master of magikk,” in his Lake Jango garage, as well as the “moron collages” that were discovered a decade ago in a corncrib on Jubal Chamborizee’s property. (Chamborizee, also known as Lord Chimborazo or Sir Henry Cotopaxi, was the acknowledged master of sooty-cob annealing, a painstaking process whose subtlest techniques died with him.) Ruth Billbew’s “The Beast from the Stygian Deeps,” “Larry’s Bony Wife, Martha,” and “Ants at a Picnic: Study in Black and Egg Yolk,” are clearly in the same early-ingenuous mode as Duwayne Bushelle, Bushelle Edwards, Mac Brontus and his humming raccoons (Brontus’s droll designation for those who selflessly assist him in his crush-and-burn operations); and her “Vomit in the Doorway,” perhaps the central iconic image of all postwar ingenuous art, and an acknowledged focus for contemporary studies of painterly surfaces, especially in the work of Katz, Thiebaud, and, not surprisingly, Warhol, reminds the most jaded gallery-goer of how sublime the “cripples” can be. The powerful construct, “Leventy-Seven,” by Duke Charlotte La Bushe, startles anew in its position of majestic prominence in a small gallery off the main corridor, as it gestures toward, illumines, and shrewdly “explains” its immediate successors in the fiendishly difficult heavenly-glaze procedure, “Uniform and Chips, with Pastor,” by Whitfield Wamp, “Weightlifters at Prayer,” Fincher Leroy Ellerbing’s last known work, and “Jesus Destroying Pornography,” by an anonymous member of the Southern Baptist Corsairs. The catalogue, informative and entertaining, by the exhibition’s curator, Stanford MacArthur, informs and entertains, indeed, yet helps us to remember that which it is dangerous, much like history and current events, to forget; that art is, at its most sublime, simple, decent, and, as one delighted visitor to Kangol-Polo was overheard to say, “easy on the eyes.”