Ed
McGowin and T.M. Dossett:
“True Stories” and “The Southern Voice”
Ed
McGowin, under a variety of names and guises, has created an expansive
body of art which has rarely fit comfortably into standard contemporary
categories. As curator Jane Livingston observed in 1975, “Ed
McGowin’s work has been notoriously difficult to characterize
in words, and even to fix in the mind’s eye.” This remains
true, to a significant degree, to the present date. Despite this,
he has maintained a national reputation, working in a variety of media
and styles, inspiring and challenging a generation of artists. What
his diverse art forms—including paintings, sculptures, conceptual
art projects, films, writings and public art installations—seem
to have in common is a Southern sensibility, one rooted in his early
experiences in Mississippi and Alabama, and marked by his appreciation
of the oral, narrative and literary traditions of the South. This
has been tempered, as well, by an intuitive outsider’s analysis
of the evolving political and critical direction of New York’s
art world.
Born
in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1938, McGowin emerged from the Deep
South, far from New York’s insider art circles, yet he quickly
became a pioneering figure in the art worlds of New York, Washington
and Baltimore during the 1960s and 1970s. He established a national
profile as a conceptual artist and maker of abstract sculptural forms,
demonstrating that he was an artist from the South who was keenly
attuned to the nuances of both New York and the international art
world. Over time, he was recognized as an “artist’s artist,”
known for his technical skills, innovation and unique vision. Due,
in part, to his continual evolutions in styles and materials, as well
as his deliberate use of diverse names in his projects, McGowin remains
an elusive target in many ways. At times baffling critics and the
general public, he has avoided the creation of easily identifiable
imagery that could be recognized simply as “Southern”
by an expanding range of Southern collectors and art audiences.
Essential
elements of his art and his aesthetic philosophy were embodied in
works featured in two significant exhibitions of the 1970s, the “Name
Change” project, presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art in
1972 (discussed in a related essay by Tom Sokolowski), and “Ed
McGowin’s True Stories,” presented in Washington at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1975. A third related exhibition, “The
Southern Voice: Terry Allen, Vernon Fisher, Ed McGowin,” was
presented at the Fort Worth Art Museum in 1981. These exhibitions
document McGowin’s evolution as an early proponent of the pluralism
that came to define the American art world in the 1980s and 1990s.
The latter two exhibitions and the works of this period are the subjects
of this essay, as are related works created by McGowin and T.M. Dossett
in the 21st
Ed
McGowin first moved to Washington in 1962, when he was selected to
serve as an aid to Mississippi Congressman William Colmer. He had
completed a B.S. degree at Mississippi Southern College (now the University
of Southern Mississippi) in Hattiesburg, in December of 1960, studying
in the small art department there with Vernon Merrifield, Walter Lok
and Charles Ambrose. After one semester of graduate painting studies
at the University of Alabama, encouraged by Merrifield, McGowin accepted
a position as an art instructor and returned to Mississippi Southern,
teaching there and supporting his young family until his move to Washington,
in April of 1962. He established himself rapidly in Washington, visiting
studios and befriending artists such as Howard Mehring, and meeting
local gallery owners and museum officials, including Gudmund Vigtel
at the Corcoran Gallery. At the invitation of Vigtel, an exhibition
of his paintings was presented at the Corcoran in December of 1962.
Following this first exhibition at the Corcoran, he was invited by
Henrietta Ehrsam to join her stable of artists at the Henri Gallery
in Alexandria, Virginia.
Encouraged
by these developments and the promise of an exhibition at the Henri
Gallery, McGowin moved back to Tuscaloosa to complete his MA degree
in painting at the University of Alabama, in the fall of 1963, after
he was offered a teaching assistantship. Alabama was recognized then
as one of the most progressive art departments in the South. McGowin
regards faculty members Theodore Klitzke, chairman of the department,
Melville Price (an Abstract Expressionist painter and New York studio
partner of Franz Kline), Tom Scott, Richard Zoellner and Howard Goodson
as important influences upon the development of his early career.
