People and Places of Week Two

Museum of Appalachia

Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts

Knoxville Museum of Art

Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens

Pasaquan Preservation Society

Slotin Folk Art

Ave Maria Grotto

The Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective

Marcia Weber Art Objects

Unclaimed Baggage Center

Orange Show Center for Visionary Art

Workshop Houston

Grrl Action

Sound and Outsider Art

“In my music I wanted to place myself in the position of a man of fifty thousand years ago, a man who ignores everything about western music and invents a music for himself without any reference, without any discipline, without anything that would prevent him to express himself freely and for his own good pleasure. This is what I wanted to do in my painting too, only with this difference that painting, I know it-western painting of the last few centuries, I know it perfectly well-and I wanted to deliberately forget all about it. . . But I do not know music, and this gave me a certain advantage in my musical experiences. I did not have to make an effort to forget whatever I had to forget”.

- Jean Dubuffet (Llhan Mimaroilu, “Jean Dubuffet: Musical Experiences,” http://www.avantgardeproject.org/agp74/Dubuffet.pdf).

Dubuffet’s artistic ambition to pursue an art form that was in fact formless, timeless, and ephemeral propelled him to discover sound as a visual material. His experimentation with exotic instruments and lo-fi recording technologies set the foundation for understanding sound within an outsider art context, and shows how both the marginalized means of perception (listening) and the marginalized members of the art world coexist with the intention of being untamed by tradition and  unchanged by cultural values and “taste”.

Have a listen to Dubuffet @ Ubuweb:

Dubuffet’s Musique Brut and Musical Experimentations

First week – itinerary

American Visionary Art Museum

Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

Black Mountain College

Hub-Bub

Tartt Gallery

Mark Cline’s Foamhenge/Dinosaur Adventures

Vollis Simpson’s Whirligig Park

Henry Warren’s Shangri-La

Davidson College: The Reverend McKendree Robbins Long’s paintings of the Apocalypse and works by Benjamin Old Folk Davis

Clyde Jones’ Critter Crossing

Pearl Fryar’s Topiary Gardens

UPDATE/WASSAIC SITE VISIT

Today we did a site visit at the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY, where we hope to end our trip. The Wassaic Project Summer Festival coincides with the last leg of our journey, and today we were able to speak with Eve Biddle, who runs the project, about possible options for site-specific installation during the festival. The place has an absolutely beautiful sprawling barn and a 7-story renovated grain factory to use as exhibition space. Early ideas include doing some silkscreen demos out of the back of our car and playing sound recordings from Alisa’s amp in the trunk. More information to come as our proposal coalesces.