William Christenberry, who would become a teaching colleague of McGowin’s
at the Corcoran and a prominent figure in the Washington art world,
had served until 1961 as one of the youngest members of the Alabama
art faculty, and was a also graduate of its MA program.
McGowin
left Tuscaloosa in 1964, aspiring to be a painter, and returned to
Washington, then a more supportive environment for a Southern artist
than New York. In 1964, however, the New York art world was moving
beyond Abstract Expressionism, embracing Pop Art and a range of emerging
styles and media. During the 1960s, he witnessed a proliferation of
new styles and movements including Pop art, Neo-Dada, Minimalism,
Post-Minimalism, Conceptual art, Earth art and Feminist art. In April
of 1964, before returning to Washington, he wrote to his dealer, describing
a direction that seems to anticipate his future course in the art
world, as well as his “Name Change” project of 1972. He
indicated that his art would be “changing constantly, never
repeating anything no matter how much I like it....I don’t want
to be put in any school or group. It is too confining—I want
to be able to do anything I damn please—which is the only way….I
don’t want a label unless the label is change. I change every
day, every hour, every second. Why shouldn’t my art change,
and the more the better….”
In contrast, during this period his native region, the Deep South,
was perceived by many to be a dark and dangerous place, unenlightened
and primitive, far removed from the rest of the country, especially
the world’s enlightened art capital, New York. Names and locations
from Mississippi and Alabama dominated national television and newspaper
headlines--Emmett Till; Rosa Parks; Martin Luther King; Autherine
Lucy; Medgar Evers; George Wallace; James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner
and Andrew Goodman; Philadelphia, Mississippi; Eugene “Bull”
Connor; Selma, Alabama; and Birmingham. While New York’s art
wars were challenging, they were nothing compared to the brutal realities
of the civil rights era in the segregated South. People died there—hung,
burned, buried in levees, dumped in rivers, or they just disappeared,
permanently—as civil rights and voter registration activities
accelerated. And the nation watched.
For
the nation, and for any sensitive person from the South, these were
shocking images, disturbing realities. For Ed McGowin, these were
deep and difficult issues, related to the very nature of his birth
place and native region, issues that directly influenced his art,
as first evident in the “Name Change” and “True
Stories” exhibitions, and continuing to the present date. These
were difficult realities to introduce directly into the contemporary
art world during the time of Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art, especially
when there was limited recognition of the importance of the art and
culture of the South. Andy Warhol, in his way, addressed the topic
in works drawn from the front pages of the daily papers, works such
as Red Race Riot (1963).
Consistent
with his university art department training, McGowin’s work
began with an abstract focus during the 1960s. Though trained as a
painter, he quickly became a sculptor and pioneer in the use of vacuum-forming,
creating a distinctive early body of abstract forms in a variety of
new materials. From 1964 to 1966, he directed the McGowin/Bright Art
School in Alexandria, Virginia. And, from 1966 to 1978, when he served
as an associate professor of art and chair of the sculpture department
at the Corcoran School of Art, McGowin emerged as a highly influential
figure in the Washington and Baltimore art worlds.
By
the early 1970s, the direction of his art changed. In 1971, he launched
his unique “Name Change” project, legally changing his
name twelve times and working under those names, in the following
order: Alva Isaiah Fost; Lawrence Steven Orlean; Irby Benjamin Roy;
Nathan Ellis McDuff; Eure Ignatius Everpure; Isaac Noel Anderson;
Nicholas Gregory Nazianzen; Thornton Modestus Dossett; Ingram Andrew
Young; Melvill Douglas O’Connor; Edward Everett Updike; and
William Edward McGowin. He has explained this project concisely. “In
October 1971 I had my name changed in the Washington DC courts to
Thornton M. Dossett. This was one of the twelve legal names that I
had over a period of eighteen months….This was an effort to
demonstrate a theory I had about the development of art history as
a pluralistic model rather than the linear model that Modernism had
followed since its beginning.” Continuing, he clarified why
the Dossett name was used so often. “While working on a number
of things as Ed McGowin I have also developed a body of work under
the name Dossett….The Dossett work refers in large part to race
relations and the issues and events surrounding race relations that
effected me growing up in the South. The contradictions, irony, fear,
anger, etc. that effected me as a white male in a society that was
going through a profound and fundamental change is something that
I feel compelled to express.”
McGowin
advanced his work in a major exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of
Art, “Ed McGowin’s True Stories,” presented from
September 13 to October 26, 1975. Notably, as he recently affirmed,
the concepts and the major works featured in this exhibition took
final form in Paris, in 1974, in a studio and a residency made possible
by the Galerie Darthea Speyer. In the “True Stories” exhibition
he created a foundation for ideas he would explore throughout his
career, also demonstrating the range of his technical and conceptual
progress, as indicated by Jane Livingston. “He thought it more
interesting to go from one medium or idea to another….he is
a skilled painter, draughtsman and sculptor in plastic and other materials;
when he decided to make a series of technically sophisticated prints
he proved himself not only proficient but superior; he’s created
works using both film and videotape. Beyond this, his is a verbal
and conceptual artistic personality.” Livingston also reflected
upon his influence in Washington.
One
simply does not know whether his presence in the late sixties in a
city like Washington, DC—an artistic center at the time, close
to New York but certainly not New York—catalyzed McGowin’s
independence of style, or whether he happened to be an artist from
the South whose development would have followed a similar course no
matter where he worked. (It does seem clear, for some reason, that
he “had to get out” of Mississippi and Alabama; there
were, however, any number of alternatives besides Washington.)….Be
that as it may, McGowin settled here in 1964…and proceeded quickly
to engage in every manner of unpainterly activity, besides continuing
to paint….There is no doubt that he has been immensely influential—albeit
more by his presence, and suggestive, experimental approach, than
by an imposed “look”—through his years of teaching
at the Corcoran.
For a Southerner from Mississippi and Alabama, what better way to
address complex and difficult realities than in the form of the familiar,
the Southern story, and related sculptural environments, as he did
in his “True Stories” project? McGowin maintained a fine
balance in this project, moving in new directions with “True
Stories,” as Livingston has suggested. “McGowin has displayed
both literal and metaphorical bents of mind as an artist, more the
former when he was making ‘conceptual’ and sculptural
work, more the latter in recent work.” Yet, in this body of
work, she believes, he has created something new, “it is as
though the artist at last has become confident, relaxed and self-possessed
enough to act truly ingeniously—simply to tell stories. McGowin
may be said to singly comprise an important part of a well-defined
‘movement’—narrative art as a component of conceptualism.”
Noting that the exhibition “transcends an analysis of the artist
as a painter,” she offers this conclusion: “What finally
becomes the overarching issue and content of the project is the narrative
spirit in which all of the works are conceived, in which the present
catalogue is constructed, and which integrates all of the artist’s
excessively disparate activities into a complex, fully formed art.”
By
presenting his Southern stories within this museum context, transcending
his earlier works, he demonstrated, as Livingston indicated that “the
overarching issue and content of the project is the narrative spirit,”
perhaps creating even a new art movement, what she calls “narrative
art as a component of conceptualism.” In the exhibition and
his tabloid catalogue, McGowin created a complex narrative world familiar
to, but somehow different from, those known to Southerners. One series
related to Hoyt, “The Stories About Hoyt,” including “Hoyt
and the Dog’ and “Hoyt Clobbers Fur Ball.” Another
main character is Bobby D., who was featured in two major stories
and Corcoran installations, “Bobby D.’s Cabin” and
“Bobby D.’s Chicken Episode,” the latter a Southern
gothic tale centered around Bobby D., a push lawn mower, and a group
of baby chickens: “he had buried these chickens about eighteen
inches apart down this curvilinear driveway, right down the middle
of it, each one up to its neck.” Anyone familiar with Southern
storytelling knows where this is narrative is leading (and that a
moral lesson would be involved, somehow), but also understands that
the art is in the storytelling, as McGowin demonstrated in his concluding
paragraphs (creating a tale that soon became legendary in Washington
and Southern art circles).
The
drive was made of a sort of sandy pea gravel, this little fine gravel
and sand. So the chickens were in all these little mounds, buried
about eighteen inches apart, making a curvilinear line, their heads
sticking up, turning from side to side, and they were going “peep,
peep, peep,” and it was a very strange sight. My grandmother
said, “Bobby D., what is this?” She said, “What
have you done this for?” And one or two of the brothers were
saying, “What the hell is going on?” and swearing. And
the women were speaking to one another sort of hysterically and the
children were running around.
And
with that, Bobby D. reached up under the house and pulled out one
of these old-fashioned lawnmowers. And before anybody realized what
was going on, Bobby D. ran as fast as he could with the lawnmower
right down the row of chickens and just chopped off each biddy’s
head as he ran. The women were screaming and shouting and the children
were running and the men were sort of staggering and swearing at Bobby
D. and trying to catch him before he could kill all these baby chickens.
And my grandmother had sort of semi-collapsed; she was about to faint.
I was sort of looking between Bobby D.’s legs as he went charging
down this driveway. The dust was flying and the chicken feathers,
and the blood from the chickens’ heads was flying.
Bobby
D. just went right down all twelve chickens and never stopped. He
just dropped the mower and there were a couple of brothers chasing
him and he kept right on running and ran out through the lot down
past the barn and right off into the woods. And he never came back.
He just vanished again. Eventually they found him back in Detroit
and he was still drunk and he was a derelict and was refusing any
help from the family or anyone.
Finally,
when Bobby D. was very old, he moved back to south Mississippi and
bought himself a little house down by this creek, sort of in the swamp.
And he spent his last years fishing.
In 2006, McGowin’s “True Stories” would be a radical
concept and a challenging installation for many art museums, perhaps
for some contemporary art centers as well. In 1975, in a Washington
art museum, it was more than radical, reflecting the innovative and
embracing nature of the curators (it was one of Jane Livingston’s
first exhibitions at the Corcoran) and the administration of that
institution (where, during the 1980s, controversy over the photographs
of Robert Mapplethorpe raised an entirely different set of issues).
“True Stories” and McGowin’s evolving art forms
in 1975 should also be considered within the larger context of the
period, at a time when plans for the 1976 American Bicentennial celebrations
were evolving, bringing a new level of appreciation and understanding
of American art, and at a time when there was a new interest in the
regions (and regionalism) of the country.
In
1975 and 1976, there was an emerging sense of the importance of contemporary
Southern art and artists, and McGowin and his unique works were vital
parts of this process. The foundations for the prominence and acceptance
of Southern art today can be traced to this period, which expanded
considerably during the 1980s. A milestone event in 1976, building
upon what “True Stories” suggested, was the hosting of
the Southern Rim Conference by Appalachian State University, organized
by artist Bill Dunlap (whose ties to Washington’s art world
were strong by this time) and curator Jane Livingston, bringing together
a major number of the Southern artists who are now acknowledged leaders
of what was then an emerging Southern art renaissance, not unlike
the Southern literary renaissance of an earlier period. Notables present
included McGowin, Dunlap, Livingston, William Christenberry, Terry
Allen, William Eggleston, James Surls, John Alexander, Marcia Tucker,
Paul Schimmel, Jerry Noe, Bill Fagaley and Charmaine Locke. That same
year the appearance of Eggleston’s color photographs, featured
in the Museum of Modern art’s first exhibition of color photography,
in the exhibition and book, “William Eggleston’s Guide,”
served as another critical milestone in this process.
During
the 1970s and the 1980s, interest in the nation’s regions expanded--
especially in the Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast--as those
areas experienced a new boom period and as populations, industries
and corporations embraced them. In the art world this resulted in
a new form of regionalism, different from that classified as “Regionalist”
during the 1930s, which featured John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood and
Thomas Hart Benton. Benton lived until 1975, long enough to see the
return of narrative traditions and to defend his career, including
the fact that he never identified himself as a “regionalist,”
explaining in 1969 that it was a pejorative term used by New York
critics after he, Curry and Wood left New York for the Midwest and
were then typecast as provincials. “We came in the popular mind
to represent a home-grown, grass-roots artistry which damned ‘furrin’
influence and which knew nothing about and cared nothing for the traditions
of art as cultivated city snobs, dudes and aesthetes knew them. A
play was written and a stage erected for us. Grant Wood became the
typical Iowa small towner, John Curry the typical Kansas farmer, and
I just an Ozark hillbilly. We accepted our roles.”
For
McGowin, the work of the late 1970s and early 1980s continued the
trends and directions he had initiated by 1975, leading to the development
of his “inscapes,” sculptures he described as “narrative
architecture,” such as Mississippi Inscape, dedicated in Jackson,
Mississippi, in 1979. He designed it as a tribute and metaphor to
the writings of Mississippi native William Faulkner, incorporating
quotations from Faulkner on the exterior of the piece, surrounding
an interior tableau that was visible through a window opening. He
developed the concept for a related work in the series in 1981, Spanish
Music Inscape, for the University of Southern Mississippi, as a tribute
to Mississippi writer Eudora Welty. Building upon his unique and expanding
Southern narrative aesthetic, he offered clarification of his intent
for these works. “I was trying to invent a new aesthetic I thought
was interesting. I decided to invent a piece of sculpture that the
viewer could read going from one piece of information to the next
piece….It’s another layer that allows the viewer to participate
in the work without having an art history background. It makes it
more accessible, if not populist in its intent.”
By 1981, the year he completed Spanish Music Inscape, McGowin was
featured with a
group of emerging national artists in the exhibition, “The Southern
Voice: Terry Allen, Vernon Fisher, Ed McGowin,” organized by
the Fort Worth Art Museum. This show was significant for stressing
his importance as a Southern artist, and placing him within the company
of these two prominent figures. “The Southern Voice” exhibition
and catalogue also reflected a very different attitude toward regions
and regional art than that evident during the 1930s (especially in
contrast to that described by Benton, in 1969). By the time of this
show, McGowin was far from unknown; he had been featured in thirty
one-man shows, beginning in 1962, in galleries including the Henri
Gallery, the Martha Jackson Gallery, the Simmone Stern Gallery, the
Fendrick Gallery and Sculpture Now, to museums and institutions including
the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney
Museum of American Art, P.S. 1, the American Culture Center in Paris
and the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris.
However,
“The Southern Voice” added a new level, and a new focus,
to the recognition of his emerging vision, and his regionalist ties.
Looking back, in 2006, to the importance of “The Southern Voice”
exhibition, McGowin has stated that the exhibition was directly related
to the evolving and expanding Southern aesthetic that he initiated
in the “Name Change” project of 1972, but even more directly
to the Southern narrative and conceptual concerns of “True Stories”
in 1975. He considers the period from 1974 to 1976 to be a “breakthrough
period” for his art, which “until then, had been other
directed.” Yet, as he clarifies, he did not travel to Washington
seeking to be a Southern artist, or to develop a Southern aesthetic;
that issue emerged later, over time.
From
1964, when I returned to Washington, until around 1974, I was not
trying to be a Southern artist. It was not my intent to be a Southern
artist. I was operating out of the mainstream, even in Washington,
where the mainstream was Color Field painting. Sam Gilliam was an
extension of the Color Field painting. Rockne Krebs and I both functioned
outside of that mainstream approach. So how hard was it to be Southern
in Washington? It was easy to be Southern in Washington. But the art
was not addressed to being Southern. Nobody seemed to care. My art
became Southern in “True Stories,” and in works leading
up to “True Stories,” before I went to Paris in 1974.
Even in the “Gilliam, Krebs, McGowin” show at the Corcoran,
in 1969, there were pieces that appeared to be abstract but the force
behind them was narrative, especially one work called Mo-Digger, made
from large plastic sheets with silk-screened dots and urethane foam
balls. It was really about this mythical swamp monster we knew as
kids, that we heard about in summer camp, this monster that would
get us in the woods and swamps. This and other seemingly abstract
works in that show had a narrative foundation.
Perhaps,
most importantly, this show was significant for acknowledging that
McGowin was a pioneer in the emergence of Southern contemporary art,
of a “Southern Voice.” Prominent critic Dave Hickey, in
his essay for the exhibition’s catalogue, wrote: “The
thing that interests me is that Terry Allen and Vernon Fisher and
Ed McGowin seem to share a lot of the strategic concerns with the
three best artists to come out of this area in recent years: Robert
Rauschenberg, Donald Barthelme and Robert Wilson.” Continuing,
he observes that “this is a new culture: the post-technology
Sun-belt, so the artist has a new job to do and a new job requires
new tools. Lacking those tools, he has to engage in research and development
with the materials at hand.” Hickey offers his analysis of what
is most unique about the work of these three artists.
All
three of these guys, Allen, Fisher and McGowin, are somehow concerned
with the way people live down here, or out here, or over here, but
the traditional forms of imitation don’t get it for them, don’t
communicate what it is about the world that they wish to “vilify
or celebrate,” as Barthelme puts it, so they have to mix and
match. If you look at the work in this exhibition, you’ll see
versions of all the traditional conventions of imitation: painting,
sculpture, song, theatre, fiction, opera, etc, etc but there are also
tactics inferred from other more secular forms of expression: the
pageant, the tableau, the arrest report, the legal brief, the job
application, the map, the homecoming float, the home show exhibit,
the public school audio-visual, the vacation Bible school felt board,
the half-time activity and the science fair booth.
After
the American Bicentennial cultivated new interest in American art
and culture, and after “The Southern Voice” exhibition
was presented in Fort Worth, a series of regional and national museum
exhibitions, and related catalogues and publications, placed emphasis
upon the art and artists of the American South, bringing the art of
the region to growing national audiences. These included the Corcoran
Gallery’s Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980 (1982); the Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts’ Painting in the South: 1564-1980 (1983)
and Art and Artists of the South: The Robert P. Coggins Collection
(1984). Beginning in 1992, when the Morris Museum of Art opened as
the first museum dedicated to Southern Art (with the Coggins Collection
as its core), and continuing in 1994, when the Ogden Museum of Southern
Art (founded upon the collection of Roger Houston Ogden) was announced
by the University of New Orleans (opened 1999, 2003), recognition
of Southern art became an established fact. Collections, exhibitions,
art markets, publications and developing scholarship reflect these
realities.
By
the early 1980s, when Ed McGowin had served as an artist, professor
and leader in the contemporary Washington art world, was an established
resident of New York (beginning in 1976) and served as an art professor
at the State University of New York, he had become, to some degree,
an art world insider. Beginning in the 1970s, attracted no doubt by
his Southern roots and his interest in the Southern narrative, he
witnessed the emergence of exhibitions and interest devoted to self-taught
art and artists, and began to collect in this field. For thirty years,
he and his wife, artist Claudia DeMonte, have assembled an important
collection of outsider and folk art, which they have exhibited and
traveled in Japan and elsewhere as “Art in Paradise, From the
Claudia DeMonte & Ed McGowin Collection.” Focusing primarily
upon artists they have met and known, including many from Mississippi
and Alabama, their collection now includes works by Lucy Estrin, Howard
Finster, Lonnie Holley, James Harold Jennings, O.W. Pappy Kitchens,
R.A. Miller, Bernice Sims, Mary T. Smith, Jimmie Lee Sudduth, James
“Son Ford” Thomas, Mose Tolliver, Bill Traylor, Inez Nathaniel
Walker, Fred Webster, and Luster Willis.
More
than forty years ago, McGowin indicated that he looked forward to
creating art that was “constantly changing, never repeating
anything, no matter how much I like it.” His evolution during
the 1970s and 1980s reflected this philosophy, and his “Name
Change” project anticipated the pluralism of today’s art
world. He recently underscored this point, stating that “pluralism
as it is used today refers to simultaneous schools of art coexisting.
In my case the names were a metaphor for this, anticipating its predictability.
You could see it coming.” During the 1990s he became increasingly
involved in the creation of large-scale sculptural projects and grew
less interested in traditional gallery and museum exhibitions. These
larger public projects made it possible for him to explore issues
in the studio at a more personal pace, especially the T.M. Dossett
projects reflecting the racial history of Mississippi and Alabama
as it resurfaced in the past decade.
In
2000, reflecting the evolution of his aesthetic philosophy, the Mississippi
Museum of Art presented “Works In Progress: Ed McGowin,”
an exhibition featuring works that mirrored concerns of an earlier
period, revised and updated. As explained by curator Rene Paul Barilleaux,
the show focused on works by T. M. Dossett. “In the traditions
of the South, McGowin uses storytelling techniques to construct his
visual journeys. The strong linear quality and stark silhouettes in
these cartoon-like narratives make them inviting and familiar. Ironically,
they seduce the viewer with their charm and primitive lyricism before
fully revealing their disquieting subjects—for example, civil
rights activists Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Medgar Evers and
the death of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi.”
These
long-standing concerns continue to the present date. In a recent artist
statement, related to a proposal for a “Delta studio”
for the Deep South, McGowin suggests that he is far from finished
with Dossett or the goals he established for this persona. “As
an artist that grew up in Mississippi and Alabama I have long been
curious about any ‘Southern’ mystique or the lack of it.
Over the years I have developed a body of work under the pseudonym
T.M. Dossett that has aimed at creating an aesthetic to acknowledge
the kind of irony and contradiction, the mystique if you will, that
I see demonstrated in so much Southern culture.” Continuing,
he explains what it is he is exploring in (and what he means by) Southern
culture.
It
is my opinion that the roots of Southern culture come not from the
popular notion of the plantation life style myth, which only represented
a small fraction of the population, but from the experience of the
white society being defeated and occupied in what is arguably the
most psychologically shocking experience in the history of the U.S.
I believe that it is this experience for the white population, joined
with the influence on the society by the enslaved African population,
and the combining of those two cultures after the war that has produced
whatever uniqueness that is the Southern mystique. At its best this
can have glorious results as demonstrated by the food, music, literature,
vernacular architecture and to my
mind, especially the art of the untrained.
Issues addressed, in diverse ways, more than 30 years ago by Ed McGowin
(and T.M. Dossett) still drive his distinctive vision of contemporary
American art. During the intervening years, McGowin has explored the
realities of other, diverse art forms in a variety of media—including
self-taught and outsider art, as well as art from “third world”
countries. He has collaborated with artists from these countries,
and has explored other collaborative ventures. As one new T.M. Dossett
project suggests, he has imagined ways to collaborate with workers
and artists in the Deep South, perhaps inspired by the success of
Project Alabama and the quilters of Gees Bend, Alabama. Another Dossett
project, a new painting hanging in his Connecticut studio, devoted
to the Civil Rights-era murder of Medgar Evers, is being completed
in a style “that will not be well-painted, or well-crafted,
but that will be just as brutal, just as ugly, as the historical event
itself.” The works and words of Ed McGowin indicate that, in
his South, “the past is never past,” and the narrative
and the conceptual, the ironic and the absurd, endure, in a delicate
balance.
My
art is derived from my roots; not only the narrative, but also the
conceptual art—the way I perceive and go about something—both
come from that ironic culture. It comes out of that mix of being born
into a society that was defeated and occupied, and that was married
to a society and culture that was enslaved. And it comes from all
that boiling around. That is what I am interested in, as an artist.
And, I think, I could make a good argument for my name change project.
I could say that being multi-disciplinary is a natural outgrowth of
that environment, for me. It may not be for someone else. Irony and
absurdity are parts of Southern culture that I recognize, that I embrace,
in my art.
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